•  Tony Schwartz on What it Takes to be a Great Employer. I like it because of its “Ask not what your employees can do for you; ask what you can do for your employees” orientation.
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Five Lessons from 2010 Worth Repeating - not all on communications, but all relevant and all pointing to the conclusion that it really is a new world when it comes to transparency and the speed of change.
• Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainard on Resolution 2011: Make your Strategy Coherent, which argues that companies that do this well “earn a market premium in terms of higher earnings and greater shareholder value.” I’d just extend that to include employees as one of the key audiences you need to reach with that coherent explanation.

So what’s my contribution to the January 3 blog post storm? I’m not sure it’s unique or pithy, but here it is: It’s not rocket science.

What do I mean by that? Sometimes I think we complicate the whole world of leadership communications and employee engagement too much when it’s really pretty simple. Employers want employees to care and be committed. Employees want employers to see and value them as individuals and be committed. Since employers have more power (especially in an economy like this one), they need to go first - set the tone, make the ask, take the first step. So for 2011, in the interests of keeping it simple, here are the resolutions I’d love to see all leaders keep:

• I will be honest with my employees about how we are doing as a company, what I need them to do, and why
• I will include them in the conversation and take their input seriously
• I will say thank you as often as it’s earned.

What do you think leaders should resolve to do this year?

1. If you want employees to be engaged, engage THEM. For example, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles recently on the “to cancel or not to cancel” question vis a vis holiday parties. My advice? Don’t just make a decision about the holiday party; tell employees what your budget is and ask them what THEY would prefer. For example, Fidelity Bank employees in Massachusetts are choosing to forego their holiday party in lieu of making charitable donations, which is a pretty good idea, and making that kind of decision together will forge a strong bond between employees.

2. If you want to improve morale, respect your employees and give them the authority they need to do their jobs. According to the Chicago Tribune, Macy’s has made some changes that have significantly improved employee morale, including giving local stores more control over merchandise decisions and bringing managers out onto the sales floor where they’re in closer contact with employees.

3. If you want to bring back some perks (USA Today says this is a trend for 2011) make sure you’re bringing back the ones your employees care about most, whether it’s free turkeys at Thanksgiving or more flex time.

What can companies do to maintain morale and retain talent? What do you hope we’ll see more of in 2011?

I was reminded of this last week (the connection will become clear, I promise) when the head of our local utility’s Smart Meter program was outed for participating in anti-Smart Meter chat rooms under a fake name. He has since resigned.

The background to this is that the utility instituted a program to replace old meters, which are read in person, with new ”smart” meters, which can be monitored remotely,  without asking for input and a lot of folks are opposed. From what I’ve read, some are convinced their bills spiked after the meters were installed, some are afraid of radiation, others that the new meters make the power grid more vulnerable to bad guys, and some just on principle because they were told, not asked. The important thing for MY story is that this is a highly visible arena - a lot of folks are interested, have strong opinions, and aren’t afraid to share them.

From a communications standpoint, what’s interesting  is that despite knowing  that this is a highly visible arena that people care deeply about, someone thought that in the modern world, you could keep a secret. And was reminded publicly that you can’t. How was he outed? Because his email address showing his real name registered next to the fake name he’d chosen.

Why is this important to companies? The incident isn’t, but the general principal is. Transparency has long been a value - something companies talked about and aspired to, and had to consciously implement. Today, it happens whether we like it or not. Today, it’s what’s for dinner.

First, the background: Employment attorney Jay Shepard writes a cool blog called Gruntled Employees. More than a year ago he offered a corporate twitter policy in 140 characters, which, in Twitter lingo, is a meme. He’s a man of few words: he also offers a ”A two-word corporate blogging policy” and “The world’s shortest employee handbook.”

His point - that people are busy, attention spans are short, and thus concise policies are more likely to be read and understood (and effective) than long, boring, complicated ones - is one we know instinctively but too often forget (or just give up).

Today at long last I came across a worthy competitor - the eight-word mission statement. As reported by Eric Hellweg, Kevin Starr of the Mulago Foundation presented this at the PopTech conference held recently in Camden, ME:

“Starr insists that companies he funds can express their mission statement in under eight words. They also must follow this format: “Verb, target, outcome.” Some examples: “Save endangered species from extinction” and “Improve African children’s health.”"

