Event on 8 April – joined-up employee engagement

Event: Left hand, meet right hand. Now, shake.

Moving beyond functional silos to get more for less in employee attraction and communication globally

Breakfast Event – 8 April 2010 – Andaz Hotel, London
Featuring case studies from Siemens & The Coca-Cola Company

It’s now 15 years since a causal link between employee engagement and business performance was statistically validated, with research and case studies piling higher every day. Why, then, do so many organisations continue to struggle with attracting, motivating and retaining the best talent? The answer, our research has shown, is more often than not in the failure to effectively join things up across functional lines who believe they alone ‘own’ the employee communication agenda.

This event will provide insights and inspiring food for thought about how you – whether you sit in brand, marketing, HR, internal communication, recruitment or change management – can take a fresh look at how to get more from your efforts in employee communications. Global practitioners from Siemens & The Coca-Cola Company will share their experiences of  tackling the sometimes daunting challenge of crossing silos in order to get greater impact from their investment in employer reputation management through the entire employee experience.

This, the third of our knowledge-sharing breakfasts of 2010, marks the launch of the global Brand & Talent Network™ – a group of over 10 agencies around the world, building and sharing capabilities and best practices to benefit clients who need global perspective matched with local market and audience insight and delivery.

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Agenda

Welcome to the world of brand and talent
Olivier Fleurot, Chief Executive Officer, MS&L Group

In a world of democratisation of technology, increasing cynicism and declining trust, what is the role of employee communication in reputation management? Olivier believes employee engagement is one of the three key priorities for CEOs today, and shares how MS&L Group is responding with the creation of the Brand & Talent Network™ – the world’s first truly integrated global employee communication service.

How joined-up thinking about “The Talent Journey” can create business value
Kevin Keohane, Global Head of the MS&L Group Brand & Talent Network / SAS Client Partner

Leading MS&L Group’s global Brand & Talent Network™, Kevin will present a romp through his new book, The Talent Journey, that should appeal to anyone who has a finger in the employee communication pie – from attraction to talent management to HR to Marketing to internal communications to change management and beyond.

Joining up international external and internal communications
Vera Janssens, Vice President, Corporate and Marketing Communications, Siemens South West Europe

Having managed both the HR and corporate communications of a multinational, Vera Janssens shares her personal view on the importance of internal communications as part of genuinely integrated corporate communications where employee engagement sits alongside external stakeholder communication. Vera shares her experiences of integrating internal and external communications to maximise business impact.

Creating an authentic, joined-up employee experience
Stephen Mulvenna, Talent Manager – Europe, The Coca-Cola Company

Creating an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) within a complex franchise system and one of the world’s most recognised brands is a formidable challenge. Stephen shares how The Coca-Cola Company has created an authentic, relevant and differentiating EVP, and how they have joined up the ‘external’ EVP with the ‘internal’ employee experience. He will share insights into how the business is leveraging social media to influence its reputation as an employer.

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Invitation – SAS_Brand_and_Talent_080410 (3)

Filed under: Employee engagement, brand engagement, employee communication, employer brand, hr and brand, internal communication, internal marketing, social media, stakeholder engagement

CommScrum 5 Live, and it’s gloves off!

Pre-match pleasantries out of the way, you can really see the steam rising off the Commscrum this week. In this latest offering from the four-partner blog, Dan Gray tackles sustainability, challenging businesses to take a much broader view of what it means to be sustainable, and suggesting a much more influential role for employee communications in demonstrating a credible commitment. This week, the studs are showing and no-one’s going to leave anything out on the pitch. See the sparks fly at http://commscrum.wordpress.com

Filed under: Uncategorized

2010 Edelmann Trust Barometer

Edelmann does an interesting annual study about the (apprently declining in a tailspin) levels of trust we have in various people/entities. 

http://www.edelman.com/trust/2010/

Take a look at the vids:

• key drivers of corporate reputation
• shift from a shareholder world to a stakeholder world
• trust in all sources of information declines
• Influence of NGO’s rises

Filed under: brand engagement, employee communication, employer brand, hr and brand, internal marketing

CommScrum 4 live … event tonight + slideshare

1 CommsScrum 4 now live.  We debate the dissolving internal-external communication divide - here

2 Speaking tonight at the Institute of Directors as part of the Ashridge Business School programme.  Slideshare available here.

Filed under: Uncategorized , employee communication, engagement, internal vs external communication

Green shoots?

Interesting data … we hit Q4 targets … and in Q1, unless something goes radically wrong (which is, alas, something I seem to excel at), I’ll knock off more than half of my annual target. 

Maybe it’s also a function of the pressure that built up with organisations shutting the tap off completely in terms of people communications?

Just a thought.

Filed under: Uncategorized

CommScrum 3 now live

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.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Come to the 11 February ‘55-minute guide’ launch at Ashridge Business School

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.

• 18:00 Arrival and networking (buffet/drinks will be provided)
• 18:30 Live Long and Prosper (Dan Gray)
• 19:00 short break
• 19:15 The Talent Journey (Kevin Keohane)
• 19:45 Further networking
• 20:00 End of session

Live Long and Prosper
 A lot of people are talking about sustainability these days. Still more talk about brands. Yet few people truly understand either. In the first part of this session, Dan Gray will offer fresh insights and must-knows on the really big questions when it comes to sustainability:  

• What does it really mean to be sustainable?
• Why is that critical to long-term brandand business success?
• And what does it take to establish it as a meaningful source of differentiation? 

 

 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.

• Why “joining it up” is no longer an option, it’s mandatory
• How it helps to keep things simple and avoid information fatigue
• Why that should matter to everyone in your organisation, from the C-suite down

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 .

 

Filed under: Uncategorized

The first ever typology of internal communicators?

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

CommScrum Rugby-Tackles “Internal” Communication

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

Filed under: Uncategorized

2010 Predictions

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.

Filed under: Uncategorized