p l a i n t a l k

7 Social Media Trends for Employee Engagement

2009-10-20T08:33:06-05:00

At Fleishman-Hillard, we 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!

Training Goes Social

2009-09-22T13:20:53-05:00

Training within the organization is starting to go social, catching up with other parts of the company that have been social for a while including external communications and, in many cases, internal communications. Check out these examples from the USDA and Best Buy. Thanks to Becky Ericson at Fleishman-Hillard for uncovering these!

USDA upgrades to a social e-learning platform

Best Buy has gone social with their training through Learning Lounge:

Storefront: https://www.bestbuylearninglounge.com/

Best Buy's Learning Lounge discussion on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StifXdtYMaw

The Destructive Power of a Jerk

2009-08-10T11:23:36-05:00

We've all known them. The jerk of a manager who has a chip on his or her shoulder and lives to make life suck for everyone in close proximity. I've known a couple of people like that in my career. And, from personal experience, let me tell you it's no fun having to deal with that kind of a person in the workplace.

In one instance years ago, this one leader was so tough on her team that we all joked that the candy dish on the front desk should be filled with Prozac to help us all cope on a daily basis. I've never experienced more frustration, angst and literal crying in a workplace before or since. A typical day would start out with a team meeting tirade that did more to demoralize the team than help the company succeed. Weekly tongue lashings were commonplace, with every minor error exploded out into ridiculous proportions. All we could do was take it and wonder when it would end. Unfortunately, leaving became the only way to escape all of this and most of us eventually did. Those that remained became jaded about work in general and, in my opinion, never really recovered. And those of us who did escape took a long while to recover from such emotional abuse in the workplace. It sucked.

Tom Davenport, a blogger on the Harvard Business Review website and an expert on organizational process and productivity, has an excellent post today about how jerks in the leadership ranks can really ruin an organization. He points to a couple of recent examples from the financial crisis as proof that the wrong people in the wrong jobs can have a devastating effect on a company (and, in these two cases, on the whole economy).

At the firm where I work, we talk about the eight drivers of employee engagement, which are drawn from years of experience in the employee communications business. One of those drivers is having senior leaders who care. Time and again, employees point out that it's important to them that they have senior leaders in the organization who care about them, the business, the competition and the company in general. This caring approach is the exact opposite behavior that corporate jerks exhibit. And that behavior can crush employee engagement and, ultimately, the bottomline results of the organization. I've been amazed at how long this behavior is tolerated within many organizations, as if somehow the results are more important than the methods. Sure, being an ass might lead to short-term gains, but that approach will do a ton of damage over the long haul.

After I left that company with the intolerable boss, the company eventually folded. I have no real idea why it folded. I can only take refuge in the thought that it was driven into the ground by someone who didn't understand what it is to be a leader in an organization. Nobody wants to work for, around or with a jerk. I guess karma finally caught up with her.

Good for karma.

Employer Brand: Fishing for the Right Talent

2009-07-30T11:55:40-05:00

I like to fish. I mean really like to fish. I go every chance I get, especially during the spring and fall. And while I fish a good bit, I wouldn't say that I'm a great fisherman. I catch my share of fish. But sometimes I do get skunked and return home without the first bite, much less a catch.

But what I've learned over the years is fishing is all about presentation and frequency. I have to put the right bait or lure in the right place repeatedly if I want to increase my odds of catching a fish, particularly a big one. If I'm using the wrong lure or my presentation is too fast or slow or if I'm simply not casting enough into the right places, I'm doomed to having a long day. The fish are smart, but fairly predictable in their behaviors. I have to use that to my advantage if I'm going to have any success.

The same is true of your employer brand. I define employer brand as the face of the company you're putting forward in the marketplace as it relates to hiring the best candidates for your open positions. It's similar to, but not the same as, your external brand or internal brand. It's based on the same value propositions as your external and internal brands, but the messaging and presentation are different. And just like with fishing, a successful employer brand is based on presentation and frequency.

How you present your company to employees-to-be is critical. If you don't take a highly strategic and aggressive branding approach to the recruiting process, you're much less likely to be successful. Don't leave your employer brand to be defined simply by your external communications activities such as marketing, advertising or community relations. These are only telling part of the story that employees-to-be respond to. You need an effort that involves recruits in the process by engaging them and telling a story about your firm and what it's like to work there.

A great tool for doing that is a careers website. Sure, most companies have a careers section or tab on their websites. But having a separate careers website is a much more aggressive path to follow. Freed from the constraints of living on the external brand's website, recruiting activities and materials can have their own look and feel and speak to a completely separate audience than is typically looking at your external website. Liberal use of video, especially of current employees telling their own stories about working there, will go a long way in attracting and engaging your recruits. And having a separate website helps in popping up on career searches on Google, Bing and the other search engines.

