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.

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.

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.

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

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

[3] Albert Einstein, 1879-1955.

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.

First, a HAPPY THIRD BIRTHDAY to Death To Internal Marketing (DTIM).

Hard to believe we’ve been having this conversation for some 1,100 days.

On to business…

I am currently working on several strategic corporate brand positioning exercises, all including important employee engagement requirements, for very different businesses.  Different sizes, geographic scope, and industries.

Yet their stories are remarkably, eerily similar.

All have started as “provincial” players who excelled at one thing.  They got a bit bigger and more confident, and started adding services both organically and through acquisition.

All of their brands face similar challenges:

• product or service lines that have broadly greater equity than the emergent “Corporate” monolithic brand that is seen to be required to bring clarity, order and efficiency to ensuring the brand strategy supporting the business strategy.
• cultural differences at both social and corporate levels, internally and with client/customer/marketplace

Something tells me that if all of the projects I am working on have such similarities, it must be a broader brand issue — SMEs finding their feet in new markets and a requirement for more sophisticated brand strategy.  Which requires investment. 

I think we will see some interesting developments in SME branding in the coming year…

“Why is there so little innovation in internal communication and employee engagement?”  was the question.  My  answer is, “Because most internal communication and engagement associations are inwardly-focussed.”  We tend to follow trends, not create them (example: social media).

A great example of the kind of thinking our profession needs is this example - from Coca-Cola.  In short, when you own 70% of the soft drink vending machine market and your approach hasn’t really changed in a lifetime, where do you look for inspiration?  I suspect many IC peers would look at other soft drink vending operators and ape what they are doing.

Coca-Cola looked at medical devices.  You know, things that mix substances with water to dispense medicine for diabetes or chemotherapy and so on.  The result?  The next generation of vending machine that serves more than 100 products.

I know, I am ranting against my industry.  You’d be used to it by now.  The thinking that got us here won’t get us somewhere more interesting.  Maybe TowersPerrin will go buy Linkfluence, but I somehow doubt it.

A good article over at BusinessWeek on how design thinking is gaining pace and  starting to gain traction.  In essence it’s broader, more creative thinking about how to solve problems and drive strategy than traditional silo-managed and owned ways of working.  Dave Armano pushes it into social media and the idea of a “collaboratory“.  Have a gander…

It links in to systems thinking and Dan Gray and my ongoing crusade against an internal communications / change communications / employee engagement / employer brand community that seems hell-bent on driving incremental competence-led changes rather than higher-level approaches to delivering more to the organisations we work with.

In other words, to paraphrase Einstein, the thinking that got us here is not the thinking that is going to get us out of here.  It’s not about better employee surveys, or using social media as a communication channel, or getting better at writing for the web, etc.  These are all tactics, and valulable ones, but we need to be looking at a new toolbox, or a bigger van…

Two base hits from the wonderful David Armano.

First, close to my own heart, a jab at “social media experts” – one of my favourite targets.  Since generally they talk a lot about how to “do” social media, but lack any actual portfolio.  These people run conferences, write books, and lecture, but they don’t actually DO THE JOB.  http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/09/snake.html 

A close second, an interesting video and post about a Bruce Nussbaum speech, the point being about new ways of leveraging listening as opposed to surveys etc.

We’re working on re-positioning an ambitious mid-tier professional services firm and have had to mark the “people – relationship – partnership – human” space as completely off-limits.

There is simply no room to maneuver there.  It is densely occupied.   Everyone is so people focussed, human and collaborative that, by golly, we may well have to advise people to go back to making more of their QUALITY and PRODUCTS / SERVICES.  Do the “hand over the logo” test and The Big 4 and Magic Circle pretty much fail.

On the other hand, we’ve recently helped reposition an aerospace/engineering company and the reverse is true.  It’s all jet engines and radar towers.  So we’re moving them into the people space.

I love this job.