PR and Employee Relations.

Hi guys,

Here is another issue I would like to raise. I have always thought that those companies with a good PR framework should have even better employee relations, because that’s what we have learnt from our books and theories. However, while working in the ‘real world’ I have felt on many occasions that PR is contributing more to other relations outside the organization rather than concentrating highly on inside. Sure, when it comes to presenting the organization to the society, we all look like one big happy family, and they are all for the causes the organization works as well as put their maximum effort to achieve these to be successful. But most of the time this is not enough because I noticed a few number of cases in which employee communication or rather the lack of it played a role in the unsuccessful execution of a program.

Lack of sufficient communication between one another and the policy of ‘each for his own’, I believe, is the problem here. Looking back into the days of internship, on many occasions I noticed that there isn’t as much as rapport between the employees as there should be. A lot of times, those in one section might not really know what is going on in another section or might believe that it is none of their business to find out what’s happening. Once, this happened during a workshop which was organized by one section. Two sessions of the workshop was left out, because the organizing section (CS) forgot to inform the facilitator (also a full time employer) from FP unit. When the session was on, the facilitator was busy with another client. Blame was on the organizing unit for not letting her know the time beforehand, as of course, it was their responsibility. But in my opinion both CS unit and FP facilitator was at fault. The facilitator who did know she had two sessions to take, I believe, had equally responsibility as CS to find out the time she had to present the sessions. If she had taken the initiative to find out this embarrassment could definitely have been avoided. This is just one such instance out of a few more I noticed.

I did not notice this only within the NGO I worked, but also in a PR firm where the employees had more rapport with the accounts they handled than between themselves. This I believe would be the case in such a firm (good rapport with their respective accounts) but internal relations within employees should be taken as seriously as external relations. My experience was that, when it comes to employee relations, a lot of times the companies, organizations (and even the NGO I worked with) have the belief that employee relations is all about celebrating holidays together, celebrating the birthdays of other employees and such stuff. These are important, but they are not as important as trust, confidence, openness, involvement, perspective or organizational structure and objectives, pride in where you work..etc. In other words, the birthdays and other stuff are just frivolous ways of neglecting real employee relations which uses communication as a tool to build up the trust, confidence, involvement, pride…etc I just wrote about. According to Arranof, Baskin and Lattimore, (1997), research shows that subject of interest to employees on a scale of one to ten, the top goes to ‘organizational plans for the future’, ‘job advancement opportunities’, ‘job related and how-to info’, ‘policies and practices’…etc while the bottom goes to ‘human interest stories about other employees’ and ‘personal news such as birthdays and anniversaries”.

Employees are the most important stakeholders in any organization, company or firm. They are no longer costs, but are a powerful asset. Hence, I think if the company does not realize the true meaning of communicating with their employees to get them involved, they are far from achieving their goals and objectives. What do you guys think?

Tc and Rgds,
Imaan