Know F all about Gen Y? Get the IQ PDQ

#downwiththekids

PWC estimate that the millennial generation, or Gen Y ( born roughly between 1980 and 2000) will make up half of the global workforce by 2020. They are a generation like none other, with expectations and demands of their own that will reshape the world of work.

I’ve been in a couple of meetings recently with clients of a certain seniority and of a certain age whose lack of knowledge about them was startlingly evident. OK so they knew they had some 25 year olds milling about their office, but they didn’t know just how different they are from generations gone before them or how to even begin to engage them in the workplace.

Tech firms and TV, music and media bods and the like have it sussed, as it’s Gen Y central there; all hipster beards, BYOD, dogs in the office, gin flavoured popcorn and knowing whose Spotify playlists to follow. It’s the more established traditional, dare I say it old school employers, who make up the majority of global businesses in terms of number of employees who need to play serious catch up.

Woodreed’s been thinking about the Millennial generation at work and have written a report which helps senior leaders and internal communicators gain insight into this unique generation. We think it’s an essential read. If you’d like a look, grab yourself an organic fair trade soy latte with a shot of caramel and click here to read the report in full.

From Tunbridge Wells with love

What is that one phrase that makes you think? What is that one phrase that makes you smile? What is that one phrase that makes you stop what you are doing and focus on the person who said it?

I love you.

Think back to the first time you heard that said to you. 

Think about where it was. 

Think about how it made you feel. 

Think about how many times you’ve heard it since.

Thought about it? Good. 

Like how your attention has been nicely diverted whilst reading this blog post? Well the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council has done the same with their road work’s messaging on the A21.

The message is “Someone loves you”.

Now this is supposed to make you drive carefully through the road works so you can return to your loved one/s. However, it completely distracts you from driving. It makes you think about something other than driving. It does the exact opposite of what it was meant to do.

The TWBC has clearly tried to use emotion to force safer driving. But if they had read a bit further into behavioural economics they would have seen that “emotions can act as triggers of other mental states (stored memories, new beliefs, new preferences, and the like)” (Cecchi, 2015). Stored memories is what I am really trying to drive home here (excuse the pun). If you are accessing stored memories you are not focusing on the job in hand. And that job is driving.

Happy to hear your thoughts on this too, so please leave a comment.

The Engagement's off

There’s a whiff of heresy in the air this week (thank you Wolf Hall) and I’m about to add to it.

We need to stop talking about employee engagement. That’s it.  Let’s put it out there.

The problem with employee engagement is the terminology.  The minute you give it a name the arguments start.  What does it mean?  Yeah, but is that really right? What else should we call it? How do we define it? How many angels on the head of a pin? Yada, yada, yada….

More importantly as soon as you give it a label it then has to become someone’s responsibility.  And whose responsibility should it be?  And if it’s someone’s responsibility then it will need to be measured.  So how do we measure it? 

Re-wind.  Stop.

If we stop calling it ‘employee engagement’ then it all becomes so much easier.  
Let’s stop debating the terminology and focus on the outcomes instead.  Then it becomes clear that it’s a whole business issue with real value and benefits to the organisation.  It’s a board level, leadership level, managerial level, team leader level responsibility.

With proven outcomes like these:

• Profit – twice the net profit; 2.5 x revenue growth 
• Customer satisfaction – 12% higher customer advocacy
• Productivity – 18% higher
• Innovation – 59% of employees at their most creative
• Absence – down by 50%
• Turnover and retention – 40% lower turnover
• Health and safety – fewer workplace accidents
• Efficiency – 35%
Source: Engage for Success

Let’s stop talking about employee engagement as a topic, a discipline or an endgame and focus instead on doing 4 things that will make a difference to all of these business KPIs: 

1. Have visible, empowering leaders who can share a strong strategic narrative about the organisation, where it’s come from and where it’s going.
2. Recruit, train and support your managers to better focus their people and give them scope; treating them as individuals, coaching and stretching.
3. Give your employees a voice for reinforcing and challenging views;  acknowledge them as central to solving your business challenges and driving innovation.
4. Have organisational integrity – make sure the values on the wall are reflected in the day to day behaviours of EVERYONE in the business, at all levels. There is no ‘say – do’ gap, anywhere.

These 4 enablers all underpinned by your brand, the driver of emotional engagement, are the catalyst for transformational change within any organisation. 

