The first thing I went looking for as an answer:  a reliable benchmark to use for comparison purposes.

After a fair number of hours, no luck.  If you’ve ever searched for benchmarks, you’ll know they are impossible to find, since there are hundreds of factors that influence survey completion.  Angela Sinickas, noted measurement specialist, came the closest with her statement that a good survey response rate can be anywhere from 20% to 80%.  And she’s right!

So now what?  Instead of looking for a magic number, you have to gauge the caliber of your survey response by carefully considering the following factors relating to your survey’s audience, content, and execution. Some of the factors above are under your control, while some are not!

Why measure?

• To see if, in general, employees believe they have enough information to perform their duties well.
• To figure out the areas where improvements in communication are needed.
• To establish a baseline measurement so that when you do make a change in communication you can see if it made an improvement, remained the same or made things worse.

No budget for research

It would be nice if we all had the resources to hire a research firm. Few non-profits and small business owners do. That doesn't mean that evaluation is impossible or that unless it's done by a professional researcher it has no value. With a bit of thought and a small amount of time, even organizations with small budgets can carry out some basic research that can be meaningful.

How are you communicating now?

First, make a list of how employees get company information presently such as:

• Staff meetings
• Memos and letters
• Email
• Employee newsletter
• Staff supervision sessions
• Intranet site
• Media releases/news reports (shouldn't be a line of internal communication but hey, it happens)
• Word-of-mouth (aka office gossip/rumours)
• Suggestion box or other feedback mechanisms

What to measure

Once you've got your list, examine what you want to find out. You may want to know how employees get the bulk of their information, whether some groups of employees prefer some methods to others, whether employees feel they have adequate methods to voice their own concerns, suggestions and opinions. Are there certain topics/issues that are not being communicated well?

From here you can begin to shape some questions and themes you'd like to discuss or get feedback about from employees.

How to measure

There are a number of ways to carry out basic evaluation.

Focus Group - Probably the easiest and least costly option is to gather 10-12 people (perhaps a few different groups if you're a larger organization or the whole staff if you're small) and ask them some structured questions based on the above with someone recording the answers. This method has some pros and cons. It's great for getting more in-depth comments but some people might not feel as free to speak their minds in a group or want to be identified with their comments at all.

Survey - The tech-age has made doing a survey very easy. There are a number of online, free or very inexpensive survey tools that are easy to use and execute. The one I've used with great success is SurveyMonkey. Others are Zoomerang and SurveyGizmo. These tools allow you to easily design professional looking surveys and will collate the results for you. Having collated results manually in the past, this feature rocks!

Note that it's worth consulting resources on survey and focus group design to avoid pitfalls such as asking leading questions.

Polling - This is more of an ongoing evaluation strategy. Rather than one big survey, you can target your questions into a daily, weekly or monthly poll. There are a number of polling widgets that you can insert into your intranet site. One I found online is Quibblo which seems to have received some positive reviews. Polls are great because they are easy for employees to fill out (only one or two questions) and everyone loves to review the poll results--perhaps generating further discussion. This can be a great ongoing tool to keep you apprised of how corporate messages are being understood and can quickly reveal communication gaps.

Evaluate often

Evaluating all aspects of internal communication once a year with a great big survey is not the best way to engage employees. The survey will likely be too long resulting in fewer employees choosing to complete it. Also, smaller, more frequent surveys or polls are more likely to get thoughtful feedback as they are more focused.

Don't overlook informal feedback as well. Talking to a group of employees in the lunch room or by the water cooler or hosting informal small gatherings to get general feedback about communication can work well too.

Report back!

One aspect of evaluation that is sometimes overlooked is reporting results back to employees. By neglecting to do this, you are helping to ensure that participation rates on your next survey or poll are lower. People want to hear what you learned from them collectively. In addition, you should report what steps your organization is going to take to improve areas based on the feedback from employees. Make reference to the employee feedback once you actually make the change as well. This will send the message that employee feedback actually does result in improvements.

How does your organization evaluate internal communication? Tell me about it by submitting a comment below.

If you got something out of this post, why not subscribe to the blog?

Gallup has published some interesting stuff in the past 6 months about where their Human Sigma(TM) product meets their Q12(TM) product.

In essence, in a study of 2,000 units across 10 companies, units with superior customer engagement (e.g. brand loyalty) outperformed the baseline by 170%.  Those units with superior employee engagement (e.g., brand engagement) outperformed the baseline by a similar 170%.

However, things got interesting for the units that were above average (not leading, necessarily) in BOTH customer and employee engagement - with their performance at 340% above baseline.

This all links nicely to the Vivaldi study in 2002 that had these metrics at 160% and 320% respectively -- more than coincidence? Probably not.

The point?  If you can align your brand and marketing efforts with your internal communication and HR efforts, both your customers and your people benefit, and you make more money.  Again, it's the AND that is more important than the OR.  Marketing alone is an OR.  Employee engagement alone is an OR.

