Internal

Items dealing with employee communications

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Moving beyond the organic benefits of open employee access to social networks

As more than half of the companies in the U.S. continue to block employee access to social media sites, the organizations that maintain open channels are positioned to innovate and compete at levels that could crush their competition.

Being poised to extract value from a workforce that is networked 24/7 isn’t the same as taking the steps required to get there.

I intend to continue the campaign to end the conterproductive practice of blocking employees from their online communities. But the time has come to shift the focus from those companies that can’t see the opportunities inherent in a workforce that is connected to thousands of other people. Let them flounder and fail as their competitors tease new business opportunities from these networks, identify and recruit top talent, spot problems and address them before they become crises, and build a larger, more loyal customer base.

In fact, the best way to convince organizations that blocking works against their self-interest is to have them watch their more enlightened competitors kick their asses in the marketplace.

Some would argue that all a company needs to unleash this power is connected employees freed to connect to their networks. Business, though, is all about achieving established goals. The processes companies establish to produce the best results from employees’ organic networking activities will determine who really wins.

I see three types of processes organizations can model:

• Employees share information of value, such as complaints, product improvement ideas, ideas for new products and services, and competitive intelligence
• Departments initiate systems that integrate resources employees contribute from their networks into existing processes (for example, recruiters tapping into employees’ professional networks to identify the next key hire)
• Companies activate employees for focused efforts from product launches to political actdion to customer service (like Best Buy’s Twelpforce effort on Twitter)

Organic networking is just the first step

To realize these kinds of benefits, organizations can’t rely solely on employees’ organic social networking activities. Yes, some value can certainly be derived from the communities with which employees already engage. But consider the difference between a bunch of prospectors with pans in the river versus a mining company armed with geologic data and the best minds inside and outside the company working together. Which approach will produce the most gold?

Sustainability is just one reason to be more systematic about business use of social media. One recruiter who is smart enough to ask employees to tap their networks to identify the best candidate for a job may produce some great results, but what happens when she leaves the company? When social media is left only at the organic state, most efforts aren’t sustainable.

(I know of one company that had a fanstastic internal podcast that died when the producer took a new job with another company. That never happened with employee publications, which the company viewed as integral communication, as part of the management process. Strategic processes don’t simply fade away just because the champion left the company or changed jobs.)

In a recent post, Brian Solis argued that the brand management role is now every employees’ responsibility:

When we listen to the activity that populates the statusphere and the blogosphere, we find that in addition to the overall brand, conversations map specifically to the individual departments that define the business foundation, which ultimately supports brand stature and resonance. In turn, these activities inspire immediate and long-term responses either directly through focused interaction or indirectly through product refinement, adaptation and overall messaging, targeting, and positioning.

Brian’s right, and in his post he outlines a process for evaluating conversations based on keyword discovery (collected at a central source) with relevant information parsed to the right departments so they can incorporate this intelligence into their operations.

Turning noise into business results

But this still doesn’t address those thousands of networks to which the frontline employees belong. And without processes, all those conversations that could lead to improved sales, the next great product or the next key hire is all just a lot of unrefined data. It’s just noise. Processes filter out the crap and turn the remaining data into information, and from information into actionable knowledge.

Employees in your company are listening to their networks. Some are even talking to their colleagues about what they’re hearing Few companies, however, are positioned to activate those employees or the data they’re accumulating:

• The cultures don’t support it.
• The processes necessary to inspire those responses don’t exist.
• Internal communication doesn’t provide employees with the intelligence they need to interact with their communities beneficially.
• Training efforts don’t let employees know what to do with the information they obtain or how to react to it.
• Business and product literacy among employees is shockingly low.

 

In other words, companies don’t have the foundation to support connecting networked employees with business goals.

As companies begin to recognize the competitve advantage currently dormant in employees’ networks, many will make mistakes by implementing programs that smack of astroturfing, asking employees to convey common messages to their networks. Others will install layers of bureacracy that ultimately hinder rather than encourage employees bringing the power of their networks to bear on the company’s business.

