Talking Internal Communication...

Disruptive Ideas - making Viral Change happen

I've just ordered my copy of Dr Leandro Herrero's new book, Disruptive Ideas - the follow up to his excellent work on Viral Change. While I eagerly await my Amazon delivery I've been looking at the Disruptive Ideas 'open book' - basically a blog which allows you to read and comment on much of the content. I love what social media has done for publishing and how its beginning to create a real dialogue between authors and readers. If you want a taste of Leandro's views and insights, be sure to check it out. The introduction provides an excellent overview of Viral Change thinking and its associated methodology. What's more, if you are willing to leave your thoughts and comments behind, you could help shape the second edition of what may well become a classic text on change.

L

Technorati Tags: change management,change communication,internal communication,employee communication

Linden Lab's Love Machine

Here's a really cute example of a simple but effective employee recognition programme. It comes from Linden Lab, the creators of virtual world, Second Life. It's been around for a few years, but I hadn't come across it before - so I thought it was worth sharing here....

The Love Machine is an intranet-based tool that allows any Linden employee to send a simple electronic thank you note to another Linden employee. You basically go along to an intranet page type in the details (name, what you want to thank them for, etc) and your colleague receives an email saying 'Love from Lee" and so on. 

Okay, so it sounds a bit cheesy to us 'real world' UK-based communicators, but stick with me.

What's clever about it is that it's hardwired into the performance review system - so all the 'love notes' get recorded in a database (which everyone can access) and these then get discussed at appraisal time.

Doing that makes employees and managers take it seriously and, as a result, it's really taken off says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale.

Apparently at the end of every quarter everyone receives a pink envelope containing cash linked to the number of 'love notes' they received.

Cute.

I can't comment on whether it works or not (Google doesn't throw up much useful information there) but I think it's quite a nice example of the sort of thing that fairly small organisations can do fairly easily. 

Linden Lab may be a quirky San Francisco-based business, but I could imagine something like this (perhaps with a little fine-tuning!) working well in organisations of all shapes and sizes.   

CVs, little white lies and leadership

Wednesday night saw Sir Alan Sugar say those two magic words 'you're hired' to wannabe apprentice Lee McQueen. 

I was delighted to see him win and I wasn't surprised that his rough-around-the-edges persona appealed to former market trader, Sir Alan. 'Get in there son!' as Lee would say. I love it when the underdog wins through against the odds.

But, as regular viewers will know, Lee is a liar. A CV cheat. He told a fib about a stint at college and got exposed by one of Sir Alan's aides last week. It caused quite a stir in the boardroom.

That Lee has gone on to win one of the most coveted jobs in Britain says a lot about the values of business and the low importance some leaders place on honesty. Or at least that's what some people would have you believe.

I'm not so sure.

I suspect more people than you imagine have done exactly the same thing - maybe not in writing on their CV, where they are likely to be found out, but most certainly in interviews and day-to-day conversations with people. 

Whether it's to hide that embarrassing period of unemployment, to erase those months in your late teens when all you wanted to do was doss about, to eclipse a bad career move, or to enhance your contribution to a particularly high profile project, I think many of us would secretly confess to deploying such tactics from time to time. Overt lie or covert omission, it really makes little difference.

So I don't think we should chastise Sir Alan for his choice. I think he did what most of us would have done in those circumstances - look at the skills, talents and overall character of the individual and put everything else to one side. 

In my mind that 'little white lie' made Lee more real, more authentic, more like us.  I wasn't impressed by it, but I think i'd have given him the job too.

New events on the Talking IC calendar

I've recently added a couple of interesting new events to the Talking IC calendar...

• Melcrum is running its Intranet 2.0 conference in London on 25 June. See www.melcrum.co.uk for details.

 

• VMA Group is hosting its annual summer bash on board HMS Belfast in London on 9 July.  One of the highlights of the summer calendar, this event is well worth popping along to.  if you're interested in attending please send an email to invite@vmagroup.co.uk by 2 July. See you there!

 

• On 30 July VMA is also staging its first ever drinks evening in the Midlands - at trendy bar Mechu in central Birmingham. If you fancy it just email Louise Yankovic on marketingnorth@vmagroup.co.uk or call 0161 838 9090.

 

There are also a couple of provisional dates you might want to make a note of:

• CIPR is running its annual internal communication conference 'Inside Story' in London on 29 September.

 

• Melcrum's flagship SCM Summit will take place in London on 15 & 16 October.

 

Watch this space for more details on both these future events. 

L

Employers slow to tap into social media in search for recruits

I received an interesting press release today from the CIPD.

