Before you read any further, we need you to watch this youtube video! Just in case you’re on dial-up (or your workplace blocks youtube, facebook and weather network stories that use the phrase ‘warm front’), we’ll briefly go over the details. Basically, the video follows two young artists, Vincent Fichard and Matthew Jones, as they create a series of custom road signs in Dubai and videotape the public response. What makes their project so captivating are the signs’ contents. Rather than offering up traditional traffic information, the signs ask a driver to “beep your horn if you’re in love”, or go around a roundabout “…twice if you’re happy”. To us, there’s something truly magical about the whole thing.
As you may have already guessed, we couldn’t help but see a connection to business communications in all of this. As communicators, we’ve continually stressed the importance of stakeholder engagement. Many organizations are trying to become more effective and engagement seems like it just might be the magic bullet they’ve been looking for. Communicators often see engagement as the simple means to an end... If employees are engaged in their careers, it will lead to higher performance and eventually positively impact business outcomes.
Watching the video, it occurred to us that engagement could potentially be an end in and of itself. Noticing that the drivers in the clip eagerly responded to the road signs (even to more downbeat messages, like “flash your lights if you’re broke”), we immediately thought of Abraham Maslow and his famous Hierarchy of Needs. When covering the universal desire for esteem, Maslow spoke about the need to be consulted, heard and respected by friends and colleagues. This is the very essence of a good stakeholder engagement policy. While engagement is certainly a big part of a larger strategy for business effectiveness, watching this video brought us back to a simpler truth. Stakeholder engagement should always be a priority for our organizations because, in the end, engagement satisfies a basic human need. Practically speaking, perhaps we all need to ask ourselves if our communications campaigns include two-way dialogue to ensure that stakeholders have been heard. As we learned from the Dubai experiment, we all need to occasionally honk our horns!
Links:
Go Around Twice If You're Happy - Youtube Video
Youtube
Facebook
No More Mr. Nice Guy - Around The WaterCooler
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - Wikipedia Article
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