Can you state your company’s mission statement in eight words? Can anyone?

Years ago, I got my sister a button that said, “I’m the mommy, that’s why.” It worked when her kids were little, but now that they’re teenagers, they understandably want to be heard. The employees most of us are hiring today grew up being part of the conversation - they don’t just read articles; they comment on them and share them, and they are as likely to produce and post their own videos as watch TV or movies. 

I’m convinced that the employee engagement programs that succeed will incorporate the idea of employees as “citizen producers” - not just passive consumers of information.

In “It Isn’t Just a Myth: A Little Thanks Goes A Long Way,” Robert I. Sutton quotes an academic study that provides evidence for the value of a simple thank you:

“The simple act of having a boss come by and offer a public thanks to one group, and but not the other, really packed a wallop. These fundraisers were paid a fixed salary, so Grant and Gino compared the number of phone calls made be each fundraiser before and after the “thank you” intervention. The results were pretty impressive, as while there was no change in the average number of calls made by the group that was not offered thanks, the folks who heard a warm two sentence thank you from a boss made an average of about 50% more calls during the subsequent week.”

In “Chip Conley Took the Maslow Pyramid, Made It an Employee Pyramid and Saved His Company,” Kermit Patterson interviews the founder of the Joie de Vivre hotel chain, who’s just published a new book called Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Conley says, “What really is meaningful to people is genuine appreciation shown in real time. My basic belief is that life and business is all about where you pay your attention. Let’s pay some attention in our management and leadership to the idea of recognition. It’s not just platitude.”

What is the best way to make “thank you” a consistent part of a company’s culture?

The study goes beyond the markers we typically look at (unemployment, for example) to try to gauge the overall impact of the recession, and the results are striking. For example, more than half - 55% - of adults in the labor force say they’ve felt some effect, from layoffs to wage or hour cuts, far more than the number captured by the official unemployment rate. Almost the same number, 54%, say the country is still in a recession. Two thirds have cut back on their spending, and a third say they’ll continue this new frugality even after the recession ends.

The surge in long-term unemployment and the meltdown in household wealth are the two things that make this recession different from other twentieth-century recessions, and both will have long term effects.

Why is this important? I believe those of us who spend time thinking about how to engage employees need to understand the larger forces that shape their hopes and expectations. “A Balance Sheet at 30 Months: How the Great Recession has Changed Life in America” is a thought-provoking starting point.

Employers have implemented a variety of changes that have increased productivity and profits - but often those have come at the expense of employee comfort, the study asserts. Consequences include:

• Stress caused by a “brutal work pace”
• A “greater sense of chaos” caused by frequent change
• An increase in fear/distrust of management connected with layoffs

As a result, the researchers say, professionals are more focused on protecting their own jobs and less likely to help co-workers than they once were, and less likely to be loyal to their employers.

While it’s sometimes tempting to yearn for a simpler time, stress and chaos are most likely here to stay. Given that, what’s the best way to create loyalty and engagement?

At about 5:30 this evening, according to CBS News, TSA reversed itself on that particular category, assuring its employees that it does in fact want them to think for themselves (my interpretation).

For communicators, I think there are a couple of lessons here. One, of course, is a simple reminder that “internal communications” no longer exists as a category, if in fact it ever did - companies should operate on the assumption that any information provided to employees will go public, sooner rather than later. A second is that it’s hard to regulate the consumption of information in a way that makes sense in the borderless world of the internet. Most people would - I think - agree that companies have the right to prevent employees from using company provided equipment to access pornography and violence during working hours, but even the definitions of those categories can be problematic  (in reference to the TSA policy, for example, what exactly is “extreme violence” - and does that mean “normal violence” is acceptable?). And it only becomes more complicated, as TSA’s experience shows us.

In an earlier post, I cited Jay Shepherd’s Tweetable Twitter policy as an example of a thoughtful, smart social media policy - any other policies you’d recommend?

“The organization will provide interesting and challenging work. The individual will invest discretionary effort in the task and produce relevant results. When one or both sides of this equation are no longer possible (for whatever reasons) the relationship will end. So if the organization no longer has interesting or challenging work for the individual to do, or if the individual is no longer willing or able to engage in the work — to invest the levels of discretionary effort required for excellent results — it is in everyone’s best interest to part ways.”

Read the whole post here - it’s worth a few minutes.