27 January, 2010 • 5:03 pm 0
CommScrum–the four-partner collaborative internal communications blog-continues its exploration into IC issues with a look at “communication spaces”–the events and activities that generally occupy the time and attention of internal communicators, with NL-based Lindsay Uittenbogaard leading the charge, and my partners Dan Gray and Mike Klein and me piling in for another spirited discussion. The current posting can be found here.
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20 January, 2010 • 7:11 pm 0
You are invited to an evening event at Ashridge… where my colleague Dan Gray and I are launching the first two books in a new series of short guides to business communication topics (what we bill as “the antidote to most business books”).
Ashridge Alumni Business Briefing – Live Long & Prosper and The Talent Journey
In this two-part Alumni business briefing, Dan Gray (Ashridge alumnus) and Kevin Keohane share the insights behind their new “55-minute guides”– the products of their shared passion for simplicity and systems thinking in bringing to life critical aspects of brand and employee communications.
The aim? To get you thinking and talking in a completely different language about sustainability – less about soft principles, values and ethics, and more about hard business logic and the value to be created from pursuing more sustainable strategies.
With his six laws for building sustainable brands, Dan provides a simple yet powerful argument why CSR is dead and ‘design for sustainability’ is the next competitive advantage.
The Talent Journey
It is 15 years since Heskett et al first wrote of the Service Profit Chain, evidencing the causal link between employee engagement and improved business performance. Why, then, is it that so many organisations are still so bad at doing it?
Kevin believes that the primary reason is businesses’ failure to join things up and, in the second part of this session he illustrates the benefits of adopting a whole systems view of the employee life-cycle – from attraction and recruitment, through on-boarding and engagement, to the employee’s eventual departure.
By the end, you should have some powerful ideas, tools and examples to help you create far more effective engagement strategies – clear, consistent and compelling.
For more information or to book a place at any Alumni Event, please use the online booking form. Alternatively, please contact us by email at: alumni@ashridge.org.uk or by calling: +44 (0)1442 841202 +44 (0)1442 841202 +44 (0)1442 841202 +44 (0)1442 841202 .
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15 January, 2010 • 6:47 pm 4
Cross posted from CommScrum, I may have inadvertently invented something quite useful based on a lot of feedback.
I’ll work more on this, but in essence there is a lot of convergence of practice as different camps attempt to occupy the employee engagement space, both in-house and agency-side. Their technical/functional bias tends to drive their philosophy (naturally) …
The channelers – Very slowly disappearing, and not a minute too soon, dinosaur ex-journalists and newsletter publishers who reduce the role of internal communication to getting “the right information to the right people at the right time”.
The human capitalists - There is a camp that believes it is all about ‘the employee’ – broadly, the HR camp. It’s about policies, processes, forms, measurement, measurement, measurement, competencies, reward systems and moving levers (The Gallup 12 etc.) to get the most out of people – if they are satisfied, engaged, etc., then they will be more productive. Business performance links are there, but are tangental outcomes of pandering to the best possible employee experience. The McLeod report is a great example. It only mentions ‘brand’ in passing – and then in the context of HR branding internally.
The experientialists – Another camp is the customer experience camp or “brand engagement” - e.g. marketing. They argue that if employees aren’t focussed on the customer or client, it doesn’t matter how engaged/satisfied they are since that becomes irrelevant (although you can argue cause and effect of course). You’ll find a lot of brand agencies here. And they don’t do HR, dahling… On the other hand, they tend to be far more influential and persuasive by nature than HR.
The influencers – A third camp is (and often the most seriously flawed) the PR and change camp, where internal/employee comms is all about defining “publics” and then influencing them using spin and external PR techniques.
The changelings - Communications is change. Change comes from workstreams.
The executives – It’s all about leadership communication.
The managerials – It’s all about line managers.
The KM brigade - It’s about intranets and managing knowledge.
The storytellers – It’s all about big pictures and stories, since the dawn of time it always has been.
Filed under: Employee engagement, brand engagement, employee communication, employer brand, hr and brand, internal communication, internal marketing
13 January, 2010 • 1:10 pm 0
Challenging the very viability of what’s currently known as “internal communication” is the task taken on in this week’s iteration of CommScrum—a cooperative e-publishing venture dedicated to “Full Contact Internal Comms.”
The Commscrummers: UK-based Dan Gray and Kevin Keohane, Netherlands-based Lindsay Uittenbogaard and Brussels-Based Mike Klein, take a whack at the inward-facing focus of internal comms to date, and debate its viability in the face of the ongoing convergence of communication disciplines and emerging importance of employees as an externally-facing communication channel.
Commscrum aims to publish at least twice monthly—and can be found at: http://CommScrum.wordpress.com
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8 January, 2010 • 4:59 pm 5
Ok, here goes. This has been sitting a while and reading the paper this morning two of them are already well on their way to being accurate so perhaps I am not ambitious or thoughtful enough… but…
1) Employee engagement spend, recruitment spend will increase – the speed of this being dependent on speed of recivery, but a definite increase. Too much has been cut for business to sustain normal, sustainable operations.
2) Free content will (really) begin to replace over-priced Intellectural Property such as specialist publishers in non-traditional channels (for example, Forrester, Melcrum, IABC, etc.). Slowly, of course, but noticeably as demand drops off due to alternative channels. Smart companies will react to this with innovation and generosity of spirit. Dumb ones, won’t (probably increasing prices to fill the gap and pursuing illegal copying more vigorously).
3) Small and exclusive will replace big, blingy and mass market, big time. Limited edition, limited access, preferred mail lists, word of mouth, invitation or recommendation-only access/membership, etc.
4) Something even more trendy will replace Twitter, then something will replace that. And so on. Privacy will become a much more relevant consideration as SM mature.
5) People will finally “get” PTT (Push To Talk) – and wonder why they didn’t use it 5 years ago when it was available on most handsets.
6) Concentrated, tactical, ephemeral “microbranding” will begin to dislodge cumbersome and time consuming branding approaches – both corporate and consumer.
7) The business book press will slowly begin to realise that people will pay for insightful brevity. We’ll see more 50-100 page books like Zag, The Brand Gap, The Talent Journey, Live Long and Prosper, etc. entering publishing schedules toward the end of the year and fewer pseudo-academic tomes of more than 200 pages.
8. ) Google will stumble and lose its way (they may then recover, we’ll see).
9) Powerd by the wonderful success of Avatar, interactive experiences will begin to also gain traction in the corporate setting as well as in consumer home theatre and gaming. Invest now in 3D display companies…
10) Connecting internal comms to employer brand will gain mainstream acceptance, for example, internal comms about HR actually looking like and saying similar things to recruitment media.
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6 January, 2010 • 12:41 pm 1
Mocking the extra-polite culture pervasive within the internal communication industry and recalling the varied rugby careers of its participants, four leading communication pros have launched CommScrum—a co-operative blog dedicated to “Full Contact Internal Comms.”
Joining Mike Klein in the initial crew are Dan Gray, Kevin Keohane and Lindsay Uittenbogaard—fellow co-authors of the Gower Handbook of Internal Communication—and practitioners known for strong opinions, international experience and innovative work.
The initial effort raises the question of whether internal comms practitioners need to take on a more multidisciplinary orientation—and whether IABC as a leading professional organization is likely to help or hinder that process. Commscrum aims to publish at least monthly—and can be found at:
Filed under: Employee engagement, brand engagement, employee communication, employer brand, hr and brand, internal communication, internal marketing, organisational communication, pr, social media, stakeholder engagement
5 January, 2010 • 12:15 pm 6
Here were my predictions for 2009 and my self assessment:
1) Strategy, design and communications businesses will fare better than advertising and PR. (Duh)
100%. Not much of a prediction perhaps…
2) The new must have / bling thing will be exclusivity — that will be the thing — invitation-only music sites, for example. Fewer, quality things in our lives.
75%. I think this prediction was about a year ahead of its time what with the recession. However, there is ample evidence that this trend will accelerate – look at the American Express Platinum Card campaign.
3) Similarly, Luxury brands will have to go ever more bespoke and tailored.
95%. 5-point deduction since this actually wasn’t just about Luxury brands; all good consumer brands headed this way.
4) Similarly, social media sites will see ever more exclusive and bespoke content. “Discoverability” will emerge as a common term. Pull communication will disrupt old models.
50%. Social Media is still in its adolescent-broadcast “look at me me me” phase, but it’s getting there.
5) HR and Marketing will solidify ownership of the employee engagement and brand engagement space, and will more likely co-opt corporate comms/corporate affairs than the IC community
75%. The economy had an affect here as well, but IC seems to be wandering in the wilderness, at least in my experience, deeping its content and channel focus and growing ever less strategic.
6) Large multinationals will embrace employer brand and EVP efforts as a way to cut through attraction noise; but smaller (still big) companies will question how this differs from the behaviour touch point of their corporate brand. Smart multinationals could well head this way too.
75%. Again, in my experience this was bang on, but I’m really a small universe. Most companies definitely are getting it.
7) At the same time, consolidation of internal communications around brand and HR issues — driven by marketing and HR, see 4, above — will expand dramatically, with actual process changes emerging rather than just communication about issues/processes.
0%. Nope. Recession killed this one.
Mobile. Bigger and more present than ever; my new laptop has a bloody SIM card in it! Unlimited data! Slow, maybe; cool – very.
100%. iPhone etc. Again, maybe not much of a prediction on hindsight.
