What if you simply paid your employees more to work less? How about that for a different take on employee engagement? Just pay your employees more and they’ll be happier, right? Forgive the rhetorical questions, but there is a point.

Rhetoric, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary, is the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques. This is so true of employee communications!

How many presentations have you heard where the employee is acknowledged there right up front, maybe even top of the bill, in statements like “Our People are important to us,” “We can’t get this job done without our wonderful employees,” or “This company is our people,” and then, then what? That’s the last mention in the presentation?  It is rhetoric, it is art, but it is not effective.

Stop cascading, now! It’s passive, hierarchical and does not inspire managers to pass on the information. A cascade may conjure up an image of water flowing with energy, but in reality organizational cascading all too often stops at the manager level, and have you ever had a shower that only reaches your chest?

Here are two cascading questions you can ask about your organization:

Nothing like sharing values to become one big, happy family!

Companies love to have their values, and there is much to be said for them. However, how these values are communicated, and whose values they are is where the trouble starts. Splendid rhetoric does not make values stick; it simply creates more communication noise. It could be said there is something insulting about how companies have traditionally gone about the business of values, as if their employees need to be told what their values are. So, here’s a little opportunity to test your leadership, or client, against this overlapping triumvirate of tell-tale signs you need to look out for to see if the values proposition needs revisiting.

The opera is not your run-of-the-mill employee engagement case study, but recent events show there is a great need for dialogue in a place of musical dialogue where the management and staff are very much out of tune with each other.

How would the Dialogue Box approach the matter? There are four zones to the dialogue box: intelligence, emotion, interpretation and narrative. The Dialogue box seeks to locate the heart of the challenge in each zone, and use this to define the dialogue word that could create effective dialogue to change the situation, in this case to bring parties in dispute from a broken relationship to a more engaging approach to solving the problem.

In this blog, I am using the Dialogue Box to assess the MetOpera confrontation currently happening in New York, and see how they might start a dialogue to resolve the situation. I am grateful to The New York Times for its report on the dispute.

This is a fun way of looking at the serious problem of when employee engagement fails, and when communications are not based on open dialogue. In the Comments section, feel free to add your own suggestions and why you chose them! Have some fun with this!

Now, I’ve got your attention, here’s the good news! This need not be the case. Indeed, there are many companies working very hard at tackling internal communications, but they are a minority and there is till much potential left untapped. The potential for internal communications is exciting. If companies are going to change, live their values, fulfill their brand promise and all those expectations launched by the leadership and raised by external communications and branding, then they have to get their employees engaged. Shouting louder is not what is effective, nor is spin.