As you implement policies to address these you’ll see improvements to KPIs and you WILL be enjoying underlying employee engagement improvement too – no more measuring employee engagement one dimensionally with employee surveys.

So stop the love affair with employee engagement and embrace business success instead.

How do you define culture?

When we talk about positive or healthy cultures, we mean cultures of engaged employees aligned with an organisation’s values – the organisational watchwords for what drives, unites, motivates and differentiates one business from another.

Engage for Success defines engagement similarly:
"A workplace where employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success"

Values and culture are inextricably linked. Culture is the things are done ‘round here’, what it’s like at our place. Culture impacts on everything the organisation does.

Culture must be managed from within, as important a part of your brand strategy as your customer communications. This can be done with what we call, Cultural Frameworks; sets of behavioural guidelines stemming from the values setting out how people in an organisation should interact with each other
and with customers. These frameworks are about empowering employees to do what feels right individually within the framework rather than shackles to stifle. Without behaviours to drive them, values are of course, simply meaningless words on a poster.

How many UK organisations are still simply paying lip service to their brand values? Who are using them as tools to create powerful cultures to give them that common purpose and the competitive edge? What can we learn from them and what needs to happen to maintain and sustain the right sort of culture?

We've looked at culture from all angles speaking to experts and practitioners along the way. We've also looked at some of the UK best organisaitons in terms of culture to uncover how they go about it. Read it all in our report 'Culture - the true story' here

The battle for talent is well and truly on. Reputation and recommendation’s not enough

As the economic recovery continues, organisations are competing for talent on an unprecedented scale. KPMG’s recent survey of HR professionals revealed that more than 80% of respondents say that addressing skills shortages is a higher priority now than it was two years ago – and will become critical in the next two years.

Personnel Today, July 2014

So how are you approaching your talent attraction right now? Are you limbering up in the red corner preparing to knock out the competition or twiddling your thumbs in the blue corner wondering what to do next?

How can you package up your offer in the most compelling way? How do you make sure you and your recruitment partners are telling the same story? How do you make sure the experience promised in the ads and on your website matches that within the walls of your organisation?

This is how

Treat your potential employees like you’d treat your customers with engaging, relevant communication based on insight.

Use your brand values to make sure the promise in your recruitment comms is aligned with your culture. Get it right first time by employing people who demonstrate they’ll fit with your culture; recruit for attitude as much as skills.

You don’t need to be Mars, Unilever or Coca Cola to get this right. We’ve recently done just this for two clients in professional services. A strategic planning led research programme, including key messaging workshops defined a compelling and competitive value proposition for our clients as the potential employer of choice. From this we developed distinctive visual identities to act as blueprints for all talent attraction communications, whatever the channel, and striking creative campaigns to put them both firmly on the talent map.

It's worth adding a postscript that you don't need a mega media budget to raise the recruitment bar. The key is in uncovering your value proposition then developing a platform of consistent content to use wherever, whenever and however you want to get your message out there.   

Release your inner voice

I ran a little workshop at Woodreed recently where we were having a bit of think about the importance of tone of voice by playing around with the copy of some ads.

We looked at the original copy and identified the tone of voice. We then debated the ‘anti-voice’ and rewrote the ads in the new voice.

We looked at a whole bunch, but I’ll share just the one for hair care brand Aussie. Here’s the original copy for its ‘Miracle Recharge Frizz Remedy’ where the tone of voice, so we thought, was ‘quirky, witty, exciting and optimistic…’

"Car parks locker rooms rooftops the moon.  Now there is nowhere you can't give your hair a quickie between-wash boost (Okay maybe not the moon).

Behold Aussie’s new miracle recharge collection

A gaggle of eight lightweight leave in conditioning sprays packed with luscious extracts of Aussie exotica.

Need a fix of defrizz? A spritz of shine dashing straight out from work?

A dash of miracle recharge on wet or dry hair and suddenly you're re-jzhoojzhed (technical term)

It's just the thing for girls who are always on the move even if the cupboard is stationary"

Here’s how it might sound in its anti-voice (Lacklustre, vanilla, dull, pessimistic).

"Like all the other shampoo companies, our staff in Sheerness have mixed a bunch of chemicals together to produce a spray shampoo to get rid of smelly grease and grime.