What else can you do to increase your presentation and frequency? Plenty, such as:

A Facebook page about your careers opportunities
A Twitter feed with updates on job openings at your company
A widget that people can place on their desktops that lists job openings and career information
Partnerships with certain colleges and universities to participate in their career fairs, and
Text messages about current openings people can opt in to receiving

These are just a few of the tools you should consider when establishing an employer brand. Obvious other choices include printed collateral, educated and engaging recruiters, placement ads for newspaper classified sections, placements on job boards, advertisements on blogs and discussion boards and direct mail to qualified candidates you've kept in your database of potential hirees.

Using a variety of lures and baits and placing them in the right places over and over increases the odds you'll land a fish. Nuture your employer brand in similar fashion and watch as your pipeline of potential recruits fills up with the kind of folks you really want to hire. All you have to do then is set the hook.

Too Much of a Good Thing is a Bad Thing

2009-07-22T16:55:47-05:00

A friend's son turned one over the weekend. She shared with me a photo showing the birthday boy up to his elbows in cake and icing. I have the same photo of my son doing the same thing on his first birthday. I bet those of us with kids all have that same photo. There's just something about giving a kid a giant cake with lots of icing and letting him get beyond messy with it.

Today on Twitter I participated in a chat about internal communications and how we as communicators are both experiencing and contributing to a similar messy situation in our workplaces: information overload. It's tough realizing we're both victims and offenders in this situation.

But I'm afraid that, in lots of workplaces, it's true. In an effort to thoroughly communicate, we have a tendency to overcommunicate, leaving employees to the dirty job of filtering through all of the information to find the important pieces of data. Here's your newsletter, emails, e-newsletters, intranet site, videos, town hall meetings, instant messages, texts, blogs, voicemails and Twitter/Yammer feeds. Good luck keeping up.

In fact, my firm just completed a communications survey with a client's frontline managers. More than 55 percent of the respondents indicated that they "do not have the time they need to share important information" due to information overload. In the commenting section, one manager put it this way: "what you expect me to share, give me the time to share." Another said "we need info that is direct, easy to find, and easy to pass on to my employees; we have about five minutes to pass any information we have prior to dispatching my crew."

Clearly these folks are up to their elbows in cake and icing. They barely have time to get their "real" jobs done, much less their communications responsibilities. And we've helped contribute to the problem by throwing all of these communications tools at them without clearly thinking through how to use all of these tools and whether they're all needed. Don't get me wrong: I can be just as guilty of this as the next person. I love cake and icing, especially all of the shiny, new stuff that's out there.

But as we discussed on Twitter today, a few well-chosen tools of both the push and pull variety populated with honest, transparent, relevant and interesting information can work as hard as you need them to to get the job done. A mad rush to provide everything to everybody in every form possible creates more problems than it solves. Choose your tools wisely and carefully and then let them do their jobs. Evaluate them every once in a while to make sure they're still relevant. But resist the urge to add a new tool just because you can.

All of that cake and icing is tempting. Just know you'll pay the price for it sooner or later.

A New Adventure

2009-07-15T09:43:40-05:00

Those of you who follow my blog know that I've been running my own shop for the past decade. So it may come as a surprise to you that I've given all that up for a position with Fleishman-Hillard in St. Louis.

Yeah, I know. Sort of a bombshell. Many have asked, "why give up being your own boss to work for somebody else?" It all came down to opportunity. At FH, I'll have the opportunity to work on different kinds of accounts in different industries and partner with other professionals in the office in ways I wasn't able to do through my own shop. This will give me an opportunity to expand my horizons and gain new experiences, and it will give me a chance to share these new experiences with you and others.

Yes, the freedom of running my own shop was great. I learned a lot and have a ton of great memories from that experience. But the time came to look for a new adventure and this opportunity with Fleishman came about at just the right time.

I started work here July 13 and am already thrilled to be working with such an incredible group of folks in the internal communications practice. There's an energy here that tells me we will be doing some great work for our clients. And everyone has been so nice and helpful and eager to make my start here a good one.

I'll keep posting to this blog for the time being. There's a chance that we will begin hosting our own internal communications blog. If/when that happens, I'll let you know. And you can always follow me on Twitter through @jasonanthoine, as well, which features tweets about internal communications, management and leadership topics along with the occasional commentary about business in general.

This is an exciting time for me and I appreciate all of the well wishes I've received via email and Twitter.

As my former boss at Southwire used to say, onward and upward! Here's to a new adventure!