The pain of the procurement culture.

I'm working remotely today - actually writing a book review, which is one of my several sidelines. But a break for some lunch gives me time to reflect on the first working week of 2011.

This week has been all about the return to work. I'm just about on top of things, and very pleased that the pipeline looks considerably better than it did at this time both in 2010 and 2009. Since UK plc opened for business again on Tuesday, I've spent time in London and Brighton on one project; have seen my work signed off on two others and am waiting for client feedback on two more projects.

The only fly in the ointment is one client - an important one for me - tripling the time they plan to take to pay invoices. Now if I was a large supplier, this wouldn't worry me in the slightest, but working at the end of the business food chain - and after the nadir of 2008-2010, still operating rather hand to mouth - this news, which I found out on Tuesday - was a particularly hard smack in the solar plexus.

What made it worse was the fact I found out only when an invoice submitted early in December hadn't been paid, as it usually would be, by Christmas. For the past four years, this particular client has paid me within three weeks - I'd have been happy with four. But now they've put their terms out to six weeks.....and seemingly not told anyone about it. That's what really sticks in the craw.

If they had told me they were changing their policy, I would still have been cross, but at least i would have been prepared.

Supplier relationships work best when there's mutual respect. That respect breaks down when the perception on one side is that the other is taking the piss. I have great relationships with clients and the payment side never is a problem where my direct client - or at least someone in their team - has direct management of the supplier payment process. Things have a tendency to go wrong when the client loses that authority and Procurement or Finance steps in to 'manage' the supplier relationship.

What happens is that the 'relationship' is severed, and replaced with a transactional approach which too often tends to be based on price only. Service, and the added value a small supplier brings gets lost in the mix and is replaced by a process that tends to load the relationship in favour of the client organisation. Given that day rates have been squeezed significantly in the past couple of years - and every large client wants more for less - the loser in just about ever case is the small supplier - micro businesses such as my own.

I have a relatively small number of clients. They all matter hugely to me since my income is directly dependent on me giving them good service, and them consequently buying more of my time and expertise. A procurement or supplier payment team, dealing with thousands of suppliers who are rarely more than a line on an entry screen to them have no need to go the extra mile for me - and probably no comprehension of how important my relationship with their organisation is to me.

I put my terms on every invoice I submit - yet these are routinely ignored and I'm paid only when it's convenient to the client organisation. the effect is that I'm currently giving six to 12 weeks' credit to some of the largest organisations in Britain. Does my bank manager, the VAT man or HMRC understand this? Not really - but again, they're salaried employees who'd soon kick up a massive fuss if their monthly pay cheque wasn't paid.

So what's going to suffer in the end because of the rise in the Procurement culture? It will be the relationships that departments within organisations who depend on the army of small service and goods suppliers have with those suppliers. Will I give my fullest discretionary effort to an organisation that sees me only as a commodity? However much I may like my individual clients, I rather like getting paid at the end of the month too....just like they do....and their Procurement and Accounts Payable colleagues do too.

For all that organisations drum the vital importance of relationship building into their teams, they appear very blinkered when it comes to supplier relationships. It's an area where we're heading swiftly into a cultural breakdown.

Institutes, inertia and a time to break out of the circle

Last Friday, I was chased for my annual subs for the Institute of Internal Communication - and organisation I've been a member of in the UK for 20 years. It didn't take me too long to decide that I didn't want to renew.

Under its British Association of Industrial Editors guise, I began to make the switch from consumer magazine journalist to internal communicator, successfully acquiring a Certificate in Industrial Editing. As the organisation morphed into the British Association of Communicators in Business, I became one of the last people to be awarded a Diploma in Business Communication. Under its Communicators in Business Guise, I was a national committee member and was made a Fellow of the organisation. But, as the recession bit and my career direction turned more to academia, CiB (or the IoIC as it now is) and I began to diverge in thought and action.

Today, internal communication plays only a small part in my business output. I write about it, but have found that B2B and B2C work is both easier to pick up and, at the moment, more satisfying. For me, that's because too many businesses have shown their true colours during the economic downturn: turning to organisational communication not to help engagement and build for the future, but to slip back into the default of command and control - telling people what to do if they want to still have a job.

