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.

Culture - 2014 word of the year

So it turns out that Culture was the word of the year in 2014.  According to Merriam-Webster, America's leading dictionary publisher’s analysis of the top lookups at its online dictionary, Culture was the most searched word from a staggering 100 million lookups per month:


1. Culture
2. Nostalgia
3. Insidious
4. Legacy
5. Feminism
6. Je ne sais quoi
7. Innovation
8. Surreptitious
9. Autonomy
10. Morbidity 

Although by no means a top 10 of corporate words it got me thinking.

1. Culture – I’m not at all surprised it’s at no.1. It certainly is for us at Woodreed where we’ve been banging on about the importance of organisational culture for ages – “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”(Drucker) after all doesn’t it? In 2014 we published our own take on the topic from an organisational perspective – Culture the true story. When we talk about positive cultures, we mean cultures of engaged employees aligned with an organisation’s values – the watchwords for what drives, unites, motivates and differentiates one business from another. A positive culture isn’t just a nice to have. It’s a competitive advantage. It’s people that give you the edge. You can copy technology, you can copy process, you can copy the product. You can’t copy the culture. It truly is Number One.

2. Nostalgia – is there a hankering in the workplace for some long lost halcyon age? If so when was it?  In our own ad industry Mad Men is of course a must watch show, but, putting aside the Martinis, do we really want to return to an age of such stratification, ingrained with sexism and racism, both in the workplace and society at large?

3. Insidious – the much propagated, and yet still widely held, perception that employee engagement is somehow pink and fluffy or doesn’t apply to us or is HR’s job, that soft skills don’t really matter in the work place.  Keep holding on to this belief system and you’ll find yourself in the area of the 4th word of the year – legacy!

4. Legacy – legacy systems! Yes, hard to believe I know but in 2014 there are still corporate organisations still struggling along with Lotus Notes.  But as businesses upgrade and invest in new technology it brings a raft of opportunities not just for employee engagement, collaboration and work life balance – good things – but also of course threats to the perfect life balance with a potential ‘always on’ culture (there’s that word again). Canadian employee engagement expert David Zinger talked recently instead of ‘work life infusion’ as one can in a healthy way infuse the other – of course new technology, used sensibly, can certainly play its part in making this happen.

5. Feminism – see number 2 above.  But the job is by no means done – in the workplace or outside.  Feminism seemed to get a resurgence in 2014 – both in the wider world with No More Page Three and the recognition of the great work of Laura Bates at the Everyday Sexism Project.  And of course the efforts of so many in trying to get more women onto the boards of plcs. Despite research cited in Management Today which shows that Fortune 500 firms with three or more women on their boards outperformed those without any between 2004 and 2008, still the FTSE 250 has 29 all male boards – shameful.

6. Je ne sais quoi – Odd that this snuck into the list, apparently it appeared in a US TV ad and drove the lookups. But of course we’re all French now in January 2015 – yes free speech, honesty, transparency, standing up for what you believe in, fighting for what you believe in. As important in the workplace as outside. Je suis Charlie, Je suis Ahmed.

7. Innovation – the key to business success and an absolute must if an organisation is still going to be around in ten year’s time.  But don’t think of innovation as just a job for leaders and futurologists – the most successful businesses are recognising the value of involving all their people in the process of innovation and using new technology, like that of Woodreed’s partner Challengera, to unlock and harness their knowledge and energy – and of course push the dial on employee engagement too.

8. Surreptitious – the way to approach employee engagement.  Don’t set out to ‘do’ an engagement campaign, don’t tell your workforce you’re going to ‘engage’ them, don’t approach employee engagement as a project, something to be done and ticked off the ‘to do’ list.  Approach it as just the way things are done around here – but do it with a clear strategy and plan and do it by unleashing the power of your brand to engage your audience. We know that the emotional engagement people have with brands is a far more powerful driver of behaviour than rational – as much as four times, so use that power to force behaviour change and create the right kind of positive and successful organisational culture you need to achieve your business goals.  And if you don’t think you have a brand then stay behind and talk to me after class.

9. Autonomy – the great Dan Pink’s favourite three words. Autonomy, mastery and purpose being the three drivers of motivation – more powerful than monetary incentives, although try telling that to the banking community at bonus time!  If this has passed you by what rock have you been hiding under for the last goodness knows how long?

