Australian telecom giant Telstra recently announced they were eliminating 12,000 jobs. Unfortunately for the so-called modern communications company, their own internal communications appears to suck dingo. While Telstra has announced the layoffs (no doubt the announcement is intended to impress the stock market watchers) it has communicated very little with employees.
In fact, to quell panicky employees fearful for their job, Telstra internal communications circulated an e-mail with a few Q&As (An e-mail; how progressive! My god, what thinking! What planning! What communications!). Unfortunately for all involved, the e-mail was horrendously written, contained grammatical errors, was limited to the worst cliché stock answers ever written, provided virtually no information, and in sum was so horrendous that it ended up in Australian newspapers that added their own brutal commentary and opinions of Telstra’s communications.
This from The Daily Telegraph via a reprint in The Advertiser (Emails tells little of sackings):
“THE questions make perfect sense. Pity about the answers.
Telstra has found an impressive array of ways to say almost nothing in a Q&A to help staff understand looming job cuts.
An internal e-mail containing the Q&A sent to worried employees yesterday begins by posing this question: "How will these changes affect my job?"
The answer was anything but illuminating - it wasn
"You will continue doing what you are doing and continue to report to their [sic] current on-up [sic] manager, unless advised otherwise," it said.
The answer to the second question - "Will there be any redundancies?" - was less helpful and arguably misleading: "No jobs are redundant and no employees will be retrenched at this time. There will be some redundancies in the future. However, we are working through the details of the new organisation."
This advice was provided despite a Telstra spokesman confirming that hundreds of jobs would be cut (this after an announcement of more than 10,000 job cuts).
Staff hoping for advance warnings about redundancies would have been disappointed. The e-mail said: "You will be told about any specific changes in your work area as they arise. You should direct specific questions to your line managers and you should keep monitoring the Telstra Services intranet site for further updates."
As for what to tell customers, the answer was straightforward - nothing. Question 15: "Do customers need to be notified of this change?"
And the answer: "It is important that this transition activity appears seamless to our customers. We do not believe that customers need to be notified at this time."
The only employee who should be immediately sacked is the communications genius behind that communications plan (and writing). Mind you, how progressive of Telstra to encourage employees to keep monitoring the intranet for more information.
In the words of Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting), “What a bunch of wankers.”