Brand and employee engagement lexicon

From my upcoming book The Talent Journey, part of the upcoming 55-minute guide to … series .

Definition Of terms

Attraction – Getting the right people to want to come to work for you and not your competitors.

Brand – The sum total of what and how people think and feel about your organization, its people, and its products and services.  Typically a significant intangible financial asset seldom managed like one.  It’s what they say it is, not what you say it is.

Brand engagement – Broadly, how connected people feel to your brand.  In this context, brand engagement is about how well your employees and other stakeholders are connected to, and prepared to go the extra mile, for your products and services.

Employer Brand – Your reputation as an employer amongst potential and existing employees and other stakeholders.  Again, it’s what they say it is, not what you say it is.

Employee Journey[1] – Whether it’s broken down into two stages or 12, there is a well-embedded concept that breaks down the experience into touch points.  In broad terms, thinking through how your engagement effort applies to people at each of the following stages of the employee journey can provide great insight into who needs to be involved, the potential ROI and benefits to the business, the best media and engagement techniques to apply, and what other actions need to be taken:

1. Brand – A person knows something about your organisation, or learns about it, through a variety of touch points.  These may include your consumer/corporate brand, product and service experience, word of mouth, recruitment advertising, or online experience.
2. Employer Brand – At some stage, the person considers your organisation as a place where they might like to work.  They seek information about your organisation – again from a range of sources, most of which your organisation has no control over whatsoever.
3. Attraction & Recruitment – The person decides to find out more about you, and to seek a job offer from your organisation.  They experience your attraction and recruitment process and decide to join you or not join you.
4. On-boarding and induction – The person is inducted into the organisation and experiences “on boarding”.
5. First 90 days – The person experiences their initial time with your organisation, including initial perceptions, setting of initial goals, objectives and expectations, and forms a picture as to whether what you offered is what they receive.
6. Engagement – The person continues to develop in their role (or not), and at various stages, they consider looking for a different role or challenge – with your organisation or with another organisation. Or, the organisation considers finding a different role for the person with itself or another organisation!
7. Departure experience - The person leaves employment with your organisation – and may (or may not) consider rejoining at another stage, continuing to advocate your organisation as an employer, and its products and services.

Employee Value Proposition – What you say and do to show what you offer as an employer and what people can expect of an employment relationship with you. 

Engagement[2] – Employee engagement is broadly how much people care about, and are willing to do something extra for their career, their company, their colleagues, their communities and their customers.  When it’s working well, therefore, employee engagement is a good thing for everyone on your stakeholder list.  Employee engagement delivers:

• Commercial and cultural benefits to the organisation, and
• Personal and professional benefits to the stakeholders involved.

 Insanity[3] – Doing the same thing but expecting different results.  Often prevalent in employee communications. Alternatively, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got!”

ROI – Return on Investment (or Return on Involvement) – Getting more out than you would if you put your money in the bank or invested in something else (or if you want to calculate it, let us know your current discount rate). 

1.  Engagement builds shareholder value
Smart companies understand that how they attract, engage and retain their people has as much impact on their business performance as their R&D, products and services, and marketing communications.  Companies that do it well outperform those who don’t. 

2.  Engagement builds brand equity
Your brand and intangible assets represent something between 40 and 70 percent of the total value of your organisation on your Finance Director’s balance sheet.  People make or break your reputation.  And people are your greatest asset (according to your annual report).  So it makes sense to manage your reputation, as a business and as an employer, like the important financial asset it is.  External brand building in the employment space is no longer just about recruitment marketing and advertising, either.  It’s just as much about marketing, advertising, PR, HR and internal communications.

3.  Engagement enhances productivity
There are always going to be employees who go the extra mile, and those who don’t. The trick is to have as many of the good ones as possible.  People don’t join a company with the intention of “not being engaged.”  If you invest in making sure people have the awareness, attitude and tools to contribute, people will be more productive.  They will contribute more, and the good ones will stay longer.  Make sure your employer brand, employer value proposition – whatever you want to call it – is working hard as a business asset.   It’s critical to ensuring that you get the right people, that they get productive quickly, and that you don’t have to go through the process of hiring them all over again.

