You are here: Home / Archives for employee communications

Workplace communications: the revolution is in progress

January 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The use of smart phones and social networks in the workplace is expected to double in the next three years, according to an IDC/Unisys study of 2,820 people employed in companies with 500 or more employees. (“A Consumer Revolution in the Enterprise”)

What people use at home, they expect to use at work. And if their company isn’t providing them the devices or access to social networks, they’re using their personal devices to communicate at work in new ways.

The average survey respondent already uses four devices for work, and the proliferation is growing fast.  Much faster than enterprises’ IT support and security, governance policies, and communications training. This is somewhat like the early days of PCs, where enterprise IT departments were slow to introduce PCs so individuals in departments went out and bought them. the difference? Change is happening much, much faster.

In a time of such rapid change, there are few “best practices,” and there may be greater risk in waiting for these best practices than proactively establishing some fundamental enterprise communications behavioral guidelines, especially:

  • Who can communicate about what with customers? With employees on an enterprise-wide basis? How do you coordinate efforts to prevent customers or employees from feeling “spammed”?
  • What is an acceptable response time to interactions in the company? With the lines between work and personal life blurring people  respond at night, on weekends, and vacations.  Do you want a 24/7 norm for your enterprise — or are is there a need to set more human guidelines.
  • Education: what device/channel is best for communicating what kind of information? In other words, when is an instant message or email called for — and when is a posting on the internal social network a better communications alternative?
  • Security: what should be communicated within an enterprises’ VPN — and what  can be shared via instant messaging?

There are many questions to consider. I urge you to form a group and get to work laying down some communications fundamentals, carving out the time to think through how to provide communications guidelines  that reduce risk. But not so many guidelines that you suffocate people and add too much complexity.  (I’ve been guiding a number of enterprises in these discussions. Write me if you’d like to talk more about this approach: lkelly@foghound.com)

At the same time IT organizations need to quickly figure out which new apps, devices and Web-services are needed for your organization and customers — and how to introduce those in a way that provides the security and scalability for this new communications tsunami upon us.

The good news in all this, of course, is that employees are becoming much more productive, are having an easier time accessing resources and expertise important for their work, and are willing to blur the lines of work and personal, working more “off hours” if it’s easy to do so.

Filed Under: Activating change, Communicating, Innovation, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Two programs to get on your calendar

August 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I know it’s still the lazy days of summer (if only), but wanted to let you know about two programs I’ll be doing with the Conference Board in New York this fall in case you want to get them on your calendar.

The first, on Friday, October 16, is an all-day, roll-up-your-sleeves workshop on social media where we’ll go deep into HOW-to’s. This won’t be a day of PowerPoint presentations about the value of social media, but small group and individual work sessions where you’ll learn the fundamentals by doing.  Plan to have fun, learn a lot, and maybe be exhausted by the end of the day. But in a good way.

Check out the agenda/program and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see added.  (Note click on the “download the full agenda” at the bottom of the Web page for details. ) Lastly, when you register mention my name and I believe you’ll get a discount.

The program, “Extending Your Brand to Employees” is on December 1. To me, this is a hugely valuable conference because employees are the front line word of mouth advocates (or not) for organizations. Yet too few conferences address this important group and topic. The speakers are an impressive bunch from Google, McDonald’s, Zappos, Hilton Hotels, and Boston Coach.

I’ll be interviewing my friend Larry Moulter, CEO of Boston Coach about how he led his organization through a drastic downsizing due to the massive cutback in travel services like Boston Coach’s this year.   Larry’s approach to communications and leadership, particularly in tough times, is quite inspirational and full of lessons.  Again, check out the program and let me know if there are questions you’d like me to ask Larry.

Until then, enjoy summer.

Filed Under: Communicating, Leadership, Social media strategy Tagged With: , ,

Adopting social media for employees: biggest anchors + Conference Board preso

November 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Here’s some of the material from last week’s Conference Board workshop about how to extend brands to employees by empowering employees with social media.

Using Social Media to Empower Employees: Confernce Board Workshop
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: communications netowrking)


The workshop was four hours, yet the time flew as there’s so much to talk about and learn in this area. What made the session especially valuable to me was the tremendous participation and insights from HR and communications executives at some of the biggest companies in the world. What a great group to teach and lead! Thanks all.

During the workshop we did an exercise about “anchors” slowing companies down from realizing the possibilities of social media, which we addressed as part of the session. Here were the biggest anchors from the group, in order of “anchor weight.” The overwhelming resistance to change was a bit frightening to me. How can companies survive, never mind grow, without some risk and and openness to new ideas?

Top anchors slowing down social media adoption

  • Time and resources: Finding resources amid competing priorities, where to find budget, who to manage
  • Fear: Inappropriate employee comment, fear of bad news, maintaining company secrets, afraid to fail, fear of exposure, fear of unknown – this has never been done; fear of change; loss of control
  • Management buy in: Conservative culture; old guard holding on to what has always been done, senior management not in favor of “sharing”; resistance to change; senior executives are anti-communications
  • Generational issues: baby boomers not always willing to embrace new technology, generational resistance
  • Value: lack of clear purpose for getting involved
  • Initiating: Lack of a champion who gets it; knowing how to get started, where do you begin?; no resident expertise

Additional, but less significant, obstacles

  • IT: security issues; IT desire to maintain control of tools; Complexity: too many competing technologies, too complex
  • HR
  • Legal/risk management
  • Having to try to make SAP and Sharepoint work as social tools
  • Maintaining company voice
  • Employees feel they are already asked to do too much

Filed Under: Activating change, Conversational Marketing, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , ,

Recession communications: 8 strategies

November 14, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday I talked with a CEO client, one of the smartest, most positive and respected executives I’ve ever worked with. He, like most CEOs today, are creating plans to slash expenses, people and programs. “I’ve been through a number of recessions, but nothing like this,” he explained, with not a trace of optimism.

The greatest challenge is treating people who are losing their jobs humanely and with dignity. The second challenge is keeping remaining employees engaged during such uncertain times. A Gallup poll shows that companies with engaged employees grow earnings 2.6 times faster than those that don’t. In this economy, that may mean that companies with engaged employees make it, and those without  will not.

Here are eight communications suggestions for these difficult times:

  1. Create  online alumni communities ASAP – a place to help find new jobs,  provide encouragement and support, get financial advice on how to keep life together, etc. You can be up and running with  Ning community in less than 30 minutes for less than $30 a month.
  2. Don’t paint a rosy picture on a bleak landscape: people know things are bad, don’t pretend they are not.  Be clear about your business situation and what you believe the company needs to do to survive and come out stronger.  For every action, help people understand the why behind it. You’ll earn more trust by being real vs. trying to put a “good spin” on a difficult situation, that will continue to be fraught with uncertainty for at least another four fiscal quarters, if you can trust the economists.
  3. It’s not about transparency, it’s about fairness and caring: Employees must feel that you care about their personal well-being. A recent Harvard study found that “even well-meaning organizations can destroy trust if they are perceived as being fair but callous.”  Get out of the office and into the field with your employees so that you can both experience their worlds and show that you care and that all the HR  “employees first” mantras are more than just rah rah.
  4. Tie every decision to your corporate values: take out those values and use them as the guide for making decisions and communicating.  If you really believe the values, they will guide executive decisions in a way that will resonate with all your stakeholders, particularly employees.  In making announcements, explain to people how the decision supports the organization’s values.  And if the values are not helping to guide decisions,  you know that the vision/value exercise was a failure.
  5. Start with managerial incompetence: the largest driver of employee trust, according to the Harvard study, is managerial competence. In looking where to reduce staff, don’t simply cut by salary range or management level. Make sure you keep the A players, and excuse the mediocre. This will earn trust and motivate employees.
  6. Put Enterprise 2.0 tools in place to make it easier to work: with fewer people needing to do more work, make it a priority to provide company-wide 2.0 tools (wikis, blogs, communities, forums) that make it easier for people to find help and resources within the company, collaborate, solve problems small and large, and connect as people with other people.  Most of these tools are inexpensive, easy to install and require little training.
  7. Sit in the chair: last year a communications manager of a large retailer put two chairs in the company lobby and made herself available to employees who wanted to sit and talk. The response was overwhelming. (Read more here.) Sometimes small gestures go a long way, especially in such stressful times.
  8. One point at a time: My tennis partner, a financial CEO,  and I were recently getting crushed in a match. He came over and gave me this advice: “Take it one point at a time.” We did, and we came back and won.  In such stressful, uncertain periods this same advice may be good for business as well.

Filed Under: Communicating, Leadership Tagged With: , , , ,

Management 2.0: Nurses unionize "to be heard"

October 26, 2008 By 1 Comment

The greatest impact of Web 2.0 on our culture is that people expect to have a voice and input into company and organizational decisions. Sure, this has always been true to some extent, but today people are taking action when they feel that management is ignoring them. (Note to executives: while you may feel like you are communicating, that’s different from making people feel heard. How they feel is often more important than all the usual rational communications strategies.)

One example: last week nurses at a local hospital — Kent Hospital in Rhode Island — voted 290 to 214 to join the United Nurses and Allied Professionals union. The reason? The nurses said that didn’t feel like they were being heard.

