Some communication techniques

Read any attitude survey and it will say people want face-to-face communication. This may be admirable – but how practical is it? Some managers are very uncomfortable at communicating with their staff. They need coaching/training/encouraging to do so. Then there is the sheer difficulty of getting peripatetic managers to stay in one place long enough to give quality time to face-to-face communication. Neither of these challenges is insuperable, but they do need working on. Meanwhile there are other useful techniques to back up the desired one-to-one face-to-face communication and these are described in the BP case study that follows.

Primary tools range from various forms of debrief such as team meetings and large gatherings where staff have the chance to listen to, and ask questions of, a senior manager, to facilitated focus group meetings that give staff the chance to provide feedback in a ‘safe’ environment. Among the secondary tools to support the primary processes are articles in house journals, videos, audio-tapes (easy to listen to on the way to work), award schemes and surveys.

The point to make about both primary and secondary tools is that they are more about processes than products. They need to be tailored to the individual needs of not just the company but also the specific part of that company. And they need to adhere to the basic communication principles of timeliness, openness and honesty.

There is one final essential point to make about communication and it is this: communication is a shared resource. It is not, as some people think, something that is done to them. Nor is it, as some managers think, something that people do for them. The success or failure of communication rests with the whole organization, with a little help from the person at the very top…

Communication and leadership: the BP Oil experience

1 In 1992 BP came as close as it has ever come to disaster. It made a loss. It cut the dividend. For a long-established and reputable international business this was profoundly shocking. This article deals with how BP in general and BP Oil, its refining and marketing business, in particular, moved internal communication from being a soft option to a strategic imperative to help turn the business round. And fundamental to the move was the recognition that communication is a line management responsibility, and that communication is a two-way process between staff and management.

2 Crucial to the turnaround, as BP’s chairman and former chief executive David Simon says, was the commitment and motivation of the people who work for BP. The challenge was to keep this while transforming the way BP operates. The company had to change from one where employees were protected from the hard facts of commercial life, where a job with BP was a job for life, to a company where knowledge and understanding of performance provide the motivation, where returns and the need to manage costs were accepted as the day-to-day way of working for everyone in the organization, from the managing director to the truck driver.

3 The results of this new way of behaving are stunning. In less than five years BP’s share price has trebled. Group chief executive David Simon’s original financial targets of cutting debt by $1 billion a year, making $2 billion a year profit and holding capital spending to $5 billion a year were achieved a year early. BP Oil moved from close to bottom to top of the industry league table for return on assets. The business continued to be profitable even while global refining margins, reflecting the difference between the cost of crude oil and the finished product such as gasoline, fell at one stage to their lowest level in ten years.

Background

BP’s downstream business, BP Oil, is one of the three core international businesses in the BP Group. Employing more than 35,000 people around the world it is the face BP presents to the general public. BP Oil operates in 70 countries and is a major brand in 50 of them. The other two main businesses are BP Exploration and BP Chemicals.

BP Oil is a highly developed decentralized organization: it needs to understand its local customers. It has five main regional headquarters. They are in Cleveland in the US, Brussels in Europe, Cape Town in Africa, Singapore in the Far East and Melbourne in Australia.

Each year BP Oil refines the equivalent of Kuwait’s entire crude oil output in its 13 refineries, then distributes and markets the resulting petroleum products to 3 billion customers around the world. Among them are the 5 million motorists who fill up at BP each day, and the world’s major airlines and shipping fleets.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 742