It has been dispiriting. At a time when we should be making a paradigm shift to more open, transparent, enabling and effective communication, underpinned by a far wider armoury that should be built on the opportunity of social media, top teams have been slow to change, and communicators have been weak in championing the necessary cultural shift. There are, of course, pockets of brilliance - but the practice or organisational/employee/internal communication has actually moved far more slowly and covered a lot less ground than it thinks it has in the past two decades.

The fundamental for me is the focus on and rewarding of output over outcome - reflected ingloriously in the organisations supposed to represent the organisational communicators' role and advocate its ascendancy.

The revolution hasn't happened: the 'new' has a distinct whiff of emperor's new clothes; and organisational communicators remain in low earth orbit when we could be reaching for the stars.

I'm going to keep on doing what I'm doing - though probably ever more in b2b and b2c. Internal communication isn't dead - but it seems to need some radical new medicine.

Here is your audience: now engage

I spent a fascinating day at the University of Oxford on Saturday, taking part in my first academic conference. The British Association of American Studies' 2010 Postgrad Conference - American Geographies - brought together probably 40 doctoral students from across the UK and beyond to present papers on a range of themes within anthropology, literature and history.

It was my first experience of this kind of event and I was struck by both the intellectual power on show - and by how unengaging so many academic papers are.

I sat through 11 papers before presenting my own and, I think, nine out of those 11 speakers read their prepared texts, hardly raising their eyes from the page, and taking virtually no account of the audience before them. In some cases, it was a very sterile experience, and I found my thoughts drifting far from the seminar room. In other cases it was frustrating: a really good subject with some nuggets of great information - but presented within an academic convention that clouds understanding with meaningless verbiage, and creates a barrier between the presenter and the audience by means of the academic 'do's and don'ts' of presenting.

I don't need the presenter to say 'end of quote' when they reach the end of the passage they're quoting. I don't want them to read in a monotone and make no effort to check for understanding. I want them to engage with me and work to ensure I can share their experience and be a part of whatever knowledge they have to bring to the room.

I tried to do that on Saturday - I had notes, but no fixed script. I expanded on points where people seemed interested and truncated material that was grabbing less attention. I used images to illustrate my points - but was very conscious to avoid reading my slides. I'm not sure how successful I was (I didn't cover everything I'd planned to say), but I got some great feedback after my session.

Walking away at the end of the day, one thing that struck me was how few presenters smiled or looked for a response from the audience. Maybe this was a one-off experience, but I suspect it's an area that academics should be working on more.

Breathe, hold...and release

Lots going on at the moment, which is always good. I've got several projects on currently and while some are more fun than others, they're all stimulating.

I'm busy on the PhD front too with a paper to deliver at the BAAS Postgrad conference this coming weekend - and that's adding a bit of stress as I haven't had a whole lot of time to prepare.

However, I've learned over the past 20 years that when life's busy and stressful, the best release is to get a way - even if just for an hour or two - and do something totally different.

To that end, Jac, Sophs and I went walk in Wendover Woods yesterday afternoon. The glorious golden hues of Autumn were a bit past their best, but it was still a relatively warm afternoon; the ground wasn't too muddy and once again I was brought up short by just how beautiful it is here in the Chilterns.

The feedback that makes it all worthwhile

Eek! Almost a month without a post. Not because I've got nothing to say, but much more so because I've been flat out for the last few weeks.

I'm just about surfacing for air now, and it was great to get a bit of feedback for a rush job carried out over the weekend:

Hi Mark

Just thought I would pass this on to you, just in from the client:

Thanks so much. We have just gone through all the files and your guy has done a really thorough job. Please pass on our thanks - also for honouring the initial quote. We will be sure to recommend him to others here at BL.

It's always nice when a client - or a client's client - appreciates the effort.

It's a runner

Thanks to everybody who took time to complete the employee comms in engagement survey - according to my colleague at Brunel who knows far more than me about these things, the sample size is now viable.

So, when time permits, I'll start digging into the findings.

