Communication Matters, Not E-mail

Posted on January 11, 2008
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The New York Times had a story the other day that read as though it was from another era, when unions and employers were constantly bickering over who controlled the workplace. That was especially so if you attempted to read the National Labor Relations Board’s decision behind the story – which was that employers have a right to keep workers from using company e-mail systems to send out union-related messages.

The case arose at a newspaper, The Register-Guard, in Eugene, Oregon. Somehow it seems that some of the most intractable, time-wasting labor disputes arise among folks who are supposed to be in the communication business – newspaper managements and the Newspaper Guild.

I put the NLRB decision in The Guard Publishing Company and the Eugene Newspaper Guild aside in dismay. With its parsing and hair-spitting, it made you question whether there really is a sensible role for government, which of course there is.

We’re talking here, or should be, about workplace communication, not who controls a corporate e-mail system. First, e-mail is becoming passè, unmanageable anyway, regardless of who “owns” it. Blogs are becoming recognized as a more functional way to conduct communication in workplaces. See Jeremy Wright’s great book, Blog Marketing, on that.

A strong workplace communication climate won’t be achieved by bickering over who controls the electronic system behind it, regardless of who owns it. Employees are simply not likely to use for collaborative purposes a system that an employer tries to regulate. Even if the union somehow abused the e-mail system in Orgeon (which apparently it did not, despite the NLRB’s arcane findings), communication is in the eyes and ears of the receivers. There are many messages, a constant stream of them. Whether they flow freely enough to promote engagement in building and changing a business is what matters.

Pity the readers of the Oregon newspaper, not its owners, who seem consumed about monitoring e-mail, not fostering communication.

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