It’s like all other hair care products and comes off a production line in a bottle, which you can carry anywhere in your bag – if it’s big enough and you want the extra hassle of having to rummage through the phone, keys, tissues and lipsticks. 

We have eight different coloured bottles, which do the same thing and smell a bit like flowers.

Of course it will cost you more and probably take up more of your time as you’ll still have to wash your hair properly.

But if you are too lazy to wash your hair in the morning, you could give it a quick spray before you get to the office to fool people for a couple of hours"

Ok so it was just a bit of fun, but it really helped remind us that it’s not just what you say, it’s the way that you say it that makes all the difference to how you want your audience to feel.

After years of devoting my life’s work to putting the brand at the heart of internal as well as external comms, it still makes me raise at least one eyebrow, perhaps sometimes two (and that takes some doing I can tell you) at how many organisations are still forgetting the importance of using the right tone of voice inside to their people as well as to customers.  It’s well documented that emotional engagement is four times more powerful than rational in rallying the troops, but people still insist on dishing out the same old cold rational communication to their own people saving their deliciously on brand engaging voice as the exclusive preserve of their customers.

Keeping your corporate voice on track doesn’t have to leave you hoarse, but it does take a bit of effort up front. Woodreed often work with clients to help put their corporate voices through their paces, especially those who have multiple departments creating comms inside as well as outside their organisations.  The emphasis is on the practical application of tone of voice and sessions are run with copywriters on hand providing clients with a set of tools to enable them to deliver tone of voice inside and out with ease.

If you would like to know more or just generally shoot the breeze on all things tone of voice, please do get in touch cdahl@woodreed.com  

"Uggh a culture we must change"

So said a respondent to Woodreed's recent survey in our Brand Inside Report.

And it seems they weren't alone, with only 29% of respondents reporting that their organisation has "a great culture of people living our values." A worrying 20% reported a culture yes, but "not the one we want" and over a quarter of respondees said their organisation had "no sense of what we stand for internally" at all.  Not great results for UK plc but, given the recent wake of corporate scandals and misdemeanours, not perhaps that surprising.

So what's the answer?

Engaging on an emotional level is four times more valuable than rational engagement when it comes to driving employee effort, yet all too often internal comms are cold and rational - devoid of the emotive power a brand can deliver.

A well defined cultural framework, grounded in brand values and delivered through a strategic and integrated internal communications programme can effectively fix the disconnect and successfully embed the values amongst employees in a sustainable way to help create the right kinds of values-based cultures for the long-term.

Employee engagement is becoming a board issue and rightly so.  What boards now need to do is direct HR and Marketing to work together, to combine their brand and people expertise and share some resources too.  But don't panic Marketeers, a little spent inside goes a very long way and don't forget there's a direct and proven link between engaged employees and your bottom line revenue.

Can't see the wood for the trees

Last year, Woodreed published a thought piece which we called 'Bursting the boardroom bubble'.  It focussed on the importance of employee engagement and just what an important contributor it is to an organisation's bottom line.  Lots of facts, lots of proof points.  We asked has the message reached the boardroom agendas of UK companies.

The answer appears to be mixed. For every client who 'gets it', and they are increasingly out there, we come across headline stories like Goldman Sachs, News Corp, RBS et al where the culture appears to be far from healthy.  What some of these worst examples share is an inability to see what's going wrong. Without kissing and telling we've sat in a meeting in the C-suite of one of the headline grabbing organisations and been assured in all seriousness and with a total commitment to the party line that everything in the garden is rosy.  More than rosy, positively blooming and sweet smelling.

Sometimes it's a refusal to accept that perhaps, just perhaps, top leadership is sending out all the wrong messages. A company culture based on a load of vacuous words on a poster which, even if they are robust and grounded, nobody in the senior team is seen to live.  Is anyone walking the walk or are they just talking the talk?  Are they even doing that?

And even if they get all this are they prepared to invest the time and money to do something about it? Disappointingly those of us who practice in this area still come across senior managers and executives who say they've got far too many pressing operational issues on their plates just now to bother about employee engagement.  Employee engagement is all pink and fluffy after all isn't it? 

Well no. Wake up UK plc and smell the coffee. What's pink and fluffy about a cost to the UK economy of £64bn?  Yes, £64bn.  The annual cost to the UK economy of disengagement.  Pink and fluffy?  I think not.

