In addition to keeping on the right side of the law, it’s important to realize that simply writing a policy does not protect the organization. The policy needs to be augmented with communication, training and monitoring. The policy is a living document which will need revision as the organization learns about social media. It will also need revision when missteps on social media occur – as they inevitably will. But with experience comes learning and that is a good thing.
The problem with many policies is that while they are often quite clear on what the company’s employees should not do, they leave some unanswered questions about what they should do. We believe a more useful approach for social media policy writing is to focus on the dos, rather than the don’ts.
Just telling someone what they should not do doesn’t automatically help them understand what they should do. In cut and dry situations – the ones we’ve all been through a dozen times before – it is easy to infer that if the sign says “stay off the grass” it means we should use the paved path instead. With social media, inferring the positive action that is desired from the negative action that is forbidden is not always so easy. Will every employee know how they can avoid violating applicable copyright laws and statutory requirements? Can they list the five signs that indicate when they are not appropriately safeguarding company assets?
While most small business owners are starting to realize that social media is a necessary part of any marketing strategy, as a social media coach, the question I get most often is how to add social media to a day that is already way too full. For those of us working as solopreneurs or small business owners, it may, at times, feel like we are working virtually around the clock so when are we really supposed to tweet, post or blog?
I’ll admit creating a social media plan that will stick is like starting an exercise program. You just have to take that leap and do it. You need to look at it, not as a series of social media tasks that need to be done during the day, but more of a lifestyle change that you need to incorporate into your entire way of thinking.
5 tips to make the social media lifestyle change
- Coffee and Twitter: For most of us, a morning cup of coffee is sacred. Without one, our day cannot get off to a good start. Try to incorporate tweeting with your morning coffee, Instead of reading the newspaper, read your stream to find interesting articles to share with your followers. If you still need to read the paper, know that most publications these days are online and make sharing with your networks very easy. In addition to coffee first thing in the morning, take a moment or two to tweet during your mid-morning or mid-afternoon coffee break as well.
- Change the way you look at the world: Instead of walking through your day with blinders on, as most of us do, focused on the tasks we need to get done, try looking at the world with a different set of eyes. Examine everything — images, articles, conversations you have with co-workers — and use it as fodder for posts, blogs and tweets. This doesn’t mean that you need to be online all day, it just means changing the way you think to include a social media aspect to your day. Taking mental notes to save for your social media coffee breaks.
- Blog on the weekend: We all know that blogging for business is one of the most important factors to getting found online. It improves our SEO, increases our professional credibility and lets our audience know who we are and how we interact. Blogging can also be the most time consuming part of any social media plan. During your busy workday, as your taking in everything that is going on around you, take mental notes and save the blogging for the weekend when our schedule is more open. Most social dashboards will allow you to schedule posts to go live at a later time.
This question, “Why don’t they get the strategy?” drives straight to the heart of what internal branding and change communications is all about.
As a senior executive, what would you do? What would you do if you discovered that different business units of your company were essentially working against each other to support their own business and political agendas, rather than the objectives of the entire company? Or, what would you do if you had just found out that, after spending five years in IT planning, deploying 65 full time staff and exceeding $55 million on an ERP implementation, that you were only achieving 40% utilization across your enterprise? Scenarios like these are real and are happening every day, and CEOs and their boards continue, sadly, to ignore and tolerate them.
These matters are urgent and important. But management doesn’t know what to do about them, or how to deal with them. So, all too often, they do nothing.
Why am I drawing your attention to this? I was recently talking to the CEO of a major Fortune 100 company about change management and the importance of communicating with his employees. I was pointing out how companies, who embrace change effectively, making wise use of internal branding and team alignment, perform better, grow faster, and produce higher revenue. His answer has been haunting me ever since. “What you’re selling me on is soft stuff”, he said. “I need to make tangible investments that have a direct impact on results. If I can’t touch it, feel it or talk to it, it doesn’t seem like an imperative investment.”
I tried my hardest to explain, “Most companies who fail,” I said, “do so because they can’t execute. Employees receive mixed messages. They don’t really recognize the consequences of doing things in new ways and changing old behavior. Your employees are tangible assets – in fact they are your greatest assets.”
It didn’t matter. I failed to convince him that effective change management is urgent and critical in today’s business world. CEO’s confide to their direct subordinates, “Why don’t they get the strategy? I’ve only told them about it a thousand times”. But what these CEOs fail to appreciate is that hearing something and really understanding it are quite different animals. Employees need to understand an idea deeply for it to become relevant and important enough to change their behavior. If they don’t get it change will not occur.
This question, “Why don’t they get the strategy?” drives straight to the heart of what internal branding and change communications is all about.
I have a passion for helping companies become high performance businesses. High performance comes from aligning your people, your process and your resources with your company’s strategic vision and its mission. In other words, if you have the right people in the right jobs, working with efficient and effective processes that are repeatable, trainable and coachable, your company can indeed attain a higher level of performance, as measured in throughput, productivity and revenue growth.
Technology enhances process improvement, speed, communications and productivity, ultimately saving money and improving productivity. But CEO’s and boards often make one huge mistake, believing that people management issues will take care of themselves naturally. After all, employees are hired to do the job they are instructed to do. Right? Absolutely not!