4.  Engagement improves talent attraction & retention
The simple act of making the effort to engage and give people a voice is often enough to make a difference, even to cynics.  What’s more is that your employees can act as a key channel to market for your reputation as a business and as an employer.  It’s not just about being nice – it’s about cost saving and improved productivity.  You can reduce recruitment advertising costs as well as agency fees if people become employer brand ambassadors.

5.  Engagement affects customer attraction & retention
Organisations invest heavily in their infrastructures, in developing products and services, in sales and marketing, in supply chain and getting their products and services to markets at the price that will yield them the most profit. The problem is, you can get all of that right — and still lose customers and market share.  The truth is that for nearly all products and services, even if your performance and pricing are perfect, poor service and interaction with your people – sales forces, procurement people, customer facing, client facing and service staff – is where your reputation is made or broken.  Customers are willing to forgive a lot if your people treat them well.

 Stakeholders – Depending on your objectives, your stakeholders may not be limited to employees of your organisation.  Often, engagement efforts need to take into account other stakeholders who may be affected by changes in the way people inside your organisation think and behave. 

 These can include:

Your organisation

o     Senior executives and leaders

o     Business and people managers

o     Employees (and their families and friends)

o     Contractors (and their families and friends)

o     Former employees

o     Future (potential) employees

Other organisations

o     Outsourced functions (HR, IT, etc.)

o     Suppliers

o     Partners

o     Regulators and government & related bodies

 The broader community

o     The investment community

o     Shareholders / investors

o     Environmental and Corporate Responsibility interests

Your customers/consumers or clients

o     Potential customers or clients

o     Current customers or clients

o     Past customers or clients

Your competitors

o     Direct ‘traditional’ business competitors

o     Non-traditional and indirect competitors

o     Competitors for talent

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[1] Gower Handbook of Employee Communications, Gower Publishing, London, 2009.

[2] Gower Handbook of Employee Communications, Gower Publishing, London, 2009.

[3] Albert Einstein, 1879-1955.

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

AA: Example of Just Not Getting the new communications arena

It may be old news, but what a great example of both corporate brand and employer brand converging at the intersection of “internal” and “external” communications, and the new social computing world we inhabit. 

Plus, employee brand engagement and customer engagement.

In short, an American Airlines customer who happened to be a user experience professional wrote about some issues with the AA website and suggested some changes.  An employee saw this and responded, saying it was hard to get right but they were trying.  AA fires the employee for disclosing internal company information.  How stupid can you get?

Read here for more.

Filed under: Employee engagement, brand engagement, digital engagement, employee communication, employer brand, internal communication, pr

If you’re going to navel gaze, why not look at someone else’s?

David Ferrabbee and I had lunch recently, and asked the question, what value do we add, really, as “communication experts”?

The main reason many of us seem to keep our jobs could arguably be because we serve the outdated management thinking and organisational structure of our employers, not because the skills we bring to the table matter to the business.

I know, that’s a bit harsh.

But a small movement is gathering.  A newish generation of those who are a bit fed up with the old guard and their relentlessly incremental, inward-looking, clubby and self-congratulating thinking…

The point is,  have a look at, say, Euan Semple; or Guy Kawasaki; or Mike Williams; or Russell Davies; or Flo Heiss… Euan has more followers on Twitter as there are international members of several communication associations. 

Maybe it’s just me.  I have a sardonic edge; I’m suspicious of clubs that would have me as a member; I don’t like groupthink; and ultimately maybe I need to admit I believe can make a bigger difference being on the outside of the tent pissing in.

And maybe it’s the world I inhabit – designers, digiterati, most under 30 (25 even) and constantly not only tapping apps on their iphones, but developing apps for iphones.  I’m sort of an honorary member of their club; the older guy who gets it.  Who is, in fact, often their champion on projects.

Once again, I wish internal communicators and our broad associations would start looking over the fence into other people’s yards, because to be frank theirs are a lot more interesting.  And we can get inspired by what they’re all doing, rather than eking another 1% effectiveness out of how to run employee surveys, or write for the web, or use social media internally. 