The Institute included a section on social media in its annual Recruitment, Retention and Turnover survey - and the findings make sobering reading.

The vast majority (80%) of the 779 organisations surveyed do not currently use Web 2.0 tools to attract or recruit employees - with only 8% planning to start using them in the next year.

Yet, of the 100 CIPD respondent members, over half (56%) believe that social networking sites are useful for engaging potential job seekers and welcome its ability to shed light on how they are perceived in the marketplace (52%). The majority (62%) are concerned, however, that damaging comments about their organisation might be posted.

Encouragingly, the majority of organisations that do use social networking (85%) do not use it as a tool to vet candidates during the recruitment process.

Of the 54 respondent organisations that use social networking sites to attract or recruit employees, the favoured sites include LinkedIn (62%), Facebook (58%) and MySpace (11%).

There are some excellent examples of organisations out there that are using blogs, photo and video sharing, podcasting and social networking to connect with potential employees and to build their employer brands. It's clear, however, that they represent the minority of employers at present.

The Authentic Enterprise - free report/white paper

Here, courtesy of Simply Communicate, is an excellent free report from the Arthur W.Page Society on authenticity in leadership and corporate communications.

It's a substantial document, but well worth a read as it reaches some interesting conclusions about the role of communication professionals. It's also a project that has been led by an impressive and very credible task force. 

I consider this report a must-read for anyone interested in getting under the skin of that much-loved buzzword, authenticity.  

Technorati Tags: internal communication,employee communication,leadership communication

What does your dream IC conference look like?

Together with some of my colleagues on the CIPR Inside committee, I’m currently involved in designing Inside Story, the CIPR’s annual one day conference on employee communication, which will take place in London on Monday 29 September (make a note of the date).

We’re not short of ideas, but I’d be really interested to hear what sort of themes, topics and speakers you would like to see covered.

If you’ve been to communication seminars and conferences this year, what have you most enjoyed and what would you like to learn more about? Who are your dream speakers? Which communicators inspire you? What are you bored of hearing about?

I’m very conscious that topics like social media have been done to death this year and so my own desire is for a ‘back to basics’ type event – looking at areas like storytelling, visual communication, the psychology of communication, trust, dialogue, and the importance of face-to-face and line manager communication. But that’s just me.

Looking at the environment we’re currently working in, you might feel that we should focus on themes like doing more with less, helping employees cope with change, inter-generational communication and planning for crises.

Anyway, we’d really appreciate your ideas and views – please leave a comment here on the blog, email or call me with your thoughts.  Thanks.

View from the Summit – day two

Day two of the Ragan/Simply Employee Communications Summit was another interesting one. 

First up was Richard Dennison of BT who let us peek into the organisation’s social media kaleidoscope. BT is a great example of a business that’s experimenting with just about every social media tool available. They’ve got corporate and project wikis, podcasting, photo sharing, blogging, user generated news, RSS and Facebook-style social networking.  They’ve got thousands of publishers and in excess of 60,000 people (out of a total population of 110,000) regularly access, comment and participate in intranet-based discussions. Not bad for an organisation that launched social media below the radar.  For more, check out Richard’s blog.

Next came John Smythe of the Engage Group, talking about…. engagement.  Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of John’s book, the Chief Engagement Officer, so I was looking forward to this session.  And it didn’t disappoint. John is a good speaker and practices what he preaches – so there was a nice balance between tell/sell and discuss/debate. 

He started off talking about the future of the workplace and how, by 2020, organisations will be a lot more democratic, fluid and flat – a little like Brazil’s Semco Group, W L Gore, Whole Foods, Waitrose and Google are today.  

He then introduced his ‘four modes’ of communication/engagement - telling, selling, including and co-creating.  We then broke into groups to discuss the challenges we all face in making co-creation a reality (of which there are quite a few!)  

This session underlined that engagement is, first and foremost, a philosophy – a way of operating that leaders either ‘buy’ or don’t. Only then is it a set of processes, tools and activities.  It also highlighted the fact that co-creation involves risk on both sides – leaders need to let go of control and employees need to step up to the plate and implicate themselves. 

The final session I witnessed today was an enlightening look at employee communication inside eBay by its European IC chief, Tobias Huebscher.  Now there’s an interesting organisation - one of the fastest growing businesses in history, a global household name, a business with multiple brands (Skype, PayPal, etc) and an average employee age of just 29/30.

Much of the discussion focused on the eBay’s intranet, iWeb, and some of the social media tools that form the backbone of it. There were echoes of the other sessions (IBM, Microsoft) but everything was done in a slightly more quirky/funky way. Like other best of breed intranets, iWeb includes the must-haves (podcasting, blogging, video and RSS) and it is successful in stimulating a conversation – employee comments and challenges accompany every news story, for instance.