High performance actually comes as a direct result of people doing their jobs in the ways they feel are most effective. Success has always been about people, and about their will to set their own priorities – not about technology, policy or strategic initiatives. The job may be reducing internal slippage at Best Buy, or recognizing the importance of keeping prices low and margins high at Wal-Mart or understanding the importance of co-marketing to serve Campbell’s Soup’s retail clients better. But it all comes down to people understanding what is expected of them, being motivated and inspired by that knowledge, and signing on to change their behavior to support the company’s goals.
Metrics & measurements show clearly that this is so…. Here are a few factual illustrations of the value and necessity of investing in the soft stuff.
- Last year Pitney Bowes launched a major external branding effort. They were redefining the scope of their business from a mail meter firm to “Engineering the Flow of Communication”. In addition to an outstanding advertising campaign, they sought to educate each and every employee as to what “Engineering the Flow of Communications” would mean to the company’s bottom line and business success. Results show that the internal brand immersion program was a big success. Where only 29% of Pitney Bowes employees had understood the brand, soon over 70% said they did (40% among customer facing employees). Among the sales force, the understanding rose from initially 11%, to a whopping 65% who claimed to use the new brand to open doors with C-suite customers rather than as was usual in the past, going through the mailroom.
- With Sam Walton as a mentor, Wal-Mart learned early that it was critical to enroll employees to care about the customers. From its research, Wal-Mart found that if it took the time to educate employees about how the company worked, and to communicate basic instructions to them about how to perform their jobs, the company would not have to nag them constantly. Eventually, they would figure out what to do on their own, and customer-caring behavior would become the operational standard across the company. This would save billions of dollars worth of time and energy. The results are obvious – Wal-Mart has become the largest retailer in the world, with gross revenues and profits higher than many countries’ GNP.
- After HP acquired Compaq the company sought to create a unified brand that embodied the cultures, employees and products/services of the two companies. Their efforts culminated in the launch of a new marketing campaign and tag line: “Invent”. They added additional attributes (such as brand equity, employee commitment and understanding to the traditionally non-financial, creative elements of the brand (such as corporate reputation, brand perceptions, customer experience and messaging). HP created a brand model that would compute and correlate their contribution to growth and shareholder value. By pushing the right buttons and doing these analytics, HP was able to compute how internal & external brand attributes contribute to performance and shareholder value. Wow – powerful stuff!
Your people and their customer facing experiences and behavior are indeed assets. As with all your assets, you must manage them so they become drivers of employee commitment and customer satisfaction. These in turn ultimately drive shareholder value. It’s time to start managing the “soft stuff” as if it were a financial asset-because it is. The result of doing so will contribute to above average share growth in strong markets and protect you against market downturns. It will build the kind of employee commitment that helps to justify premium price protection and customer loyalty.
So–is this soft stuff when all is said and done? Clearly, NO. But a lot more education will have to happen before CEOs understand its impact, and before they can stop wondering why their people just don’t get it.
High levels of job satisfaction don’t necessarily translate into an engaged workforce.
That’s the key finding from research by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which found U.S. employees are generally satisfied with their jobs, but only moderately engaged.
The results show that, overall, employees are fairly satisfied with key attributes of their jobs, including:
- Relationships with co-workers (76 per cent).
- The work itself (76 per cent).
- Opportunities to use skills and abilities (74 per cent).
- Relationship with immediate supervisor (73 per cent).
But other aspects of the work experience were seen as falling short, and had considerably fewer respondents reporting satisfaction. These included:
- Career advancement opportunities (42 per cent).
- Career development opportunities (48 per cent).
- Communication between employees and senior management (54 per cent).
- Job-specific training (55 per cent).
- Management recognition of employee job performance (57 per cent).
Here are four ideas that will help you become a more inclusive leader:
1. Let Them Build It. To construct and convey key messages, smart leaders don’t always rely on professional communicators or on elaborate messaging campaigns. Instead, they recognize that often it’s front-line employees who know best how to tell a given company story. (For an example of a grassroots project that resulted in an employee-generated book, see our earlier post on that topic.)
2. Lead by Following. The notion that senior executives might maintain a blog or a Twitter feed — one that employees, along with other company stakeholders, can follow — is fairly commonplace. In some instances, though, leaders reverse that equation: In a bid to share the digital limelight, they invite rank-and-file employees to become company-sponsored bloggers.
3. Send a Messenger (Not Just a Message). People today are skeptical of slickly produced brand messages. They’re skeptical of slick official spokespeople, too. Leaders who want to build public trust in their company brand, therefore, often recruit employees to serve as brand ambassadors. Training people who work for a company to speak for that company is a marketing practice that doubles as an engagement-building practice.
4. Lose Control. It’s hard to break free of the mindset that treats communication as a control function. But many leaders find that ceding control over what employees say on company channels — on an intranet discussion forum, for example — means gaining a new way to tap into the talent, the insight, and the passion of their people. They also find that self-policing by employees works to keep such discussion from going off-track.
For an inclusive leader, the term “employee communication” takes on a provocative new meaning. For generations, that term has referred to communication aimed at employees. Today, by contrast, more and more leaders are seeking ways to leverage the value of communication performed by employees.
