Steve,

First off, sorry you don't feel well and had a rough experience, what with being arrested, spending time in jail, and driving illegally with your young, impressionable, highly intelligent son in tow. :)

That said, I think you might have something with your communication epiphany. My dad works for a company which shall remain nameless in this post (it's one you use comm. examples from in your Strategic Comm. Vehicles workshop though) and word leaked out almost two weeks ago about them having to potentially layoff up to 400 people in my dad's area.

The "announcement" went out in the media and then was followed up by an e-mail to the employees at work within a few hours. Then, a week went by...and nothing happened. Other than people sort of freaking out and not being particularly productive at work...no layoffs. Another e-mail last week went out to let the employees know that they were still not sure if the layoffs were going to happen or not (it's all dependent on winning a contract of some sort). This e-mail tried to be reassuring and let the employees know they would hear something as soon as possible. (Yeah, right.)

This was followed a day or two later by a message from the top about how their area is not meeting its quality and production standards needed to make the next bonus ($$) and how they need to work harder and focus on achieving the standards to get the bonus. When is the next bonus due to be awarded? July.

So, the message is, we might lay you off in a week or so, but please keep working hard to achieve a bonus you will not receive if you have been laid off. Huh?

I think in this case, you are right. The employees would feel better and be more productive if they were blissfully unaware of what is potentially about to befall them.

Anyway, please make sure in the future to get your emissions tested at the appropriate times, pay attention to your mail, and drive safely!! And get well soon!

(Sorry for the long post.)

Steve,
This very same thing happened to me, several years ago while I was driving home with my brother after urinating on the Arch in St. Louis. The officer was very kind to have moved to the right and let us fly by at about 110 mph. He was also kind enough to empty our open beers on the side of the road and put the unopened containers in my trunk. I was only going to get an illegal transportation of alcohol ticket until my license popped up suspended. The officer could not tell me why, only that I was under arrest. Luckily my brother was able to track down my oldest brother and bail me out. I was a free man walking away from the joint to my car which my brother had parked illegally in front of the police station with two fresh cold ones sitting in the cup holders.

I felt the need to tell the judge that I had no idea it was even suspended. The judge explained that they just follow the law and have no control over what the state does. There were over sixty people in that court room all with suspensions and most of them didn’t know their driving privileges were revoked. The judge told me that I was looking at seven day in the county jail if I didn’t get this taken care of and 100 hours of community service if I fixed it. Because I was from Chicago and the Community service was in Champaign IL he told me he would keep the c-note I paid for bail and we would call it even. I was a free man once again…

Now my old man (like every south side Chicago kid) was a cop and I asked him to run my drivers license because I never took my seasonal work truck for the emissions test. He told me the suspended it again. I was able to call and have them suspend the license plates instead of my driver’s license and they obliged.

Two suspensions not a single notice…

steve, i think we can all learn a little something from your experience being arrested- what i will take from this is to open my f-------- mail and stop procastinating.
Also, having been to Pamplona and witnessed the running of the bulls, i would highly suggest you switch number #1 to #6 and vice versa. Since you have already been in jail once, the second time will be much less shocking, and you are better off in jail than in the hospital with a giant gaping hole in the middle of your body.

and i am sure we can all forgive you this once-but don't try any of this crap again or we will banish you from your own blog!

I think in the case of my dad's company, the company should have held off (and tried to keep word from getting to the media, which forced them to then have to address the situation with employees). If they could have kept it internal until they really knew they were going to be forced to lay people off or not and had their plan ready for how it was going to go, the employees wouldn't currently be experiencing week two of this emotional drama. (I do understand this is a best-case scenario, which almost never happens.)

Also, if it is impossible to keep word in (and it may be), don't communicate reassuringly that you will keep everyone apprised as soon as you know something and then the next piece of communication you send out scolds employees for not making quality and production standards needed for bonuses (that they may or may not end up getting). Talk about kicking people when they are down.

The company has created an environment counterproductive to achieving production goals and then wonders why it is not achieving them. Companies need to treat their people a little better than that.

