Talking Internal Communication...

Deloitte Film Festival taps YouTube potential

Here's a great example of a YouTube-inspired communication initiative from the professional services sector.

Global consulting and accountancy giant Deloitte has just undertaken its first ever Film Festival in the US. All of the firm's US employees were invited to produce their own short films to address the question "What's your Deloitte?"

Teams of one to seven people created films about their lives and experiences at work. Around 400 submissions were received and more than 2000 Deloitte people participated. Apparently Deloitte planned to buy production equipment for 250 teams but ended up buying it for 350.

Videos were posted on a special YouTube-like area on the intranet and then rated by colleagues. From there, a panel of judges chose the finalists and Deloitte's employees picked the winners. The top videos, which are now featured on YouTube, will be integrated into the organization's future recruitment efforts.

There are some cracking little films there - check them out. The winning video, featuring rapping interns, is great, but there's something to suit most tastes if that's just not your thing. Many of them are either comical or slightly tongue-in-cheek. All of them capture the creativity and talent of Deloitte's people.

I think this is a superb and brave example of a professional services firm successfully leveraging social media tools.  It's a bit like the Accenture digital storytelling initiative I've raved about here before, only on a bigger scale.

This campaign works on a number of levels and, as such, illustrates just what can be achieved when you join together various elements like video, YouTube, internal comms, recruitment and so on. The key points for me are:

• Initiatives like this are a great way to involve and engage employees, particularly Generation Yers.
• They're a great way to build teams. 
• They create a sense of excitement, an internal "buzz" and healthy competition between employees. 
• This may have started as an internal campaign, but the output is now out there being viewed by Deloitte's external stakeholders, among them potential recruits and clients. Sceptics might say that's a bad thing, but I disagree.
• The resulting videos provide a window on the inner workings and culture of the organization, aiding transparency and helping potential recruits get a better feel for the business than they do from the usual glossy corporate brochure.
• In professional services differentiation is difficult - this is precisely the sort of thing that sets one firm apart from another.
• What better way to capture the culture and identity of an organization than to ask employees to tell their stories?

Congratulations to Deloitte on what looks like a superb programme. I'd love to hear more from those who were involved.

Free report sheds light on business use of social software

I'm always keen to share the latest communication thinking with you, particularly if it takes the form of a nice chunky report that's completely free of charge :-). 

Accountancy giant KPMG has just produce an excellent publication entitled "Enterprise 2.0: Fab or Future?" This 19 page PDF document, which comes with an accompanying podcast, provides a good overview of the social media landscape and pinpoints a number of big businesses that are already using these tools successfully. It may be a little cautious for some, but it's nevertheless a decent read.

On a related note, I read an interesting excerpt today from management guru Gary Hamel's new book, The Future of Management (you can access it at the Management Today website). He appears to be focusing on the revolutionary potential of social media, so this looks like one for the bookshelf. 

Here's a little sample: "Although no company would put up with a 1940s-era phone system, or forgo the efficiency- enhancing benefits of modern IT, that's exactly what companies are doing when they fail to exploit the web's potential to transform the way human beings work and collaborate. Most managers still see the internet as a productivity tool, or as a way of delivering 24x7 customer service. Some understand its power to upend old business models, but few have faced up to the fact that, sooner or later, it's going to turn our smokestack management model on its head." 

I like where he's coming from! Definitely one for my Amazon wish list...

 

Thought leaders - Harvard's management & leadership blogs

A quick bit of sign posting....Did you know that a number of leading thinkers on management and leadership are now blogging on behalf of Harvard Business Online - click here for a list.

Be sure to check out Tammy Erickson's thoughts on generational differences, Sylvia Ann Hewlett's insights on talent (particularly her recent post "Is your BlackBerry lowering your IQ?"), and Marshall Goldsmith's practical advice and tips.

More good stuff from the Harvard camp.

Happiness at work - the next big thing?

Happiness at work is something I'm hearing more and more about these days and it's a subject that's being hotly debated at the CIPD annual conference in Harrogate this week (unfortunately I couldn't make it, but I'm keeping an eye on things from a distance). 

According to Nic Marks, founder of the centre for well-being at nef (the new economics foundation) and a speaker at the event, feeling good at work actually enhances organisational performance. He points out that positive emotions are linked to several key performance indicators such as job satisfaction, engagement, loyalty and job meaning. CIPD research backs this up, showing that happy and engaged employees perform better than others, are more likely to recommend their organisation to others, take less sick leave, and are less likely to quit.

I guess very few of us would be surprised by this - for most of us who work in internal communications, it's just good old common sense. But that doesn't make it any less true.