Based on interactions with recruiters, friends who have worked there, and Amazon employees in the working world, a couple of things stand out, and I’ll contrast with eBay where I worked:
- It’s a very customer driven company; everything they do is with the goal of improving the experience for the customer (we were more revenue focused in the short term).
- It’s an anti-PowerPoint culture—all of their products are ideated and communicated through written stories/long memos. I recall their recruiters saying every product starts with you writing the press release for the final product, because if you can’t articulate that well, then the user won’t be able to understand it either.
- It’s a very innovative culture, where people are encouraged to do things differently from how others are doing things—note this is different from Facebook (move fast and break things) or Google (most elegant, scalable way of doing something)—in that different may not fit either of these criteria, but if it’s better for the customer, it’s okay.
Before a company can communicate well externally, it needs to communicate well internally. Companies that focus on honing their culture and employees via communication and education can create brands with a purpose. Brands need to start trusting the voices of their valued employees. In essence, brands need to become social.
Take, for example, this site, the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog. Bill Strawderman and Trish Nettleship spearheaded this blog in order to bring the digital voices of their employee ambassadors in the public sphere as part of the company’s effort to help foster authenticity. In an eMarketer article, Nettleship said, “The idea is to build that thought leadership and engage customers earlier in the research process, as they’re starting to learn about these technologies and how they are going to help their business.”
While it’s been over 12 years since the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto companies are still trying to humanize their businesses. Internal communication among employees is critical for external communication to start the process. Despite the reality at most companies, these firms need to remember that people don’t think of a brand as a series of departments. Rather, they think of a brand as a whole entity.
The concept remains difficult for many brands, but companies are made up of people. Real people. Brands need to start tapping into this golden opportunity to elevate their brand relevance in a world where a person or business’s reputation can be destroyed in a mouse click. There’s liquid gold in the voices of employees, but few brands realize this unharnessed potential.
The technology decisions that businesses should make are not trivial. In his 2005 book, Dealing With Darwin – written at the dawn of the enterprise 2.0 movement – Geoffrey Moore discussed the dynamic between systems of record (SORs) and systems of engagement (SOEs). Think of SORs – enterprise software platforms and tools – as investments that will get a bigger return when the next generation of technology (SOEs) are implemented. If you are a CIO, you will not need to blow up what you have already built (nor should you). But you should find a way to integrate and fit the new technologies that have been purpose-built for human engagement.
If you want to evolve you need to kill PR. Why? Because there is too much head trash about what public relations means. I think it is unrealistic to expect that others outside the profession, including most bosses and clients, will ever see it more than publicity, free advertising, or press releases. Your job is about to get harder than it already is, and dragging that old description around is just dead weight. If we want to evolve I think we need to kill “PR”.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a “PR is Dead” post. In fact, the idea of relating to the public is now as important as ever. Your smart practices on quality communications are extremely valuable, but I think to stay fresh you will need to shift your view of yourself from a company communicator to that of a communities facilitator
The Pinterest frontier as yet unexplored is the territory of internal communications. The fast-growing social network is a natural for companies that sell visually pleasing products or promote a lifestyle brand. Brands like Nordstrom, Whole Foods Market, Bergdorf Goodman and even Chobani Greek yogurt have started Pinterest boards directed at their consumers. Ann Taylor launched a brilliant Valentine’s contest that motivated Pinterest users to pin Ann Taylor clothes and accessories to their own boards.
Now Pinterest has the potential to become a powerful employee engagement tool as well. At Tribe, we’re beginning to recommend its use internally, particularly for brands with predominantly female workforces, such as retailers for women’s apparel.
One of the trickiest communication issues for such retailers is communicating with the employees on the sales floor. They’re separated geographically from corporate and from other stores, yet it’s essential to loop these employees in on what the brand represents.
After all, the sales associates are the ones who interact with shoppers. You can have fantastic external branding, but if the customer experience doesn’t live up to that branding, you’re sunk. Especially in this economy, retail customers want to feel like they’re getting what they’re promised.
Perspectives and tips on the current state of the U. S. workplace and the people in it:
American Mania: When More Is Not Enough
Peter Whybrow MD
Norton, 2005
(The author links psychiatry, anthropology, economics, neurobiology and genetics to explain the root of increasing incidents of depression, obesity and addictions in our ever-faster-paced American society. Possibly this is the dark side of “hard fun”…)
Contagious Success: Spreading High Performance Throughout Your Organization
Susan Lucia Annunzio
Portfolio, 2004
(New global research that supports the idea that high performance (the ideal organizational form of “hard fun”) depends on the same things no matter where you are.)
Getting to the seventh person first
Paula Bartholome
http://www.parallax-perspectives.com/newsletters/summer2004.html
(Lead article in my enewsletter about the positive culture of an organization doing a mundane job, web hosting, and how they have “hard fun” doing it. Includes tips on creating such an environment.)
Story Power for Teams
Paula Bartholome and Evelyn Clark
http://www.parallax-perspectives.com/images/Story_Power.pdf
(A brief article on how communicating with stories can facilitate moving a team through the stages of development and on to “hard fun”.)
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace
Gordon MacKenzie
Viking, 1998
(A joyously fun read! All about maintaining creativity in bureaucratic environments.)
