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Friday, March 18, 2005
Community development of company policy
Michael Hyatt posted his request on his blog today and already has five comments, most asking specific questions or raising substantive issues. It’s not the comments, though, that make this particular blog post stand out. It’s the nature of the post itself and the man who wrote it.
Hyatt is president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the publicly traded Christian publishing company that ranks as the world’s ninth-largest publisher of any kind. With 600 employees, the company achieved sales of nearly $223 million last year and earned $16.2 million. Companies that size usually develop their internal policies, well, internally. But on his blog, Nelson requested public coment on a proposed policy to govern employee blogging at his company.
It’s getting less and less interesting to see executives blogging. While those executives who do blog still represent a tiny fraction of the total population of company leaders, the growth curve in the numbers of executive bloggers suggests momentum that will only continue to build. It’s getting tiresome already to read, “Oh, look another executive blogger,” although eyebrows will continue to rise when certain names are added to the list. (For instance, when will GE CEO Jeffrey Imhelt start a blog?)
But Hyatt has used his blog to a purpose that is unique among CEO bloggers. Hatt, who has been blogging since June 2004, announced that Thomas Nelson Publishers will establish a “corporate blog aggregator site,” a repsository of links to blogs of employees who write about the company. The company won’t host the blogs; it’s up to employees to find a host for their efforts. This is just a listing of all those blogs employees start on their own. The reasons, Hyatt says, involve raising company visibility, making a contribution to the publishing community, and giving people a look at the inner workings of a publishing company.
Then Hyatt offers up a draft of the company’s “Blogging Terms and Conditions,” which he created with some colleagues and input from legal counsel.
I am posting this draft publicly so that you can comment on it. If we have missed anything, I would like to know. Also, I am hoping that this might be helpful to other companies who are struggling with this same issue. I know that it would have been much easier for us if we could have started with someone else’s work first.
Sharing a policy is cool. Seeking outside advice is outright daring, particularly in an industry as tradition-bound as publishing. The fact that it’s a blogging policy is no reason to minimize the move. Hyatt has opened the door to a new use of collaborative tools such as blogs. Why shouldn’t companies get help from one another—and from their audiences—on any number of internal policies? To be sure, not all policies lend themselves to such openness. A company’s benefits policies, for example, are a recruiting tool; most organizations wouldn’t want to give the competition a heads-up on the benefits they’re using to attract the best and brightest employees.
But what about ethics guidelienes? Codes of professional conduct? Conflict resolution? Dress codes? How about use of the Internet for non-work-related purposes? The list of policies developed by companies that pose no risk if made public is a long one.
Based on the quality of the responses to Hyatt’s post, the collaborative approach to policy development appears to be paying off. I hope we see more of this.
