It's Time to REvitalize the Work Place (and the Work Force).

It is slowly beginning to dawn on some business leaders that concentration on shareholder value at the expense of employees is badly hurting work-force commitment. The latest and most compelling critics of this long-standing shortsightedness are the respected team of Allan Kennedy and Terrence Deal. They were the pioneers in 1982 in identifying the existence of distinctive corporate cultures. Their work has proved invaluable in helping us understand the way organizations behave and how leaders live their values, both good and bad.

In their new book, "The New Corporate Cultures," Deal and Kennedy argue that today's business leaders in their single-minded pursuit of shareholder interests have created employee distrust, skepticism and fear that have ripped apart once great corporate cultures. And they unhesitatingly name names. In their view it will take at least a generation or two to restore the trust that has been blown to smithereens by leaders absorbed in their own obscene bonuses and golden parachutes rather than the well-being of the people who make it all work.

So seriously do they regard the consequences of this phenomenon that they argue the last, best hope for repairing and revitalizing damaged cultures lies with managers, supervisors and team leaders with the people skills to restore lost trust - if only in their own small enclaves.

These lower-level leaders, argue the authors, have the credibility and respect that many senior leaders have squandered on ill-conceived mergers, miscalculated downsizings and failed re-engineering initiatives. To the extent that middle managers, supervisors and other first-line leaders can help knit together enclaves of motivated, committed workers, there is hope, they say, that the damaged cultures can be restored.

Another of the villains, in their view, is the increasing use of technology to automate processes that once were in the hands of skilled workers and creative professionals. For example, Deal and Kennedy describe engineers who are tethered to computer-aided design systems as little more than "terminal operators."

This "de-skilling" of work, they argue, is one more step in reducing company dependence on human creativity and knowledge. In an era where employee loyalty is now turned inward on self-preservation, senior leaders are looking for ways to defend their vulnerability to disaffected workers. The authors say this fascination with technology is also a logical outcome of business's long love affair with the efficiency experts, beginning with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early days of manufacturing. These were the people who were charged with minimizing work-place costs and company vulnerability to human commitment and to any one individual's knowledge or skill.

The picture Deal and Kennedy paint is bleak, and yet anyone who works in any kind of organization today can recognize the growing shadow of its reality. Many of us in communication have dreamed of a work place where human values dominate the culture, one in which committed people could join together to do important work that was worth doing and that gives meaning to their heavy contributions of time and energy. Otherwise, what is the point of work? And what does individual freedom to seek fulfillment in important work count for in today's culture?

That is more than an academic question. It gets to the root of what our lives will be like in the work place of the future. Today that work place often seems to grow uglier and uglier. Insecurity, fear and alienation are often the dominant emotions. Employee surveys show that the level of anger is rising among employees who see themselves as expendable and used, if not resigned to their fate.

As the nature of work changes and we increasingly become a knowledge-based, information-dependent economy, these practices are self-defeating. The best talent will not abide a value system that sees them as expendable cogs in an impersonal work machine or that declines to share the wealth equitably.

If you analyze the negative numbers on trust and communication in so many employee surveys in so many companies these days, what you often discover is people's sense that the company and senior leaders are prospering while their own fortunes and careers stagnate.

Deal and Kennedy and others concerned about the issue of single-minded focus on shareholders are not closet advocates of paternalism or revisionist supporters of entitlement. They readily acknowledge the pressures of global competition, the effect of the technological revolution and the need to reduce costs in organizations under heavy cost and profit pressures. They are shrewd and sophisticated observers, but they worry that once-vital and productive cultures with a sense of community have been severely damaged. It is their further conclusion that we will pay for years to come for the abuse of the work force in pursuit of shareholder value.

Which brings me to my own point. I believe our best hope for repairing our damaged cultures and creating truly high performing work organizations is leaders at all levels who care about human values and the people they lead. That may sound hopelessly idealistic and naive in the context of today's cynical corporate cultures. But naive or not, it is our best hope in combating the dehumanized work places that can only distance us from others and ourselves and create increasingly dysfunctional corporate cultures.

The issue is intimately connected to company reward systems. As long as leaders are rewarded mainly for short-term results and increasing shareholder value, the problem will get worse. The only ones who can break the cycle are people fed up with the current situation. That sounds to me mostly like the members of the work forces themselves.

Could that mean forming unions and creating third-party representatives to fight the present destabilized value system? Maybe, but professionals have typically seen themselves as above that need and resistant to the idea of organizing to blunt the power of their leadership. It could turn out that such a rebalancing of power and influence of an organization's traditional constituencies is the most practical way out.