Identifying existing business processes and models already working in companies—and developing new ones—are top priorities for me. In fact, it’s the subject of the pre-conference session I’m conducting at the NewComm Forum next month. (“Becoming a Networked Organization” will take place on Tuesday, April 20 beginning at 1:30 p.m. at the conference venue in San Mateo, California.) It’s also the subject of the next book I hope to write.

It is time to move beyond this notion that large, complex organizations can accure the greatest benefit from social media by sitting back while employees join in conversations—someone from sales chatting with this person, someone from finance joining that community—without resources to inform their contributions to the dialogue, without the means by which they can share what they learn, and without mechanisms to filter the data and turn it into action.

Let the companies that block employees keep blocking. But if you want your organization to reap the rewards of open access, you need to start thinking—now, today—about how best to leverage it.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Undercover Boss makes for good television—and bad management

Once the Super Bowl—the most-viewed television program of all time—ended, 38.6 million people (about 36% of the Super Bowl audience) stuck around for the premiere of CBS’s new “reality” show, “Undercover Boss.”

In case you’ve just emerged from a coma and aren’t aware of the show, the premise is simple: Company leaders go undercover on the front lines of their companies to discover what it’s really like to do the heavy lifting. Surprised at what they see—from abuses to the horrific consequences of their own policies—their humanity bubbles to the surface and they initiate changes to improve the lives of front-line workers.

(As of right now, you can watch the full episode on the CBS website.

The concept isn’t particularly revolutionary. Hertz used to require its senior staff to spend time working rental counters in order to stay in touch with the customer and remind themselves of the challenges faced by employees who are the human face of the company. JetBlue’s former chairman Dave Neeleman used to work as a flight attendant from time to time for pretty much the same reason.

The wrinkle in “Undercover Boss” is that the employees with whom the executives work are in the dark as to their new colleagues’ identity.

It makes for entertaining television, and the number of tweets I saw from communicators I follow on Twitter proclaiming “Undercover Boss” their new favorite indicates that the show resonated with people who work for a living.

Of course, it “Undercover Boss” is a network reality program, which means it’s superficial and contrived. The footage CBS requires for an hourlong show isn’t going to result in a comprehensive overview of the company’s operations and it won’t reveal most of the significant issues affecting the organization’s performance. But that’s okay. It’s just entertainment. If the executive hitting the road with a camera crew really wanted to uncover the conditions that are holding the company back, this isn’t the approach he’d take.

Ultimately, though, the program could do the company more harm than good.

Organizations need committed, engaged employees. Unlike loyalty, we know a lot about what leads employees to be committed and engaged. One driver of commitment, according to research, is the certainty that pay and benefits are handled fairly and equitably throughout the organization. This belief in fairness and equity is far more important to employees than the actual size of their own paycheck when it comes to inspiring employees to deliver their best work and to put in discretionary effort on behalf of their employer.

I once worked for an organization facing a dilemma. One of their rising stars, already a member of the management team, was pregnant and had decided to resign so she could be a full-time mom. To convince her to stay, the company made arrangements to make room for a crib and a rocking chair in her office and told her she could bring her baby to work and take all the time she needed to care for the child. The executives who concoted this scheme were proud of what they viewed as their forward-thinking solution.

Of course, the news got out to hundreds and hundreds of women at lower levels who struggled with child care but didn’t have the resources that would have allowed them to quit. Their thoroughly understandable reaction: Pay and benefits at this company is unfair. We who work our asses off get no help while the company pulls out all the stops for a highly compensated director-level executive. Morale plummeted.

Waste Management, the company featured in the premiere episode of “Undercover Boss,” could suffer the same backlash. One employee, Jaclyn, is supporting an extended family in the home she’s about to lose while she does the work of three or four people at the landfill where she works. The undercover boss, Waste Management President and COO Larry O’Donnell, risks breaking cover to tell Jaclyn’s boss that something needs to be done to help. At the end of the show, when O’Donnell reveals his true identity, he sees to it that Jaclyn gets promoted from an hourly to a salaried position that pays better; the company also hires a couple people to fill the vacant positions to relieve Jaclyn’s workload.