In a story in the Providence Journal psychiatric nurse  Debbie Almeida said, “Over the years the whole climate has changed here. We felt we no longer had a voice in things.”

Nurse Rose Desnoyers added, “The reason I wanted to see a union here was basically for respect. Money is not the issue.”

With the community and social networking tools available, it’s much easier to open up discussions and invite employees to engage in a genuine way and in a large scale. The only obstacle is management mindset.

We’re working on one project where the senior management initially poo-poo’d our recommendation to set up an online community for employees to talk about the issues. “They hardly use email.”  “They won’t participate.” ” What if someone starts trouble.” “This is more of a working class crowd, they’re not into that Web stuff.”

Instead of taking no, we created a private community using Ning, put up some discussion forums, showed it to management and suggested we invite employees in and try it. Worse case, we close it.  The response from employees has been quite good. People are offering insightful ideas in the community. Others are talking to their friends at work not in the community and telling them that management is really trying and the community shows it.

Our only obstacle: the company’s corporate parent blocked employees from being able to access the community at work. So people have to access the community from home and use their personal emails to register. And, due to hourly employee regulations, we have had to explain to folks that the community is optional. If they felt it was mandatory for their jobs and could only access it at home, the lawyers felt that we would be liable; employees might think, they warned, that looking at the community at home was part of work and demand to be paid overtime.

Fortunately, the CEO we’re working with is a risk-taker, squarely focused on his employees and his customers. The lawyers and corporate naysayers are secondary.

We’re working with another client who has yet to embrace social media but whose employees are also being courted by unions.  This company’s lawyers, too, block employees from being able to access the corporate intranet at home due to the same fears about hourly workers. And senior management and the lawyers worry about what might happen if they open up discussions and forums. What if someone starts trouble?

Seems to me that be trouble is already in the works. The risk of not opening up and really listening to employees — and acting on their often very good suggestions or helping them understand why their thoughtful ideas can’t be implemented — is unionization. And with unionization comes management issues of another magnitude.

In reading about the nurses at Kent Hospital it’s clear to me that they love their jobs and have a passion about the hospital.  Same with our clients’ employees. Most people want to work for successful organizations and most willing to share ideas have good ideas.

So why not learn how to really listen so that people are heard?

PS — If anyone has examples of how to get around legal issues, and open up employee communities and corporate Intranets so people can access from home, please share!

Filed Under: Activating change, Communicating, Communities, Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

A true story about a chair

March 3, 2008 By 4 Comments

Patrick Schaber over at The Lonely Marketer has a beautiful post about his friend Jill who put two chairs in the middle of a busy corporate campus and sat down to listen to anyone who had something to say. Needless to say there was a line of people waiting to talk and be heard. This is one of the more innovative employee communications strategies I’ve heard in a long time. No technology. Just real listening among people. Thanks for sharing Patrick!

Filed Under: Communicating, Innovation Tagged With: ,

Don’t forget employee engagement

July 27, 2007 By 1 Comment

While there’s a lot of interest in customer engagement, don’t forget employee engagement. And it seems most companies have. A Towers Perrin study found that just 21 percent of all US employees are fully engaged; most are frustrated and skeptical about their senior leadership, which correlates to operating profit and income, according to two recent studies.

The bottom line upsides of an engaged work force:

  • 3.7 percent increase in operating margins and a 2.1 percent boost in net profit margins, according to an I. M Dulye & Co study of 41 international companies with 360,000 employees.
  • 19.2 percent increase in operating income and 13.7 percent increase in net income, according to a Towers Perrin study across 50 global companies.
  • 19 percent improvement in annual operating profit, 18 percent improvement in productivity and 400 percent reduction in errors at Rolls Royce Engine after committing to an employee engagement program. “It’s been like a tidal wave,” said Raj Sharma, president of the division. “Employees couldn’t believe that we’d listen to their suggestions, that decisions would involve them. And business performance is the only motivation to do this.”
  • There’s a direct link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and between customer satisfaction and financial performance, according to a study by Prof. James Oakley of Ohio State University.

What three things matter the most in engaging employees, aside from the obvious Sr. leadership commitment to involving employees? Says Julie Gebauer of Towers Perrin:

1. Rational understanding of the company’s goals and values

2. Emotional attachment to the organization

3. Willingness to go above and beyond specific job tasks

Whose job is it anyway? HR? Corporate Communications? Marketing? Probably not HR. None of four HR functions — selection, development, performance management and compensation — was found to influence employee engagement according to a study by Northwestern University Forum for People Perfrmance Management and Measurement.

Filed Under: Activating change, Leadership, Musings Tagged With: ,