AWLP 2013: What’s in Store in Baltimore

Although this is primarily a blog about writing, I occasionally veer off-topic to write about my other area of expertise: work-life effectiveness. Last year at around this time I published an interview with Kathie Lingle, Executive Director of the Alliance for Work-Life Progress, in which she described their upcoming annual event—known at the time as an “un-conference.” The post was very well-received, as was the event, so last week I called Kathie up to find out what was in store for this year’s, scheduled for late February in Baltimore. Here’s how it went:

I see you’re calling this event a forum again. Is it another “un-conference?”

We’ve dropped that label. I think we’ve made our point. We can show we’re different by what we’re doing, rather than by what we call it.

Actually, the agenda looks pretty different from last year’s.

Every one of our forums is quite different. We listen to the feedback we get every year. This year, two very important recommendations came to the fore. One was, “Can we have new blood, can we hear from companies that are not the usual suspects?”

And the other thing people told us, which is a big overarching driver this year, is, “Last year was all about talking about the future of work. Let’s stop talking about what work will look like and let’s make it happen. Give us tools. Give us people and practices so we can go get it done.”

So we’ve brought in some very different companies [more on that below] and a big theme running through the whole forum this year is tools. We’ve also got a different spin from most conferences because maximum interactivity is a big priority. We don’t want the usual workshop format, the talking heads.

So tell me about the tools.

Well, we’re starting with Ellen Kossek who will present the first tool, the work-life indicator, and going on from there…

And the work-life indicator is…?

You may know the book she published a few years ago, CEO of Me. It’s all about diagnosing yourself into one of four quadrants based on how you manage your own work-life boundaries. She’s partnered with the Center for Creative Leadership, in North Carolina, to create an assessment tool called the work-life indicator. You take a ten minute survey that assesses how you manage the boundaries between work and family. On the basis of that you get a report with tips on increasing your effectiveness in all spheres.

So we’re inviting up to 30 people to sign up for a pre-conference session. Anyone can sign up but there is an obligation. They have to take this assessment online in advance. Their results are sent to the CCL, which will analyze them and create personal reports for each participant. Ellen will come to the session armed with people’s reports, hand them out, and the session is all about getting your feedback and then a discussion about how to use this organizationally with managers and employees.  So that’s a super-powered tool.

By the way, anyone can do one of these work-life indicators any time but it costs about $30. We’re covering the cost for people who do it at the forum, because we think work-life people should be the first to know what their own work-life management issues are.

What are some other tools?

There are a couple sessions with Leslie Hammer and Erin Kelly from the Work, Family and Health Network, who are going to be talking about their very messy interventions in real organizations. They’re going to talk about the work they’ve been doing as part of this huge National Institutes of Health funded project with many different private companies and industries involved. They survey what’s going on in real organizations, change some things and then measure the change. And what’s radical about what they’re doing is that they’re not just looking at behavioral change, they’re down at the level of biometrics.

Biometrics? Can you elaborate?

They go in and do interventions—train managers and employees for some kind of change, often around flexibility—and they collect biometrics on people. One of the things I think is pretty fascinating is they’re detecting changes at the biometric level sometimes independent of behavioral change, which can lag quite a bit.

What kind of biometrics are they collecting?

Well, cholesterol, for one: good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, total cholesterol. Cardiac rates. And then there’s one study they’ve done of low-wage workers in interaction with their supervisors where they did saliva tests to measure cortisol, the stress hormone. They’ve done some fascinating work where they’ve been able to get cortisol readings of employees who’ve had interactions with their supervisors at work and then look at the cortisol levels of their children 24 hours later and can see the impact of stress.

So we’re looking at work-family interaction at the organic level. That’s what so radical about this. These are the kinds of measures that we work-life people have been looking for. And you know, many, many companies are already collecting biometrics of their workers as part of health intervention initiatives. Why couldn’t work-life people give them the tools and information they need to make new connections with it? Not just, “ok, we know who’s got diabetes, let’s have a diabetes seminar,” or “we know who’s smoking, so let’s get people to stop smoking.”

Okay, hold up. The cortisol is amazing and it also makes sense that there’d be a direct connection between employees’ interactions at work and their cortisol levels and even their families’ cortisol levels. But are they also finding connections with things like cholesterol?

Yes! A lot of this research was presented at last year’s Work and Family Researchers Network conference. There are several notable studies showing what work-life people have been asserting forever: that it’s all about stress reduction and as you add more flexible work practices and culturally embed it (in other words, to the degree that you’re not just publishing policies but you’re changing people’s work practices), cholesterol improves. Cardiac measures show a beneficial impact, too. This is what I mean by radical: we’re now getting to the point where we can actually measure, at the body level, the impact of what we’re doing.

That’s totally incredible.

When I said tools, I meant tools.

Are companies part of these presentations or is it mostly going to be researchers?

Real companies have been a big part of the project Erin Kelly and Leslie Hammer are presenting, but they aren’t going to be involved in that presentation. But that session’s going to be followed by four different workshops about transformational change with four specific companies. These are other companies, other practices, so we can expose people to multiple tools and practices.

And also this year the number of participants in our Work-Life Seal of Distinction, which we launched last year, more than doubled. Fifty-four companies got through our threshold and got the Seal and a lot of them will be at the forum. We’ve invited the top 10, who have the most remarkable things going on, to show their tools and solutions in an Innovation Showcase.

So that’s going to be some kind of exhibition?

Yes, like a poster session, on opening night. Our three Innovation Excellence award-winners will be there, too.  One of them is State Street Bank. They have a fabulous twist on flexibility where it’s their managers who go about tapping people on the shoulder and saying, “Hey, you need some help.”

Wow. That’s unusual.

It’s an antidote to what we hear all the time: “How do you get managers involved?” This turns the whole thing on its head.

And then there’s Banco Santader.  It’s this Spanish Bank that captured our attention because they’ve literally built the perfect work environment for work-life. They built it ten miles outside of Madrid. It’s got everything from a church to a clinic and now they’re working on a forest. They have ISO-certified child care—have you ever heard of ISO certification for a child care center in this country? They’re pushing the boundaries like we’ve never seen.

Wait, did you say they’re building a forest?

Well they’re not building a forest. They built a city, and they’ve got all the internal stuff done and now they’re working on the outside environment for employees, with walking paths, etc: the natural world brought to the workplace. It’s extraordinary.

Then, as we were hearing from them and looking at what they’re doing, we found out that Zappos is about to do the same thing out in San Francisco. So this is not as far-fetched as it might seem as first.

And then our third Innovative Excellence winner is the USDA, a government agency. So these will all be more solutions and tools. We’re exposing people to as much as we can. I think people’s heads will be spinning.

Who else is presenting?

We’ve got Cali Williams Yost, who just published a new book about personal work-life effectiveness, and Theresa Hopke, who’ll be leading a best practice sharing session, and a session by the Red Cross about disaster preparedness. And then, as I said, some big and small companies and some other groups, like Bright Horizons.

And it’s really exciting, we’re accomplishing our objective, which is that a lot of the people attending the forum, and exhibitors, are ones that none of us would identify as being in the work-life field. Some of them are names you know, that just haven’t been involved in the work-life world. Some of them you’ve never heard of. For the first time, I’m in the position of not recognizing more than three quarters of our audience this year. This is a whole new field of energy and activity and I think it’s wonderful.

Last year’s forum was pretty small. This one sounds bigger.

We try, deliberately, to keep it reasonably intimate. I can promise you it won’t be a 500-person conference. I think the number will land somewhere between 75-100. Not so huge so you can get lost, but big enough so you have a strong influx of ideas.

Who should come to this conference, if they haven’t already signed up?

I wouldn’t label the kinds of people who should come, I think it’s going to be a very interesting, eye-opening look at ways to connect the dots between functions. Anyone who is really involved in talent management and people strategies and workplace effectiveness. There are health care people coming, communications people, general heads of HR.

That’s really what AWLP is all about: we cut across boundaries: universities, corporations, the federal government, hospitals… And we also don’t stay in a box about work functions. We tend to be bridge-builders.  In fact, ideally people should come with a team that might include several different practitioners, because some of these tools are pretty sophisticated and will require involvement across organizational functions.

Thanks, Kathie. I’ll include a link for anyone who wants to sign up. See you in Baltimore!

And here it is: 2013 AWLP Work-Life Forum

The Working Mother “100 Best” application deadline is around the corner. Need some last minute help?

Just Call Me The Woman With the Hammer

You know the saying, “To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” It came to mind last week when I was at the Working Mother Work Life Congress, an annual conference built around the release of the magazine’s  famous “100 Best Companies” list. Sure, people were there to talk about work-life, but as a communications professional, everything I heard seemed to be about communication.

It’s not surprising, really, because ultimately a lot of what makes work engaging and do-able for people who have lives outside of it comes down to good communication. Since it’s National Work and Family Month, let me show you what I mean:

When keynote speaker Beverly Kaye, Founder and Co-CEO of Career Systems International, spoke about employee development, a lot of what she had to say was a case for more communication.  Kaye was referring to spoken communication between managers and those they manage, but many of her comments could also apply to the ways companies communicate to employees, in general (or don’t).

Take her “five myths” that prevent managers from talking with employees about their careers. At least three of these (paraphrased below) are widely used by senior leaders in companies as an excuse for not sharing crucial information with employees:

• If I open the discussion, it will be a Pandora’s Box. (The truth is, your employees are talking about it already. You’re not releasing anything into the world that isn’t already there. You’re just bringing it out into the open and providing yourself with a chance for input.)
• Employees own their own careers—it’s not my job to give them the answers. (The truth is, employees don’t generally expect definitive answers—they just want support and information.)
• I can’t deliver on their desire to move up the career ladder, so talking about it will just lead to disappointment. (The truth is, not everybody aspires to move up. Employees want jobs they care about—“meaning is the new money,” as Kaye says. Translated to more general employee communications: don’t second guess what your audience wants to hear. Be open in what you say and be open to hearing what they say, too—what they want and need might surprise you.)

In a break-out session, Suzanne Vickberg, Senior Manager for Inclusion at Deloitte, spoke about data forensics—specifically, how to use data about your workforce to tell a story that demonstrates the value of work-life programs to leadership. Here (again paraphrased) are some of the points she made:

• Most companies already collect data about their employees. By connecting these data in thoughtful ways, you can tell a strong story. For example, connect data from last year’s talent survey to current attrition rates—how do what employees said about their work-life balance correlate with whether they’re still with the company a year later? Through an analysis like this, Vickberg’s team was able to show leadership at Deloitte that addressing employee concerns about work-life fit had six times the impact on retention as addressing concerns about pay.
• Numbers don’t mean much in isolation. Find ways to bring them to life. By way of example, Vickberg  showed a chart that used proportionately-sized dots to illustrate the dramatic difference in effect on turnover among a variety of factors. A small thing—but a big effect on communication.
• Speak the language of your audience. For example, if you’re reporting to leadership in finance, talk about the relative cost to the business of providing work-life policies and programs and losing employees.
• Understand what will and will not be heard. If you are addressing the problem of workload, recommendations that workload simply be reduced are unlikely to go very far. But you can probably use the same data to show how much better employees are able to manage their workload when they have control over where and when that work gets done.
• Respect your data—it might not always tell the story you expect it to tell, but chances are it does have something to say.

Finally, keynote speaker Patrick O’Neill, President of Extraordinary Conversations, introduced the “Rule of 13.” Describing the vital role clear communications play in strong leadership, O’Neill said leaders should be able to state the vision behind any initiative in 13 words or less—and the statement should be “understandable to your teenager.”

For example? There’s the head of an entertainment company whose 12 words–“One of every five CDs sold will be sold in our stores”—helped take his company from $28 million to $200 million in three years.

There’s the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation, which laid it on the line in 5: “Conquering cancer in our lifetime.” (Admittedly, this begs the question: “whose lifetime?)

And then there’s another guy you might have heard about, who said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade.”

Hmmm.. wonder how that one turned out?

Thinking about trying for next year’s “Best Companies” list? You can’t get on the list if you can’t tell your story.  Download my free tip sheet and put your best foot forward.

 

What’s the Story?

Everyone loves a good story. Not coincidentally, stories are one of the best ways to communicate, because our brains are wired for them. Not only do we pay more attention to stories, we remember them better. (There’s research out there demonstrating this, but it will be no surprise to anyone who can recite entire scenes from The Godfather or episodes of Seinfeld, but can’t remember her own cell phone number.)

So it stands to reason that if you’re trying to get employees to remember and use your benefits, work-life and wellness programs, you’ll have more success if you reel them in with a good story.

First, a word about what I mean by “story.” The concept has become a bit of a buzz word in the business world lately and though this is mostly a good sign, it’s also led to some dilution in meaning. It sometimes seems like any few bits of information, strung together in logical order, are called a story. Data can tell a story, but mostly to those who already have more than a passing interest in the data. If you’re running a corporate child care service, the number of people using that service, and perhaps what jobs within the company they have, tell you a story–you’re happy just to look at the numbers. If you’re considering whether to continue offering a wellness program, the decrease in health care costs associated with that program tell you a story.

But if you have some other job altogether, the fact that 20% of employees with young children are enrolled in child care is not a compelling story. What might be compelling, is that someone who initially shared some of the same misgivings you have about the center is now happily using it. Or that someone who thought they couldn’t afford the center discovered how generous the sliding fee scale was. Or, frankly, simply that someone with a name and a face is using the center. Because research also indicates that people respond much better to stories of individuals than they do to stories about large numbers of people.

So, how to go about telling stories? Here are a few options:

• Depending on the circumstance and what you’re trying to promote (and thus how much privacy concerns come into play), you can simply provide profiles of employees using a program or policy. I once worked with a company that was trying to promote a culture of flexibility. It already had a number of employees working in some pretty flexible ways, and for some pretty interesting reasons. (In other words, not just people leaving at 3 to pick up the kids.) Leadership wanted others—including management—to get the message that these kinds of arrangements were not only possible but encouraged. So they gave me a list of employees working flexibly and I interviewed them one at a time. Then I wrote a brief, lively profile about each one. The profiles were no longer than a handful of paragraphs, but they described a typical day of work and personal pursuits, explained how and why this particular way of working had come about, and summarized how the arrangement was going for all involved. Now, flexibility was no longer an abstract list of potential work arrangements. It had a face—many faces, in fact.

• Another, less formal option is to let your employees do the talking. Take advantage of social media! More and more organizations are introducing corporate social networking sites like Yammer or Pulse. Take advantage of these to invite employees to tell their stories. Try posting a different question every few weeks. Have you used the R&R service? Tell us how it went. Did you join a Weight Watchers group? How hard has it been to stick to the plan—and how near are you to reaching your goal? Even without official social networking sites, you can invite employees to post their comments on a dedicated Intranet page. Or have a video competition—show us your favorite work-life program and why.

• Finally, you can take the creative way out (and avoid all privacy worries): make your stories up! I’ve always admired the company that ran an ongoing narrative soap opera, with a cast of characters that got into all kinds of catastrophic situations—only to be saved by one of the company’s work-life programs or policies. The HR department released a new story each week; they were avidly followed by employees. I could imagine doing this as a comic strip, as well, if you’ve got somebody on the team with the talent to pull that off. Perhaps a “Perils of Pauline” -type series featuring a feisty young hero or heroine. Perhaps a contest again, to help decide the fate of the characters. Just think of the possibilities!

Here’s a secret shared by storytellers: telling a story can be just as fun as reading one. (Ok, the writing, itself, can have its agonizing moments, but there’s still something deeply satisfying about a good story, which the writer experiences every bit as much as the reader.) So give yourself and your programs a break: let your storytelling instincts—or those of your employees—take over for a change.

Need help telling your story? Let’s talk!

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Open Season

Over the summer, many HR departments start gearing up for fall or winter benefits Open Enrollment. Wait—why are you reaching for the Advil?

Ok, so it may not be your favorite time of year. And yes, benefits communications, especially when it comes to the level of detail required for this process, can be deadly. But that doesn’t mean they have to be deadly—either to write or to read.

Why not do something different this year? Turn them into a challenge. If you’ll excuse the ugly proverbial phrase, kill a few birds with one stone. (Sorry, PETA.) Think of Open Enrollment season as Open Season on several communications goals at once:

Promote the heck out of your organization as an employer of choice.

Quite possibly, you live in benefits-land, a world of costs and returns and heavy negotiations, both with vendors and with management. You know how expensive some of these programs are. And what it might cost to get the same benefit in the outside world. But does Joe Employee? Not necessarily. Sure, intellectually he might have an idea. It would be hard to be awake in 2012 and not at least know something about the cost of private health insurance. But when he looks at his paycheck, minus his health insurance premium, does he think, “Gee, if it weren’t for my employer, I’d be paying a whole lot more?” I’ll leave you to answer that.

And that’s just the obvious benefits, like health insurance. What about flexible spending accounts? What about the 401(k)? What about programs and policies that have nothing to do with benefits open enrollment or pay, but still count as part of employees’ total rewards, like time-off policies? How much are they worth to employees?

You have to get so much information out, anyhow, this time of year. Why not take the opportunity to remind employees of what they’re getting?

Bump up program usage.

Again, every employee knows she has health insurance, but does she know her plan offers reimbursement for gym use? A 24-hour nurse-on-call? Does she know she can save on prescription costs by getting them mail-order? And about that 401(k) and Flexible Spending Account…does she know how much actual money she can earn with the former, if she takes full advantage of the company match—and how much she can save with the latter, if she uses it wisely? Does she remember that your child care referral service can help her find summer camps? Heck, does she remember that you have a child care referral service?

Benefits enrollment doesn’t have to focus only on the mechanics of enrolling and it doesn’t even have to focus only on benefits. It’s a once-a-year chance to grab the attention of busy employees and strut your stuff. Take advantage of it!

Free up some “me” time.

At most organizations, benefits open enrollment season makes the HR team cower not so much because of the front-end work (although that part can certainly be daunting), but because of what happens when the communications go out and the sign-up period actually begins. Phones ringing, e-mails ping-ing, people stopping you on the elevator. Questions. Problems. Confusion. It’s a giant headache and, to be honest, it’s never going to go away completely. But you can mitigate some of the pain by writing clear, jargon-free communications with plenty of concrete examples. At minimum, you shouldn’t find yourself on the phone explaining the difference between co-insurance and a co-pay, or what “pre-tax” means. At least, not too often.

The trick to writing clear, understandable benefits enrollment communications is the trick to writing all good communications—put yourself in the head of your reader. Remember that the vocabulary of human resources and of benefits is not the vocabulary any of us grew up with—what may be familiar and obvious to you is far from familiar and obvious to most of the world. Remember, also, the value of a good example. The picture that is worth a thousand words doesn’t have to be a picture picture—it can be a word picture. So, draw, baby, draw!

Go ahead, take the challenge. Turn Open Enrollment Season into Open Season and make all your trouble worthwhile. Happy Hunting!*

*No animals were harmed to write this post.

**Want some help with your benefits open enrollment materials? Look no further. Contact me and let’s set up a time to talk.

The Goldilocks Rule

Subtlety has its place in writing, of course. Specifically, it has its place in literature, where it’s often agreed that the more interpretation possible, the better the work. But subtlety has no place in employee communications. And it certainly has no place in “great place to work” applications. At least, not in the actual part you write down.

If you’re working on the latter right now, do yourself a favor and think in terms of Dick and Jane, not Virginia Woolf.

This is not, of course, because the judges read at a first-grade level. It’s just that they’ve got a job to do and to do it they need information. The last thing you want to do is make them read between the lines. (Or worse, read your mind.)

This may seem obvious, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. I’m constantly seeing Great Place to Work submissions—and myriad other “best employer award” submissions—that omit the most important facts.

Here’s how it works: You set out to answer a bunch of open-ended questions about your work environment and culture. You’ve got a good company that works hard to support its employees, so you know you have a shot. You reach the question about how well management listens. Easy! First, you assure the reader that management does, indeed, listen. Then, you mention an event in which management listened. “Done!” you think, and move on to the next question.

But you’ve left out the most important part. The part that describes how management listens. The part that all but proves management listens.

For example, lots of companies have town halls. In some, leaders show up, make speeches, provide prepared answers to a few questions that have been submitted in advance, and leave. In others, leaders invite discussion, candidly answer questions from the floor, promise to personally provide an organization-wide answer to any emailed questions that should follow, and ask what else employees need. Do you see why it may not be enough just to say you have town halls?

Or say you have a system for employees to submit suggestions. Great. You write that down. But do employees know about it? Do they use it? And if they do, what happens then? Does anyone respond to their suggestions? Have any suggestions actually led to changes in the way things are done? That’s the kind of information that demonstrates you’re a company that listens.

In some ways, writing about management communications is relatively easy. Other kinds of questions actually do require some subtlety—not, as I said, in your writing, but in the way you think about your response. Maybe you have an organization with a real sense of mission—employees are passionate about what they do and feel they are making a difference. You can’t convey this by simply stating it’s the case. You can’t convey it by copying out your mission statement.  (Although you probably should do both these things.) Somehow, you’ve got to show that employees feel that way. This can be tough, but there are several ways you can approach it. Maybe you’ve got quotes from employees about how they feel. Maybe you’ve got quotes from customers about the level of committed service they received. Maybe you’ve got stories about employees going the extra mile—demonstrating by their actions that they care more about their mission than their job description.

Connecting the dots in this way is critical. But it’s equally important not to be distracted by some dot that has no business being there. According to my secondary sources, it was Chekhov who said: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” In other words, include the details that make your point—any other details are a distraction.

For instance, if you’re describing a policy supportive of employees, you’ll want to say how it works and who it benefits. You might have some statistics on usage, or feedback on how helpful it’s been. But you don’t have to go into details about how employees go about signing up for it, or include fine print from your legal department about the occasional exception to the policy. The extra detail just confuses the message, requiring the reader to figure out what matters and what doesn’t—a variation on having to read between the lines.

Which brings us to what I’ve just dubbed the Goldilocks rule: Good communications have not too little, not too much—but just the right amount of information.  Apply this to your “great place to work” submission, and at very least you’ll ensure you’ve gotten your message across.

Thinking ahead to benefits open enrollment? Ask me how I can help you make it easy.

To my loyal readers: sorry my posts have been a bit less frequent lately. It’s busy season here! Be sure to click on “Follow” to be notified when I next manage to post.

A Thoroughly Idiosyncratic Overview of Three Days in Scottsdale

Yes, I write about writing. But I also occasionally write about  the field of work-life,* one of my areas of content expertise. Those who don’t come to this blog to read about work-life might still enjoy this post, as it’s really about communication. (Frankly, to my mind most everything comes down to communication.) But I can also assure you that I’ll be back to writing as a topic in my next post, “Communication: The College Tour Edition.”

*work-life, for the uninitiated, has come to refer to the universe of programs, policies, benefits and culture-changing initiatives employers, policy-makers and others offer to support people’s efforts to be whole, fulfilled, responsible people in both their personal and work lives.

The future of work-life may depend on our ability to tell stories.

That might have been my greatest lesson from last week’s Work-Life Forum, sponsored by the Alliance for Work-Life Progress — except I already knew that. It’s all about communication, baby. And communication nearly always improves when stories are involved.

But that didn’t make the forum any less interesting. It drew an entertaining mix of thinkers and practitioners from corporations, consulting firms, non-profits, think tanks and academia. Since it was designed to be highly interactive, and since many attendees have been in the field and known each other forever, it took on a relaxed, late-night-in-the-dorm feel: lots of intense conversations, lots of bad jokes.

It opened with storytelling.

We spent the entire first afternoon together in a workshop on the topic led by Mark Guterman, co-founder of MeaningfulCareers.com. Guterman had a lot to say about how and why stories work: fascinating stuff that I will no doubt pick apart and admire in future posts. But in relation to advancing the work-life field, the main takeaway is that they do work. Data alone rarely convinces an organization’s leaders that it makes good business sense to trust employees and provide them with the supports they need to navigate their many life commitments. Data alone rarely breaks through the information-overload to connect employees with programs and policies and benefits that can help them. Data alone rarely changes public policy.

Storytelling was not officially on the agenda for the second day… 

…but it was in the air, nonetheless, as participants traded real stories to get their points across or dramatized their points with fictional scenarios. (Really. A talent scout would have found it worth the trip.) We spent much of that day in break-outs called “imaginariums,” discussing the real and the ideal of leadership commitment to work-life; of methods companies use to spread wellness initiatives into the community; and of what work will look like in the future. (We began the morning with a catch-up on research, which often tells a story, too. My favorite nugget from a report called Networked Families, as reported by Judi Casey of the Sloan Work & Family Research Network: Technology allows families to connect when they are apart and keeps families apart when they are together. There’s a prize-winning novel in there, somewhere, don’t you think?)

It’s a stretch I can’t quite make to say that the final event, late on the third morning, had anything to do with storytelling, but it did have to do with communicating.

Six leading work-life practitioners were each given 60 seconds at a time to deliver advice on a work-life-related topic.

Time limits were strictly enforced through the use of a mélange of (highly amusing) sound effects that loudly drowned each speaker out after her/his minute had passed. This went on for ten rounds—an exhaustive and exhausting display of communication-on-steroids.

It was interesting to hear what they had to say, but it was equally instructive to hear how some managed to tie up their messages in a neat 60-second package while others were caught at the buzzer with a tangle of unfinished ideas. This is not to disparage those who couldn’t quite pull it together in the time allotted—I have absolutely no doubt I would have been one of them, given the chance—but just to once again point out how dependent communication is on context. In this case, the context depended on the ability to work with sound bites and the kind of small detail that brought the message home quickly: the striking statistic, the aphorism, the metaphor.

And speaking of sound bites

The actual greatest lesson I learned from this forum (since, as I said, I already knew the one about storytelling) was how to tweet. I already had a Twitter account, but I rarely used it. With help from some more digitally-savvy folks like Casey Carlson (@caseylcarlson) and Kyra Cavanaugh (@lifemeetswork), I stepped more firmly into the Twitter universe. I’m not promising I won’t step right back out again. I still have trouble understanding its value in many situations. But for now, you can get a good sense of some of the ideas flying around the AWLP Forum by checking out my tweets and those of others, at #awlp2012.

Feeling exhausted or confused by the 100 Best Companies application? Contact me for help!

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The Making of an Un-Conference: An Interview with Kathie Lingle

In April, the Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP) is holding a Work-Life Forumin Arizona that’s being billed as an “un-conference.” Since many of my readers are interested or intimately involved in the work-life field, I thought I’d devote this blog post to an interview with Kathie Lingle, Executive Director of AWLP. I asked her to tell me more about this event. We talked for nearly 45 minutes, so I couldn’t include it all, but here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Kathie Lingle

So what exactly is an “un-conference?”

We’re experimenting with turning many of the expected features of a conference upside down, in order to stimulate creative thinking. A typical conference is usually an event where a whole bunch of people sit down while talking heads present to them. It usually begins and ends with a keynote speaker who may or may not be from the same profession as the audience. In between are workshops with more talking heads who use PowerPoint slides. Some are consultants who are selling something. If you’re lucky there might be some interactivity and the opportunity to network. If you were to survey participants six months later they’d probably struggle to remember what went on. That’s a conference.