Then there’s Walter, O’Donnell’s supervisor at a landfill. Walter has been on dialysis for years but still works hard and has a positive attitude. At the show’s conclusion, we learn that O’Donnell has made Walter a health mentor for the company.

Yes, it’s emotional and satisfying television. But Waste Management employs tens of thousands of people. Jaclyn and Walter are not the only employees struggling to pay the bills, coping with a “do more with less” mentality, or overcoming health issues just to be able to get a paycheck. But they are the only ones O’Donnell spent time with on camera and they are the only ones whose issues were addressed by the company.

And make no mistake: There are very few Waste Management employees who didn’t watch “Undercover Boss.” Every admin doing the work of three people, every employee who isn’t making enough to save their house from the current mortgage meltdown, every employee with health issues who still needs to work or lose their health insurance watched the show and wondered, “What the hell? What about me?”

And their levels of commitment and engagement went right down the portable toilets Waste Management manages at outdoor events.

Even the resolution of a time-clock issue at a recycling facility could cause bad feelings if the problem (or similar problems) aren’t addressed at other company locations.

I’m hardly alone in recognizing the problem. Time magazine’s review notes:

Sure, he handed out promotions and raises to the few people whose stories we saw. It was moving to see a woman with overwhelming family and job responsibilities get a bump up that kept her from losing her house. But is there anything reason to believe anything is better company-wide?

The time review also notes that the policies that led to some of the situations O’Donnell encountered were the result of shareholder demands for higher ROI. Should O’Donnell alter those policies to the extent that ROI suffers, it wouldn’t be the first time a company found itself a new president. (Just ask shareholders at SAP.)

I have to admit, I’m not a fan of reality shows. I’ve never watched a single episode of Survivor or American Idol. There is one reality show I do watch: chef Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares.” One of this show’s regular features is an update. The crew revisits a restaurant where Ramsay worked his magic to see if the initial success wrought by the changes stuck. It would be nice if “Undercover Boss” went back to Waste Management in a year to see if anything changed company-wide.

But don’t hold your breath. It wouldn’t be good television to show a company with lower morale as a result of the undercover experience.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

What Employee Communications looks like in the networked company

Awareness is rising of the impact on business of networked employees—those workers who are continuously connected to their social circles and can tap into them at will. The discussion seems to be shifting, ever so slowly, to the characteristics of companies that, rather than inhibiting these traits, want to reap the benefits of a networked workforce. Recent posts by Olivier Blanchard and Valeria Maltoni have speculated on the nature of these companies. Olivier calls them P2P companies; Valeria refers to them as connected companies.

They both see the recruiting process changing, for example, to one of inviting people already connected to the company through online and offline social networks to come work for them. The IT department becomes the ET department—Technology Enablement. P2P companies don’t outsource customer service. Collaboration is supported by the use of the best tools available. And, according to Maltoni, “Facilitating conversations inside and outside the connected company means designing business through interactions.”

You’ll recognize more and more of these traits as existing companies evolve into networked companies and startups embrace the P2P model. But succeeding under the P2P model won’t happen just because it seems right. It’ll take work. Companies have to implement systems to support the model.

Employee Communications is a critical function that must adapt in order to accommodate its role in a networked company. Inspired by Valeria and Olivier,  I’d like to offer a list of characteristics of the employee communications function in the networked/P2P company.

Ease employee access to social networks. Both Olivier and Valeria have noted that connected companies won’t block access to social networks. Leaving access unfettered is, indeed, a requirement, but companies will need to go a few steps beyond unshackling employees from the restrictions that keep them from connecting. It will be incumbent on the internal communications function to identify communities within social networks where the company’s products, services, operations, and other dimensions are discussed and even summarize the nature of the conversation taking place in this communities. Helping employees identify where the conversation is can help them begin participating in a more meaningful way. After all, it is within some of these communities where employees will establish and build relationships with people who are likely to become candidates for employment. These networks are also where employees will glean insights from customers that could lead to product or service innovation.

