I’ve been watching with bemusement as one American institution after another loses its credibility with the public. Fewer people believe much of what they hear from authority figures and I can’t blame them. I’m interested in this because I spent my public relations career helping employers and clients build trust with employees, customers and government regulators.
It’s not complicated. In general, people will believe what you say if you do not lie to them, listen to them and refrain from harming them. The Public Relations Society of America’s code of professional ethics says roughly the same thing in fancier language.
I saw these principles in action because I worked for a reasonably honest company. AT&T’s Bell System depended on a favorable reputation to sustain its regulated monopoly. Every employee signed a pledge to safeguard customer privacy, and I know of several executives who were fired for misbehavior. It may have helped that the chairman was a former Eagle scout.
The company generally was treated fairly by the news media because we never ducked reporters’ questions (and in those days media still covered news fairly). When I worked in media relations at Illinois Bell and Western Electric, we made it a point to be accessible to reporters 24 hours a day. Our answers did not always satisfy reporters but we never refused to comment.
We had an agenda, of course, and promoted it with the understanding that the news media were not going to accept our talking points at face value. Rare attempts to spin the news fell flat. When AT&T became one of the first companies to report more than $1 billion in earnings, reporters laughed when the news release from the company’s headquarters in New York expressed the number as $1100 million instead of $1.1 billion.
Building credibility with employees was equally important. Our employee publications, in addition to recognizing and highlighting employees, delivered information on issues affecting the business as candidly as possible. I had regular skirmishes with the company’s lawyers over this.
During a period of massive layoffs at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, management needed to keep employees informed without arousing speculation in the news media. The solution was a confidential newsletter that was distributed to supervisors to guide them in talking to employees. While it was impossible to predict future layoffs, supervisors were able to explain to employees that more cuts were likely if present trends continued.
This long-term investment in credibility paid off during the frequent labor disputes and strikes the telecommunications industry encountered in the 1970s and 80s. Illinois Bell had a phone-in employee newscast on an answering system. It got little traffic under normal circumstances but was so popular during strikes that we had to add circuits to meet demand for up-to-the-minute information. During one strike a competing union hotline failed to gain traction because employees trusted management’s newscast more.
Our biggest communications challenge was the court-ordered breakup of the Bell System in 1984. The largest corporate reorganization in history (at that time) was an unprecedented shock to an employee culture built on stability and certainty. For the first time, executives could not tell employees what was going to happen because the future of the business was tied up in antitrust litigation and regulatory proceedings. It was natural for some employees to suspect that the bosses know but aren’t telling us.
The solution was a series of employee town meetings that became a permanent part of the company’s communications. After some initial discomfort, Illinois Bell’s executives became comfortable answering questions from employees. A few even acknowledged responsibility for management’s occasional missteps. Being candid about what they knew, what they didn’t know, and why they didn’t know it renewed confidence in management and helped employees develop a tolerance for uncertainty.
The same kind of challenge to credibility is facing American institutions and most of them are failing in the eyes of the public. Only 52% of Americans still trust the U.S. Center for Disease Control, 44% trust the FBI and only 16% trust newspapers. Members of Congress and used-car salesmen have roughly the same reputation for honesty.
I wonder if the high-powered communications experts these organizations employ will start advising their principals to be transparent, candid and truthful. It’s not rocket science, and if all else fails it might work.