10. Morbidity – the only certainty in life along with taxes (unless you’re Jimmy Carr, Starbucks or Vodafone of course). So as it’s the direction of travel we’re all heading in I for one want to have some fun along the way and that means working at something I’m absolutely passionate about – using brand to engage employees and make workplaces better places to be. We know that organisations who treat their employees like customers are more successful than those who don’t – end of.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/2014-word-of-the-year.htm

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

Are you a culture vulture or culture curator?

Culture is one of this decade’s buzz words, with the media delighting in naming and shaming what it views as toxic and unhealthy cultures from some of our biggest institutions whether it is the banks, the Beeb, the NHS or its turning on its own like News International.

What lies at the heart of culture are brand values – the organisational watchwords for what drives, unites, motivates and differentiates one business from another.

But often these values are not clear, not embedded and not lived from the top, so people take them for granted or create silo cultures. This ‘taken-for-grantedness’ is what frequently makes culture problematic in organisations. People assume that everyone views things in the same way. What I’m saying is, just like the consumer brand, it needs managing to flourish.

A strong culture isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a competitive advantage. It’s an organisation’s own DNA, as intrinsic a part of the brand as the logo. Brands, in their most powerful form being organisational blueprints for growth led from the top.

Your brand inside matters as much as your brand outside. As Peter Simpson, founder and ex commercial director of First Direct, said: "Why would you want to be one kind of brand to your customers and a different one to your employees?"

Smart organisations know that the stronger the culture, the higher the levels of employee engagement (broadly defined as the skills to leave but the desire to stay). There’s a direct correlation between levels of employee engagement and business performance.

The higher the level of engagement, the better for business. Just look at Pret, Innocent, B&Q, Whitbread and, most recently, Nationwide, who have just posted a 113% increase in pre-tax profits for the year to 31 March - a leap it has directly attributed to employees. Ads recently ran in the national press thanking staff with the names of its 15,000 staff under the headline 'Our most valuable assets'. It cites GFK research for the year to May based on interviews with 60,000 customers of the main high street banks who were asked to rank satisfaction levels. (Source: Marketing Week, 28 May 2014)

It makes sense - engagement improves productivity. Engaged employees work harder, take less sick days, stay longer, are happier and make customers happier. People buy people. Forget the inside and lavish all your time and effort outside to your detriment.

Making money matters, of course it does, but people matter too. Treating people like dispensable cogs or work horses just won’t cut it anymore. Gen Y certainly won’t tolerate our old way of working.

The fast-track has lost much of its appeal for them and they’re willing to trade high pay for fewer billable hours, flexible schedules and a better work/life balance. Times are a changing; we need to move with them.

Our clients are seeing the bigger picture of employee engagement. CEOs are starting to take notice. In ‘Engage for Success’ , a government white paper on the importance of employee engagement, company leaders describe their "light-bulb moment" when an understanding of the full potential significance of employee engagement dawned.

Ex Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy talks about his reaction when he realised that the company knew more about its customers than it did its own people. He then set about understanding what the workforce wanted and what motivated them at work.

So what about us then? Our own industry? Your own agency? We live for our clients’ brands and the work we produce for them. We relish the thrill of the chase of new business; we love to compete, love to win and we’re obsessed with the prize. I wonder sometimes, really, honestly, how healthy our own cultures are? Is our industry really much different from the likes of News International and the banks?

Do you know what your agency’s values are and the defined and expected culture–defining behaviours aligned to them?

Are they simply words on a manicured wall, in a beautifully art directed induction vanity piece or genuinely embedded into the culture of your business?

Are they measured, recognised and rewarded? Are they used in induction, training and recruitment? Are they lived from the top down and right across your business or is it simply lip service? The say-do gap – how big is yours?

We are making some headway through the IPA’s CDP and, arguably, the Gold agencies are making their own people more of a priority. But employee engagement isn’t just about winning a Gold (see, it’s that prize thing again), it’s what you do every day that matters.

It’s about being true to your values by encouraging a collective set of behaviours that bind you together as one organisational culture.

A curator of culture, guarding and nurturing, or a vulture picking over fragments of a stagnant culture. Which one are you?

Check out Arianna Huffington's take on the subject in her Campaign piece

This first appeared on the IPA's website www.ipa.co.uk/blog

Internal marketing - make your brand work for you

Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2, has been saying some things* about brand lately. What's a CEO doing talking about brand? Isn't that the role of a marketing agency or team?

Source - Marketing Magazine

No, of course not and with increasing debate about how to get marketing taken seriously at the top table this is valuable endorsement of just how important brand is to an organisation's success.