Employee communicators in engagement survey - one week to go

The survey monkey's still ticking over as more and more communicators complete the research questionnaire on the role of employee communicators in engagement. There's still a week to go if you want to add your voice which you can do here

To whet your appetite, here are a few of the trends at the half-way collection point:

• Almost half the organisations that have responded have no engagement strategy
• While the majority of organisations recognise the difference between communication and engagement, only 4% claim that recognition is total
• Almost 90% of communicators who have responded have some responsibility for their organisation's engagement agenda
• HR is the top 'owner' of engagement - drawing twice the response of 'everyone'
• HR is also the most common owner of the engagement strategy
• When it comes to tools, nine out of 10 communicators use email and the intranet
• Fewer than half still use printed newsletters/magazines
• Over 80% of respondents formally use social media in the comms mix, with blogs and internal social networks the most common uses
• Engagement varies widely among responding organisations. No organisation is fully engaged, though 30% claim a 7 out of 10 engagement score
• Asked what would make the greatest difference to engagement, the most popular response so far is a more joined up approach between functions.

That's a slice of the picture with a week still to go. Will it change? Your views could be vital.

In this only a Transatlantic issue?

Interesting: after an initial splurge of responses, the last couple of days has seen only a trickle of responses to my survey looking at the role of employee communications in engagement. In many ways, that's to be expected: those who are interested will respond immediately while others will either delete the message or put it on the 'nice to do' pile for some time never. Still, there are still 12 days left, and if I can double the current response over those 12 days I'll have something robustly statistically viable.

This is a learning experience for me, and one of the most noticeable features is the strong UK/US bias to responses. They're running fairly even; I have a few from Canada; a few from Scandinavia and ones and twos from other northern European countries. I didn't expect much from non-English speaking countries (or countries where English isn't the language of business), but hoped I'd pick up some response from Africa, Australia and New Zealand and, most of all, India. But as yet, it's radio silence.

I have a presentation to prepare this afternoon, but after that, I suspect I'll be pushing the survey out to those particular communication outposts.

Early days, early findings

Just one day into the survey mapping employee communicators' roles in engagement and there are already a gratifying number of responses from across the UK, Continental Europe and North America - it would be great to get some input from other parts of the world too.

Anyway, the number of responses is statistically interesting, but perhaps not get a truly viable sample - still there's a fortnight yet to go.

Some early findings - which may well change as the number of responses rises suggest:

• Almost half of all respondents have a role that includes employee communication - but has responsibility for other stakeholders as well.
• Almost half of all respondents state that their organisation has no employee engagement strategy.
• A third of respondents' organisations really don't differentiate between employee communication and engagement.
• Virtually all employee communicators are involved in engagement strategy or implementation, with a third of respondents stating their team 'owns' engagement in the organisation - though HR is the most common 'owner'.
• The intranet is the most widely used communication channel from our early respondents, closely followed by emails - with face-to-face channels very popular, but restricted by time and capacity, especially of leadership.
• More than three quarters of respondents to date use social media in their organisations, with blogs and internal social networks leading the way - though one respondent is also using virtual worlds.
• Engagement levels vary widely, and the 'must haves' to help employee communicators vary from a social media strategy to effective line management support and a joined-up approach across functions.

However, this is just a broad-brush round up 24 hours into the survey. It still has two weeks to run. If you haven't taken part yet, why not do so here?

The role of Employee Communications in Employee Engagement

While the debate continues around the correct terminology for employee engagement, there's an equal lack of understanding of the role the employee communication function plays in engagement within organisations.

I'm currently working on a report covering exactly this area, and would very much like to get a snap-shot of where exactly employee communication practitioners operate today within the engagement agenda.

It strikes me that too few organisations today differentiate properly between employee communication and employee engagement - but I'd like to apply some evidence to that hypothesis.

So, if you have a role in employee communication and perhaps play some part in engagement in your organisation, pleas complete this survey and help build a picture of what role the employee communication team plays in engagement - and how you're fulfilling that role.

The survey will be open until September 24th - and I'll post details of the final report once it's published.