Many organisations are now experimenting with well-being prorgrammes designed to make the connection between between happy, healthy staff and business performance. I'm always a bit sceptical about anything that smacks of a HR fad (diversity is another area that's often characterised more by spin than by substance), but approached in the right way, there's no doubting the impact a strategic approach to well-being can have. You only have to glance through the annual Best Companies to Work For report to see the evidence, whether it's labelled well-being or not.

Research shows that challenge and interest are key drivers of well-being in the workplace. If jobs aren’t challenging or interesting enough this will be reflected in lack of commitment, underperformance and satisfaction.  By measuring and focusing on well-being at work we can create better experiences for employees and foster more positive emotions at work.

If you're interested in exploring this subject some more, check out the folloiwing links:

• An earlier Talking IC post on the subject
• Wikipedia on happiness
• The Chief Happiness Officer, Alexander Kjerulf's blog
• The Happiness Project website
• The Business Creativity & Happiness blog
• An entertaining look at happiness research

Having fun at work is a good thing and there's no doubting that positive emotions and engagement are closely linked. The idea of a happy-clappy workforce may sound laughable, but there's definitely something in this...

Between a rock and a hard place – bank employees under siege

I feel for my brother, I really do. An employee at Northern Rock, the UK bank, he’s now at the centre of a major corporate crisis. Worst still, he’s facing real uncertainty about his future.

Like many of the bank’s 6,500 employees, he woke up on Friday morning to the headline news that his employer had sought emergency funding from the Bank of England. The first obvious UK victim of the global credit squeeze, Northern Rock has been under siege  - by the media and long queues of panicking savers - ever since.

A reassuring email from the bank’s CEO awaited him as he arrived at his desk (he’s the consummate professional so I haven’t seen it) – as did a handful of calls from concerned customers, many of whom had heard the news on News at Ten the previous evening.

Every bit the engaged, committed and loyal employee, he moved quickly to defend the bank and attempt to allay concerns amongst his network of contacts. Unlike some branch staff – who were literally being mobbed by angry savers demanding their cash – his professional contacts were a little more balanced in their response. Despite this, a number of them accused him of a white wash – claiming that he knew more than he claimed to.

Like many frontline employees, he is doing his bit to reinforce the messages being relayed from on high and, just like Northern Rock CEO Adam Applegarth and Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, trying hard to explain that the bank remains solvent and that customer’s funds are safe. Unfortunately human nature is such that pleas not to panic often have precisely the opposite effect – and TV images of long queues reinforce this hysteria.

Crises like this provide a stark warning to those of us in the internal communication profession. The PR battle may be more immediately visible, but it is in the thousands of conversations employees are having – with customers, family and friends – that reputations are made and destroyed. It is during times like this that you realise the enormous impact committed, well informed employees can have (and, likewise, how uninformed employees can make a situation worse). During times of crisis, employees are at least as important a stakeholder as the media, yet internal communication is often an afterthought.

I don’t want to cast judgement on Northern Rock, but I do hope that as much effort is going in to communicating internally as it is externally. Frontline staff need to be equipped to answer customer questions; they need to understand the issues and be able to clearly articulate what the bank is doing and why; they need to have confidence that everything that can be done is being done.

My old friend and mentor, Stephen Windsor-Lewis once suggested communicators do seven things during times of crisis (I've paraphrased). It remains sage advice.

1. Find out what employees are really thinking and feeling – listen, listen, listen
2. Establish internal comms credibility – align internal and external timings and, wherever possible, don’t let employees find information out from the external news reports.
3. Put the right channels in place – drive consistency and make use of all available channels
4. Be honest – tell the truth as far as you can and if you can’t say anything, say so. Avoid sugar-coating negative messages.
5. Involve your leadership – the role of the CEO is key, so get him/her out there.
6. Involve your comms team – internal comms should be part of the crisis team and the team should talk regularly.
7. Find something genuinely good for employees to talk about – move things on when the time is right by focusing attention on positive developments and celebrating successes.

Northern Rock’s share price has collapsed (below £3 at the time of writing, down over 40% in a few days) leaving it sitting duck for a takeover. The run on funds shows no signs of slowing - savers have withdrawn over £2bn already and the queues in some branches are no shorter than they were on Saturday. Media coverage continues.

It’s looking pretty grim up north, but for the sake of my brother and his colleagues I really hope Northern Rock finds its way out of this crisis. One of the stars of the UK mortgage lending sector in recent years, it really deserves to continue. Effective internal communication might just help.