All in all, this year’s Summit provided considerable food for thought. Social media was a strong theme and is, clearly, something internal communicators can no longer ignore. My only grumble is that it’s a shame so many case studies came from the big technology companies – whilst it’s great to see what can be achieved in an organisation that lives and breathes technology, it would be nice to have heard about successes from organisations that aren’t packed with techies.   

I’ve tried to give you a little taste of the event here, but I recommend you check out the Simply website next week for a full review, including video clips of the sessions.  You might also want to check out Krishna De’s live event blog.

The view from the Summit - day one

I’m currently at the annual Ragan/Simply Employee Communications Summit in Kensington, London. It’s a well produced event – expertly constructed by Marc Wright and the team at Simply - and I try to get along to it each year.

Yesterday was the opening day and featured some interesting speakers and some fascinating case studies from some of the biggest names in technology. There’s a strong social media theme running throughout the day, as you might expect, but there have also been some thought-provoking sessions on other areas of communication. Particularly memorably were Marc’s session on overcoming resistance to change, and a discussion on visual communication led by Ellen Coomber of Cognac.

However, the highlight for me so far was a session run by Paolo Tosolini, Microsoft’s New Media Business Manager, who explained how they built a seriously impressive internal video and audio podcasting channel called Academy Mobile.

Described by Paolo as 'enterprise YouTube', Academy Mobile is basically Microsoft's very own online TV channel/radio station. Hosted on a password-protected extranet, it enables Microsoft employees to post video and audio podcasts which can then be accessed by their colleagues worldwide. 

Each podcast ‘programme’ is available there together with a profile of its producer, ratings for viewers/listeners, information about the number of downloads, etc. There are also text-based case studies, single frames and 30 second audio summaries – providing a variety of ways for people to access the knowledge contained within.

What’s just as interesting as the platform is the way Paolo and his team launched and maintained the visibility of it. Serious effort (and a sizable budget) has been put into promoting the channel internally, encouraging use and equipping employees to be able to produce their own podcast shows. It’s clear that even within a company like Mircosoft you cannot simply launch a podcasting channel and expect people to use it.

Tactics include:

• incentivising production – they have a ‘points mean prizes’ incentive programme for contributors
• getting the leadership team on board – new CIO Tony Scott promotes his favourite programmes on his email signature
• the ‘Podcast in a Box’ initiative where they give away free podcasting equipment (worth around $750) in return for a commitment to produce three podcasts a month
• A big Bond-themed launch campaign based around ‘Dr Know’
• A showcase at the annual conference featuring a live studio, roving reporters and gimmicks like ‘pod corn’ to tie-in with the Bond movie theme

According to Paolo the most popular podcasts are the ones from the leadership team and the long-established ‘Drive Time’ programme (an audio update designed to be listened to on the way to/from work).  His focus now is shifting from encouraging contributions to encouraging people to listen to the wider range of content that is available.

I think Academy Mobile is a great example of strategic podcasting. It has been approached essentially as a knowledge management tool – a way to ‘bottle’ the views, opinions, thoughts and ideas of employees and to share them across the global organisation.  As you would expect from Microsoft, it does it with technological finesse. But there is much more to it that a nice front-end.  The proof of the pudding is that it has been a big hit with employees – with more than 2000 podcasts contributed during its first year of operation (against a target of 750).  

Academy Mobile shows what can be achieved when you have the right environment (a global technology giant), the right budget ($400k/PA) and the right team in place to support a channel like this.

Finally, I have to share this communication related YouTube clip with you as it had us in hysterics yesterday. Enjoy!

L

Viral Change book review

I recently finished reading Leandro Herrero's superb book, Viral Change. I was planning to review it here on the blog, but I've just discovered that Kieron Shaw has beaten me to it! 

The good news is that Kieron's response to the book was very similar to my own - in Kieron's words, it 'rocked his world'. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it's a seriously impressive book and a must-read for anyone in the business of change.

So, rather than reinventing the wheel, I suggest you check out his review in full on the Viral Change website. It will also be published in the next issue of Melcrum's SCM magazine, for those of you who subscribe.  

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Buy it now. Read it and re-read it.

As an internal communicator you'll need to take some of his comments on the chin (Leandro doesn't have many good things to say about traditional approaches to communicating change) but at the heart of it is a sensible and workable methodology for delivering real, tangible behaviour change. 

For me Viral Change is up there with John Smythe's Chief Engagement Officer as one of the most important books on employee communication, engagement and change to emerge in the last few years.