As I begin my second tour in Europe, one of the questions people ask me frequently is “How is organizational communication different in Europe to the U.S.?” It’s a question that has frustrated me much over the years, but when I turned the question around, things became much clearer: “What is the major similarity in organizational communication in the U.S. and Europe?”
For me, the major similarity is that organizational communication in each region starts from an equally flawed fundamental premise. In the U.S., despite all of the energy spent on enlightened approaches to organizational culture and the raising of the professional status of the internal communicator, the fundamental premise is that employees are the property of the company, and
In Europe the premise is different ‒ that one’s job is ultimately one’s possession and entitlement ‒ and that the best the organization can do is encourage, cajole, or pressure employees to do what’s best for the organization.
What makes these two seemingly disparate positions effectively identical is that they both ignore the basic relation between employee and employer as it has existed since the abolition of slavery ‒ the employment relationship is one that is comprehensively voluntary, and one based upon mutual agreement rather than coercion or inherited obligation.
Certainly, there are many valuable reasons why organizations on both sides of the Atlantic resist basing their communication on the basis of the underlying voluntary relationship that undergirds employment. By acting as if they own their employees, U.S. companies can downplay the possibility that their orders will not always be complied with, and stifle consideration of more empowering alternatives to the current edict. By acting as if their employees cannot be moved, European companies can attempt to manage expectations by acting as if the major barrier to achieving change or performance targets is the recalcitrance of the Works Council.
But as the world moves towards globalization, towards the “internalization” of external partners from Bali to Bangalore to Buenos Aires, the need to shift the tone and terms of communication towards one grounded in voluntary terms becomes increasingly acute.
Interestingly, if one looks at the employment arrangement as voluntary, the communication tone and approach ultimately shifts from autocracy to democracy. While the word “democracy” has been known to send shivers up the spines of Chief Executives on both sides of the Atlantic, acknowledging the voluntary nature of the employment relationship merely involves recognizing that each element of the work experience is ultimately voluntary too.
Indeed, each day is a never-ending stream of referenda: individual votes on whether to show up on time, whether to accept direction as given, whether to challenge directions, whether to read the daily news on the intranet, whether to take the daily news as read, emphasize one’s agreement or disagreement with the contents, or make up one’s own interpretation. While the end result of much internal communication is to deny that these referenda take place, the opportunity that a more democratic approach presents is the opportunity to stop ignoring these referenda and to start winning them.
Of equal importance, a more democratic approach offers the opportunity to ditch the martial tone and tinny cheerleading all too common in the U.S., and the nannying tone so endemic on this side of the “pond”. A key detractor in the effectiveness of organizational communication is tone, and no amount of calling people “colleagues”, “partners”, or “associates” is going to have any real impact when the undertone respects that their participation emanates from free will and not compulsion.
To be sure, there are some who say that the network of obligations that workers encumber themselves with ‒ children, mortgages, payments on the SUV or BMW ‒ render their participation in the work force somehow involuntary, and effectively hold employers responsible for their meeting of these obligations ‒ all of which are also entered into voluntarily by the employee. This represents a strong challenge to the credibility of a communication effort that treats staff and partners as voluntary participants, but it is by no means fatal. Indeed, this is one case where the best defense is a good offense ‒ by grounding internal communication in the voluntary nature of the work relationship from the outset, communicating from this paradigm will continue to convey where responsibilities lay in the relationship.
While much is different in the style, tone and focus of most organizational communication on both sides of the pond, the fact that most such communication is grounded in an erroneous view of the nature of the work relationship should give practitioners pause. With organizational communication becoming more global by the day, communication needs to emanate from a point of view that works across the globe, and the only such point of view (excepting of course economies where there is genuine coercion) is the fundamentally voluntary and democratic nature of the work relationship.
(This piece was published previously in the September CCM Communicator, the newsletter of the Council of Communication Management)