I am all for communicating and being honest, but it helps to have your ducks in a row and your responses and actions planned in advance. That did not happen in this situation and the fallout is inevitable.

Now in your example, Steve, you are at fault for not reading your mail! (Not that I blame you, most of it is junk!) But in the case of my dad's company, they announced "potential" layoffs in the media before they A) knew if they were really going to be necessary and B) had a plan for how to communicate about and address the layoffs if they happened. And when you put it in the media, people pay attention! Unlike the mail, intranet, etc.

Unfortunately, the employees and the company are both paying the price now.

DATE: 05/31/2005 10:61:0P AM
Steve (and later, Sonya)
Like the warden said in "Cool Hand Luke", "what we have here is a failure to communicate." Your failure to open the envelope kept the govt. from communicating with you. At least you got a letter ("The fault, dear Brutus, lies in ourselves")Andy didn't get a letter, so the fault lies with the govt. but good luck on proving that.-)

. I believe your nervousness at having to drive without a license had more to do with your ethical nature and less to do with receiving too much communication.

As for Sonya's comment, it's sounds like your dad's company not only had a poor communications plan, but failed to properly execute the plan.

Sounds like Sonya's dad's company needs your help, Steve.

DATE: 05/31/2005 10:91:0P AM
Well, Steve, I can tell you that I work for a company where communication is nonexistent. Last year we had layoffs - quite a few considering our company is not that large to begin with. When the first round came down, everyone was in a tizzy and no one worked well that day. I was one of a very small number of people to know about them because being in IT, I had logins to disable, email accounts to handle and whatnot. They sent out emails about the cutbacks AFTER they happened and said that there could possibly be more on the way. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Well the building was dumbstruck. No one was talking to anyone except in whispers and I must say the productive atmosphere was broken. No one knew when and if it was going to happen to them. The second round of layoffs came a month later, and this time they did it at the end of the day and told people to come back AFTER HOURS to clean out their cubicles. They basically tried to pretend it never happened and left it up to the department supervisors to inform their people what had happened and how to disperse the workload. It was awful...it was bullshit. There were no more emails, no information. A ton of people (myself included) were worried that on any given day you would walk in and lose your job. Luckily I have a great boss who would reassure me that I was fine. No word of IT cutbacks on the horizon.

I guess communication isn't bad - but you'd better not say anything until you are prepared to ACT. Don't say "maybe there will be layoffs/more layoffs" unless you intend to do it and do it quickly. Then communicate the end of it so that people are no longer freaked out. The morale around here has never recovered and it's almost been a year.

In my experience too much communication isn't bad, it's just the delivery and the timing that matter.

DATE: 05/31/2005 12:55:9P PM
This is a tough one. My company also announced potential layoffs recently. I'm one of many treading water indefinitely, uncertain how long my employment will continue. While I'd be happier in ignorant bliss, I would also have signed a contract for a brand-new downtown condo. Now, thanks to the up-front communication from leaders here, I can avoid the catastrophe of buying real estate I might not be able to afford, and I'm able to widen my job search. I think it may have been in my company's better interest to keep us uninformed, but the leaders here respected us enough to come clean about what was happening. Rumors were FLYING like crazy a month before, but most employees tried to ignore them as baseless. In the end, many of the rumors were true, but many were not. By communicating to us, and even by saying "we don't know" exactly what will happen, they showed a respect to trust us with potentially explosive information, and the wrong rumors were squelched.

Overall, I'd say it's healthier to have everything out in the open. (Or as much as they can legally say.) Now, everyone can openly discuss changes occurring, and not treat it like a big secret, where you can't discuss what someone else might not know, but you can't ask them about it because you're not supposed to know!

Honesty is always the best policy.

