For Your Approval

I’m worried

I have the honour of sitting on a panel of IABC Master Communicators today to discuss the future of our profession. The discussion will be led by one of Canada's leading communicators, Jacqui d’Eon, Deloitte Canada’s Chief Communications Officer and IABC's 2008 Master Communicator.

The theme is "Are Communicators Still Relevant -- Or Have We Become Disposable?"

The panelists were asked to contribute two or three minutes of commentary to help kick off the discussion. Here are my notes:

I believe there is a crisis of confidence in our profession, at least on the internal side.

We’ve been through a very dark time over the last decade, a time in which employee engagement has declined and digital communication tools have proved to be far less effective than expected.

This is a time of great change and opportunity for employee communicators, but I worry that we might not be not up to the challenge.

I worry that many of us are trapped in our roles as technical/tactical specialists -- constantly posting, posting, posting to intranets that don’t get read and don’t get measured. 

I worry that we’ve forgotten how to offer strategic advice, or how to effectively say no to stupid instructions from our leaders (and offer them thoughtful alternatives).

I worry that, at time that calls for leadership and action, we are so paralyzed by our habits, stifled by the bureaucracies in which we work, and fearful about the security of our own jobs, that we are doing nothing where we should be doing something.

I worry that we’ve forgotten about the basics of the old RACE formula (research, analysis, communication, evaluation) and we’ve become entrenched in our role as order-takers and crisis responders.

And I worry that the new social media tools, which reduce the need for intermediaries like us, could speed the erosion of our strategic importance.

I always say the more you worry about something, the less likely it is to happen. So in the end I’m optimistic about the future of employee communication, and here's why:

We’ve got powerful new tools that have uses we haven’t even begun to explore.

There’s growing interest and attention by corporate leaders in improving engagement, because there’s hard evidence linking engagement to bottom line business performance.
 
Put Web 2.0 technology together with the burning need to improve engagement, and you have a big opportunity to rebuild a new kind of loyalty -- a new kind of corporate culture based on the creation and support of strong internal communities.

There has never been a better time to make the business case for improving internal communication.

A once-in-a-generation opportunity is right in front of us and we must seize it now.

Reserve that twitter id now!

I'm noticing that a lot of companies don't yet have a twitter account in their name. It's easy to check - just type twitter.com/yourname into your browser. It's so easy to start an account that you can do it in about 30 seconds. Have you reserved your microblogging future? Or has a twitter-squatter already claimed your brand name?

The Corporate Village

In a recent blog post, techno pundit Robert X. Cringely uses Susan Boyle's stunning performance on Britain's Got Talent (sitting at 37 million views as I'm writing this) to illustrate the power of the Internet to create shared experiences.

"Marshall McLuhan, who seems smarter every day, called it The Global Village. He said communication technology would link us together in ways we couldn’t imagine and those ways would lead to common experiences and shared values. McLuhan didn’t know about the Internet when he wrote that and he sure as Hell didn’t know about Twitter. But his prediction came true.....[And] every time our Global Village comes together in this way, it’s because of a shared delight that makes us feel more alike and less apart. We could all use more of that."

Are today's communicators helping create meaningful shared experiences in the workplace? Or are we too busy shoveling information onto intranets that no one wants to read?

Sadly, the only true shared experience in many big organizations is the frustration of dealing with bureaucracy.

It's time for a change. Time to build the Corporate Village.

Communicating in Hard Times

On April 20th I'll be delivering a luncheon talk at Vancouver's Steamworks Brewing Company on Communicating With Employees in Hard Times. It's part of the Vancouver Sun/IABC Speaker Series and the idea is to share some lessons I've learned from past downturns and "show how old-school tactics can be paired with new age tools to help organizations get through the recession and emerge with a workforce that's stronger and more committed than ever."

I've got my own war stories, at least one of which I'll be telling in an upcoming blog post, but I invite you to share yours in the comments below.

I'm also looking for examples of how companies are using social media tools to help employees participate in cost-cutting and efficiency improvement efforts -- or simply to help maintain morale as we go through the big downturn. What are internal communicators doing these days other than fighting for their own survival?