Show employees who’s saying what, right now. Employees already participate in the networks and communities aligned with their interests. Some may be interested in engaging elsewhere, such as communities they’ve never heard of where the company or its brands are being discussed. At the least, companies should provide a directory of these communities. Ideally, however, companies will let employees see, in as close to real time as possible, what the members of those communities are saying about the company. You might consider this a curator role for Employee Communications, one that demonstrates the sentiment of real people with real influence who are having real conversations about your organization. I can easily see a dashboard on the intranet portal with the very latest customer sentiments along with a link to more detailed content from these communities.

Communicate research results. Organizations of all stripes spend a ton of money on consumer research. Few share the results of the research with employees company-wide; it’s data that, for one reason or another, is usually made available only to brand team members. With all employees networking with customers, knowledge of the study results can inform the conversation. Internal communications needs to become a channel for sharing the results of market research throughout the organization.

Increase business literacy. Employees need to know the business. It’s a sad fact that most frontline employees couldn’t answer basic questions about the business beyond the work of their own department. It’s equally sad that this is most often true because nobody bothers to teach them about the business and the resources for them to teach themselves aren’t readily available. Employee Communications needs to focus considerable effort on ensuring employees are savvy about the company for which they work.

Build awareness of business initiatives. In addition to general business literacy, employees need to know about specific initiatives. Employees in a hospital that has started marketing its quality ratings should know about the effort. Employees in a manufacturing organization that has taken steps to be more sustainable should be able to talk intelligently about what that means.

Make sure everyone knows the rules of the road. Too often, organizations assume that because a policy has been published, everyone knows what it is. Employee Communications needs to communicate the policies and guidelines that govern employee activity in online communities on an ongoing basis through multiple channels. No employee should ever be surprised to learn they have violated a policy.

Champion and support internal training. Some of the companies that have the most positive employee engagement are ones in which employees can attend classes to learn about how to engage. At Zappos, employees can take classes on Twitter. The Mayo Clinic offers tweetcamps, where doctors and other staff can learn about social media. Ideally, the Internal Communications team will partner with the Training department to develop learning opportunities—face-to-face and online—that will help employees get business-literate and learn about social networking and how their engagement can produce meaningful results for the company.

Enlist company advocates. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is one of the more forward-thinking initiatives for engaging front-line employees with customers. Blueshirts—the employees who work in the retail stores—volunteered to respond to queries sent via Twitter to the Twelpforce account. Companies can take this concept beyond the initiative level, finding those engaged employees—that is, the employees who want to make discretionary efforts on behalf of the company, train them, and get them into vital communities. (This kind of engagement must be disclosed and transparent, of course. I’m not suggesting anything deceptive, just a means of identifying and activating those employees who want to be part of the organization’s organic networking efforts.)

Work with ET to ensure systems support networking. If IT has transformed into Technology Enablement, they are the ideal partner for Employee Communications to identify and launch the tools employees can best use to network with one another. The technology department can also ensure the intranet supports the modules referenced earlier, such as business literacy training, communication of research results, and real-time updates of who’s saying what about the company in key online communities.

All of this has to happen along with much of the traditional work Employee Communications performs, such as letting employees know that benefits enrollment is coming, supporting an internal change process, and informing employees about decisions that will affect them. In a networked company, there’s no question in my mind that the role of Employee Communications becomes bigger and more important.

What other traits should characterize the Employee Communications function in the networked organization?

Monday, October 12, 2009

Voice vs. angle

The Net has rendered the notion of corporate voices obsolete. The fact that anything a company says to one stakeholder audience can be found online by members of a different audience means inconsistencies in messages will be found, analyzed, and spread.