9) Astronomers will uncover our first ever evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe.
Startlingly, I’d give myself a 50% here. There was a MASSIVE increase in the discovery of extraterrestrial planets, making it a statistical near probability that there is life out there. Though we will probably never know it exists.
10) Greenwashing on a major scale will be uncovered across at least 3 Fortune 100 companies, wiping billions (more) in brand value off their balance sheets.
10%. Thanks to Copenhagen.
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22 December, 2009 • 4:50 pm 3
LONDON — It’s interesting to be a participant in a news story that is making front page headlines in European metropolitan dailies.
Safely back in London thanks to an Air France pilot pushing the throttles to the firewall to get us from London to Paris in about 40 minutes before the wings and engine froze up was an interesting finale to my small part in experiencing the Eurostar debacle.
Reading the news stories, I realise how fortunate I am — employed, well paid, with credit card limits that one wouldn’t dare get anywhere near to. So we could go back to our warm hotel, get hot chocolate, log in and watch Eurostar say nothing terribly helpful, then have a late dinner and a hot bath before bed. Some people slept at stations and on platforms.
Nonetheless, reading the news stories, I also realise how badly Eurostar got this wrong. I was a participant, so perhaphs my initial blog post was emotional. But it wasn’t. That first instinct was right: this travel company had thousands of people in its care (both employees and their customers) and they were completely unprepared to deal with a relatively simple situation.
From a communication standpoint, look at the basic rules they broke and think about the parallels with your organisation, its people and leaders and behaviours…
1) Don’t say anything until you are 100% sure about the situation
2) Keep staff in the dark, and for heaven’s sake don’t give them information or tell them what to do while you work things out
3) Tell everyone to just look at the website
4) Announce detailed, thought-through financial reimbursement stuff about the problems while customers are still freezing their arses off waiting for (a) a train or (b) some information about where the trains are
5) Tell people different stories from different ends of the same train and let them work it out for themselves
6) Hide your staff in one of the compartments in case people try to speak with them
7) Do your lipstick in the reflection of a window while scores of passengers are looking for someone to ask for information
8.) Tell people you’ll pay for their hotels. After you have once told them you would provide hotels, then changed your mind and said they were on their own to make arrangements.
8.1) Then, the next day, say what you meant was you’d pay for a certain level of hotel. Two days after they’ve booked in somewhere.
9) TO BE DETERMINED – really make the claims procedure hard on people
- Home at last. With a big credit card bill on its way.
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20 December, 2009 • 1:23 pm 0
PARIS – As a final kick in the pants from My Worst Year, the Eurostar has been cancelled, stranding me and my wife in Paris. Yes, there are worse places to be stuck.
My comment is about the appalling behaviour of Eurostar.
We boarded a train yesterday. It got as far as Lille where it stopped and we were told we had to return to Paris since the trains were still breaking down in the tunnel. One would have thought they would have been a bit more certain before piling people into trains and sending them down the line.
We stopped at the Charles de Gaulle station, where we were told to get off the train for a hotel room.
Over the following 5 hours, we received intermittent and garbled communication; on the train, off the train. Stay here for a room; board the train and return to Paris for a room. No hotel rooms here; no hotel rooms in Paris.
Staff standing 10 meters apart gave different stories (if you could find them) – most were hiding in one of the compartments. In some ways I didn’t blame them, since it was clear Eurostar had absolutley zero control over whatever was happening. I would hate to see how this company behaves during a genuine crisis such as a disaster where people were hurt, if they couldn’t manage to think through details as basic as whether to send a train through a tunnel without knowing if it would make the trip.
We returned to our hotel, thankfully where our room was still available. I called Eurostar, eventually getting through. How do they handle managing the re-booking? In the 21st century? How do they ensure customer service and an orderly, controlled experience?
Show up at the station – first come, first served. That should be fun.
I suppose it is actually an expedient solution, and one which saves a fortune on pesky things like IT and software capex.
It will prove interesting to see what transpires, but I need to get back to London and as big a fan of Eurostar as I have been, I hope this opens up channel rail to competition.
It’s not the fact that the weather caused mechanical/electrical problems – that’s life. I could live with that.
It’s how they acted as a result that shows the character of the organisation and its leadership. They deserve to fail, plain and simple.
ADDENDUM
We’re booked on Air France, so watch this space. Interestingly, Eurostar have already made very specific policies about traveller compensation etc. although they still have yet to communicate how customers are supposed to get home. I think that speaks volumes to the company culture: they get the money bit, but managing the customer experience, and communication with employees and customers is not a priority.
Filed under: Uncategorized
8 December, 2009 • 2:27 pm 1
I was going to write a long post, but the headline says it all for me.
May 2010 be annus mirabilis for me, and to the rest of us.
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