That’s how we will remain relevant, and valuable. That’s how disruptive innovation occurs.  The time for incremental improvements in employee engagement is past, I’m afraid.

The guys on the other side of the fence are looking at ways to destroy – for all the right reasons – everything our profession seems to stand for.  Not in a meanspirited, evil way, but just in a way that reflects that the incremental audience-message-channel-measurement view of the world is just so … flawed. 

The founder of Facebook recently said, “The other guys think the purposeof communication is to get information. We think the purpose of information is to get communication.”

That is a massive shift in thinking no number of awards for “internal communication excellence” as is going to be able to stave. 

I mean, THIS is interesting (from Publicis sister agency Fallon):

(And I’m a twitter sceptic)

And THIS isn’t:

 Well, I’m tired of it.

Anyone want to join the Evolution, drop me a line.

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

Mapping the internet: where influencers live

Our sister agency, Linkfluence, are mapping social networks on the internet.

Fab stuff.  Want to know who influences your audience? Where to advertise?  Where to do online PR?  They can find out precisely.

To tease you:

“(l)in(k)fluence

Conversation leaders and shapers exist within social web communities, where they weigh on the public agenda and the tone of conversations. There are no at large influential bloggers. However, many bloggers yield qualified influence within the different communities of the social web.

A site may enjoy a high level of visibility with the main stream media and yield influence with their political peers online. Still, it may remain unknown to communities interested in fashion trends and be deprived of any form of influence therein.

Beyond a website’s structural influence within its community, the dynamic nature of the social web, where millions of opinions are exchanged everyday, has led us to apprehend influence with each message using its viral level (number of comments, trackbacks, partial or complete quotations without links).“ 

linkfluence studies and solutions

linkfluence uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse the social web, its territories and communities, actual live panels of conversation leaders.

knowing = linkconnected™

• Topographic studies (identification and analysis of communities, conversation leaders and shapers)
• Reputation2.0 studies
• Brand Perceptions2.0 (territory, values and attributes)
• Campaign propagation and impact studies
• “Cultures & Lifestyles” studies
• Trends studies

monitoring = linksight™

• Quantitative and qualitative monitoring of the social web’s conversations
• Crisis monitoring

technological solutions = linkscape™

• Monitoring and analysis portals of the social web’s main territories

 Look here, and be amazed… from feminism to politics to HR to marketing, your audience and its influencers await…

Filed under: brand engagement, digital engagement, employer brand, hr and brand, internal marketing, pr, social media

Annual Predictions 2009

For the third year I will be making my predictions for the coming year.  In January I’ll revisit last year’s predictions and see how I did.  That way, I have to write a blog posting, see? 

I have to admit I’ve had less time to think about it than in previous years.  However… here goes:

1)  Strategy, design and communications businesses will fare better than advertising and PR.  (Duh)

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.

3)  Similarly, Luxury brands will have to go ever more bespoke and tailored. 

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.

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

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 behviour touch point of their corporate brand.  Smart multinationals could well head this way too. 

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.

Mobile.  Bigger and more present than ever; my new laptop has a bloody SIM card in it! Unlimited data! Slow, maybe; cool – very.

9) Astronomers will uncover our first ever evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe.

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.

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

888 words from Eurocomm 2008

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.

Filed under: Employee engagement, brand, brand engagement, employee communication, employer brand, hr and brand, internal communication, internal marketing, organisational communication, pr, social media, stakeholder engagement , brand, conference, employee, engagement, human resources, iabc, internal communications, internal marketing, international communications

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…

Filed under: Employee engagement, brand, brand engagement, employee communication, employer brand, hr and brand, internal communication, internal marketing, organisational communication, pr, social media, stakeholder engagement , brand, brand engagement, employer brand, human resources, internal communications, internal marketing

Is design the new management mantra?