Or, in other words, employee engagement is OF EQUAL IMPORTANCE TO EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS in business performance.  Are the budgets equal?

Marketing?

Human Resources?

Internal communications?

Your leaders?

Your managers?

Your employees?

Your former employees?

Your recruitment agencies?

Your PR agencies?

Your customers?

Your former customers?

Facebook?

How do you manage this across organisational structures, media and audiences?

Good morning!

"Let's take the CEO who announces to her staff that they must strive to 'maximize shareholder value.'
 
"Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it's short, but it lacks the useful simplicity of a proverb. Is it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at all. Credible? Only in the sense that it's coming from the mouth of the CEO. Emotional? Um, no. A story? No.
 
"Contrast the "maximize shareholder value" idea with John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 call to "put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade." Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so. Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature.
 
"Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, "Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives." Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO; he knew that opaque, abstract missions don't captivate and inspire people*... It was a brilliant and beautiful idea -- a single idea that motivated the actions of millions of people for a decade." (*emphasis added by soulmagnet75 for dramatic effect)

Here's soulmagnet75 again to editorialize: It seems to me what we're trying to do anywhere in corporate America is "captivate and inspire people." That's what we're talking about when we're talking about "employee engagement." So far, what I've heard about "the thing" at my company isn't sticking with me. If we were to apply more of these Heath principles of sticky ideas, could we be more successful? We're getting into the story, we're attempting to get at the emotional, I think, with a new idea that will spotlight individual employees. What I'm missing is that simple, concrete expression: From the earth to the moon and back. Where are we going? We'll have to be careful about avoiding overused analogies about "getting on the bus" and "reaching for the stars," but isn't there something? Isn't there some way to say this more effectively so employees actually care?

In a podcast, Barbara Keats, associate professor of management at the W.P. Carey School of Business, discusses the Millennials’ belief systems.

Keats said that, given their propensity for “frequent validation, quick rewards and permission to shape the rules to fit their lives,” academics and employers “are wondering if millennials have determined that cutting corners and cheating is an acceptable way of getting ahead” and “taking it to a new level.”

Given some recent examples of fraud and plagiarism in the U.S. – the 45 students dismissed from the University of Virginia for cheating in 2002 and allegations that three sections of Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel bore similiarites to one written by Sophie Kinsella – should give companies pause.

It also should cause companies to strengthen their ethics policies. And if they don’t yet have one, companies must begin establishing ethics policies or rules of behavior. Many professional organizations have codes of ethics in place to ensure their members abide by a level of integrity that protects the association and the profession. In the same way, companies can protect themselves and their other employees from the actions of one bad apple.

• Corporate blogging rules: when it comes to setting rules about corporate blogs, I like this way of seeing things
  

  1. Don’t blog about something you are privy to (upcoming products, organizaional structure changes - good or bad)
  2. Don’t talk about other companies unless you have permission to do so & when/if you do, those facts are correct.
  3. Be courtious & Professional: if you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t say it at all.
  4. If you think you will get fired for saying it, you probably will.

• Internal comms vital for innovation:
  

  The study, called The changing face of marketing and communications in today's creativity economy, shows that 70% of high-level managers believe good internal communication is fundamental to promoting innovation among employees

• The next frontier in employee communication:
  

  The key benefit of social media tools is to help employees actively participate in creating and sharing information.

• Poor communication stopping business change:
  

  More communication is needed to overcome resistance from middle managers and employees to lean business innovation, according to a survey of 2,500 businesspeople conducted by the Lean Management Institute (LEI).

• Bad communication wastes employees' time, survey says: research shows poor office relations and unnecessary e-mails soak up workers' time.
• Your Communication Style Makes You or Breaks You: how to improve your e-mail communication with your clients by following some basic rules.
]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=95 Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:46:58 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=95 We're continuing to see evidence that the distinctions between internal and external communication are becoming more blurred and less distinct, thanks to fragmentation of media, the emergence of more useful social computing tools, and the increasing sophistication of all audiences in their consumption and use of media.  At the same time external audiences don;t fit into nice neat boxes like consumer, potential employee, investor, stakeholder, etc. (if they ever really did).

I think most organisations still aren't structured to deal with this - I suspect most still structure their communications functions around internal, marketing, corporate, human resources, etc. 

So what's the solution?  

1.  Take the existing functions and force them to work together holistically, probably by making them report to a single person who gets the "holistic" nature of communications.  The problem is, I think these people are pretty rare; most "Heads of Corporate Communications" tend to stick to their functional (or even sometimes channel management) heritage.

2.  Get functions to cooperate and share accountability for delivering a core agenda across the piece.  Probably works better in some situations than others based on politics and the strength of senior management to make it work. 

