Employees: PR ambassadors, or your worst nightmare? Smart communicators arm their internal audience with enough information to be a potent PR force in the community

Communication World, May-June, 2005 by Steve Crescenzo

Some companies spend millions on charitable endeavors in order to build a good reputation in their communities, not realizing that individual employees can undermine that reputation every time they open their mouths about the organization.

Please take the following multiple-choice quiz to see how well you know the readers of your employee publication.

When employees finish work at the end of the day, they:

a. Go home, crawl under the bed, and don't think or talk about work until the next morning.

b. Go home and drink martinis until they fall asleep, not thinking or talking about work until they get back to their desks the next morning.

c. Stop home to change and then go out, listening politely while everyone else at the party talks about their work, but keeping quiet about their own jobs.

d. Leave work and talk to everyone--family members, friends, relatives, people on the train, people on the Internet, people in their book clubs--about their jobs, their companies, how they are treated, their organization's strategy, its products, what the culture is like and so on.

The correct answer, of course, is "d." (Well, if the employee in question is anything like me, then the correct answer is sometimes "b" as well, but it's mostly "d.")

Think about it: When you are mingling at a party and you meet someone new, what's the first thing that person asks you? It's "What do you do?" isn't it? In fact, work often dominates social conversations.

When you gather with the family for the holidays, how much time do you spend talking about your job? When you go out with friends, how much of the conversation revolves around careers and work?

Companies pour money into media and community relations, but they tend to ignore the most powerful public relations force available to them: their employees.

Some companies spend millions on charitable endeavors in order to build a good reputation in their communities, not realizing that individual employees can undermine that reputation every time they open their mouths about the organization.

The sad thing is, it's not that hard a situation to fix. You just have to be honest with employees, treat them like adults and then give them the information they need in order to win friends and influence their neighbors.

For a good example of how to do that, take some lessons from a recent article in a State Farm Insurance employee publication. Titled "Over the Backyard Fence: Seven talking tips on State Farm's tight spot," it's a case study in how to turn employees into public relations ambassadors in the community. There are so many things to like about the article that it's hard to know where to begin. So let's take them one by one.

1. The headline. Putting the words "tight spot" in the headline is brilliant. It sends the message right away that this is not going to be your typical corporate spin story. Some companies still refuse to acknowledge any kind of bad news or "tight spots" to employees. But you can't enlist their help to turn a problem around if you don't admit you have a problem in the first place.

This headline tells employees up front: This is the real world, not corporate propagandaville.

2. The hybrid news-feature lead. I would call this lead a cross between straight news and an anecdotal feature lead. It starts with a concise summary of what the story is about: "If we live where our customers live, we should be able to let them know how their insurance company is getting along." Then, the editors move into an anecdotal lead: "Going from her car to her house one day, Senior CAP Specialist Rocky Kelly stopped to chat with her neighbors, State Farm policyholders who told her their rates had just gone up."

What a nice little one-two punch. The news lead sums up the story nicely for busy readers who are cherry-picking which stories they want to read, and the anecdote featuring a real employee is something all employees can relate to.

3. The no-nonsense language. The third sentence--a quote from the employee about what the customers said to her--sets the tone for the entire article: "'They said they thought insurance companies were ripping them off,' Rocky recalled. 'They said they were going to shop around.'"

Wow! "Ripping them off," eh? "Shopping around," huh? That's not language you often find in employee publications. Most companies would water that down in the approval process, until poor Rocky ended up saying something like, "The customers indicated that in a customer-driven marketplace, they needed world-class service, which is a State Farm core competency we need to proactively focus on."

That management is willing to even acknowledge that customers are ticked off, suspicious and "shopping around" gives this story instant credibility with employees--who, by the way, already know this, but it's still nice to hear the company say it out in the open.

4. The seven questions. There are no softballs here. The editors--and the organization--understand that employees need to have a basic understanding of the business climate if they are going to explain it to customers. And the questions reflect that: