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A provocative Harvard Business Review blog post says trust is dead. Well, not completely. But in her recent post Tammy Erickson offers a new equation to replace the old (dead) “You be loyal, we’ll take care of you” contract between employers and employees. She suggests:

“The organization will provide interesting and challenging work. The individual will invest discretionary effort in the task and produce relevant results. When one or both sides of this equation are no longer possible (for whatever reasons) the relationship will end. So if the organization no longer has interesting or challenging work for the individual to do, or if the individual is no longer willing or able to engage in the work — to invest the levels of discretionary effort required for excellent results — it is in everyone’s best interest to part ways.”

Read the whole post here - it’s worth a few minutes.

From my new favorite blog, employment attorney Jay Shepherd’s “gruntled employees,” a twitterable twitter policy that not only fits within the 140-character limit but HITS that limit straight on, thereby earning the sobriquet, a “twoosh”:

Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

Shepherd’s post is a well-deserved, if not entirely welcome, bucket of cold water in the face for all of us who have heard – and, mea culpa, may have said – “We can’t do it in {one sentence, one paragraph, one page].”

Life is short. People are busy. Wouldn’t you rather your employees were out there twittering about your products than slogging through a long policy (no matter how well-conceived, -intentioned, and -written)? As communicators, we need to not just practice what we preach, but also model it.

More Shepherd gems: check out “A two-word corporate blogging policy” and “The world’s shortest employee handbook.”

A new survey* finds – surprise, surprise – that women lawyers in New Jersey are more likely to quite their jobs if their employer does not offer flexible working arrangements, and are moving to firms that do offer flexibility.

The study offers recommended best practices, including offering flexible work arrangements to everyone (there’s a stigma attached to taking advantage of such arrangements if they’re only offered to women) and providing the technological support (cell phones, blackberries, etc.) needed to make them work.

To me, the survey was interesting, if not particularly surprising – but the main implication for employers is that what you DO is more important than what you SAY.

Our equation at OgilvyImpact is Know + Feel = Do. Our emphasis is on helping businesses get their employees to do what’s needed to advance the business agenda and strategy, and part of that is figuring out what they need to know and feel to want to take that action.

Sometimes, though, we need to turn that equation around. What do you as an employer need to DO to make it possible for your employees to do what you need them to? What do you need to know and feel in order to take that action?

Heads of New Jersey law firms now know that they will lose good people if they don’t evolve their behaviors. What they’ll feel and do remains to be seen.

*The study was conducted by Rutgers University Center for Women and Work and the New Jersey State Employment and Training Commission Council on Gender Parity in Labor and Education.

According to the study The Road to an Engaged Workforce, the four areas that most affect employee engagement are reduced role conflict, appropriate training, personal autonomy, and personal power.

Interestingly, as Paul Hebert, managing director at influency consultancy i2i notes, these are all controlled by managers, NOT by employees.

Hebert suggests that employers could save money and increase engagement by focusing not on convincing frontline employees that they’re engaged, but on motivating managers to engage them and rewarding them for doing so. His suggestions include rewarding managers for seeking input, for changing work processes to maximize employee autonomy and power, for prioritizing training, and for communicating openly and frequently with their teams.

It’s a truism in employee communications that employees prefer to receive most information from their direct manager. Why wouldn’t engagement follow the same path?

In the United States, today, April 28, 2009, is Equal Pay Day, marking the day that the average woman’s earnings have caught up to the average man’s earnings — from 2008. Women who work full time earn just 78 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make, a percentage virtually unchanged since the 1960s. The gap is even more acute for women of color - African American women earn only 69 cents and Latinas just 59 cents to every man’s dollar. It also varies widely by state – for example, full time working women in Wyoming earn just 63% of the wage earned by Wyoming men.

Where does your state fall? Check out the American Association of University Women’s interactive map.

How about your country?

Australia’s at 83%.

Britain’s at 77%, and a recent proposal to require companies to disclose their differential is creating quite a stir.

Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Alfred A. Knopf, 1980) opens, not surprisingly, with an unforgettable image. It’s a snowy February day in 1948 and Communist leader Klement Gottwald is bareheaded, so the solicitous Clementis gives Gottwald his hat. Four years later Clementis is charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section airbrushes him out of history and out of the photograph. “Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”

What does a novel about Communist era Czechoslovakia – however brilliant –have to do with employee communications?

It’s the hat.

In tough times, things change. Perks – and people – disappear. If we pretend these changes aren’t happening, we become like Kundera’s propaganda section, removing people from history and hoping the survivors don’t recognize the hat, and everything it signifies.

This year, Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For spotlighted nine companies who have never laid workers off. Ever. With layoffs mounting into the hundreds of thousands, how did they do it?

Three of them – Nugget Market, Stew Leonard, and Publix, are grocery stores, and a fourth, QuikTrip, is a convenience store, which may give them a leg up – as the eponymously named Stew Leonard CEO, Stew Leonard, Jr., noted, “We are fortunate that we are in a business that does not have dramatic swings in sales due to the economy. … One of the benefits of being in the food business is that people have to eat.”

But they’re not all in “food, clothing, and shelter” industries.

Here are some things that pop out.

Smart labor management: when times get tough, Nugget Market stops replacing departing employees. Stores located near each other share staff and employees are cross trained. A reserve force of past employees (think college students home for vacation) fills in the gaps.

Controlling costs, even when times are good: QuikTrip rejects expenditures that don’t benefit customers or employee growth. NuStar Energy similarly has focused on containing costs while keeping workers, leading one employee to comment, “It’s an honor and pleasure to work for a company that considers you a valuable individual.”

Flexibility: At Devon Energy, employees may forego raises in slow years, and in good times, they may be rewarded with midyear pay increases. At Aflac, telecommuting and flex schedules — programs which resulted from employee suggestions — helped streamline the organization and save millions of dollars.

Listening to employees: Insurance company Aflac’s “Bright Ideas” program solicits and implements ideas from employees. Four recently approved “Bright Ideas” projects are expected to save $3 million annually.

Definitely something to quack about.

On a recent Friday afternoon, an internet startup that shall remain nameless announced a mandatory conference call Monday at 10 AM for its eight employees “to hear a status update on the company.”

After spending the weekend speculating about what the announcement might be, Monday the employees gathered on the phone. They were told that six of them would no longer have jobs, and that in individual phone calls following the conference call they would be notified whether they were to stay or go. Their boss was told that his services were no longer required, as his former employees (and in 2/3 of cases, soon-be-ex employees of the company) listened.

After the call, the employees sat at their computers, with their email open, waiting for the phone to ring. They were friends and colleagues, as workers at many close-knit startups are. The first to receive negative news sent an email to the rest – “SH-T.” As each received the call, he or she added to the round-robin email, until only two were left.

All in all, a textbook case of how not to handle a layoff.

What can we learn?

1. Don’t ruin anyone’s weekend – they can guess until the cows come home, but until they find out for sure, they can’t do anything productive, including sign up for unemployment.
2. Respect the hierarchy – tell managers first, and privately. Tell the affected employees next. You can ask the employees to please give you ten minutes to complete your calls but don’t assume that they will. Explain succinctly what you are doing (“We are laying off six of our nine employees, effective immediately”) and why (“because we are running out of money, and by cutting our staff by 2/3 we can stretch what money we do have for another three months, until we are able to procure additional funding”). Then call each of the employees you hope to retain. Explain what you have done and why, and what you did for the employees that were let go (“We are paying 2 months severance and three months of Cobra to help with the transition”) – knowing that their colleagues were treated with courtesy and respect will help assuage the “survivors’ guilt” that the remaining employees will feel and reassure them that if things continue downhill they will at least be treated well.
3. Rally the team – Schedule a conference call for the remaining employees and lay out your plan for the future. Acknowledge that everyone’s reeling from the recent news but keep your focus on the future - “Now, let’s get to work.”