Inspiration from Kurt Vonnegut and The No Asshole Rule!

This isn’t about social media. It’s not even about employee communications. It’s just about the most brilliant advice/perspective one could adopt.

Author Bob Sutton of ”The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t” (which I highly recommend) just posted about writer Kurt Vonnegut (who recently passed away). The crux of his post is this: reframing a situation can change how you experience it…and change it for the better….if instead of constantly pursuing money, beauty, prestige you simply look at your life and see all that you have, you’d be happier.

Here’s the post. Enjoy.

The “we-ness”

Internal communicators are talking these days about employee engagement. What we’re really talking about here is trying to foster a sense of community and belonging….that the work employees do for the company matters and makes a difference. Why? We want them to be happy, healthy, productive employees–engaged.

So how is this done? I think one small thing we can do, is use “we” when we write instead of “the company”, “it”, “Intel”, etc. speaking as though we (the communicators) are an unaffiliated lot, writing about the company.

“We” is inclusive, it suggests that the people in the “we” belong to a group, that “we” have something in common…and “we” do….we’re all employees. So let’s not pretend that we’re not.

My background is as a journalist, and at first this idea of “we” made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. But the more I think about, the more it makes sense to use “we”.

1. It fosters a sense of belonging

2. “We” is more personal….and people connect and relate to other people, not corporate entities. If we want employees to engage, we need to create a community and personalize the corporation.

We need to create the sense of “we-ness”.