DATE: 05/31/2005 01:94:1P PM
Sorry that you were arrested. Having never been arrested myself I can only imagine how awful it must feel. That said, I believe that you can never communicate too much. It’s been my experience that by not communicating with employees, you only add fuel to the rumor mill fire. I’d rather have employees hear something from the company even if it’s bad news than hearing nothing at all, because one way or another they’re gonna find out. And as you know with rumors, after the information has filtered down several notches, it gets distorted. Heck, people get good information all the time and make bad decisions. When bad news arrives, some may act out of fear, but some will most likely take the news for what it is and continue to be productive.

DATE: 05/31/2005 02:91:7P PM
Well, we cant have this... a self-doubting Steve C? What the hell did they do to you in the Morrison Sneezer?

Now, of course, I could point out that you *were* communicated to (via the unopened letter) and failed to avail yourself of the information... the bane of communicators everywhere. But I am willing to cut you some slack based on your being my twin brother from a different mother.

But I would like to comment on the nature of rumors. ECOM frustration #872 is the fact that people, when presented with differing rumors on the same subject, invariably believe the absolute worst case scenario. Which, frankly, is seldom the most accurate. What is it in human nature that makes us reject the reasonable, rational, likely story in pursuit of the outrageous and unlikely?

Occam's Razor, anyone?

DATE: 05/31/2005 11:42:9P PM
Ignorance may be bliss, however, there is rarely a situation in the workplace where there is true ignorance. Someone somewhere will hear something or leak something and the rumor mill is off and running. I'm with Carmen on this one.

And I'm thinking that if you weren't heavily medicated, Steve, you probably wouldn't even ask this question.

DATE: 06/01/2005 09:23:6P PM
Well, lets see. I've:
1. Run with bullsh*t - close enough?
3. Done.
4. Was in Vienna... but I dont dance.
5. "He went to Paris, looking for answers, to questions that bothered him so..."
No desire to go back, really.
6. Went UP in the arch, but it stopped right there. Who are you, Ozzy??

(3,4,5 were on the same college trip. Ah, youth.)

Anyone else?

DATE: 06/01/2005 80:84:6A PM
I was busted at a movie theater a few years ago with my son and his friend, Sam, the son of Pastor Brandt, the administrator at my son's Lutheran school. The sign clearly read "No outside food and drinks," and my son, age five and a new reader, read the sign ALOUD and looked at me with a worried expression, aware of the fact that my backpack/purse was stuffed to bursting with candy, soda and freshly popped popcorn. I waved off his concern and boldly walked in.

When I was relaying this story to my husband later that night, he said, "Maybe it was cracking open the soda cans before the trailers even started that tipped off the usher."

The worst part was dropping Sam off at Pastor Brandt's house and having to explain what happened. So, you see, Steve, a ticket with my son in the back seat doesn't seem so bad. I fear I'm already a criminal in his mind.

DATE: 06/01/2005 81:52:5A PM
First . . . I WANT TO PEE ON THE ST. LOUIS ARCH! Andy, I'm so jealous. As a fellow south sider son of a cop, you have one up on me. I'm putting that on my list of life goals:

1. Run with the bulls
2. Swim with dolphins
3. Drink ouzo on a terrace on a Greek island
4. Dance a waltz in Vienna
5. Take my son to Paris
6. Pee on the arch

Second, and most importantly, the meds have worn off somewhat, and I see the error of my ways. Of course you can't withhold information from employees. I was just being a scared little bedwetter when I started thinking that way.

I mean, I guess you could withhold information IF:

1. They would be guaranteed to NEVER find out. Which, as Colleen points out, is never going to happen. The old saying, "If two people know, the entire company knows," is usually true, I've found.

2. Something is being done to actually fix the problem. In my case, if someone were working quietly behind the scenes to make everything right, then I guess the ignorance would be fine.

But nobody was doing anything. I needed to do it! And---except in the case of layoffs----it's the same in corporate America. The employees have to help solve whatever problem it is you're trying to hide. So you HAVE to tell them.

Sorry for being a big, fat, bald sissy.

Steve

DATE: 06/02/2005 42:22:3P PM
So, I think we can all agree this "when to tell employees about the upcoming layoffs" business is a tough question for leaders.