3.  Restructure the function.  But how? seems to be the burning question.  Is the answer to restructure by audience?  Probably something along those lines.  But then, these conversations can come full circle, since while internal-external lines and indeed audiences are overlapping and blurring, there is still a perceived need to control marketing communications, brand communications, HR etc. etc.

Interesting challenge to ponder...

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=92 Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:42:00 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=92 Embarrasing but incredibly funny.  In my presentation this morning to about 60 internal communication professionals I used the wonderful YouTube clip about "What if Microsoft designed the iPod package?" as a way of illustrating that we often end up putting too much crap into our communications.  It was illustrating a point (and to be honest I did check the attendees list earlier in the week ... but they must have been a late registration...) but a pair of people from Microsoft were in the audience.

I felt bad, and I had a nice chat with them during the break (they were very gracious indeed).  But, sometimes with the best will in the world, I am a complete fool.

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=88 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:07:57 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=88 Gearing up for a couple presentations (one at the Marketing Week Employee Engagement conference and one for the upcoming SAS Culture Shock event) some thinking...

It seems like the internal communication/engagement world splits into several camps (see attached).

• Internal communication as information management. In the old days, "the newsletter brigade," but now arguably more sophisticated. They might now use wikis and podcasts, but at the end of the day the key objective is moving the right information around the organisation at the right time, from and to the right people. Feedback may be present, but it's still pretty much a one-way ticket.
• Internal communication as projects for the business. This is where the business needs something done or changed, and ropes in internal communications to make it happen. At its worst this can be pretty diabolical, but my recent experience shows that sometimes, given the complexity of today's global organisations, the speed of change, and the difficulty of managing "the big picture" in spite of theoretical exhortations to "join things up", this actually doesn't work too badly for some companies. So long as the execution is good, this can actually work pretty well.
• Employee engagement by numbers. Run a big, monstrously expensive and complex survey every year. Track the numbers by department. Do action plans to move the problem numbers in the right direction. Repeat as necessary until people are engaged.
• Employee engagement as an HR exercise. Often tied to the above, but usually run by the HR function (ideally with, but all too often without, consultation with those irksome internal comms and marketing/brand people) - all about workplace issues, connection to the firm and colleagues, development and performance planning, etc.

Two observations.

First, and no big surprise, all of these things are about managing change. But it isn't "change management" in the "here comes Accenture to fire everyone" sense of the word. Having previously worked for 5 years in a top agency dedicated purely to engaging employees in large-scale, complex, global change, I would say that, though, wouldn't I?

Second, you guessed it, in an ideal world it's all of these things. It sounds hard (or impossible) to achieve, but it doesn't have to be. As I've said before, the main problem is that the way organisations structure their communication function (as such) is for the most part woefully inadequate to deal with the advances in practices, technologies and changes in audience behaviours. Some of it has to do with handing the keys over to those lower down in the organisation structure, and some of it has to do with realising that functions don't "own" audiences.

Which brings it all back to audiences. Or stakeholders or whatever you call the people you're trying to talk with. They aren't who you say they are. Even if your segmentation model is 100% accurate, which it never will be. I've argued with some success that audiences don't exist -- the communicator creates them, for better or worse, and the better you do at creating your audience in context, the more connected those individuals will feel to you and your ideas.



]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=83 Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:40:54 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=83 A quick digest of my favourite posts from a thinking pov.  Bold ones would be the "must reads" if there is such a thing.


Employer Brand


• Why internal marketing is a flawed concept
• Employer brand
• Brand is about people.  More people is better.
• Is design the new management consulting? More as well here


 Employee Brand Engagement

• Long article about the changing face of engagement – turn the hierarchy upside down and stop pissing about with channels
• How is it different from “employee engagement”?
• The semantics of engagement
• Engagement points of entry


Internal Communication and employee engagement – a changing field

• The end of internal communications.  The article I hope to be famous for someday.
• Crowdsourcing in your organisation (2 posts) here and here
• Employer brand – HR sees employer, Marketing sees brand
• Blogs, wikis, amateurs, wise crowds, language going to hell
• Wisdom of crowds links
• The end of intranets and how to set yours free
• Idiot’s guide to social media and more here
• History of engagement, sort of

  

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=82 Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:26:48 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=82 Some believe that The Wisdom of Crowds doesn't apply within organisations since the employee population is too small to truly leverage the economies of mass intelligence.

 I disagree.  Effective markets are not necessarily dependent on scale.  Communities of practice or social networks thrive at many sizes -- in fact, once they reach 150 people or so they can face some challenges.

 BNet ran this great article on crowdsourcing -- in real life.  Read it.

]]> http://leeaase.wordpress.com/?p=564 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:33:51 +0000 leeaase http://leeaase.wordpress.com/?p=564

Chuck Gose from MediaTile, who formerly worked for Rolls Royce, presented on this topic that goes by many names: video signage, dynamic signage, video bulletin boards, etc. It's intended particularly for reaching workers who may be on a factory floor and may not be at a computer screen during the day.