The impact of incivility on employees and workplaces
http://www.civilityworks.com/resources.html
(Several articles [research and anecdotal evidence] on the corrosive impact of uncivil behavior in workplaces. It’s difficult to imagine anyone being able to have “hard fun” in such places…)
Last year, a friend who works in corporate communication for a major local company advised me to keep my ears open to the topic of “offshoring” — the latest cost-reduction trend of sending service jobs to other countries. “This is going to be a big issue for communicators,” she warned.
I was aware that some companies already were exporting jobs, but sure enough, I began to hear more and more about it. More stories about “offshoring” appeared in business publications, more talking heads with creased brows lamented it, and I even saw more discussion in the public-relations industry press.
I have paid close attention to the topic, but two things keep bothering me. One is that the only thing new about “offshoring” is that it primarily affects white-collar and service-industry jobs. Exporting jobs as a cost-cutting measure is nothing new. It has been going on for years in the manufacturing sector, but white-collar managers essentially told their blue-collar employees to suck it up and get used to the global economy. Now that those white-collar managers are seeing their jobs disappear, the practice has a new euphemistic name and urgency assigned to it.
One of these days — and I hope I live long enough to see it, but I doubt it — business managers everywhere will realize just how condescending they often appear to the people they manage. This is a communication issue because an inappropriate attitude and tone can create huge barriers to open communication between bosses and employees.
The other thing that keeps bothering me is that “offshoring” would be considered a big issue. This is not to downplay the significance of exporting jobs as a workplace issue, but it is only a communication problem when business leaders try to dance around it. Telling people that some of them might lose their jobs is not fun. It’s not easy. The discussion won’t make managers the object of employees’ affections. However, people deserve to know why jobs are being sent to other countries and they deserve the opportunity to express their anger, fear and disappointment.
I was talking recently with an employee of a local company who described a new manager in her department. She contrasted the former manager’s style of keeping everyone in the dark with the new manager’s style of frequent and open communication. The former manager’s approach led to mistrust and dissension. The new manager’s talk of the reasons for upcoming layoffs was not easy to hear, but employees appreciated the honesty and candor.
One of my favorite newsletters for communication executives, The Ragan Report, recently published comments from an unnamed computer programmer for a high-tech firm that was planning to export jobs. She wondered about the degree of employee backlash to “offshoring” and then described why she believes it is not the best solution to her company’s problems. She described the amount of time it will take her to train workers in other countries, to overcome time and language barriers, and to adjust to the cultural differences.
I found the programmer’s points to be interesting, but I couldn’t help wonder how much more useful her ideas would have been if she had the opportunity to express them to the leaders of her business.
Startup cultures are often defined by personalities of their founders (hoodies and hackathons, anyone?). Growing beyond the original crew means that those initial quirks either become more defined or diluted, depending on how tightly leadership holds on to them. So how to preserve that scrappy vibe and the can-do vision that will continue to attract the best and brightest so your business can grow? Fast Company talked to culture mavens who are working at that right now to get their best advice.
Grow the Staff, Not the Teams
As part of its due diligence process, CityGrid hunts for startups with a strong sense of company culture, even if it’s only shared among three people–the size of Urbanspoon’s staff was when it was acquired. Still based in Seattle, Urbanspoon’s ranks have swelled to 70 people and counting, but true to its roots, the vibe is still casual. There are no corporate titles listed on the Web site and all headshots are candid photos of staff tucking into a favorite dish.Nortman says that’s due to a CityGrid-wide practice of keeping the size of teams and meetings manageable. “Even if you become bigger, you should size your teams so they have a clear feeling of ownership,” she offers, “That’s instantly more important than a boss telling you what to do.” Likewise, Nortman advises hammering out how many meetings will be required to make any decision and then determine how many people should attend. “You want to make those decisions and fail quickly instead of waiting for 17 people to say yes,” she adds.
Keep the Lines Open
Teamwork was so important to cofounder of Foursquare Dennis Crowley that when the company added its first eight people, he hired friends he knew could foster the kind of open sharing that continues to be a core value, with 135 people now working in three separate offices.Susan Loh, head of talent at the social check-in company says that to keep the lines of communication open, Crowley started holding office hours once a week. “Anyone can sign up for a 10-minute time slot,” she says, to bring their ideas and feedback straight to the boss. For those not based in New York, video technology such as iPads in the conference room are available for virtual face-to-face meetings.
Foursquare also has an internal email blast called Snippets that allows everyone, including senior management, share what they are working on. “It’s not about what meetings they have scheduled; it’s what’s keeping them up at night and calls to action,” Loh explains.
Pay People to Leave
Culture isn’t passed through osmosis at the water cooler. When Clate Mask, CEO of Infusionsoft, talks about the early days (in a garage) of the sales and marketing software company, he references family and fun as often as he cites innovation from within, faster execution, and fierce loyalty. He admits it’s been a challenge to keep that “one big happy” feeling as the company grew to 300 employees, but is on track to beef up to 1,000 in three years. “We believe we can keep this forever as long as we are intentional. We wanted to dispel the notion that you can’t scale culture.”To do this as Infusionsoft adds about 10 to 15 people per month, each new hire must go through a two-week intensive orientation. When that’s complete, they are offered $5,000–to leave (a practice made famous by Zappos). “It’s expensive to have the wrong people,” Mask says, “This gives the individual an opportunity to assess if they are really committed.” So far he’s gotten no takers and says Infusionsoft’s retention rate is 90 percent.
