Brand?

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!

Many moons ago, I set up the UK Usability Professionals’ Association and also co-founded the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF).  At the time, usability was an established discipline coming out of the shadows, and links to internal communication and engagement were clear: It’s about the audience.

Usability has really come a long way in five years, let alone 25.  Jakob Nielsen (love him or loathe him) has recently posted some interesting reading on the evolution of usability and intranets.  The most interesting point to me, once again with an eye on employee engagement and internal communications, is the declining ROI of usability improvements.  While the improvements are still more than worthy of investment, best practice has come a long way; people are adopting it; it’s harder to find a “competitive advantage.”

Just as in engagement and internal communications, today’s best practice is tomorrow’s hygiene factor.   Yet even with the evolution of social media tools that some say have revolutionised internal communications and corporate stakeholder dialogue, much of the deployment of these new approaches follow the old processes; they are simply seen as “new channels”.  The same debate occurred with intranets; revolution or new way to distribute information?

I wonder: is it actually getting harder to squeeze ROI out of our employee communication approaches, or are we just not able to get better solutions through the organisational treacle?

About two months ago I was in the Brecon Beacons in Wales on an BMW offroad motorcycle course.  Near the end of Day One I had what seemed to be an innocuous spill. Alas, I tore a ligament in my right thumb and by the end of Day Two had well and truly detached the thing entirely.

So, as I am now just about able to pick up a fork etc., I got back on the bike for a quick ride.  It was great.  I was riding better, more alert, enjoying more than I remembered before the spill.

I think there’s an important message here, at least to me.  We have to find a way to step away from the things we do, we enjoy, regardless of how “good” we are at them.  Because that distance to come back to things fresh is so important.

Apologies if I wax too philosophical these days - the moral of the story is, I’m away to Morocco on hols and hope my eyes are re-opened to my profession when I return…

Sayonara for now, brown cow…

I feel that there comes a point in one’s career where your head gets too full of information and experience.  This is not necessarily a good thing, because what it means is that your own mental model and view of the world starts to get overly filtered according to all that information.  Where it helps is in identifying issues, opportnities or solutions that others can’t see: The Voice Of Experience.

Where it doesn’t help is when your own starting point lies outside the world view of the person/people you’re communicating with.  I’m sure there are psychological, political, and anthropological terms for this.  Like so many things this is both blindingly obvious and yet amazingly complex as a communication challenge.

For example, in my calico career I’ve spent time in PR, marketing, HR and benefits communication, change management, management consulting, usability, knowledge management, musician, journalism, internal communications and brand management (not all in different jobs I might add).

As a result, it’s entirely reasonable for someone with that background to see knowledge management implications in a brand program, or to identify the organisational process changes implied by an internal communication program.  

The challenge this presents is that this gives rise to perceptions of “overcomplicating the issue” - we just need a newsletter, an intranet microsite, a session on our values, so why are you banging on about strategy links, user experience, process change implications? 

The answer, of course, is being able to turn this complexity into simplicity, which usually takes time.  Taking time isn’t very fashionable these days in a business world driven by deadlines, quarterly results and scorecards.

Two thoughts … first, this all ties in to my ongoing exploration of “the end of internal communications” — i.e., good IC/engagement people require a wide skillset not typically found in the IC practices of the previous generation.

More importantly, second, if you can take time actively simmering things on the back burner, take time in parallel to the daily grind, the simplicity will force its way to the surface.  I’m really pleased to say after about a year of complexity (added to, of course, 15+ years of work-life) I woke up the other morning and in about 62 minutes hammered out an elegantly simple way of explaining the relationship among brand, employer brand, recruitment, and the deep/wide world of employee engagement.

Get in touch if you want to talk about it.

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…

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.

I applaud, admire and respect those who ride their cycles, particulary in Central London.  Fitness, environmental footprint, reduced congestion … there is so much to recommend it.  I sometimes toy with the idea of creating a “Cycle Friendly Motorcyclist” logo or movement to show some solidarity among two wheeled road users.  I like to give them plenty of room and try to make their lives as easy as possible.  (This tends to actually annoy other motorcyclists and cars from time to time, in fact).  At SAS, where I work, we subsidise our pedal cyclists, with pride.