Nowhere is this more true than the traditional distinction between a company’s internal voice and the one it used to communicate with external audiences. Interviewed for IABC’s CW magazine, Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn said,

There isn’t anything I send to employees that I wouldn’t be prepared to have published on the front page of the newspaper. I don’t think control actually exists. The question is, did it ever exist? Probably to some degree, but social media, the explosion of technology, has just amplified the folly of the notion of internal versus external voice. I don’t think there’s such a thing anymore.

Companies that have given up on the multiple-voice approach apear to be reaping benefits. One financial services company was the subject of scorn when an internal memo to employees was leaked. But Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital CEO Paul Levy earns praise when he publishes employee memos to his blog for the world to see.

But it’s important to distinguish between voice and angle, the adjustments made to content based on the interests and information needs of the audience to whom it is being delivered.

Employees need different perspectives on information than, say, consumers, investors, or customers. Employees want to know what impact the news will have on their day-to-day jobs, something that isn’t of much interest to investors, who want to know what it means to the prospects for their investment. Customers want to know if the price will go up, product features will change, or customer service will deteriorate.

In most cases, crafting a one-size-fits-all communication is a bad idea. It would either be bursting at the seems with too much information to accommodate everybody, or it would lack the information different segments need in order to make informed decisions.

Social media provides organizations with a set of tools that makes it easy to maintain a common voice while delivering targeted information to different communities. In a company that has embraced blogging, for instance, the head of investor relations can talk with investors about the news from an investment perspective while a marketing-focused blog can let customers know what to expect from the product itself.

A Dow Jones Newswire article points to blogs-as-spokesmen as a trend among companies. In one example, a Microsoft turned down a journalist looking for a comment, but forwarded the reporter links to employee blog posts on the subject; reportable comments would be found in those posts.

It was also the idea behind Voxeo’s use of an “attention wave,” the label the company’s Dan York has assigned the idea of posting an item to multiple blogs that cater to different audiences.

These are among the factors communicators will need to consider as they update their thinking about communication models and strategies to accommodate a networked, transparent world. How do you balance the need to speak with one voice and the need to distribute a package of related content, each with its own angle, through multiple media?

Sunday, August 30, 2009

The real-world work of Enterprise 2.0

I was struck by two items that surfaced in my RSS feeds this morning.

(Yes, I still use RSS. RSS is nowhere near dead. I understand that armies of people are abandoning RSS for “better” tools but, like Dave Winer, I think people confuse Google Reader with RSS. And, like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I’m fine with the growing abandonment RSS. The more who dismiss it, the more I’ll be the one to uncover useful and relevant content. But I digress.)

The first item featured ZDNet columnist Dennis Howlett howling that “enterprise 2.0” is a crock. “Business has more pressing problems,” he argues,” adding that “the world is NOT made up of knowledge driven businesses.” He concludes…

Like it or not, large enterprises - the big name brands - have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know. In the meantime, don’t be surprised by the ‘fail’ lists that Mike Krigsman will undoubtedly trot out - that’s easy.

It was funny, then, that the very next item I read, from CIO magazine, chronicles how no less an organization than Procter & Gamble produced bottom-line business results through the systematic introduction of in-house social networking.

The goal was simple, and one that seems to have escaped Howlett in his rant: P&G wanted to expand the way its employees collaborate, “incorporating Web 2.0 tools into a single platform to unlock weak and potential ties—employees with common goals or interests who have little to no contact.”

While Howlett rails that most people “just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on,” P&G saw the potential for social tools to allow “users to create value beyond their usual circles.”

P&G’s systematic approach began with skunkworks projects involving the blogs and wikis Howlett insists nobody cares about. Once the use of those tools became part of the fabric of work, the company settled on a platform, PeopleConnect from Telligent, that employees use “to form and join groups and to interact through blogs, wikis, forums and document stores.” Nearly 12,000 employees opted into the network before the company even formally launched it.

P&G is tracking the results both with metrics the system produces but also with genuine business outcomes. For example, a 150-person team, made up of employees situated in P&G facilities throughout the world, normally came together in about six to 12 months under the hierarchy to which Howlett seems to believe organizations are bound. Using PeopleConnect, it took two. Presumably, that means the results of the team’s efforts will begin generating profits four to 10 months sooner than normal.