Hardware and software required includes LCDs or plasma screens, Integrated PC, set-top box or controller, and a physical or wireless network. The message and strategy should define deployment of this kind of system, not getting the cool technology and then figuring out how you're going to populate it.

Key advantages include the ability to change the message on the fly, enhance the message with video and/or dynamic Flash, target the message to the right work areas, and grab employees' attention.

In Indianapolis, Rolls Royce had two manufacturing facilities, a million square feet each. Digital signage was a way to start discussions on the shop floor, or what Chuck calls "social media in the social realm." It can reach both the connected office workers and others who don't have computer access.

Digital signage can increase "access" and can tease/drive traffic to your social media efforts. For example, an RSS feed of news stories from a company blog could automatically appear as a ticker on your digital signage. One thing Chuck is experimenting with is using a Twitter feed to populate the ticker. They also subscribe to RSS feeds from press releases and automatically feed it into the signage. That way the employees find out news at the same time as the outside world.

In summary, Chuck says digital signage:

• Provides greater access to your social media program
• Increases ROI by increasing visibility and offsetting printing and placement costs
• Effectively communicates to employees while they are on the run
• Delivers messages to often "unreachable" employees
• Provides message flexibility.

I think using RSS feeds to populate content and having a "ticker" is one of the best ideas from Chuck's presentation. It can keep the presentation  fresh automatically, and those same feeds can keep the intranet presentation timely, too.

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=81 Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:04:15 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/?p=81 WARNING - LONG POST

BARCELONA -- After a lovely walk around the marina and Barceloneta area, some Sauvignon Blanc accompanying a remarkable black lobster paella, I drifted back to the Catalonia Suites Hotel for a hot bath to reflect on the past two days.

A 1960s Dean Martin movie, one of the Matt Helm series I adored as a child, plays on the tv of the Catalonia Suites Hotel. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s been somehow strangely improved as an overall experience with the Spanish overdubbing. On screen, a group of waiters standing in the parking lot salute Dino/Helm, who has acquired the Hotel’s bell captain’s uniform, as he rides by on his newly acquired motorcycle.

The waiters’ trousers are around their ankles as Dean slaloms through them with a twinkle in his eye and that trademark smirk. I’m not sure what led to this, but for some reason it’s the only possible image for this particular moment of my life.

A good conference. My personal highlights were Suzanne Salvo’s (Salvo Photography) session on the ethics of photo manipulation and Ramon Olle Jr.'s presentation on the new face of consumer branding. And, of course, the ample and various networking opportunities that the conference schedule so insightfully provided – plenty of time between sessions rather than a quick cuppa and off to the next session. It’s the space in-between that glues these things together so well.

Personally, I enjoyed presenting my session, chillingly entitled “Are you communicating with a fictitious construct?”

Although it was a late addition to the conference’s lineup as I was asked to cover a speaker who had to drop out, I had had some time to think through the issue of audience segmentation and the accompanying pitfalls and opportunities it entails. Having some 20 people show up, when I was expecting to present to the translator, the audio technician and a tumbleweed (given Michael Spencer’s presentation was next door), was a nice surprise.

I was gratified that most of the participants got into the spirit of the thing and didn’t take me too literally. It was really about presenting one or two case studies that I felt explored some interesting audience-related communication challenges facing two of the world’s leading organisations. An opportune question at the end of the session allowed me to steer it right back to where we started off: the rhetorical premise that an audience is a construct of the communicator suiting their communication objective. This holds some intriguing possibilities.

Perhaps not your typical conference presentation, then.

I was really gratified by the feedback – some of which is paraphrased below. (If I have got anything too far wrong, please let me know and I can make amends). I was pleasantly caught quite off guard when the work SAS did for KPMG resulted in spontaneous applause. Some paraphrased examples of the nice comments passed on to me:

• Russell Grossman (Director of Communications, Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform) - “We are all different people from moment to moment. The whole concept that your communication can be designed to ‘create’ an audience and engage it in a given context that you create has some intriguing implications and possibilities.”
• Yang-May at ZenGuide – “Great case study and presentation -- it made me want to go work for KPMG.”
• Mike Klein (commsoffensive) – “Brilliant presentation. Actually made me (almost) want to work in an agency again.”
• Gloria Walker, ABC (consultant and former chair of the IABC Research Foundation) – “The ideas were so relevant to a specific client situation I’m dealing with that I couldn’t write fast enough. Helped me think through some new ways of engaging communication communities.”
• Indranath ‘Indy’ Neogy (enoptron) – “Completely applicable in a world of vanishing internal-external boundaries and the media fragmentation; audiences are not static and definable, but are constantly moving and shifting.” 
• Kristian Ruby, Danish Ministry for the Environment – “Excellent, inspiring and interesting presentation.”
• Sira Coll i Capella, Press Office Manager, Parc LaSalle Innovation (LaSalle) -- “Can I use your presentation to add to our curriculum? Very innovative, useful, inspiring modern practice.”
• Marc Wright (Simply Communicate) – “I would have expected nothing less from one of the new generation of 2.0 presenters and their diffident style.”
• Julie Freeman, President, IABC – “It didn’t work for me at all. You said audiences didn’t exist, then showed some pictures of audiences, then showed some case studies demonstrating how you went on to segment audiences. And you shouldn’t have been so honest, telling the audience you put the presentation together that morning. You were too glib about the whole thing.”