Our research has shown that more and more leaders — from organizations that range from computer-networking giant Cisco Systems to Hindustan Petroleum, a large India-based oil supplier — are using the power of organizational conversation to drive their company forward. For these leaders, internal communication isn’t just an HR function. It’s an engine of value that boosts employee engagement and improves strategic alignment.
Broadly speaking, there are four steps that you can take to make your approach to leadership more conversational. (In future posts, we will address each of these points at greater length.)
1. Close the gap between you and your employees. In our survey, we also asked respondents to name the biggest employee communication challenge at their company. In response, one participant cited the need to “move away from top-down communication.” Another highlighted a “disparity between the senior management team and middle management due to low transparency.” Trusted and effective leaders overcome such challenges by speaking with employees in ways that are direct, personal, open, and authentic.
2. Promote two-way dialogue within your company. One survey respondent lamented “a lack of understanding in management of the need for communication,” adding that “the traditional practice” of communication at his or her company “has been one-way.” Leaders can show that they appreciate the value of real communication by adopting channels that allow ideas to move in multiple directions across their organization, and by working to create a truly conversational culture within that organization.
3. Engage employees in the work of telling the company story. The need “to get more participation from employees,” according to one respondent, is a pressing challenge at his or her company. People in that company “tend to shy away from speaking openly.” The practice of organizational conversation alters that dynamic. Where that practice has taken hold, leaders encourage broad-based employee involvement in a wide array of communication efforts.
4. Pursue a clear agenda. One participant expressed concern about a “lack of consistency” in communication. Another mentioned a tendency among top leaders to generate “too much communication.” Yet another voiced this complaint: “The strategy is only discussed at the management level and is never cascaded to all staff.” To deal with such challenges — to prevent the communication process from becoming diffuse and ad hoc — effective leaders take steps to ensure that their conversation with employees unfolds according to a clear strategic plan. They also seek to align that conversation with organizational objectives.
There are some things about communication that are true whether you’re dealing with a Fortune 100 corporation or a sole proprietorship. A message isn’t communicated until it is received and understood. Telling the truth is the right thing to do. People can tell when they’re being fed a line. These truisms are pretty universal.
Having worked with businesses on both ends of the spectrum, however, I must confess that small-business communication is more fun and more fulfilling. Yes, it’s interesting to help corporations make their complex communication processes more efficient. It’s satisfying to see behemoth organizations communicate with people on a personal level.
But there’s something even more satisfying about seeing a business get off the ground and grow primarily because the owner knows how to communicate well. There’s something more organic – for lack of a better word – about the communication that takes place in a small business.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with more than 40 entrepreneurs at the Creative Change Center (C3) in Richmond, Va. I led a workshop on how to market a business on a shoestring budget. Anyone who has started a business from scratch knows that one of the greatest challenges is reaching your target market when you have little or no money to spend.
As is usually the case with C3, the room was filled with fascinating people: professional storytellers, artists, graphic designers, photographers, a guy who makes screen-printed T-shirts, a young woman who turns trash into unique usable products, people who pour their energy into non-profits, people who provide groundbreaking therapy to autistic children.
Here is what made me want to embrace every person in the room: each of them was passionate – not just motivated, but passionate – about what they do. It’s not difficult to get passionate people to communicate about what they do. They are eager to talk to anyone who will listen and they are unafraid to take risks and try new things
My experience is that most Fortune 100 corporations have too many people who not only lack the passion for what they do, but also are afraid to try something different.
It’s not surprising, then, that a recent study by the International Association of Business Communicators found that the success of a small organization’s public relations often rests in the communication skills and perseverance of the person at the top. Up until a company grows to about 20 employees, communication is what I call organic – informal, focused on building relationships with people. As companies grow beyond about 20 people, communication becomes more formal and process-driven.
A few large companies manage to hold onto the passion and risk-taking and the organic communication as they grow, but these companies are few and far between. And it takes work, in which many companies are unwilling to invest.
As I said to the entrepreneurs at C3, marketing is really about forming personal relationships with people. It’s knowing all about your customers and potential customers, understanding their problems, figuring out how to help them solve those problems and then telling them about the solutions you offer. It’s being flexible enough to meet your customers where they are rather than waiting for them to come to you.
The big guys could learn a few things about marketing from passionate entrepreneurs.
Here are 10 key actions to transform employees into ambassadors:
- Ditch social media guidelines for social media training – The internet changes everyday and with it, the norms, behaviors and destinations an ambassador must pay attention to. Static guidelines leave ambassadors with instructions that expire and little direction. The journey from employee to ambassador includes more than a set of rules, it includes the acquisition of skills. Those skills can only come from experience and training.
- Use game mechanics to incentivize participation – Building an organic audience is a long-term commitment. Not every ambassador will be energized by the prospect of daily production, reading, sharing and networking. To maintain momentum, break-down responsibilities into discrete and categorized actions. Weight each action by expected effort and reward accordingly. Make it all add up. Give ambassadors a set of quests that allow them to qualify for a particular specialty — set up a profile, make your first connection, unlock your newbie status. Design digital tools that monitor activities and allow constant feedback.