P&G’s experience, is not, of course, the only bottom-line benefit organizations can point to as a result of adopting enterprise 2.0. Best Buy has reduced turnover and increased retail worker participation in the company’s retirement savings plan. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance has seen an increase in collaboration. Siemens USA is finding employees establishing knowledge contacts who might otherwise never have met.

Howlett asks, “Can someone explain to me the problem Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve?”

In response, Hill & Knowlton’s Niall Cook—author of “Enterprise 2.0”—lists streamlining internal communication where overload has become the order of the day, getting sales people to share best practices, improving collaboration between people who otherwise would never connect, speeding the delivery of answers to questions.

When companies know the conditions that hinder speed to market, growth, innovation and collaboration, they can explore the options for overcoming those obstacles and adopt the strategies that move them forward. That’s what P&G and a growing number of companies have done—in fact, a study from AIIM notes that the number of companies embracing Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the past year. I doubt most of them are jumping on a bandwagon, but rather introducing systems designed to improve the bottom line.

I hope that answer’s Howlett’s question.

Friday, August 07, 2009

More meaningless data on social media and employee productivity

A Nucleus Research study mangles numbers to prove that Facebook causes productivity losses while another shows employers are buying this nonsense.

Links:

• Nucleus Reserach study: Productivity and Security Red Flags with Facebook Use at Work
• Only One in Three Companies Address Social Media Concerns

And, lest we forget…

• University of Melbourne research proves workers are more productive when allowed to use Internet for leisure

Saturday, June 27, 2009

One role for print: making dull messages stand out

Communicating mundane messages to employees is one of the tasks that has been made harder for internal communicators by the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities on internal networks.

Consider, for example, the communication of a benefits enrollment deadline. There’s little that gets communicated inside companies duller than employee benefits information. But employees still paid attention 20 years ago because the reminder was one of a few messages being broadcast to employees. Back then, the role of communications was to produce one-way, top-down messages to ensure employees knew what they needed to know (like, for instance, not missing the benefits enrollment deadline). With communicators acting as gatekeepers, it was easy to maintain a flow of content that the average employee could digest.

Today, communicators produce only a fraction of the messages through which employees must sift. Depending on the dgree to which the company has embraced the Web 2.0 concept internally, employees consume messages from communities of various stripes, employee blogs, internal RSS feeds, updates on enterprise social networks, employee-generated videos, internal presence networks like Yammer, the list goes on.

Not that this is bad; in fact, it’s great. The more employees can network with each other, the more quickly they’ll find the information they need to do their jobs, get answers to question, connect with others with whom a relationship is beneficial and form ad hoc teams to tackle problems and jump on oportunities.

But still, with all this content, how prominent can you make an email or intranet item on those drab-as-dishwater messages that still need to get out?

The solution is to go analog. While this won’t work where employees are scattered and working from wherever, but for those organizations whose employees still gather in office buildings and manufacturing facilities, analog communications can stand out from the sea of digital messages.

Who’s going to miss a brightly colored poster on an easel by the elevators, in the lobby and in other high-traffic areas? How about table-tent cards in break rooms and the cafeteria? When I worked for ARCO back in the early 1980s, Employee Communications Manager Dave Orman drew attention to a 401(k) plan by hanging mobiles all over the ARCO Towers and other facilities; each of the pieces hanging from the mobile reinforced the enrollment message.

Even a print publication can get attention. One communicator I spoke with several years ago had ceased publication of a company magazine, moving all content to the intranet. But when a critical issue arose, she produced a special print issue that was distributed to employees’ desks. The reaction from employees was, “Wow, if they’ve gone to the trouble to print this, it must be important.”

I remember one boring message that was printed on movie theater-style popcorn boxes, then filled with popcorn and distributed on cafeteria tables for employees of one big manufacturing company. That was a message that employees not only remembered, but talked about.

Not only is print not dead, it’s a means of getting mundane messages to stand out.