Dear Comcast,
I'm thrilled to see the likes of Scott Westerman, Frank Elaison, and even Charlie Douglas posting in the blogosphere -- without any hint of that marketing-written, legal-approved scripting.
I've been doing this long enough to see this come and go. You'll get an enthusiastic employee who, in good faith, writes something wrong. Or you'll have an employee having a bad day who says too much about work on his personal blog. As a result, a memo flies out of the corporate belly-button telling everybody to shut-up or ship-out.
Talk happens. The guy in the Comcast van stops by every now and then and we chatter. A desk-jockey at the local office is also someone I talk to about things. Sometimes I ask, sometimes they volunteer, and sometimes they're not sure or don't have all the facts.
But, when that talk is online, there's something called "discoverable evidence" left behind and lawyers are afraid as hell about it. Someone ought to tell the lawyers that this is a business full of people and that people do things. The lawyers ought to be figuring out how to handle litigation in a real company of hard-working but sometimes misinformed people instead of a make-believe company where there are no people to say things wrong.
Comcast, you're a Titan company -- lead the way in ungagging your employees. They work for you because they like to, and letting them talk about stuff without fear is an investment that will -- on the average -- pay dividends to you.
Ya'll might have heard that I hang out on DSLReports.com. The place is crawling with Comcast Techs, and I'd bet that I know only half of them (there are too many). Since my all-too-boring discovery about P2P-upload reset packages, they "come out" to me in droves. They trust me. They trust their co-workers, too, and they even like their jobs. They don't trust Philadelphia. Consequently, we do a lot of "non-talking" -- you know, that language you use on the telephone when someone else is in the room, eavesdropping?
That's pretty normal. A lot of businesses with satellite offices think that they'd run better if they didn't get jerked around by the pencil-necks at HQ.
Your techs and employees WILL work for you, and most of the time, they'll do a great job (and remember, they're doing it for free!). Just let them. If they over-promise or over-disclose -- that's unfortunate, but it's still probably better than the expensive chilling effect of a "Don't Help Customers Online" and "Don't Talk About Work Online" policy.
Please, write your policies now -- so that when your employees who are trying to follow your examples do something, that they don't lose their job over it. I suggest the following strategy:
1. Encourage your employees to feel free to talk online. If they see something that needs addressing, they should feel empowered to "take ownership" of the problem until it can be handed off to the right person who will see to it through completion of the problem.
2. Your employees work for you and represent you, however everybody knows that an employee makes mistakes about the limits to their authority and knowledge. By purely human error, they might exceed these in good faith. These are not employees to discipline, these are employees to encourage. They're the risk-takers, the extra-mile workers, those that need to be rewarded for doing more than "just enough to get by." Your policy should be to ASK the employee to correct whatever he said in his own words (if appropriate), and giving him (or her) information on how to best describe the item in question in the future. In the end, the employee shouldn't feel "disciplined" or adversely "trained," but encouraged to keep it up and prepared to do it better!
3. This is not a "free-for-all" strategy for bad conduct or corporate espionage. Employees who work in "bad faith," like that guy a few weeks ago that was bragging to his buddies on how he could abuse his position to perform "justice" on anyone who "flooded" him while playing online games, should be disciplined for their bad actions, not for talking online about it. In the example case, he should get disciplined for abusing his tech-support access and the conflict of interest of taking abuse enforcement into his own hands in a case that affected him personally -- both of these are far more important than the fact that he got online and bragged about it.
If you need to add some legalese to the www.comcast.net site about employee's casual statements being subject to the rules and tarriffs, then do so. Hell, we've all called the "official" lines of various companies and got the wrong answers -- yet we still paid the difference. This is no different.
I really like what you've been doing and hope to see it continue and grow.
Robb
PS: Please knock off this Sandvine stuff. Since February 20th, I cannot upload anything, anymore.
I'm thrilled to see the likes of Scott Westerman, Frank Elaison, and even Charlie Douglas posting in the blogosphere -- without any hint of that marketing-written, legal-approved scripting.
I've been doing this long enough to see this come and go. You'll get an enthusiastic employee who, in good faith, writes something wrong. Or you'll have an employee having a bad day who says too much about work on his personal blog. As a result, a memo flies out of the corporate belly-button telling everybody to shut-up or ship-out.
Talk happens. The guy in the Comcast van stops by every now and then and we chatter. A desk-jockey at the local office is also someone I talk to about things. Sometimes I ask, sometimes they volunteer, and sometimes they're not sure or don't have all the facts.
But, when that talk is online, there's something called "discoverable evidence" left behind and lawyers are afraid as hell about it. Someone ought to tell the lawyers that this is a business full of people and that people do things. The lawyers ought to be figuring out how to handle litigation in a real company of hard-working but sometimes misinformed people instead of a make-believe company where there are no people to say things wrong.
Comcast, you're a Titan company -- lead the way in ungagging your employees. They work for you because they like to, and letting them talk about stuff without fear is an investment that will -- on the average -- pay dividends to you.
Ya'll might have heard that I hang out on DSLReports.com. The place is crawling with Comcast Techs, and I'd bet that I know only half of them (there are too many). Since my all-too-boring discovery about P2P-upload reset packages, they "come out" to me in droves. They trust me. They trust their co-workers, too, and they even like their jobs. They don't trust Philadelphia. Consequently, we do a lot of "non-talking" -- you know, that language you use on the telephone when someone else is in the room, eavesdropping?
That's pretty normal. A lot of businesses with satellite offices think that they'd run better if they didn't get jerked around by the pencil-necks at HQ.
Your techs and employees WILL work for you, and most of the time, they'll do a great job (and remember, they're doing it for free!). Just let them. If they over-promise or over-disclose -- that's unfortunate, but it's still probably better than the expensive chilling effect of a "Don't Help Customers Online" and "Don't Talk About Work Online" policy.
Please, write your policies now -- so that when your employees who are trying to follow your examples do something, that they don't lose their job over it. I suggest the following strategy:
1. Encourage your employees to feel free to talk online. If they see something that needs addressing, they should feel empowered to "take ownership" of the problem until it can be handed off to the right person who will see to it through completion of the problem.
2. Your employees work for you and represent you, however everybody knows that an employee makes mistakes about the limits to their authority and knowledge. By purely human error, they might exceed these in good faith. These are not employees to discipline, these are employees to encourage. They're the risk-takers, the extra-mile workers, those that need to be rewarded for doing more than "just enough to get by." Your policy should be to ASK the employee to correct whatever he said in his own words (if appropriate), and giving him (or her) information on how to best describe the item in question in the future. In the end, the employee shouldn't feel "disciplined" or adversely "trained," but encouraged to keep it up and prepared to do it better!
3. This is not a "free-for-all" strategy for bad conduct or corporate espionage. Employees who work in "bad faith," like that guy a few weeks ago that was bragging to his buddies on how he could abuse his position to perform "justice" on anyone who "flooded" him while playing online games, should be disciplined for their bad actions, not for talking online about it. In the example case, he should get disciplined for abusing his tech-support access and the conflict of interest of taking abuse enforcement into his own hands in a case that affected him personally -- both of these are far more important than the fact that he got online and bragged about it.
If you need to add some legalese to the www.comcast.net site about employee's casual statements being subject to the rules and tarriffs, then do so. Hell, we've all called the "official" lines of various companies and got the wrong answers -- yet we still paid the difference. This is no different.
I really like what you've been doing and hope to see it continue and grow.
Robb
PS: Please knock off this Sandvine stuff. Since February 20th, I cannot upload anything, anymore.
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