- Limit your audience to interest groups – The ‘mass web’ is an extremely competitive environment where the latest gossip, extraordinary news events and cat videos fight for attention. The size of the potential audience is huge, but the chance of being drowned out is even larger. Avoid irrelevance by engaging with interest groups. Focus on becoming a valued member of the community, not just a sponsor of it.
- Don’t get caught up in audience size – 100 good friends online can often trump 100,000 acquaintances, especially if those 100 friends are well connected. With a smaller network, the content that you produce and things you have to say become more focused. That focus improves the likelihood of engagement and strong referral. Good friends don’t just ‘pass things along’, they advocate for their circle of friends.
- Choose your speciality – There are many ways to become prominent online. Brands become obsessed with leading conversations and taking the authoritative role. But, not every brand has the qualities to lead audiences like a Seth Godin or Steven Colbert. There are other specialities. For example, Jason Kottke has won the attention of a large audience by exploring the fringe of internet and sharing links that would otherwise remain hidden. It’s not about what he says but, about what he finds.
There are two ways of holding an idea. One is with a closed fist, and one is with an open palm.
When you hold an idea in a closed fist, you control it. It is yours. And no one else can access it. Ideas held tightly — as if in a fist — can’t be seen. Sure, if you try really hard, you might be able to see the little bits between the cracks. But they’re hard to see, share — or steal.But an idea held in an open hand can evolve. It has space to grow bigger. Ideas are actually organic, living things. If they have room to expand, they can quite possibly spread, and be picked up by others and grow into something much, much bigger than what you imagined.
What I’m talking about is more broadly is openness, which changes everything when used. Openness is a stance — to share with, to collaborate, to distribute power to many.
Some would argue — myself amongst them — that openness is the ethos of the era we live in today: the Social Era. Instead of competing through overpowering strength and scale by yourself, you create value in communities and by sharing power with one another.
It can be seen today on a societal, organizational, and personal level.
On the world stage, we saw the Arab Spring. Many voices advocated for freedom, effecting the change of oppressive regimes, and thus advanced the condition of their country.
We see it in organizations when we see global brands like TED decide to open up with TEDx. What was once limited to a few thousand people and two events has grown to be over 3000 events of people caring about ideas that matter — to them, in places as far away as Kibera (a slum in Nairobi Kenya), and as close as London.
And at the individual level, we see it when people work together to collectively solve problems that are relevant to all of them individually. For example, online forums allow anyone, everyone to contribute to solving problems. One such game is Fold It, which helps scientists advance their field by knowing how a protein should fold. A woman, an admin who has no bio science background, ends up being the best protein folder in the world. This is something that wouldn’t have happened if she had to first be picked, or vetted or in any other way been “allowed” to participate.
But many — perhaps you — suggest that open is just a phase and philosophy of the young, naïve, and unaware… something that people will grow out of when they accumulate power or want to be rich.
And perhaps this is human nature. Anytime we give birth to anything — kids, companies, ideas — the natural instinct is to hold that thing close, to protect it from the big, scary world and the bad things in it. This is understandable, especially with kids. But beyond the emotional desire to protect, should we apply this notion to companies and ideas?
In the Industrial Era, both money and power came from being bigger than the other guy, defending one’s turf, and keeping everyone out of your ecosystem. That’s why the icon of “success” is the 800-pound gorilla. The person who owned the machine was the person who created capital wealth. The person who set the rules had an inside track to stay in power. And, protecting IP in a closed system has allowed many a company to keep its edge. It used to be possible to erect barriers to entry from competitors and to establish entirely new markets that could be all yours. And that’s the key; it used to work when the rules of the Industrial Era were in place.
Not so much in the Social Era. In the Social Era, seemingly disparate individuals gather together and can form a powerful tribe that can do things that once only centralized organizations could do. This fundamentally changes the rules of competitiveness.
Town-hall meetings help close the gap between what business leaders see as problems and what front-line employees experience.
A West Coast financial-services company got some good news recently. A survey on communication, administered by my company and Gill Research of Chicago, indicated that employees feel their supervisors do a very good job communicating about business issues. The company’s senior management has a clear business plan, according to employees, and they feel senior management clearly communicates with them about the plan.
This company is in an enviable position. Employees generally trust the business leaders and enjoy a healthy communication environment. Among the good news, however, there was a warning sign: Employees believe senior management could do a better job of understanding the issues and concerns of people in the lower levels of the company.
Even in the best companies, employees perceive a gap between what they experience every day and what senior management sees as the most pressing problems. One of the responsibilities of a leader is to look at all the available information and to make an informed decision about where the organization must focus its attention.
Business leaders and employees will not always agree on the issues. After all, a business is not a democracy. Senior management is accountable first to shareholders or owners. However, senior management also needs the physical, mental and emotional investment of employees for the business to be successful.
That’s why it behooves business leaders to have an ongoing dialogue with employees. The financial-services company with whom we worked holds regular town-hall meetings where business leaders talk to – and more important, listen to – employees about the problems facing the company. Senior management gets high marks for the town-hall meetings, but the survey indicated employees don’t always feel senior management understands the nitty-gritty realities of front-line jobs.
Having worked for several companies in which town-hall meetings were a centerpiece of the communication program, I realize most business leaders have a hard time knowing when to stop talking and start listening. They want to explain the reasons behind business decisions – and they should. Even if employees don’t agree with business decisions, they usually find the decisions easier to accept if they understand the reasons.