(Irony can, alas, sometimes be lost on Americans, particularly when they rest in the arms of the gentle slumber of a Barcelona afternoon, peacefully jet lagged, through the lion’s share of one’s presentation. Clearly, not signed up to one of SAS's core values: Respectfully irreverent.)

Nonetheless, one must appreciate the sentiment, and if one were a betting man, he’d lay odds of 5-1 against seeing me presenting anything at an IABC International conference anytime soon.

So anyway … a very big thank you to La Salle University and its staff and students who were most gracious and accommodating hosts, to Silvia Cambie and her team for making the whole thing happen, and of course to the conference attendees who were the heart and soul of the whole endeavour. It was refreshing and inspiring to engage with such a fine group of people.

Well, Matt Helm is about to storm the villain’s hideout to capture the nefarious anti-gravity ray pistol, which the criminal mastermind has just used to unzip a young lady’s miniskirt.

A telling reminder to me that some things deserve far more attention than blogging.

]]> http://visionaryleader.wordpress.com/?p=4 Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:13:12 +0000 visionaryleader http://visionaryleader.wordpress.com/?p=4 After a very successful first Teleseminar on Leadership, I am pleased to announce the next call which will be held on Wednesday, February 6th at 10:00 a.m. PST /1:00 p.m. EST.

In the second module, we will delve deeper into the various leadership styles. It is absolutely critical that as a leader you are able to use more than one style in order to connect with your employees and other key contacts.

This teleseminar series has been designed for seasoned CEOs, VPs and the emerging leaders in both corporate and non-profit organizations as well as people that lead MLM downlines or other groups.

Click the link below to instantly see how it works:
http://M2LeadershipTeleseminar.susanbagyura.com

Even if you have a schedule conflict on February 6th, get registered now anyway because if you do, you'll also get free access to the replay of The Visionary Leader's Module
2 Leadership recording.

That way, you can revisit the important content we reveal on February 6th over and over again for new ideas on how to inspire success from the top down.

* * * Here's My Small Request * * *

Rather than have the "content" only come out of my head for the February 6th teleseminar (10:00 a.m. PST / 1:00 p.m. EST) as well as the future modules, I encourage you to ask me a question which I will answer, along with many others, during these calls.

Sound fair?

So, if you could ask me ANY question you wanted about leadership and how to inspire success from the top down, what would your question be? Just click reply and send me your question!

Then to learn more and get registered, here's that link again:
http://M2LeadershipTeleseminar.susanbagyura.com

See You Soon,

Susan Bagyura
http://www.thevisionaryleader.com

PS: Once you get registered, don't be shy to refer your friends and colleagues.

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/a-terrible-revelation/ Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:42:40 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/a-terrible-revelation/ Don't you hate when you discover something really unflattering about yourself?

I'm growing to love it more and more. Becoming a Sophist. Know thyself. (<- there is a difference between Sophistry and Socrates...)

I realised I love to speak at conferenes, and I hate to go to them. Because I tend to dislike anyone on a stage talking to me about my profession. So, if I were in my own audience, would I hate me? I probably would.

Starting to feel a bit like A Scanner Darkly here.

I would say I actually learn something new perhaps 1 in 3 times I go to or speak at one of these things. I don't mean that arrogantly, and I know it might sound that way. I have a lot to learn. I just don't think I'll learn it at conferences. Is it the conference industry? The same speakers, topics, case studies, over and over again? The people who are better at getting speaking gigs than they are at creating insghtful, innovative work?

(That reminds me of a conversation I once overheard in an elevator at a major investment bank I did an interim internal communications role for years ago. Some younger-than-me people had just left their influencing workshop. A very excited guy, well, ejaculated in the proper English sense of the word: "The great thing is, this means that even if your idea isn't as good you can still get your way!")

The older I get, the more I realise this is true.

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/gower-handbook-chapter/ Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:50:22 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/gower-handbook-chapter/ I sent off my chapter for the new Gower Handbook of Employee Communications at long last.  I was fortunate enough to get the chapter on employee engagement.

It was interesting to take a step back and observe that, compared to the previous version, my focus was really less about tools and techniques -- the tactics of engagement, which are pretty well documented both within the book and via about a million websites -- and was more about getting the homework and strategy done. 

