Plaintalk

Five Trends in Employee Engagement for 2010

Last week Brian Burgess and I conducted a webinar on five trends impacting employee engagement in 2010. Here's a link to the slides:

MS&L Five Trends in Employee Engagement

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7 Social Media Trends for Employee Engagement

Fleishman-Hillard recently conducted a webinar on Seven Social Media Trends for Engaging the Workforce. The material covered emerging trends in the use of social media for internal communications. We used case studies from best-in-class brands, including both clients and others, to show how social media is being used behind the firewall to improve employee communication and drive business results.

The slides can be found on SlideShare here:

Seven Social Media Trends for Engaging the Workforce

View more presentations from Fleishman-Hillard Internal Communications.

Would love your comments or thoughts.

Enjoy!

Station M: I'm Lovin' It

McDonald's has an external approach to an internal blog called Station M. It's for McDonald's employees worldwide and is available outside their firewall. Password protected, this makes it easy for non-wired employees (those who don't have access to a computer at work) to participate in the conversations going on at the site from their own computers or mobile devices on their own time.

Davey Rosenberg, a student blogger from James Madison University, has a great review of it over at his blog. Check it out.

Many companies struggle with blogs and other social media because of this very issue: allowing access outside the firewall. This McDonald's example is a good blueprint for how to do it without IT necessarily giving up control of the security of the corporate network.

What about you? Do you have other examples of good corporate uses for blogs and social media? Comments welcome, as always.

One Part You, Three Parts M&A, Shake, and Serve

With the economy in a state of flux, we've been inundated with requests for help with mergers and acquisitions. But, heck, a weird economy and M&A work go together like martinis and olives so it's not as though we're surprised.

But if you are caught a little by surprise by a possible M&A situation at your company and don't know where to start, here's a quick recipe for developing communications plans for mergers and acquisitions. Just think of the M&A process in three parts: Pre-Announcement, Transition, and Day One and Beyond.

Pre-Announcement is when there are merger talks going on but nothing formal has been announced yet. These talks usually aren't public knowledge. Use this to your advantage. This is prime planning time because the news could leak at any minute and you have to be prepared for the onslaught of questions employees will have. In fact, if you're the industrious type, you could start planning for a possible M&A situation now, even though one may not be imminent. In any case, you'll end up with a strategy about a mile long and a list of tactics about two miles long. And that's just for internal communications. But that's OK. Better to have planned for it than to be caught off guard later by something you hadn't thought of.

Transition is after a formal announcement has been made but before the deal closes. This is when you pull out all the stops, using every form of push and pull communication you have at your disposal. It would not be unusual for you to have daily, if not hourly, updates for your website, blog or newsletter throughout this period, which could last weeks or months, or in the case of Sirius/XM, years. Note that you may or may not be able to talk with the employees of the other company during this time, depending on circumstances. However, you can share your communications plans and activities with your counterpart at the other company so she can be bringing her own employees along in the process. You just can't coordinate or direct her efforts nor she yours. Your legal team will provide more details as to why but basically it comes down to keeping the two companies operating separately as long as they are still legally separate.

Day One and Beyond (wasn't that in Toy Story?) is the phase that begins with the close of the deal and the start of the two companies operating as one legal entity. This is where you begin the hard work of building one culture from what was two. Fortunately, you already put in a good foundation for this during the Transition phase, as did your counterpart, making the job mostly a continuation of what you've already started. A steady, routine plan reliably executed is your new best friend. And because it's hard work, it is imperative that you constantly set and reset expectations, especially those of senior leaders, about this process and what it takes to build a new culture. Keep them, and others, from having overnight expectations.

So that's it. A quick recipe for undertaking the large task of building a communications effort for a merger or acquisition. Obviously, there are tons of moving parts in each of these phases and an unlimited number of tasks and responsibilities that go into making it a success, much more than could ever be covered here. But breaking the whole idea down into three parts makes it more manageable and a lot less daunting.

When you're done, mix up your own recipe of choice, relax and enjoy. You will have earned it.

Employee Engagement Quid Pro Quo

I recently attended a conference on employee engagement. Throughout the event, speakers and attendees were attempting to answer the question: what does employee engagement look like?