CBC's loss is corporate Canada's gain

I love the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's national radio and TV broadcaster. The CBC's iconic Hockey Night in Canada, world-class news machine, generous arts and entertainment programming, regular weather reports and updates on hog prices provide Canadians with much of the shared experience that makes us a viable country. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but if you're a Canuck you'll know it's true. The CBC defines who we are as a nation. (By the way, the best thing to ever come out of the CBC is The Great Eastern, a brilliantly obscure satirical program that only a Mother Country could love.)

Yesterday the Corpse, as it's called by those who love to hate it, announced across-the-board job cuts that will eliminate 800 positions as the broadcaster tries to cope with a huge shortfall in TV advertising. The crisis is partly due to the current recession, and partly due to the decline of traditional media that's being precipitated by the mass exodus of ad money to the World Wide Web.

For some, this decline is a good thing because it signals the ascendancy of a new paradigm. Information consumers are relying less on conventional sources of content and more on the blossoming world of Web 2.0, where the "user community" generates and shares information for its own benefit, thereby reducing the need for traditional gatekeepers and content producers like the CBC.

As the broken media model spins out of control, journalists are being thrown out of their jobs faster than buggy whip testers.

The corporate world may end up being one of the biggest beneficiaries of this trend because, unlike decaying traditional news media, big companies are on the edge of a renaissance of sophisticated internal communication. It's a revolution being driven by the introduction of Web 2.0 tools into the workplace. Blogs, wikis, social networks and audio and video podcasts are on the edge of full-blown adoption, about to supplant the rusty, dusty intranets of old with an interactive new model that allows for extremely sophisticated communication at an affordable price.

The technology is ready. Management is almost ready to embrace it. Communication managers are seeing the first signs of a Golden Age of employee communication. The fun is finally coming back to our field.

There's one thing lacking, though, and that's writers and editors and producers and camera people who have the skills needed to tell great stories with sound and pictures.

If I were working in a broadcast medium today, I would be keeping my eye out for a career change. If I were a big corporation, I would be looking to hire great broadcasters to bring their valuable skills and experience into my world.

If they play their cards right, the folks getting kicked out of the CBC (and other electronic media) should be able to walk out of a dying business model and into the opportunity of a lifetime.

A few notes from the road

I've had a chance to reflect on my recent speaking (and cooking) engagements in Houston and Toronto and thought I'd share some of my observations with FYA readers:

1. IABC members are kind, hospitable, intelligent folks who treat me like a member of their family wherever I go. Which was particularly satisfying in Houston, considering that I staged an unusual barbecue demonstration for a group of TEXANS. Yikes! I'm lucky I made it out of there with my tongs intact. (See the photos here and the local coverage here.)
2. Everybody in our profession is thinking and talking about the exciting and anxiety-inducing world of social media -- and lots are also diving in, too. A show of hands revealed that at least 80 or 90 per cent of the big crowd who turned up to see my IABC Toronto talk are twittering. Which is a good sign, even if twitter may not turn out to be The Next Big Thing, because ...
3. Exactly NONE of the 40 or so very smart HR people I talked to the next morning at a Conference Board of Canada HR conference are trading tweets. That spells opportunity for the more Web 2.0-savvy communicators, who can use their hands-on experience to help bring their HR colleagues and senior executives on board.
4. Or maybe the IABC group's twitter mania is an indication of just how desperate employee communicators are to get on the latest technological bandwagon so they can escape their nightmarish day-to-day existence maintaining outdated, clunky intranets and dealing with skittish, change-averse leaders who drive them crazy with their old-school ideas. Just kidding!
5. Which brings me to a final anecdote.  It's from the last day of my Toronto trip, at a half-day in-house workshop I delivered to the communications team of a big insurance company.  This stinging observation came from the intranet manager: "The kids coming into our workplace today can do more on their cell phones than on our intranet." That statement alone should be a wake-up call for communicators and business leaders everywhere.

[Special thanks to my many generous hosts, and to Toronto's William Smith and Houston's Chris Salvo for the great photos!]