[Over the short run (say, 200-300 meters) they can make much better progress than a motorcycle, in fact, although at any distance over that the motorcycle will invariably gain the sustained speed advantage, though they hate to admit it...]

Except, of course, for the militant 10% who should have their bicycles melted and poured down their throats.  I admit I sometimes fantasize about seeing how quickly a 167kg 109 horsepower motorcycle can crush a pedal cycle and its self-righteous rider, savouring their look of horrified, indignant surprise as they go down after blocking a line of traffic for two blocks.

Let’s face it: Drivers hate them.  Motorcyclists hate them.  Pedestrians hate them.  Even other cyclists hate them. This probably eggs them on.  I suspect they’re that personality type.

You (and they) know who they are:  the self-righteous, lane-hogging, deliberately-obstructionist-to-make-some-sort-of-statement, aggressive pedal cyclists who aren’t just getting from point A to point B, or “doing their bit” and staying fit — they have a mission.  They have something to prove.  They are on a bicycle, and woe to anyone who isn’t.

Interestingly, although they make up only 10% or so of the pedal cyclist demographic, they make up some 60-80% of the spandex/lycra cyclist clothing market.

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.

From here  

How to engage your employees in your brand, values and culture

Andaz Hotel, London, EC2M 7QN
08.30-10.50am, Thursday 3rd April 2008

These are exciting but difficult times for those involved with creating and implementing communication and dialogue with employees. The importance and expectation placed on internal communications and engagement is growing, and interesting tools such as social networks are opening new possibilities and challenges.

But the big issue in creating successful communications never really changes. It’s about genuinely engaging your people, rationally and emotionally. It takes ideas, determination and creativity to overcome natural cynicism and apathy, to really affect the way people feel about their business and colleagues, and change their behaviour.

This event is designed to provide you with invaluable insights into effectively engaging an audience with brand, values and culture at a global and local level.

To register yourself and/or a colleague, please download the agenda and follow the instructions or call Polly Clark on 020 7243 3232 or email events@sasdesign.co.uk .

Agenda

I ride a motorcylcle daily in Central London, to and from work.  It turns a 1+ hour commute on over-priced public transport, unable to get on a train or tube carriage, wedged against other people in total silence, into 20-25 minutes risking my life twice a day. 

I know which I prefer.

Motorcycles are proven to reduce congestion and have a far smaller carbon footprint than cars.  They have more road presence than pedal cycles so feel safer - I cycled to and from work for about a year and finally gave up.  Pedal cycles and motorcycles share a raft of hazards.  But I’ll save my pedal cycle conversation for a different Diatribe.

Pedestrians.

Under UK law, the predestrian does not have the right of way.  Whether I agree with this or not is immaterial, but it makes sense in  a city like London given its current transport infrastructure.  This does not seem to matter to pedestrians.

The worst places are around train stations and bus stops.  I have very nearly hit, and would likely have killed, more pedestrians than I care to think about.  This is not because I am riding fast, or being aggressive, or not being observant  or am unaware of the road situation.

It’s because pedestrians don’t look around them, (often because they are on what must be a very important call, considering they are risking their life to be on it) or where they are going, and don’t cross where they are supposed to cross.  The phone call, not missing the bus, not walking that extra 10 meters to the crossing and waiting for the light — these things are clearly more important than life and limb.

At night, and in the rain, it is especially bad since on top of all this, they are nearly impossible to see amongst reflections and car headlights — yet this is when they are at their least observant, under umbrellas and hunched against the wind and rain, collar up, eyes locked dead ahead, crossing a major London thoroughfare.

Since starting to ride a motorcycle I have become a model pedestrian.  Because I realise I could get killed, very easily, by simply not following the instructions I was taught as a child.

To pedestrians:  Motorcyclists do not hate you; at least I don’t.  I’m one of you, sometimes, after all.  We are not trying to run you down.  We reserve most of our contempt for certain other road users.  We see you as vulnerable, soft objects that we really want to avoid.  But you do not make it easy for us.  So please: Pay attention.  Look around.  Think: is it worth life or injury to cross here, to catch that bus, to take that call.