It’s an interesting question. Some of the answers were long and theoretical, supported by data and quality norms. Other answers were from the gut and practical, arrived at more by experience than by design. All were a variation on the same theme, though. Employee engagement is recognizable by how committed employees are to the organization, to helping it achieve its goals, to leading the company to and through its next stage of growth, challenges and success.

To me, though, committed employees are only one side of the equation. To have employees engaged, you need not just commitment from the employees, but from the company, as well. It’s nearly impossible to get an employee to commit to their working relationship if they don’t feel that same level of commitment in return. It’s a reciprocal relationship; the more the employer commits, the more likely the employee is to commit. The two work together to achieve engagement. Otherwise, there's an imbalance.

The next time you're asked to help improve employee engagement, ask yourself whether your organization is ready to show the same level of commitment. Otherwise, the quid pro quo is a no go.

The Never-Ending Quest for The Silver Bullet

In our practice, we run into this question more often than just about any other: how do you reach blue collar workers who don't sit in front of a computer all day? It seems that this group of employees is the hardest to reach but, in most instances, the most critical. You can often reach their supervisors, using at least one form of technology, usually email. But, more often than not, that's about as far down in the organization you can go to reach those who are making the enterprise go from the front lines.

What is the silver bullet that will reach your blue-collar (i.e., non-wired) employees? And no, I'm not talking about Coors Light, though you'd be surprised how far a keg can go in helping to improve working relationships. A friend interned at a brewery one summer and vowed to never quit as long as they kept giving him a 12-pack every payday. Talk about fringe benefits! Beer as part of total compensation.

Because we run into this all the time, let me say right here that the solution to reaching them isn't kiosks. Yes, kiosks have a place in the communicator's toolbox. Yes, you can deploy them with relative ease and provide as much access to information as your white- and grey-collar employees have. And, yes, they do work well in many instances. But, from our experience, a blue-collar employee will resist using the kiosk for one simple reason, summed up best in a response in a focus group by one guy who refused to use them: "you want me to bust my ass on the line all day then spend my hard-earned break reading benefits materials on a kiosk? You must be crazy!"

That is the crux of what's wrong with kiosks. It assumes someone wants to use them. It's a push tool that tries to deliver both push and pull messages (you push the tool on them then expect them to allow you to push info on them, as well, or at the very least expect them to pull the info they might want). While the premise is solid, the assumption that someone will take their personal time to do it (yes, break time is personal time) is flawed. It just doesn't happen in big enough numbers to say that you can rely on kiosks, at least not exclusively. It is a bullet; it's just not silver.

An article in today's The New York Times shows that production employees have always wrestled with this problem and illustrates a novel approach that cigar rollers in Tampa took to keep up with what was going on. It's a fascinating look at the behaviors of non-wired employees, with some neat history thrown in. In summary, cigar factory employees had a person who was a reader who would sit up on a high chair in the rolling room and read the newspaper, novels and other important information to them as they kept production, er, rolling. That was followed by a switch to radios, which was followed by cassette tapes, which has been followed by television, cell phones, texts, iPods, ,Zunes and audible books.

Each person will adopt a technology and/or communication preference that fits their styles, both working and personal. Some will want printed newsletters, others want news through an email. Some want podcasts, others want bulletin board postings. Some audio, some video. Some want stuff sent home, others don't want anything at all unless they absolutely have to respond. The choices are as individual as the people themselves, based on personal preferences.

The point is there are lots of ways to reach employees, including blue-collar ones. And every way is just as effective as the others, if it's valuable to someone you're trying to reach. There's nothing wrong with an decidedly low-tech printed newsletter if people want it and are reading it. And there's nothing especially sexy about a blog or a podcast just because it uses shiny new technology. Get past the temptation to view old as ineffective and new as all-powerful. It simply ain't so.

As a communicator, you have lots of tools at your disposable. There are lots of bullets you can use to try to virtually slay that foe we call a disengaged employee. And, yes, this includes the occasional keg party.

Which is the only place you'll find The Silver Bullet you keep looking for.