Insights from the man behind BT's world-leading intranet

This recent Q&A with British Telecom's Richard Dennison on Steve and Cindy Crescenzo's Creative Communications website is a must-read for communicators interested in finding out about the best internal applications of social media. I particularly liked this advice from Dennison:

"Start small, experiment, don't say you are trying to change the world, don't necessarily wait for permission. If you don't spend much you can do quite a lot before people start asking questions—and by then, it will probably be too late! Proceed until apprehended!"

A recipe for reputation renewal

Yesterday I blogged about the perception that internal communications can be more credible and trustworthy than external PR. Does that mean CEOs can salvage their damaged reputations by communicating better with employees? That's what Weber Shandwick's Chief Reputation Strategist Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross says today on ReputationXchange.com in an excellent post that gives advice for "reputation repairers looking to mend the good names of companies and CEOs."

"... as companies continue to announce layoffs, reputations will be built and destroyed on how well job losses are communicated and how fairly the process is handled. In recent years, corporate responsibility had come to mean how workers in emerging markets are treated in the production of company goods and services. In the months ahead, reputations will be built on how transparent and fair leaders are in treating their employees and particularly now, in communicating workforce reductions."

Pointing to evidence that word-of-mouth is the primary shaper of corporate reputations, she also predicts that "companies that listen to and engage employees and customers online will be tomorrow's reputation kings and queens" and states the painfully obvious fact that CEOs are "woefully stuck at the Web 1.0 leve and need to embrace Web 2.0 social media tools to spread their company's merits far and wide."

Her conclusion: "Reputation experts like me have their work cut out for them."

The same goes for internal communicators.

Can you believe what a giant opportunity is sitting in front of us?

McKinsey's Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work

Out in the blogosphere techies are reporting that use of the term Web 2.0 is fading. But, for corporate types, it's still a useful catch-all for the newly rebuilt, juiced-up Internet with its fancy social networks and podcasts and wikis and such. In fact, as the geek community is getting sick of the Web 2.0 label, the social media trend is only starting to hit the corporate mainstream. All signs are telling me that the new tools will be in a period of broad adoption inside big organizations over the next couple of years.

With that in mind, you've gotta admire the folks over at McKinsey & Company, who have an incredible knack for putting self-serving (but extremely relevant) consultant reports in front of business executives just as an emerging issue is starting to get their attention. It reminds me of an old cartoon in Advertising Age, showing a bear coming out of hibernation. As he's yawning and stretching outside of his den, he sees a big billboard with the word HONEY on it.

So it is with an article in this month's McKinsey Quarterly, which summarizes what the firm has learned about the successful use of Web 2.0 tools from studying more than 50 early adopters.

Interestingly, about half of those companies who were first to jump on the bandwagon have been dissatisfied with their experience.

"We have found that, unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage," say the report's authors, Michael Chui, Andy Miller and Roger P. Robers. "Executives who are suspicious or uncomfortable with perceived changes or risks often call off these efforts. Others fail because managers simply don’t know how to encourage the type of participation that will produce meaningful results."

That's the bad news. The good news, as the article points out, is that the new tools are a powerful way to increase collaboration, which has been, in McKinseyspeak, "correlated with large differences in corporate performance." In other words, it's a bandwagon that's worth getting on. And companies are getting on it. Spending on Web 2.0 tools expected to grow steadily at a rate of 15 per cent a year over the next five years despite the tough economic times. 

The heart of the article is McKinsey's six "management imperatives" for achieving the kind of employee participation necessary to get full value out of the new technology:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top. Even though adoption of social media is often driven more by employee experimentation than management edict, successful implementation calls for active leadership. "Senior executives often become role models and lead through informal channels," says the article, pointing to a case study of Lockheed Martin, where a senior IT leader became an evangelist for the new tools, setting up his own blog and setting goals for the organization. "The result was widespread acceptance and collaboration across the company’s divisions."