Maybe an impossible problem.

It has always seemed to me--at least, since Roger D'Aprix convinced me of this years ago--that most organizations have already screwed themselves into this hole, by doing one thing and not doing another.

Doing: Constantly telling employees through corporate happy talk how we're growing, growing, growing, growing, hooray, we're growing, that's what we do, we just grow and grow!!!

Not doing: Sharing lots of industry news and putting it in perspective. Sharing this news in an aggressive way so that employees can see that their company exists in a tough business, things go bad a lot for our competitors (see, XYZ and ABC had layoffs last year due to rising raw materials costs), and things could go bad for us. .... AND, aggressively sharing bad news about OUR company's fortunes.

Then, when the layoffs come--however they are announced--you at least have a workforce that saw it coming, or that should have seen the writing, not just on the wall, but on the intranet, in the employee publication, in town meetings, for some period of years or months.

If you've done this stuff right all along, the problem of exactly when and how to shock employees with news of layoffs, while it may still be impossible, is less important.

And as for employees who ever ever read anything we send them no matter what format in which we send it or how many times?

As we say in Chicago, Dere's nuttin' you can do wit some people.

DATE: 06/02/2005 71:30:5A PM
Hmm. Never ran with the bulls, but I did go on a bender with Elvis Costello's band once. Which, in retrospect, was probably more dangerous.

And amen to those who are saying management should go ahead and tell the truth before the rumors get out. At my last job, I found out I was getting laid off from the fact that my coworkers were tearfully hugging me goodbye in the lobby. Management had decided not to tell the people losing their jobs, and yet they proceeded to include a list of the job titles and ages of those getting canned in their early retirement offers to hundreds of senior employees.

Their excuse was "Well, we told them not to tell anyone." Yeh, thanks.

DATE: 06/02/2005 78:33:7A PM
This caused extensive discussion in our office as we have always stood on the firm belief that you tell, tell, and tell more. Treat them with respect and dignity by informing them of their own future. That doesn't mean anyone in leadership has listened to us - but amongst us communicators, we are believers.

I was actually thinking about this still on the way to work and I believe your problem Steve wasn't "too much info", it was similar to most reality situations in corporations where you got the info but at the last moment. Had you received the info at the earliest possible moment, you could have planned, i.e. got the emissions, recruited a friend to drive you to pick up your son, changed weekends with your ex, etc.

This situation was exactly what we and you try to avoid by planning and providing as much as possible as early as possible. The question isn't all about how much but also about when.

I would also like to point out that one of our biggest problems as communicators is taking the horse to water but not making him drink - though I know making you drink is not a problem - open your mail Steve!!! It probably said - "if you don't do this - your license will be suspended".

DATE: 06/02/2005 83:13:8A PM
The more I think about this (and read all the great comments) the more I'm convinced that this whole episode mirrors what happens inside companies all the time. To wit: (I've always wanted to say, "to wit" but never had a reason before):

1. The company (the state in this case) had to communicate something to me that I didnt' really care all that much about. That happens in companies all the time. Employees often care about their paycheck and their particular job, and the company has to get them to care about the big picture.

2. The company DID communicate with me, but picked a vehicle that didn't work for me, because I never open any mail unless I'm expecting a check from someone (sort of like putting important news on the intranet even though 50 percent of your employees never go to the intranet).

3. Because I didn't pay attention, I was completely shocked by what happened (which reminds me of a client I had who created a whole intranet site to communicate an upcoming reorganization, and there were still a large percentage of employees who were SHOCKED by it all . . . because they never knew about the intranet site).

4. I got pissed at the company (the state) for springing this on me . . . . even though they did communicate with me. I've seen that happen in so many companies it's not even funny.

Steve

DATE: 06/02/2005 83:30:0A PM
If the company doesn't yet KNOW its own future, should its leaders tell employees that they MIGHT lose their jobs?

Yes -- honest information is respectful and healthy
No -- the best people bail when the company needs them the most

???