But explaining business decisions is not the greatest value of town-hall meetings. Most companies have multiple vehicles through which leaders explain business issues and decisions. The greatest value of town-hall meetings is in the building of affinity between business leaders and employees. That affinity begins with senior management listening to and internalizing what is on employees’ minds.
My hometown of Richmond, Va., has a wonderful example of an executive who understands the power of listening. Mayor Doug Wilder – who once was Virginia’s governor and recently was elected mayor, or the city’s CEO – has participated in numerous town-hall meetings with citizens. The fact that he is accountable to the citizens is a bit different from the relationship between a company CEO and employees. Still, he is an example of a strong leader who does not allow his strength to overpower his ability to listen. As Wilder engages in more listening, citizens feel empowered to get involved in solving the problems facing the city.
I believe any CEO of any company would welcome that kind of self-motivated involvement by employees.
“Americans are growing increasingly unhappy with their jobs” is the opening sentence of a recent Conference Board survey of job satisfaction. This indicator has been falling for the last 10 years, yet in the past few years, many people may have been reluctant to try to do anything but make the best of things. But that “stickiness” appears to be changing.
If recent surveys are correct, many of your co-workers – maybe even you – are considering a change. Recruiting firms, busy last year, are even busier in the first half of this year. A recent Execunet survey shows 61% of employees are not satisfied with their jobs; a Society of Human Resource Management/Career Journal survey shows a whopping 81% actively searching or passively receptive to offers.
Why the movement now? One theory says employees have reached the tipping point: they are tired of being expected to do ever more with less. Another possibility, more people are looking for a better fit between who they are and what they do. And yet another possibility, people want to work in an environment that really engages and uses the knowledge and energy they bring with them. The problem is real: organizations whose employees are less satisfied are at risk of losing of key human capital and increasing their cost of doing business in an ever more globally competitive world. The Conference Board is taking this issue seriously and as of March 1, 2005 launched a Working Group on Employee Engagement and Commitment.
A couple of thoughts from a “hard fun” perspective for the Working Group to consider:
- Find out how many dissatisfied employees feel that they are not respected in their place of employment. Ask for stories that give specific examples of this. Respect has been shown to be an important aspect of high performance work environments. In one global study of knowledge workers respect meant that they were able to use the knowledge and experience they had on their jobs.
- Look at the relationship between satisfaction and scale. How close can one feel to 150,000 co-workers? Effective groups have optimal sizes and organizations may need to rethink how they are structured to provide the environment where employees can feel genuinely engaged and see that their contribution matters. An example of this is Semco.
- Lastly, consider the way in which communication happens in organizations where employees are satisfied versus where there is high dissatisfaction. Issues of timeliness, trustworthiness, relevance and completeness are important. One possibly overlooked issue is that of emotional connection. Emotions are part of the workplace and have an impact on the degree to which individuals are motivated. When employees make a genuine emotional connection to what is being communicated – seeing clearly how they relate to it and how their actions contribute to organizational accomplishments – they may be much more likely to be satisfied with their jobs and their employer.
What do you think? Is job satisfaction possible or is it an outmoded concept? Post your thoughts in Q&A.
It amazes me how often business leaders miss the point: the secret to business success is an informed, empowered workforce.
I’ve worked with many companies of various sizes, some of which pour huge amounts of time and money into employee communication and some of which do as little as possible to keep workers engaged.
Some companies have all the bells and whistles – an intranet, a publication, television monitors throughout their buildings, quarterly dialogues with executives and other communication vehicles. However, in many cases employees in these companies know less about what’s going on than the organizations that have bare-bones communication.
Given the choice between a fully loaded employee communication program that fails to engage people and a limited program that reaches people with relevant information, I would of course choose the latter. But it amazes me how often business leaders miss the point: the secret to business success is an informed, empowered workforce.
A recent story in the United Kingdom’s Shropshire Star newspaper tells how employees at the Epson printer manufacturing facility in Telford reinvented the business when it looked like the end was near. Rather than give in to a soft market for their printers, employees learned the advanced technology necessary to make ink cartridges instead.
It would have been easy for workers to throw their hands up in despair. The workforce had been cut by more than half. Employees had to be retrained in every way – from the engineering and manufacturing to the technical and customer support for a different product. Their efforts are paying off. This year, three years after the change, the facility received a £5 million investment in six state-of-the-art automated ink cartridge production lines. More investment is coming in 2005. Eventually, more than 50 percent of Epson’s printer ink cartridges will be made in Telford.
Ray Prior, operations support manager for Epson, credits the company’s adherence to the Japanese improvement system called kaizen – the innovation, cost control and quality improvements that are necessary to meet market demands. And one method for achieving those improvements is employee engagement.
“The secret lies in the empowerment of the workforce,” Prior told the Shropshire Star. “You actually give people ownership and responsibility and you get employee-led improvements.”
That’s not just talk. Prior says the Epson factory significantly changed the shift system earlier this year. The elimination of double shifts might not have happened if not for employee involvement. “This meant changes which affected pay packets,” he told the newspaper, “as those on double shifts were getting special allowances. We discussed a range of proposals around which we had no idea what the outcome would look like. But there was real partnership between the management and staff and we came up with a proposal that suited both the company and the employees.”
