Lending an Ear

Companies seek complaints

The 19th century robber barons would be speechless. Instead of turning a deaf ear to their workers' concerns, a growing number of corporations are urging employees to get things off their chests by going directly to the boss on hot lines or through the mail. Firms have devised programs with catchy names such as Expressline, Speak Up! and Open Door that guarantee confidentiality and offer assurances of action on valid complaints.

One of the latest corporations to join this movement is American Express. The giant financial and travel company has begun offering a program called Expressline to the 4,000 employees at its headquarters in Manhattan. Users write their queries on special forms and mail them to an outside post office box in self-addressed, postage-paid envelopes. A personnel department worker then retypes all questions and replaces senders' names with codes, unless a questioner wishes to be known. Management promises that a reply will be made in every case within ten days by the responsible person, including the company chairman.

American Express received 80 Expressline questions in the first eight days of the program. The most common query: could the Dec. 28 payday be moved up to Dec. 24? The company has now changed the date.

One of the models for Expressline was IBM's Speak Up! The computer company installed the system to handle minor administrative problems such as heating and parking. The program has generated an average of 13,000 letters annually in the past two years from IBM's 195,000 U.S. employees. About 70% of the questions are fielded by the personnel department. Says Walton E. Burdick, vice president of personnel: "The tone of the queries ranges all over the lot. Some are testy, but most are not." Another IBM program, called Open Door, encourages face-to-face meetings between executives and employees with something on their minds.

The trend toward greater openness is generally applauded by students of corporate behavior. Says Margaret K. Chandler, a professor at Columbia's business school: "Anything that convinces people that they have a right to speak out is all to the good." She believes that growing company interest in employee problems is part of the general concern for ways to improve productivity. qed

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