Academic research – the radical side of social media

The closet academic in me is always delighted to get his hands on new scholarly thinking about employee communication and other workplace issues. He’s also frustrated by the limited amount of research being undertaken in this area, particularly around the impact of social media on working life.  So it was good to find this research paper from James Richards, a lecturer in HR management at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, which is being presented at today’s Work, Employment and Society 2007 conference in Aberdeen.

This preliminary research paper - entitled ‘Workers are doing it for themselves: Examining creative employee application of Web 2.0 communication technology’ – looks at the impact of social media tools like blogs, wikis, social networking, video sharing and the like, on employees and employers. Not only does it contain a range of interesting facts and figures (did you know, for instance, that according to one recent study 17% of employees who use social networking sites like Facebook believe it has increased the contact they have with people of the same profession) and real world examples of social media in action (like the Somerfield employees who used YouTube to post videos of themselves mucking about), but it also opens up a new and interesting debate about the impact such tools may have on the relationship between employees and employers. I find this fascinating stuff.

At the heart of this paper is the observation that social media and related technologies could become the primary dynamic in industrial relations, replacing the traditional role of the unions. The logic is clear - British trade union membership is lowest in the very groups most likely to use Web2.0 tools, namely 16-24 year olds. Rather than complaining to their union rep, it seems Generation Y employees are more likely to blog about their negative experiences, or tell their Facebook friends. No wonder the TUC has been making such a fuss about social networking recently. 

So is this a blip or a long term trend? Is the labour movement of the past being replaced by an era of self organisation, facilitated by social media?  Richards does not commit either way and rightly points out that much more research is needed in this area. But it’s certainly an argument I buy.  Whatever your standpoint, you have to admit that these tools offer employees enormous potential, both positive and negative. They enable employees to blow the whistle on bad practice, to share their workplace experiences, to undermine corporate reputations, to leak commercially sensitive information and to generally misbehave. Whether fans of social media or not, corporate communicators need to get a handle on these developments.

Whether this logic appeals to you or not, the paper is well worth reading. Among other things you’ll learn about JobVent, the employment equivalent of TripAdvisor; Wikileaks, a global whistleblowing site; the General Motors Workers Blog, which gives a voice to often disgruntled GM employees around the world; and the concept of e-misbehaviour. You’ll read about the actions some employers, like the Ministry of Defence, are taking to to silence employees.  Check it out and, if you’d like to comment, feel free to add your thoughts on James Richard’s blog.

Is office gossip a symptom of poor internal comms?

The grapevine can exert a powerful disruptive force inside organizations and its darker side, workplace gossip, can undermine communicator's best efforts and, at its worst, create a spiral of negativity and cynicism that halts progress. Yet these are topics we rarely discuss,choosing instead to focus on more formal (and manageable) communication channels like intranets, team briefings and employee publications.  So I was delighted to discover this post about the subject on Mary Abbajay's Working Wisdom blog this week. Mary, an OD specialist in the US, discusses the impact of gossip on individuals and the organization and provides some practical tips on tackling it. It's a subject worth pondering. I've been inside a number of large organizations recently where the leaders have been battling against a tidal wave of gossip, misinformation and rumor. What's interesting is that nine times out of ten you find that poor internal communication is the root cause - managers and bosses have allowed a vacuum to form which, not surprisingly, has been filled by all sorts of rubbish. Where gossip is a big problem, it's usually just one symptom of ineffective internal comms and poor leadership.   As Mary rightly points out, the solution is in regular and consistent communication, creating a climate of openness, demonstrating a commitment to discussion, listening and investing time and effort in improving line manager communication. These areas should be high on our agenda as communicators.

Free McJob webcast - Fairhurst battles on

HR people don't always impress me, but one who does is David Fairhurst, vice president of people at McDonalds.  I saw him speak at the Simply Communicate conference earlier this year, where he made a powerful case for fast food chain's approach to engaging its 67,000 employees. I also enjoy his monthly articles in HR Magazine. So I was really pleased to stumble upon this interesting little webcast. It focuses on the 'McJob' tag, something David has been crusading against over the last few years. David is joined by show host Murray Norton, The Mirror business editor Clinton Manning and HR Magazine's editor, Sian Harrington. It's an fascinating and very balanced debate - well worth watching if you're interested in this sort of thing. David is a savvy operator and his battle is certainly helping improve McDonald's reputation and employer brand, as well as helping lift the lid on what HR (and comms) people get up to. It's easy to take a pop at McDonalds, but I'd argue that we can all learn a thing or two from Ronald and co, and from Fairhurst.