 A recurring theme? Or, if you think like a hammer, everything looks like a nail?  You be the judge.

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/admission-and-speaking-at-eurocomm-2008/ Wed, 09 Jan 2008 08:34:16 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/admission-and-speaking-at-eurocomm-2008/ I re-read some of my posts from 2008 to chart my observations over the previous year.  How's that for pure vanity?

In hindsight, I was pretty rough on the recruitment advertising industry and the recruitment industry.  I think most of it was fair comment.  On the other hand, you can't blame people for changing and adapting their offer, their strategies and their business models to face the challenges and changes of their marketplace. 

Maybe this brings me full circle.  Employer brand is the sum total of the content and the experience of the employee's journey through your attraction, recruitment, retention and development process.  It's the glue that goes between ads, web forms and databases. That's the reason why, perhaps, I rail against recruitment agencies and recruitment marketing agencies periodically.  And, I must admit they are getting better.  Any business in that arena should be acquiring talent and building capability like mad if they want to stay in the game.  

I've also learned a lot this year, and to be honest my biggest learnings and insights have been about the linkages between recruitment and its role in attraction and, more importantly, retention.  Now, I know that sounds blindingly obvious; and I feel well adept at brand engagement with existing employees.  But I believe the insight is that the mechanics of recruitment -- attracting, filtering, assessing, hiring, on boarding people -- is still too disconnected from the brand building elements of it.  This is, of course, the essence of employer branding.  And even well-known recruitment marketing and recruitment agencies are delivering only half of the story -- sometimes dressed up in very clever and creative design work, but still not a strategically viable employer brand.

I have a client opportunity for a really interesting, near £1billion business, so I've done some sniffing around their competitors' websites to suss out their "employer brands."  Some sites are good, some are pretty poor, all have terrible usability, but all of them are about getting "bums in seats" -- filling roles in an environment of hard-to-find quality candidates.  You can search for vacancies by role and by geography, download CV templates to fill in and upload, and use some pretty sophisticated technology.

Mechanically, they are virtually identical in form and function.

But they aren't selling the employer.  They aren't selling their difference, and why that difference matters.  They are wasting golden opportunities at every stage of the process to tell their story and make emotional connections, not just "I want a job" connections.

-----

I've been asked to speak at Eurocomm 2008 - the International Association of Business Communictors (IABC) Annual European Conference.  There are some great speakers lined up, so I feel like a bit of a pinch-hitter as I'm filling in for a speaker who has had to pull out.  I'm presenting two quite interesting case studies from SAS clients that show how audience focus (all too often forgotten in the mix these days) can really shape your communications.  (Another obvious comment, I know).

 Talk about selling the sizzle, not the sausage, try this on for size:

Have YOU been communicating with a fictitious construct?According to the Wikipedia, an audience is a group of people who participate in an experience or encounter a work of art, literature, theatre, music or academics in any medium. Audience members participate in different ways in different kinds of media; some events invite overt audience participation and others allowing only modest interaction, criticism and reception.  With a specific focus on rhetoric, which is generally understood to be the art or technique of persuasion through the use of oral, visual, or written language, some have suggested that the audience is a construct made up by the rhetoric and the rhetorical situation the communication is addressing. Others say communicators actually can target their communication to address a real audience. Still others try to mingle these two approaches and create situations where audience is "fictionalized," but in recognition of some real attributes of the actual audience.As deliberately academic and theoretical as this sounds, too often in business communication we forget that audiences are not actually who we define them to be. Kevin will walk through some interesting internal communication solutions several leading organisations have used to address the audience segmentation dilemma. That gives me a real challenge - living up to that advert...

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/crowdsourcing-inside-your-organisation/ Mon, 07 Jan 2008 08:16:07 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/crowdsourcing-inside-your-organisation/ I caught up on a lot of reading over my long break (not to mention a lot of sleep).  I had two main thoughts about employee engagement.

The first is that (and thanks LS for prompting me on this one last time we spoke) the next time you go to see some "guru" talking about social media, ask them this question:  "Tell me about the last two projects you implemented for a live client, what the challenge was, how you went about it, and what the results were?" 

Because I think they'd faint.  There are a number high-profile guys on the speakers/web circuit talking as if they invented social media in internal communications, but by my calculations there is no way they have had time to use social media approaches to deliver anything to any client organisation, so busy has their schedule been talking about using social media to engage people.  Talking about it seems a lot easier (and probably more lucrative) than actually doing it.  Something about brand basics lurking in that sentence, perhaps?

 So: Somebody, ask the question.  Answers on a postcard please.

