A colleague recently told me about a large drawing of an ear hanging on the wall in her daughter’s preschool room. The teacher directs the kids to “talk to the ear” if they have a gripe about Jacob not sharing his toy or some other preschool drama. The teacher makes it clear that unless they are hurt or bleeding, the ear is their first stop.

At first glance, this seems like dereliction of duty — a pre-K version of the dismissive “talk to the hand.” But according to the teacher, more often than not, the child wanders off happily after unloading on “the ear.”

Apparently, a five-year-old suffers a multitude of injustices throughout the day and many of them are easily resolved by simply walking up to the ear on the wall and pleading his or her case. Otherwise, the teacher is inundated with the incessant protestations of her cherubic charges who feel compelled to “tell” on offending classmates.

I wondered if this was an isolated practice, so I Googled it and found examples of this approach at preschools across the country.

So why does it work? Is it just that preschoolers are gullible enough to fall for the old “talk to the ear” trick?

Apparently there’s more going on here than meets the eye. By sharing their grievances, even with an inanimate ear, children seem to talk themselves through potential plans and actions, as described in Speaking and Listening for Preschool Through Third Grade, a book on oral language development:

Research shows that during free-play settings, about 40 percent of children’s talk is not directed to socializing with other children but to guiding their own behavior or thinking. This “talking to one’s self,” or thinking out loud, helps to guide cognitive processes…

Let’s just hope the plan of attack concocted doesn’t involve going back and biting Jacob.

This made me think of the methods corporations put in place to solicit feedback from employees. Unless companies are sincere and diligent about how they ask for and act on input, they’re simply creating elaborate processes to tell the workforce to “talk to the ear.”

And employees are not as easily appeased as five-year-olds.

In a society used to providing immediate feedback by “liking” things on Facebook or ranting about risotto that was too loose on chowhound.com, the days of putting suggestion boxes next to the water cooler are over. Two effective methods of engaging the workforce are employee surveys and face-to-face communication with executives.

Employee surveys

An annual employee opinion survey is a powerful tool that can provide trend data from year to year. But there are a few principles that must be applied to ensure success:

Anonymity is essential. Employees are naturally skeptical and without assurances feedback is anonymous, their responses may be tempered — or they may simply refuse to participate. While maintaining anonymity, it’s also important to structure the survey in a way that breaks down results by major department to see where pockets of dissatisfaction exist.

Use closed and open-ended questions. Providing an opportunity for employees to write in responses may appear to be an invitation for disgruntled employees to harp on their particular pet peeves, but mining this data can reveal significant nuggets for improvement.

Share the results. There must be a commitment to demonstrate employee feedback has been heard and acted upon. Companies must clearly communicate when changes are the result of feedback. Otherwise, employees simply won’t connect the dots. When communicating changes based on employee feedback, some companies create a graphic icon to accompany announcements about upcoming changes. Harking back to the earlier preschool example, sometimes that icon is an ear.

Face-to-Face Forums
Another method of engaging employees is providing opportunities for direct interaction with company executives. While time intensive and potentially daunting for leaders, these forums are highly valued by employees since it provides a direct line of communication to decision makers. Again, a few simple guidelines can make the most of these sessions:

Spend as much time listening as talking. While it’s important for a leader to use this setting to deliver key messages, it’s equally important to hear from the workforce. This includes building in ample time for employee comments and questions. Recognizing some employees may be reluctant to speak up, augment the question-and-answer period with questions submitted in advance.

Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. It’s not possible to know the specifics of every issue an employee might raise. If leaders don’t know the answer to a question, they should be willing to say, “I don’t know. I’ll find out and get back to you.” And then do it.

Manage expectations. Inevitably, some employee feedback will not be acted upon. Is a company really going to build air conditioned pavilions for smokers? Not likely. And it’s important to address those kinds of issues head on.

Companies have repeated the mantra that “employees are our most important asset” so often it has become a cliché. Sincere efforts to solicit feedback from the workforce can make those words ring true again. And the improvements to a company’s bottom line will follow.

An Argentinian proverb says it best: He who speaks, sows; he who listens, reaps.

Having just finished Jack Kerouac’s book, Dharma Bums, I moved to the next book on the shelf, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. Both books provide a picture of zen practice in daily life, and Pirsig credits Kerouac as having a strong influence on his writing and thinking.

At the beginning of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there is a passage in which Pirsig captures succinctly why I have begun this website:

What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get a chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and I know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seems important.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua — that’s the only name I can think of for it — like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts to the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me that the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks.

In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into the old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. “What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. 

There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best” was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

I think this passage summarizes my intent for this site.

In just one short month, the experience of putting down thoughts — attempting to deepen the channel — on things that I thing are important has been very rewarding for me. I am so grateful for the words of encouragement that many people have provided on this site, on FaceBook and LinkedIn.

I stole the “Why I Write” blog title from George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay. I have been writing for many years but I’ll never forget my first experience with being edited. I was in junior high school and my English teacher, Kirby Lee, marked up something I had written. As a teenager, I was fairly convinced my writing was flawless and without peer, so red ink on my paper was not a welcome sight.

But as I reviewed his edits, I realized he had not just made comments in the margins; he had used his red pen to excise my superfluous words, leaving behind a much clearer message. At that moment, I realized the truth of what I would read later in William Zinsser’s classic book, On Writing Well, “‘Rewriting is the essence of writing.”

And it was also Zinsser who later wrote in his enlightening book, Writing to Learn, that it is only through putting pen to paper — or fingers to keyboard — that we clarify what we think about an issue. The act of trying to make a point in writing forces us to crystalize our thinking.

Or, in short, you don’t know it until you try to write it.

Let me extend the offer to you to contribute to this website. You don’t have to sign on as an indentured servant for the rest of your natural life. You can share your thoughts randomly, sporadically or as frequently as you want.

As Isaac Asimov once said, “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” Help yourself clarify your thinking on issues you’re facing, thoughts you’re having.

And help me deepen the channel.

“What we’ve got here is…. failure to communicate.”

That iconic line – first uttered by the prison warden in the 1967 Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke – is the fundamental reason corporations across the nation fail to engage employees.

Communication is the most important element of employee engagement – and the most overlooked. People want their work to mean something. They want to know what they contribute really matters. And to know that, they need context – the context that comes from communication of how their work fits into the company’s bigger picture.

Research from Hay Group, the global management consulting firm, shows that highly engaged employees can improve business performance by up to 30 percent and that fully engaged employees are 2.5 times more likely to exceed performance expectations than their “disengaged” colleagues.

Many things contribute to employee engagement – decision making authority, the opportunity to learn and advance, variety, and respect. But nothing engages employees more than a clear line of sight between their individual performance goals and the strategic priorities of the organization. And that line of sight is best crafted through face-to-face communication between employees and their supervisors.

But too often the process stops here and short shrift is given to developing solid metrics that determine how well those goals are being met.

In a classic comic strip, Charlie Brown is shooting arrows into a fence. After each snap of the bow, he runs to the fence and draws a target around the arrow.

Lucy, of course, becomes hysterical.

“That’s not the way to practice, you blockhead,” she shouts. “You’re supposed to draw the target and then shoot at it.”

With typical round-headed logic, Charlie Brown responds, “If you do it my way, you never miss.”

If only measurement were that easy.

As usual, Lucy is the voice of reason. A key step to achieving employee engagement is collaboratively setting goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely). And frequent communication about progress toward those goals conveys to employees that their work really does matter.

In today’s competitive marketplace, engaging employees means unlocking the discretionary effort every employee possesses but chooses to give or withhold.

And communication is the key.