The other remedy may simply lie in the demographics of the work force today. The baby bust has created a situation where the shortage of talented workers is becoming increasingly painful for companies. The companies that will be successful in competing for this scarce talent pool - especially as the baby boomers soon begin to retire - will be those who offer the most promising work climates. Even an inevitable economic downturn at some point is not going to change that statistical reality.

We know, by the way, what that most promising work climate looks like. When Fortune magazine quizzed the people who are employed at the 100 Best Companies to Work For, employees cited three characteristics that defined such organizations - meaningful work, inspirational leadership and great facilities.

To obtain, grow and nurture these younger workers, organizations will be obliged to create such people-friendly cultures or risk losing their most talented capital assets in an information society,The irony is that by discouraging employee loyalty, these same corporate leaders have made themselves potential victims of corporate free agency.

But I want to believe that enlightened companies led by committed leaders can do better. The skeptics among us say that's unlikely to happen, yet in the long run it may be our best hope - although even then it will be far from easy for anyone to undo the damage that has been done. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, it's like the new stepfather of the abused children saying "I'm different." The simple truth is that you can't communicate with or lead someone who doesn't trust you any more than you can someone who fears you.

These are fundamental issues for communicators. What should we see as our critical priorities? Many have argued that the primary need is for us to become technologists and to align ourselves with those who see technology as the only credible and democratizing wave of the future. But is the quality of human communication really enhanced by technology? That's a very big question that I leave to the philosophers and psychologists.

Technology is faster and permits us to deliver much more information, but are speed and volume the real communication problems in a society already suffering information overload? Or is the issue more a matter of clarity, meaning, leadership credibility and time to reflect on that information? I believe the latter is the real challenge.

Increasing evidence indicates that many people in the work place hide behind technology as a kind of avoidance device. They e-mail others to avoid delivering unpleasant messages or simply to save precious work time. They use voice mail to avoid the painful silence of fear or disagreement on the other end. It's arguably easier and more efficient to talk passively to a recording device or type in a comment that could elicit a pained response we don't want to hear or see.

But what kind of leadership comes through a computer screen or a telephone? That's not to devalue the importance and necessity of technology. It is to put it into perspective as only an aid to the essential process of human interchange.

Many others argue that the real challenge is for communicators to become more strategic in our planning and thinking. That's undeniably true, but what good does the best strategy do if the receivers are broken or unplugged? Or if the organization has become dysfunctional?

Besides redressing the constituency imbalance, I continue to believe that we must begin serious work on face-to-face communication if we are to combat our current work-place ills. That means stating communication expectations for both good leadership and good followership. It means offering useful training and modeling of the requisite skills. It means measurement of behavioral change or lack of it. It means upward evaluation of leaders and feedback so they can know their strengths and weaknesses. And it means what we always understand best at work: rewards and penalties.

Here is the new frontier for communicators. The organizations that win in the future will be the ones who understand how to create people-friendly organizations and effective leaders. And the communicators who win will be those who besides mastering the valuable new technologies can team up with like-minded collaborators to enhance credibility and trust and improve face-to-face interactions.

Listen to two critical quotes from the authors quoted earlier. On communication professionals: "Why do most employee-oriented publications fail so miserably in their attempts to communicate?" Their answer: the production of these documents is delegated to the corporate communication department, "who know little about business and often receive inadequate support from senior management and sit outside the loop of important information. As a consequence they focus on form rather than function."

And then: "The single most important communication channel in any organization is word of mouth. This is true because people place a premium on trust in their communication. The business world has yet to invent a means of establishing trust to compete with close, face-to-face contact. There is just no substitute for flesh-to-flesh, eyeball-to-eyeball contact."

Here is where culture gurus Kennedy and Deal finally put their money: face-to-face communication between people who want to participate in meaningful work and achieve larger objectives than they could by themselves.

Senior leaders should take careful note. The health of their cultures is at stake. Communicators should pay close attention. The fate of their profession is at stake. The work place when all is said and done is a human habitat that requires trusting, honest and clear human exchanges. To think otherwise is to fall victim to the myth that communication is nothing more than the efficient movement of information.

The real challenge that faces us is human leadership and human collaboration in creating productive work places. That's what employee communication has always been about - not media, not speed, not volume, and not the latest in whiz-bang technology.

Roger D'Aprix, ABC, is managing director, D'Aprix & Company, LLC, Rochester, N.Y. He is author of "Face-to-Face Communicating for Leadership," a comprehensive kit for training workshops defining communication roles of managers and supervisor, soon to be released by IABC.