At our un-conference, the core principle is there are no observers– everybody is a participant. We don’t have keynote speakers. We don’t have workshops. We don’t have talking heads. The fact is, every attendee at our Forum could be a keynote speaker, so our goal is to structure things so the work-life profession is talking to and amongst itself, not being talked to.

We do have a storyteller who’s going to help us kick off the meeting but unlike a normal conference he’s not coming in to entertain or dazzle anyone with his own brilliance. He’s going to interview a sample of participants in advance to find out what their challenges are, then customize his storytelling tools and techniques to the real-time needs of the audience. When was the last time you had the chance to influence the design of a conference to meet your specifications?

You held an event like this last year, too, right?

Yes, this is our second year. Our first year we looked at how many elements of “conference” we could change. We thought of following the opening reception by serving breakfast food instead of dinner. We thought of playing with clothing–if we were serving breakfast for dinner, why not have everyone wear pajamas? (We didn’t end up doing this!)

We also thought about not having enough chairs, so literally some percentage of the audience would always have to be on their feet. We didn’t do that, but what we did instead, was to put “Innovation Stations” around the room. They were tall bistro tables, and they each had different things on them. One was a Creativity Station with clay, markers, paper and some other materials. Another was a Think Station where we had blocks and puzzles and things that would occupy people’s minds. We also had a Play Station with stuffed animals, toy cars, an Etch-a-Sketch…At different times people would get up and wander to one of these tables and listen to what was going on while they were kneading clay or building with blocks.

Are you going to have the Innovation Stations again this year?

Yes. This isn’t just to be silly. The perception that some of our best thinking happens in the shower is no accident. The phrase “thinking on your feet” comes from man’s origins. We were designed to run, hunt and think on the move. AWLP has always stood for innovation with our Innovative Excellence Awards and other initiatives. If you want people to be really creative and innovative, the last thing you want them to do is sit down for hours at a time and listen to other people. That violates every principle of adult learning.

I see that storytelling is a big part of the forum. Why? What do you mean by storytelling and where did that idea come from?

Well, partly it comes out of what happened last year. We spent the whole first session re-constructing the history of the work-life movement. We went back to the 60s and caught up to the current time. We had teams of work-life folks who were actually from the various decades tell us the story of what their lives and careers were like at that point in history. And we had a graphic artist with a huge room-sized sheet of paper capturing their stories as they spoke. For the first time ever we recorded as much as we could catch about the work-life story. The finished product was a pictorial work-life timeline.

At the end of that session a number of our younger people who had just entered the profession said things like: thank you so much for sharing your stories; I had no idea what it was like back then and how much all of you have led the way to the workplace I enjoy today.

We’ll have a digital image of that work-life timeline displayed as we begin this year’s forum. It’s something you can walk up to and look at and you’ll see people and companies and developments over time. It’s a way for work-life people to catch up with their own history. So that was one big reason for this year’s focus on storytelling.

The second is that those of us who have been work-life practitioners have all learned, sometimes the hard way, that the data we produce (and I believe the work-life field produces more empirical data on the impact of what it does than any other people function) is never enough. When you’re trying to get your agenda at the top of the corporate food chain, it’s not the data that wins the argument. You have to have that, of course, but you also have to have stories about the struggles and triumphs of real people that those leaders care about. It’s the combination of fact and human interest that ultimately creates change.

So we’ve turned to the professional world of storytellers and storytelling. One of our sources is Stephen Denning, who’s written a book called The Leaders Guide to Storytelling, which is all about mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. And Mark Guterman, the storyteller coming to our event, is a CEO who spends his time educating corporate leaders about the power of storytelling to set vision and create change. We’re going to be focusing on those two kinds of stories and purposes for storytelling. What we’re going to be learning is how to modulate your experience and what you know to connect with the people you need to influence in your organization and create change. How do you wrap data in the right kind of business narrative that wins your case?

But stories are not just for leaders. They’re for people everywhere up and down the line because, if you’re going to embed a family-friendly environment in your workplace, that’s culture change and you need stories to make culture change.

Absolutely. And it turns out—as we can see on the national stage right now—whoever tells the best story, wins. The really important issues are ultimately decided by the story that grabs the most attention and gets repeated most often. Another reason for doing this now is that people are absolutely drowning in an ocean of data and disconnected facts. A meaningful story can feel like a life preserver. So stories are more important today than ever before. We’re going to help people create their storylines so they can go back to work more powerful for seeing more clearly where they’re going.

Another thing I see on your agenda is an “Imaginarium.” What’s that?