The second thought comes back to a recurring theme - using The Wisdom of Crowds to enhance engagement and decision making internally.  I do think 2008 is (finally) the year where some more organisations start to "get it."  These things take time to filter through the collective consciousness, and now that there are enough case studies around to combat the naysayers (Eli Lilly, P&G, IBM, Cambrian House, the Mechanical Turk at Amazon, Virgin Mobile USA, what M80's been up to).  There are more success stories than failures - and the failures tend to be because people generally don't follow some basic "rules" to allowing group wisdom to flourish (for example, trying to use command and control approaches, allowing inflence among members, etc.).

 There is no reason why the crowdsourcing approach cannot be applied internally, particularly in large global organisations.  This is where social media can deliver value in engaging employees, in improving business performance and acting smarter and faster.  I have set a personal goal of delivering at least 1 and ideally three projects, at any scale, to help clients achieve something using this approach.  Watch this space.

]]> http://messagecom.wordpress.com/2008/01/04/improved-internal-communication-can-turn-employees-into-ambassadors/ Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:09:14 +0000 messagecom http://messagecom.wordpress.com/2008/01/04/improved-internal-communication-can-turn-employees-into-ambassadors/ When organizations develop a communications strategy, they often focus on external stakeholders. Internal, or employee communication, frequently gets short shrift but it should really be the cornerstone of any communications strategy whether for a specific campaign or as part of ongoing operations.



Aside from the fact that better communication inside an organization is associated with better employee performance, satisfaction and retention, it's also the easiest and least expensive way to promote your brand, campaign or new initiative to outside stakeholders and the general public.

Ideally, you would like your employees to talk to customers, donors, clients, friends and acquaintances about your organization in an accurate, positive way. You want them to be ambassadors for the company.

At best, when employees are not well informed, you miss an opportunity to promote your brand externally. At worst, you risk inaccurate or even harmful information being conveyed to the outside world---putting your brand credibility at risk.

How would the average employee at your organization describe your cause, product or services? What if someone asked him/her why your organization does something a certain way or how your organization performs better than the competition? Could that employee provide accurate answers? Further, are your employees motivated, or even encouraged, to talk to their networks about what they do and how it fits into the organization's mission?

If you're not confident that your employees are ambassadors, examining internal communication is the beginning of turning this around.

Be clear about the message
The first step is being clear as a board or management team about your mission and vision and the words used to communicate these ideas.

You will also want to survey your staff to get a baseline of information about communication flow within the organization as well as the staff's knowledge of programs, services, products etc. This type of survey should be repeated regularly---ideally, yearly.

Start examining how communication flows
Even if your not prepared/able to undertake a full communications audit, you should at least examine the present methods of communication and assess if they are meeting your company's needs. Communication is not limited to formal tools but includes informal ones as well. Try to evaluate all methods including the following:

• Staff memos/e-mails (who writes them, how are they distributed, when is this method used?)
• Meetings (general staff meetings, small team meetings, supervisor/employee meetings)
• Newsletters (are they conveying meaningful corporate messages?)
• Employee feedback mechanisms (suggestion box, access to the E.D. or CEO)
• Intranet site (is information easy to find and useful to employees?)
• Grapevine or office gossip (how much is this method used to convey info and how accurate is it?)

Make communication roles explicit
It's very easy as a management team member to let internal communication slip. Often, you're so immersed in the big picture issues and have discussed them with your board and senior staff so frequently that it creates the illusion that "everybody here knows this stuff." As well, if communication roles are not planned and clearly defined, you may assume certain information is getting through to general staff when it is not.

Gaps can also occur when messages are lost because they are not well-suited to the medium used to convey them. For example, attempting to explain complex or abstract ideas in written form is often less effective then face to face meetings.

Unless you thoughtfully and consistently examine internal communication strategy, you are more than likely not accessing your organization's best potential ambassadors and your company's productivity may also be suffering.

I plan to explore employee communication tools/resources in future posts. Let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/annual-top-5-predictions-for-2008/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:10:46 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/annual-top-5-predictions-for-2008/ Last year it was three, but Top Ten sounds too much like hard work, so here are my predictions for the landsape I survey in 2008:

 1.  Monolothic brands operating in heterogenous (e.g. global) environments are going to have to flex their guidelines and rules if they are to succeed in the employer brand space.  We're going to see more variation in expression of corporate brands.  Otherwise they cannot differentiate and appeal to specific people segments.

2.  Employer brand will become an embedded and specific role in smart organisations to overcome the inertia created by the internal communications - human resources - marketing impasse that many experience. 

3.  Developing economies will move even further into the centre stage of opportunity.

4.  There will be a social media backlash as people grapple with the issues around work-public-private boundries.   It will not be a severe one. Second Life will lose momentum and new niche players will devour their market with more focussed/segmented/pragmatic offers in the social media space. 

5.  We've only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of the subprime fiasco and its long-term impacts on the global economy.  Combined with 8 years progressive mismanagement of the U.S. economy, it will not be an easy year and there will be some profound longer-term issues, making this election a poisoned chalice.  Although the exchange rate is great from a UK perspective...