2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale. "Efforts go awry when organizations try to dictate their preferred uses of the technologies...rather than observing what works and then scaling it up." The example here is AT&T, where front line staffers started using Web 2.0 applications to collaborate on projects. Instead of trying to replicate the early success by telling employees how to use the tools, the company launched an awareness campaign encouraging further experimentation. "Over a 12-month period, the use of the technology rose to 95 percent of employees, from 65 percent." Communicators, take heed. There's Gold Quills in them thar hills!

3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used. If employees can integrate the tools into their daily work routine, there's a far greater chance of successful adoption. If you don't do this, the novelty fades quickly and the tools become "just another 'to do' on an already crowded list of tasks." The article points to ultra-tech-savvy Google's success in making "Web tools relevant to how employees actually do their jobs."  At Google, blogs and wikis aren't cool add-ons -- they're essential to getting work done and tracking its progress.

4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets. Traditional management incentives aren’t particularly useful for encouraging participation. Setting hard targets for increased Web 2.0 useage and tying the achievement of those goals to monetary rewards can encourage the wrong behavior. For example, if you set a goal of a 30 per cent increase in the number of wiki posts, people will meet the goal by posting a lot of useless junk just to meet the target. The article notes that good old employee recognition can make a big difference. When leaders single out and publicly praise those who are embracing the tools and finding useful ways to apply them, they inspire others to do the same.

5. The right solution comes from the right participants. "With participatory technologies [like Web 2.0 applications], it’s far from obvious which individuals will be the best participants." The article says success is more likely when companies pick the right users. McKinsey points to a great example in Best Buy, which introduced an "internal information market" that allowed employees to place bets on business outcomes like sales forecasts. By going outside of the planning department and involving people on the front line, the company was able to produce forecasts that were more accurate than what had been generated by its internal experts. Is that cool, or what?

6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. This is the classic conflict. On one side are nervous managers, lawyers and HR types who fear the loss of control that comes with Web 2.0's ability to give power to individuals and create self-organized communities. On the other are the Web 2.0 evangelists who argue that with increased freedom comes innovation, engagement and improved business performance. It's all about striking the right balance between freedom and control. Too much freedom and you can get burned. Not enough, and you stifle the participation needed for success. Establishing reasonable policies and basic controls are part of the answer, but the authors note that "fears are often overblown" and the communities that spring up are good at policing themselves. "Ultimately... companies must recognize that successful participation means engaging in authentic conversations with participants." And that means letting go, at least a little.

The article concludes nicely, suggesting next steps: "Acceptance of Web 2.0 technologies in business is growing. Encouraging participation calls for new approaches that break with the methods used to deploy IT in the past. Company leaders first need to survey their current practices. Once they feel comfortable with some level of controlled disruption, they can begin testing the new participatory tools. The management imperatives we have outlined should improve the likelihood of success."

One more thing worth noting. In a smart, social media savvy move, the article invites readers to "keep the conversation going on Twitter. "Use the #web2.0work hashtag to respond to this article and these questions on Twitter. We’ll be following them and responding via our McKinsey Quarterly account, @McKQuarterly." (I don't know what the hell a hashtag is, but I'm all for it.)

Thanks, McKinsey, for moving this important conversation along.

Is it time for HR to make friends with social media?

Recently I delivered a webinar to members of the British Columbia Human Resources Management Association about the implications of social media for HR professionals. To complement my presentation I was invited to write an article for the BCHRMA's online newsletter. I thought it would be worth sharing with For Your Approval readers, and I invite you to pass on a link to this post to your friends in HR in hopes it might start a conversation about internal use of Web 2.0 tools. You'll notice the article applies equally well to employee communications people. Have a read and let me know what you think. (I'm also delivering a similar message to a Conference Board of Canada HR conference in Toronto next month. If you know anyone who's planning to attend, as a speaker I can get up to three people a big discount. )

_________________________________________

Is It Time For HR to Make Friends with Social Media?

Ron Shewchuk, ABC, MC

Are you keeping in touch with your friends on Facebook or sharing photos on Flikr? Do you read blogs, or listen to audio or video podcasts? Have you found yourself regularly turning to Wikipedia to get information? And do you like to find out what other people on the Web are saying about a restaurant or a vacation resort before you visit?