I mentioned that we won’t have workshops. One of the un-conference elements we’ve worked on is a replacement for those and we came up with Imaginariums. The objective is to do a group imagining on what the future will look like for a series of  topics. In one Imaginarium last year,  people were invited to engage in thought experiments about how culture change could be taken viral within an organization. Suppose you could inject a vaccine into an organization to cause culture change. What would that vaccine consist of? How would you make that happen? People broke into teams and they figured out what they would do with that idea. Or imagine you could drive a bus up to the door of a company and out would come a self-contained culture change movement that would take over the institution. Who and what would need to be on the bus and how would the change actually be mobilized on the ground?

Out of last year’s Imaginariums we got several “Big Ideas.” Remember I said six months after you leave a conference you usually don’t remember what went on? Last year, people signed up and committed to keep working on these Big Ideas until the next conference. The Imaginariums this year are actually three of those Big Ideas that teams have been working on. They’ll come back with a bit of secondary research, more of a plan and we’ll push deeper into what the future might look like. We’ll spend time deciding how and where we can take control of our future rather than having it control us.

What are the three “Big Ideas”?

One of them is about leadership. Some research we revealed last year was a an AWLP/WFD study showing 80% of leaders in the U.S. and around the world—not just CEOs but supervisors and managers— said they “get” the work-life business case. But then in the next breath when we asked them who their ideal worker is, it’s the person who has no family commitments and basically has no life outside of work. So one of the imaginariums we’re planning for this year is pushing forward on that: using the storytelling techniques we will have learned from Mark Guterman the day before, how can we communicate and create common experience with leaders to begin to close the gap between what they know and what they do?

Another Big Idea that emerged was about taking what corporations are doing with health and wellness and trying to address the huge problem of cost and the fact that this country spends more money on healthcare than any other and yet has less to show for it. A Big Idea came up about devising a community approach to health and wellness. What can we do outside of the company that will connect with efforts going on around health and wellness in the community?

And the third one (this won’t surprise you because this is what we work-life people have been trying to do for three decades now) is how can we fundamentally change the way work is done?

You’ve said elsewhere there will be a number of work-life visionaries at this event. Who are you referring to?

Well, Ellen Galinksy, President of Families and Work Institute, will be involved in two sessions, including one about the latest and greatest in work-life research. Sandy Burud, a Principal at Flexpaths who’s leading the effort on changing work; her book Leveraging the New Human Capital is one of the most important reference sources for any of us in the work-life field. Charlie Grantham—he’s the founder of the Community Design Institute and author of the book Corporate Agility and he’s working with Sandy on changing work and just led a big conference on the topic in California. Maureen Corcoran, who has the wonderful title of VP for Health, Life and Inclusion at Prudential Financial. She’ll lead the Imaginarium on community approaches to health. Perry Christensen will be with us…

Wow. This is quite a lineup…

Yes. Perry was co-author with Stu Friedman and Jessica DeGroot, years ago, of the seminal Harvard Business Review article on work-life, “The End of the Zero-Sum Game,” which really laid out the argument for the first time of how it’s not about your life vs. your work—that you can have both. He’ll be working with another luminary in our field, Diane Burrus from WFD Consulting, co-chairing the leadership gap imaginarium. We also have the president of WFD Consulting, Debbie Phillips, and Judy Casey, director of the new Work and Family Researchers Network. The Network is having its first global meeting in June, so we’re going to be the beneficiaries of some of the advance research information for that meeting.

Of course we have Mark Guterman, our storyteller, who is CEO of America’s Next Career Center. And then we have a number of our AWLP rising stars. They’re the next generation of work-life leaders: people like Kristen McNally, Judith Finer Freedman, Casey Carlson and Kyra Cavanaugh.

Your first “un-conference,” last year, was invitation-only. Why did you open it up this year and who is this year’s forum for?

Last year was invitation-only because we wanted to keep it very small and lay the groundwork for creating the Big Ideas.  We wanted to make sure we had the people there who would stay with us after the event, so we really stuck to a lot of the core work-life practitioners who have been at the business for a long time and are dedicated to making change. We did mix that up with new talent, as well, but we put the emphasis on long-term practitioners because we wanted to get things moving.

This year it’s wide open because we’ve accomplished that objective. We have our Big Ideas pretty much fleshed out and now we want to open it up to a much broader constituency. In fact, I’m hoping that some people come who aren’t conventional work-life practitioners. We really want to push these ideas forward with the richness of all kinds of different perspectives.

So everybody is welcome?

Everybody and anybody who really cares about changing the work environment and is involved in one way or another in making every workplace a better workplace. That clearly isn’t limited to one particular group of people or any one profession.

I’m sold. I’ll be at this “un-conference” and will fill you in on my experiences when I return! (In the meantime, watch here for more posts on writing for  work-life, HR  and internal communications professionals).