So what's the answer? It lies in your brand.  It lies in a commitment to create and lead a brand-hearted culture from the very top of an organisation.  If you want to know how to go about then read Bursting the boardroom bubble

White with two sugars and a revolution please

So according to Gaddafi "protesters… fueled by milk and Nescafe spiked with hallucinogenic drugs" are responsible for trying to drive him from power.

The Twitteratti went into overdrive and Nescafe began, unusually for it, trending.

So how did Nescafe respond? How should they have responded?

What is social media for? Is it just a vehicle for brands, as so many do, to post something about a new product, an ad campaign or sponsorship every few weeks?

Or is it a chance to give a wider audience a better sense of the brand’s personality. If we go back to the brand architecture, a brand's tonal values are a key component. Tonal values are the brand's personality - a much broader definition than just what words and pictures the corporate identity guidelines allow us to use.

So doesn't social media give a unique opportunity for a brand to give its audience a better sense of its personality - its sense of humour, its agenda, its politics?

A great opportunity yes, but equally a great risk. To do it right, it needs treating with the same care, and messages crafted with the same skill as any other media - with brand at their heart.

Let's see what Nescafe do about it. It's interesting to note that they've been the first brand to take advantage of the new UK product placement rules with their £100k investment placing their Dolce Gusto coffee machine on the set of This Morning today.

Perhaps we can expect to see a big 'P' on future coverage from Libya.

Notes from a small island

Well what a rollercoaster of a few days we have had; the privilege of being able to share our passion for the joined up brand, the giggliest client dinner probably of our careers and the chance to rub shoulders, share ideas and talk about our business with some really rather influential people.

What inspired us:

The knowledge that standing up on stage and presenting a masterclass is not only not scary, but a fantastic, exhilarating experience. Our audience were really buying into our message and we had tons of positive feedback. We felt especially proud that we could draw on all our examples of what we do at Woodreed to practise what we preach. Bring on the next one.

The presentation style of Leo Johnson (the far less daft, better looking version of Boris and, yes, I did tell him that!) plus his obvious passion and knowledge on the issue of sustainability.

The warmth and hospitality, sense of humour and general all round gorgeousness of our ABTA clients.

The chance to sit in summer clothes for one final day of 2010 while England begins to wrap up in coats and gloves (we’ll be feeling your pain tomorrow!)

Being thanked by Virgin Atlantic who came to our masterclass to tell us to tell us how delighted they were we had featured their brand.

Managing not to have a hangover before our presentation, despite enjoying a 4 course 4 hour dinner the night before (alas, so grown up)

A sense of zeitgeist in our proposition, evidenced by learning that in the travel industry building brand cultures internally is becoming increasingly important, as service becomes the only differentiator.

What we thought was dire:

That gender is STILL an issue in business as evidenced by a panel discussion ironically based on 'Loose Women' comprising 5 men and one token female and the female MD not given the chance to discuss anything much except for what it’s like to be a woman in business. But that's it really, everything else rocked.

The cure for the common blog

So I guess first of all, welcome to our new audience. Up until this week we've blogged for our eyes only. So now it's my turn again - but this time with the eyes of the cyber world upon me. It's the difference between singing your heart out in the shower or behind the wheel in the fast lane and taking centre stage at the karaoke bar.

Now our Woodreed blog is open to the outside world will it change the way we blog and what we blog about?

Can I, for example, talk about the sublime scene in this week's Mad Men where Peggy called the bluff of her abrasive new art director and they found themselves stark naked brainstorming new creative concepts for Vicks? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdKSDqo9FaU Can I ponder whether that approach would ever see the light of day at Woodreed - Jodie and Dave any thoughts? Or would I be venturing perilously close to employee litigation? On second thoughts......

Or could I dare comment upon the wannabee creative from the same episode who'd hopefully recycled one tired and hackneyed line across endless ads in his book: The cure for the common bank, the cure for the common chair, the cure for the common beer ... What agency would ever do such a thing?

Or should I be more business like and simply muse about how I'll be feeling this time next week? Once Charlotte and I have presented our masterclass on the power of brand as a tool for employee engagement to 200 delegates at The Travel Convention in Malta? What's really excited me putting that together with Charlotte has been the power of our presentation. It really is the culmination of so much great insight and experience - so will we inspire or will we be ....?

I'll let you know next week.