Boeing CEO cites need for ‘fundamental culture change’, US employment hits 6-month high
Plus, how managers can measure employee loneliness.
Greetings, comms pros! Let’s take a look at a few news stories from the past week and see what we can learn from them.
Boeing CEO acknowledges absent leadership
It’s been another wild week for aircraft manufacturer Boeing as questions over its safety record from earlier this year rage on. Striking machinists rejected the company’s proposed labor deal on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported, causing a 3% drop in shares premarket.
Earlier this week, a satellite manufactured by Boeing for Intelsat exploded in space, spreading debris and leaving some customers without power or communications, according to CBS.
An exploding communications device is an apt metaphor for Boeing’s troubles over the past few years. Those came to a head when a door flew off a 737 Max 9 plane in January, prompting an FAA audit ahead of new CEO Robert Ortberg’s arrival in late September.
On Wednesday, Ortberg shared a speech with employees before delivering it to investors that diagnosed the company’s problems as a culture issue — a signal that the company’s leadership was finally prioritizing employee communications as central to its change strategy.
In it, he offered a diagnosis: The company had lost too much trust, gained too much debt and made too many mistakes. To put Boeing back on the right path would require “fundamental culture change,” stabilizing the business and improving execution.
“Our leaders, from me on down, need to be closely integrated with our business and the people who are doing the design and production of our products,” he said. “We need to be on the factory floors, in the back shops and in our engineering labs. We need to know what’s going on, not only with our products, but with our people.”
The memo also included desires to cut Boeing’s workforce by 10%, implement a safety and quality plan in partnership with the FAA, and improve the company’s balance sheet by keeping its credit rating investment grade.
While the striking workers rejected the company’s latest proposals later that day, Ortberg’s words won’t fall on deaf ears. This is the first time Boeing leadership has acknowledged that operational accountability starts at the top. However, the details of how these leaders will show up on the floors, shops and labs are still missing. Ortberg’s sharing the memo with employees first suggests he understands employee engagement should come ahead of investor relations, but the actions of Boeing’s leadership will ultimately dictate whether the words are more than PR.
Union communications so often avoid the fundamental need for employee listening and solution-oriented engagement, exacerbating the disconnect by couching solutions in a mindset that comes off as “business first, people last”.
This means reminding the C-suite that managers and leaders who share employee sentiment up the chain are not union reps by another name, but valuable touchpoints for collecting concerns and potential problems before they escalate into a reputational crisis.
By the same logic, communicators must teach leadership and counsel alike that union reps are not the enemy of business growth—and that thinking with this mindset is actively harmful to long-term growth.
Setting internal baselines to benchmark against can drive the creation of bespoke reputation scores that marry qualitative engagement metrics to business performance, productivity, attrition and more. Clearly defined and well-communicated work scopes, meanwhile, foster mutual accountability between frontline workers and corporate leadership.
Boeing’s crucible is a reminder that the consequences of what happens when these ideas are not understood often become a public display, illustrating how a disconnect between corporate leaders and its workers impacts your bottom line.
How managers can mitigate loneliness at work
“We’re Still Lonely at Work,” claims HBR’s December cover story. Using a proprietary measurement tool called “the Work Loneliness Scale,” HBR contends that “there are aspects of organizational life that [employers] can change to reduce work loneliness and increase human connection.”
The first step is acknowledging that many ideas leaders believe about loneliness at work are wrong. The myths include the concept that loneliness can be solved with in-person work, that placing people on teams solves loneliness, that lonely employees are more socially needy, and that the problem belongs to an individual instead of the organization.
The solution, according to HBR, is for managers to consider loneliness and measure it:
It is difficult to address loneliness among your employees if you don’t know how prevalent the problem is. We have yet to meet a manager who systematically assesses work loneliness using a research-verified instrument. To collect such data, organizations can use our Work Loneliness Scale (see “A Tool for Measuring Work Loneliness;” to find out your own work loneliness score, click here). Given the social stigma and shame that surround loneliness, it is important to administer such surveys in a way that protects employee privacy—for example, by conducting the survey anonymously, which also increases the chances of gathering accurate data.
HBR’s development of a proprietary measurement tool demonstrates how your organization can develop its own mechanisms for quantifying seemingly qualitative factors that affect the business, while it’s sharing the tool with external audiences demonstrates how finding innovative ways to measure something that aligns with your brand values can position your organization as thought leaders in its space.
Talking about the latest job numbers to boost your influence
U.S. job creation was on the rise in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, with 254,000 jobs added in nonfarm industries (a term for paid workers in all businesses except those working on farms, serving in the military, or working for nonprofits). Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.1% from 4.2%.
This is a welcome relief from the last jobs report, which found openings were down and companies continued to make cuts. It arrived after the agency’s annual benchmark review found there were 818,000 fewer jobs in March of this year than it initially reported.
Demonstrating an understanding of how these latest numbers connect—not only to the Fed’s projections on cooling inflation but to your business performance — demonstrates a degree of business acumen that complements your already strong pulse on people. These numbers also provide valuable context to paint your Q4 asks for more comms headcount, budget or resources in a brighter and more rational light.
Justin Joffe is the editorial director and editor-in-chief at Ragan Communications. Follow him on LinkedIn.
