Lucy Adams, the BBC’s former head of human resources, has apologised for her group emails to the corporation. An employee in the BBC’s newsroom said they were “crap” and that she should get someone else to write them for her. The sad thing was that she already had someone else writing them for her. In fact she had a whole team of people writing, checking and correcting them. “As I re-read most of the communications I realised with dismay that he was right. My emails were crap,” Adams said.
At the time she was in charge, trust between the corporation and the senior management was breaking down rapidly following a host of scandals from excessive management payoffs to the impact of the Jimmy Savile affair. It got to the stage that Adams became deeply nervous about sending out any kind of email communication. “I always hesitated before pressing send, knowing that their arrival in 20,000 inboxes would spark a deluge of angry responses.”
Anger-inducing group emails are a warning sign of a dangerous and deep-seated disease in the corporate body. Email, as someone once said, is the body odour of the office, but group emails are offensive corporate flatulence. They are the internal spam of the organisation. Emails are only read if they are from people you know and are working with on a daily basis. They are read if they help you do your job. They are also read if they are fun and engaging. Group emails tick none of these boxes. What they do is tick management boxes that are of no relevance to most other people; they tick off legal, HR, corporate governance issues that must be communicated.
The case of Adams and the BBC highlights the fact that often HR forgets the “human” in their title. That’s not entirely their fault because they are so burdened by the choking red tape of employment law. HR professionals are also often used as a human shield for poor management and poor leadership. No amount of good communication is going to make a poor message seem good. The BBC management was up to its neck in corporate ordure. Group emails were possibly the laziest and least effective way of explaining the stench.
What is really shocking is that the internal comms teams were also part of this email culture. As anybody involved in any kind of communication will tell you, the meaning of communication is the reaction it generates. If you’re getting a wall of anger then your communication is generating anger and not getting across whatever management trifle you thought you were communicating. Culture eats strategy for breakfast every day of the week, and if you’ve got a culture of arrogant, distant and ineffective management then no one is going to give a monkey’s chuff about your strategy.
Actually, most people are interested in their organisation. They want to know that they’re involved in an organisation that is doing worthwhile things in a decent way. If they have pride in their organisation they will tell you when they are satisfied with this and when they are not satisfied. This is a chance for leadership to listen and learn not to haver and bluster and obfuscate. There are now advanced communication tools such as Twitter and Facebook and intranets and all sorts of social media that can create a real conversation in an organisation. There’s also the radical and phenomenally powerful face-to-face meeting, which is often ignored because it actually requires management to show their face.
The only thing worse than group emails are emails that you didn’t meant to send to the group but accidentally did. These happen as regularly as clockwork: universities telling all their rejects that their application has succeeded; data protection conferences accidentally sharing everyone’s details; office lovers broadcasting their intimate affair to the entire organisation. But the worst kind of group emails are those that everyone, including all the intended recipients, wish had never been sent. And those are the ones that our state broadcaster seemed to specialise in. Probably time for a reboot of culture, leadership, communication – and then a short email to ask whether everyone agrees that it’s been done well.