Echoes in the blogosphere … continuing the discussion about Design, management, communications, innovation …  

The follwoing is stolen with pride from The Brand Builder Blog — referencing a Business Week article on design and business management:

‘Brilliant Business Week article by Bruce Nussbaum about Design Thinking and Business Leadership (via kottke.com, by way of orangeyeti.com). Here are some of my favorite parts:

“I now believe that CEOs and managers must know Design Thinking to do their jobs. CEOs must be designers and use their methodologies to actually run companies. Let me be even more precise. Design Thinking is the new Management Methodology. There are a growing number of insightful folks with great blogs who are saying the same thing and I’ll be linking to them and having a deep conversation with them in the future.”

“Let’s face it, our business models are melting down around us, our personal careers are morphing—or disappearing– and there is less certainty about tomorrow than at any other time in our lives. Every industry, every company and every one of us is swept up in this veritable flood of change. It’s exhausting, isn’t it? I used to be The Voice of Authority at Business Week, the editorial page editor. Now I’m the curator-in-chief, coaching a brilliant team of people in creating a new online innovation site called Innovation & Design and a new magazine called Inside Innovation. That’s very far from writing editorials.”

“In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana. Peel that banana back and you find great design. Yummy design. . The kind of design that can change business culture and all of our civil society as well.”

“Innovation is no longer just about new technology per se. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation.”

“Innovation, design, and technology are all flowing into one another to form a single river of roaring change radically altering our culture, and especially business culture.”

“Designers are the sherpas of culture, the guides to community, the empathizers of the odd and foreign. Globalization and the spread of the market into each and every traditional village at the bottom of the pyramid opens up ancient communities that we now need to understand. Social networking creates entirely new communities, each with a distinctive new culture, that we need to understand as well. The empathetic tools of design can bring business people, educators, urban planners, hospital managers, transportation developers—everyone– into these communities to understand their values and rules, their needs and wants.”

“That’s Design As Margaret Mead, Design As Anthropology. Design is so popular today mostly because business sees design as connecting it to the consumer populace in a deep, fundamental and honest way. An honest way. If you are in the myth-making business, you don’t need design. You need a great ad agency. But if you are in the authenticity and integrity business then you have to think design. If you are in the co-creation business today—and you’d better be in this age of social networking—then you have to think of design. Indeed, your brand is increasingly shaped and defined by network communities, not your ad agency. Brand manager? Forget about it. Brand curator maybe.”

“Then there is Design as Peter Drucker or Design as Management Methodology. Design is popular today also because Design Thinking—the methodology of design taken out of the small industrial design context and applied to business and social process—is spreading fast. Hate me if you will, but I am a believer in Design Thinking. In the world of business, there is no value proposition left for most companies in controlling costs or even quality. All that outsourcing has leveled this playing field. Cost and quality are commoditized today, merely the price of entry to the competitive game. Design and design thinking—or innovation if you like–are the fresh, new variables that can bring advantage and fat profit margins to global corporations. In today’s global marketplace, being able to understand the consumer, prototype possible new products, services and experiences, quickly filter the good, the bad and the ugly and deliver them to people who want them—well, that is an attractive management methodology. Beats the heck out of squeezing yet one more penny out of your Chinese supply-chain, doesn’t it?

“Let me emphasize this. I think managers have to BECOME designers, not just hire them. I think CEOs have to embrace design thinking, not just hire someone who gets it. I think many business schools have to merge with design schools, not just play poke and tickle with them.”

“There are two great barriers to innovation and design in the world today. Ignorant CEOs and ignorant designers. Both groups are well-intentioned and well-dressed—in their own ways—but both can be pretty dangerous characters.”

“Design should not give up its special ability to visualize ideas and give form to options. Design should extend its brief to embrace a more abstract and formalized expression of how it translates empathy to creativity and then to form and experience. Be broad, not narrow. Global, not parochial. Do not deny the powerful problem-solving abilities of design to the cultures of business and society.”

If you tend to generally agree with the types of posts and articles that appear regularly on the brandbuilder blog, you must read this article. Check out the entire piece here. Then bookmark it.’

Filed under: Employee engagement, brand engagement, digital engagement, employer brand, internal marketing, organisational communication, pr