If you live in this new online world, you are among the majority. Hundreds of millions of people are actively using these so-called social media on a newly re-energized Internet that’s been dubbed Web 2.0.

According to a March 2008 study by Universal McCann, close to 60 per cent of active Internet users have created a profile on a social network like Facebook or Myspace, about 80 per cent read blogs and watch video clips online, and nearly half have downloaded a podcast onto their computer or personal music player.

More than a passing fad

This broad adoption of social media tools is more than a passing fad – it’s a social trend that is profoundly changing the way people find and share information. It’s also creating powerful online communities that can stage activist campaigns, lead consumer revolts and even influence the outcome of elections, as we saw with Barack Obama’s use of Facebook and other social media to build grassroots support and solicit donations.

As the use of social media gains popularity with the general public, the corporate world is taking notice. Although the adoption rate for business lags the general internet-going public, social media are being used successfully by many leading companies. Today over 67 of Fortune 500 companies have official blogs ranging from corporate CEO journals like Bill Marriott’s On the Move blog, which gives the hotel chain’s leader a direct connection to the public, to Clorox’s Dr. Laundry blog, where visitors can ask questions about how to remove tough stains.

Lots of internal uses, too

When used internally, Web 2.0 tools can help improve productivity, encourage innovation, and drive employee engagement and retention.

Examples abound, from simple internal blogs that give CEOs a direct connection to more innovative applications. Computer maker Dell, for example, has an intranet page that invites employees to submit ideas for product and service improvements and lets readers promote and discuss them. It’s a powerful tool; the ideas that rise to the top are getting implemented.

The level of sophistication is rising as companies learn how to use the new tools and some organizations are now taking a multi-channel, integrated approach. Ernst & Young, for example, has a Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube channel that work together to support the firm’s global recruiting efforts. E&Y even has an online social network on Linkedin for its alumni with over 9,000 members. Imagine being able to draw on such a large repository of institutional memory!

A new role for HR

So, what does this all mean for HR professionals? For starters, it means asking some timely questions: What is the business case for using these new tools? Do the opportunities outweigh the risks? What guidelines and policies should be set out for their use? How much freedom should employees have to join, participate in and create external social networks for business?

The answers to these questions have big implications. Successfully implementing the new tools and technologies will require new ways of thinking about the role of the human resources function in today’s organization. Traditionally, HR has been the keeper and careful disseminator of information, but business communication is now moving inexorably to a model where the users – employees, in this case – will have the power to create their own content, customize information according to their needs, and build their own internal networks and online communities. So, in addition to HR’s job of creating, communicating and administering policy, a new and additional role is emerging: that of a facilitator of conversations.

We’ve reached a tipping point

Internal use of social media is certainly gaining momentum. A survey of North American business professionals in 2008 by software provider Awareness Inc. concluded that adoption of Web 2.0 technologies “has reached a tipping point,” reporting that 69 per cent of respondents allow social networking for business purposes -- a dramatic increase from 37 per cent in 2007.  The same survey found that close to half of companies have either launched or are testing internal blogs, social networks and podcasts.

And yet, with the corporate world on the edge of broad implementation of social media, there is still a lot of reluctance. Employers fear that use of social media at work will damage productivity and compromise security.  Plus, in this economic environment, is it really worth spending money to deploy fancy new technology in a cash-strapped workplace?

These are valid concerns. The good news is that the early adopters of social media have made the mistakes that beginners make, and by now they have worked out many of the kinks and cleared the path for the rest of us. Issues of productivity and security can be addressed with clear policies that set the right groundwork for success, coupled with well-planned and disciplined implementation of social media. And the cost of using these new online tools is low; the software is often free of charge.

It’s time to take the plunge

There is mounting evidence that taking the plunge into social media can have a positive impact on the bottom line because of the link between employee engagement and business performance. A September 2008 study by Aberdeen group found that companies using social media achieved a year-over-year improvement in employee engagement of 18 per cent compared to one per cent in those who don’t.

Web 2.0 technology promises to be a powerful new way to engage employees and improve the effectiveness of today’s organization.

It’s time for HR to invite social media to be its online friend.