Dunne's mantra, "Your brand should lead your company, rather than your company leading the brand" is music to the ears of those of us who believe that brands are as important inside a company as outside, that brands are a powerful catalyst for driving employee engagement.

Coming up with strong and effective internal communication ideas

Maybe it's no surprise that Dunne's 02 is a sponsor of Engage for Success, the national movement of leading plcs, public sector, government and trade bodies committed to overturning the UK's £26bn GDP deficit caused, they claim, by poor levels of employee engagement.

Successful organisations need strong and authentic values to engage their people and what better tool for this than brand? When brand values and employee behaviours are aligned, creating what we at Woodreed call a 'cultural framework', then the brand's power is unleashed to create engaged employees - who in turn deliver improved bottom line profit, or, in the case of not-for-profits, an increased surplus.

Employee engagement and brand

Dunne goes on to say, "Failure to invest in your brand values is a false economy" and cites O2's investment in 30,000 work-skills opportunities for young people. A clear example of HR and marketing working together, breaking down the silos that exist in so many companies where brand is the prerequisite of marketing and people are HR's responsibility.

The result of this is that often whilst external communications are carefully crafted with rigour and expertise and grounded in the brand values, internal communication ideas are often cold, process-driven, tick-box exercises devoid of the emotional values and capacity for audience engagement which the brand can deliver.

Putting the power of brand at the heart of all external and internal communication ideas is the answer.

* Marketing Magazine
This blog first appeared at FindGood's marketing blog

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

Over recent weeks I've become aware of increasing debate about the EE words for example Neil Morrison's 'Nobody wants to be engaged'. EE - not the bizarrely rebranded telecomms company but Employee Engagement. A simple term which I think most people get - employee engagement as opposed to customer engagement or audience engagement, engaging the internal audience rather than the external.

There are discussions about whether EE as a term is an obstacle to the message. Whether we can think of other things to call it. Is it happiness, wellbeing, wellness or what?

This seems like so much noise, just at a time when a groundswell is beginning to build in the wake of corporate scandals and with the support of the Engage for Success movement.  To me this is typical of so many movements in the past which end up tearing themselves apart over semantics, focussing inwards instead of outwards.

What are we doing? When there is still such a mountain to climb to convince boards to invest time, resources, intellectual capital and understanding in the need for EE why do we create a distracting sideshow that can only undermine our pitch? Someone, the unerring advocate of the importance of the inside culture Ian Buckingham I think, said "Angels on pinheads" about this the other day and I have to agree.

How can we expect people to take the important concept and its practitioners seriously when we resort to squabbling amongst ourselves?

Of course debate is healthy and should be encouraged but let’s focus it where it can achieve results – on
helping overcome the barriers, on helping people see that EE isn’t something you do to people or have done to you, that EE isn’t a tick box exercise, or a series of 'initiatives'. That EE isn't an outcome. It’s about building a healthy culture within an organisation where every employee (which means all those who take a salary from the organisation so leaders and managers too) is motivated to give of their best more often that they’re not; an environment where the people with the skills to leave choose to stay.

Surely it's far better to have a word which, ok may not be perfect but at least we all understand? A word to badge the concept and act as a shorthand for something we all need to grasp - quite simply organisations with high levels of employee engagement outperform organisations who don't on so many KPIs - net profit, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, productivity, innovation, employee turnover...

These KPIs are the important evidence we have to use to convince board level decision makers of the need to take this seriously - but you know, irrespective of these I know what kind of an organisation I'd rather work in.

Whose responsibility is it anyway?

A particular topic which has really galvanised readers of our Brand Inside Report was the question of who has responsibility for employee engagement inside an organisation.  One reader observed that the answer lies with the CMO in that if we can "unleash the power of the brand inside then mountains can be moved."


Another agreed that best practice must be led by the Board with "HR and Marketing working much more collegiately, dispensing with the conflicting agendas and silo approach to ensure employee engagement is a shared responsibility."



So a challenge to all brand marketers out there - are you prepared to make the necessary changes in skills, priorities and budgets to unlock the immense power your brand has to engage not only with your external audience but your internal one too?


If you're not - why not? The topic is increasingly coming to the top of the CEO/boardroom agenda and they will be looking to you as the guardian of their brand to answer for your stewardship.  With rising demands for better value returns all the time, diverting just a small part of your brand investment this way makes good, good sense. 


Let us know what you think and if you're an HRD or marketeer tell us what help you need to drive this change in your business and really create a brand-hearted culture inside. 


Of course if what's holding you back is knowing how to go about it, then the team at Woodreed would be delighted to lend you a helping hand.