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/internal-communication-employer-brand-human-resources-and-marketing/ Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:42:36 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/internal-communication-employer-brand-human-resources-and-marketing/ I'm violating my self-imposed blogging rule - Keohane's Second Law - which is "Comments must exceed posts for your blog to be respectable."  In the past, I've never violated the Law.  Hopefully, this will be the one and only time.

Employer Brand.  Marketing Directors see the word "Brand."  HR and internal communication Directors see the word "Employer".  That's where the trouble begins, and that's where the real opportunities lie.

One of the employer brand projects I'm working on is really interesting.  The internal research has created a pretty compelling picture.  The competitor research demonstrates where the marketplace is and who has staked out what territory (which could cause some issues for my client, depending on which direction they want to move in order to attract and retain people - they may try to claim space that is already occupied, which generally means higher cost for the same results).  The consumer research is showing some interesting trends.  The basic options are boiling down to play it safe and go for a shorter term fix, or have some courage to create a new space to occupy that is still a true and compelling representation of where the organisation is and where it is going.

The most interesting facet of the whole thing has nothing to do with all that.

Deloitte's Tom Crawford and I presented on how to develop and deploy an effective employer brand back in September, and one of his slides was three dogs fighting over a piece of cloth.  The message: employer brand is owned by HR, Internal Comms and Marketing jointly, or it fails.  It fails when any one function believes it alone owns the solution at all, let alone the "right" solution, and attempts to leverage organisational politics rather than organisational outcomes to drive results.

• Employer Brand is two words:  
  • Employer is broadly about the HR bit - expressing the employer value proposition in communications about recruiting and in performance management, career development etc.
  • Brand is broadly about the Marketing bit - making sure the employer value proposition is clear and compelling and is working in harmony with the consumer/corporate brand.
  • The internal communications bit is about working with HR and Marketing to help engage people internally in the most effective manner - mostly in terms of "air traffic control" and message alignment so that employees can make sense of all the things coming at them.

When internal communications, marketing and HR don't play well together, the business suffers commercially and its employees suffer the results.  Employees suffer at the experiential end at the outset, since functional turf wars reduce organisational effectiveness and generally damage the culture.  They suffer at the other end as well -- since if the employer brand isn't working across the three functions, the business suffers, and ultimately has fewer resources to use to enhance what it does for its employees.

The moral of this story is that if you really do care about your employees, and genuinely want an effective employer brand, you need to work together to achieve results.  Not rocket science, is it?

So why is it so hard, then? Oh yeah.  Politics.

]]> http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/employee-engagement-vs-employee-brand-engagement/ Wed, 10 Oct 2007 06:36:01 +0000 kevinkeohane http://kevinkeohane.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/employee-engagement-vs-employee-brand-engagement/ IABC hosted a speed networking session last night and I facilitated three 20-minute round tables on the topic of employee engagement.  Next table over was the discussion about employee brand engagement.

This raised some interesting questions.  Are the two different? How different are they?

My initial reaction was that they are the same thing.  But thinking it through, of course there are subtle and not so subtle differences.

Your brand provides a very easy, credible, shared-ownership (HR-Marketing-Internal Communications), clear centre of gravity to align and unite your overall engagement effort in a way that is both intellectually robust and emotionally inspiring.

But it's not the only thing.  Different moments in the organisational life cycle, different market situations, different change imperatives may require something other than brand.  When do you lead with vision? When do you lead with values? When do you lead with commerical imperatives, strategic plans? Is a burning platform a better central organising thought than your brand at a given moment?

The trick, I suppose, is to be able to appreciate the difference and use two of my favourite words -- awareness and choice.  In this world of look-over-my-shoulder "best practice" it's all too easy to do the conference circuit, pick the ten things other companies say you should be doing, and then do them.  But great ideas, inspired and effective approaches don't often happen that way.  Those come from a different source altogether.

So - should your brand lead your engagement efforts thematically? My basic answer would be yes, in most situations, since your brand should really capture what your organisation and its people truly are and what they deliver to your customers/clients/stakeholders.  Using your brand makes your engagement/change effort a bit more bullet-proof when you get a new CEO or a new internal communication and change manager eager to make their mark on the organisation -- after all, they don't have the authority to change your brand, while they can easily overturn a 12-month-old engagement programme based on last year's strategic plan.

But, sometimes, you may need to hang your hat on a different peg.  Then you need to think, "What is the problem I am trying to solve with this engagement effort? What is the benefit it will provide to the business, its customers and its employees if we get it right?" Those kinds of questions usually steer me in the right direction.

]]> http://brandeblog.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/wwwbrandeblogcom/ Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:37:53 +0000 jordioni http://brandeblog.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/wwwbrandeblogcom/ BRANDEblog
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