Communication is nothing new to Epson. Employees in groups of 50 to 100 attend quarterly briefings by the managing director and local unit manager. The dialogues focus on company issues ranging from marketing to product changes. Most impressive is how the communication obviously has led to improvements. Epson credits employee involvement for an increased emphasis on training and education, a safety record 10 times the national average, lower energy costs and a more than four-fold increase in implemented employee suggestions.
Employees in most companies are ready and willing to work for the good of their enterprises, if only business leaders are willing to unleash them.
Q&A: What does your company do to engage employees in the business?
Distilled wisdom: The more knowledgeable, convinced and supportive the workforce is, the faster you can implement change. Strongly accepted change is sustainable, and that saves both time and money.
Everyone knows what a brand is, and everyone knows what advertising is. Some of us may be confused about promotion and merchandising but most have a basic idea, at least, of what they are.
Lately, a lot of people have been asking me about internal branding. What exactly is internal branding? It’s definitely a hot topic, on which seminars and workshops are offered all around the country. By my count, seven major internal branding conferences were held this past year. I have attended many of these and have heard some outstanding presenters address the topic.
It’s hot, but what is it? Very little is written that defines internal branding; so as one of the pioneers of this new branding phenomenon, I decided to pound a stake into the ground with my definition.
Before I explain what internal branding is, let me clear up some misconceptions. It is NOT letting your employees know about your new advertising campaign. It does not consist of handing out t-shirts and baseball caps to announce a new strategic initiative, name change or company vision statement. Really, it is not anything remotely like these things.
So what it IS internal branding? Why is it important? When should I do it?
Here is my definition: Internal branding is a cultural shift within an organization, where the employees become more customer focused and more business focused. You achieve this by an organized, communications and behavior driven process, which leads to a desired end state. Meanwhile, at all levels in the company, one big question is answered – “What’s in it for me?” After they hear and learn about the internal brand initiative, every single employee should understand what job behavior you expect from them, and how they contribute to the company’s success. You need to reinforce the behavior you want, and bring it into line with HR policies, internal communications and corporate marketing efforts and strategy.
Effective internal branding brings huge benefits. Companies whose workforces understand how they operate and make money perform better. Committed employees provide stronger performance and higher customer satisfaction.
Important data that supports this connection between understanding and internal change was released recently.
A recent McKinsey study concludes that change-management programs succeed only when employees at all levels-senior managers, middle managers, and the front line-share the will and the skills to change. They studied change programs at forty organizations, and found a strong correlation between good skills for managing change and the value an organization carries away from these programs. These skills, I would add, are the product of effective change communications and internal branding programming. The more knowledgeable, convinced and supportive the workforce is, the faster you can implement change. Strongly accepted change is sustainable, and that saves both time and money.
When all is said and done, successful internal branding lifts brand equity, customer focus and ultimately shareholder value. One of our high tech presenters at the recent conference shared startling numbers that demonstrated a powerful correlation between internal branding efforts, external branding efforts and shareholder equity. It’s all about the facts, the data, the metrics and accountabilities.
So the question becomes, “How should a company do internal branding or Inward Marketing™?” Here are some of key elements/best practices we’ve gathered from studying this topic for the past seven years.
- A brand is a process driven, long-term proposition. Not a deliverable! And so is internal branding.
- Internal branding follows a sequential process; through which employees achieve internal brand success. There is a difference between communicating a message, getting it understood, and changing behavior.
- You must have senior leadership participation and involvement throughout the process of internal branding. You can’t delegate this or let the managers drive it.
- Start with a clear company vision and purpose. If you don’t have one, work with the senior team to establish one and communicate throughout the company by both words and action.
- Set clear objectives and well-defined roles at the outset, and revisit them throughout the process.
- Consider assigning dedicated people to internal change communication and internal branding. Let them create a sense of such urgency that staff see no alternative to change.
- Conduct an audit of the enterprise understanding of the business objectives and strategy so you can address areas where people don’t “get it”.
- Internal branding, done well, allows employees to transition from being “Informed,” to “Understanding” the information, to becoming “Committed”, so that they “Change Their Behavior’ in support of the company goals. As a result they should “Receive Recognition & Rewards” and positive reinforcement for changing their behavior.
- Recognize the importance of the customer and all their points of contact with your company: call and service centers, sales associates, statements/invoices, advertising and more.
- Align your brand externally & internally. Let your inside be like your outside: what you say externally should be the same thing you say/do internally.
- Go for participation, consensus and employee dialogue. These work better than edicts and policies that travel down the hierarchy.
- Having “Employee Brand Ambassadors” is critical–involve a cross section of employees from all levels, who will promote the brand internally through experiential communication.
- Obtain metrics and measures before, during and after program implementation. Research your employees regularly and track their progress over time.
- Hard, Simple, Easy – Work hard to make complex concepts and ideas simple, so they are understood and communicated easily.
- Seek outside help from experts and consultants in the field – this is hard work, but with help in methodology and process, it can be done effectively.
Internal Branding should be embraced by companies and by marketing and human resource management in particular. They should work together to engage their employees to understand and behave in support of the company’s strategic initiatives.
I look forward to having an ongoing dialogue in this forum and to hear your ideas and opinions as we continue this blog. Welcome.