Employee engagement that means business
Many people feel their bosses only ever comment on what they are getting wrong. So make a conscious effort to make someone’s day, catch them doing something right. Then congratulate them with some authentic, specific and positive feedback.
How to fine tune your communication activities to power up your people
What you communicate, and how you position it, can go a very long way towards motivating your people – or indeed have the opposite effect. So it is worth taking the time and trouble to think these matters through and achieve an even bigger bang for your communication buck.
I’m not arguing that you should abandon all of your carefully crafted corporate messages, or go all happy clappy. What I am saying, is that you can craft your key messages in the context of what we know tends to motivate people.
Motivational theory gives us some very practical places to start. Achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility and advancement are the top five motivators according to Herzburg’s two factor model.
So why not actively promote these elements of life at work as an integral part of your approach to communication, for example:
Alternatively you could ignore the people dimension and simply bang on, for example, about how Office 360 is revolutionalising workplace efficiency, delivering a great ROI and run a quote from the VP of IT. Just don’t expect this approach to move the motivational needle of anyone involved in the project – let alone the wider workforce.
And if you want a more targeted approach, perhaps towards motivating a discrete, possibly smaller group such as a project team, you’d better find out what makes them tick. Then you can align your communication to maximise the contribution they can make to the success of the initiative.
I use a simple questionnaire to kick start the conversation about motivation with these smaller teams. Over the years some clear patterns have emerged. People are looking for clear direction, a sense that they are being listened to, the buzz of achievement that tops Herzburg’s list, and praise and encouragement for a job well done. The questionnaire also identifies the topics that don’t motivate them. The trick of course is to turn down, or even off, the communication volume on the latter items, focusing your efforts instead on the things that you now know get people fired up with enthusiasm.
Doing all this does mean you have to invest some time and effort, but that will soon pay dividends as business performance improves through the actions of your own better engaged and motivated people. Assuming you can be bothered of course.
For further powerful tips and techniques to help you to motivate and engage your workforce through better communication, take a look at our book, How to be a better communicator.
Before your next conference, check in with participants to find out what their teams want to hear about. Then they’ll listen more attentively, as you meet their needs at the event, and deliver more effective cascade briefings afterwards.
Maximise the relevance of your message!
How ‘presearch’ helps ensure the relevance and reach of your conference messages
Achieving a balance between what senior leaders want to talk about and what their people want to find out about, is a discussion that all too rarely takes place. That’s a missed opportunity for all forms of communication, especially in the lead up to an annual conference, roadshow or town hall. You can easily avoid this, with some simple advance research, or presearch if you like.
The question you need to answer to maximise the relevance of your messages, help join up the dots for people, or even avoid a total mismatch, is ‘what are you talking about?’ In truth there are better ways to phrase it. Such as, ‘what are the hot topics of discussion in your team?’ or ‘what’s the word on the street?’ or ‘what are people actually chatting about whilst grabbing their coffee?’ And there’s no need to ask everyone, just a representative sample.
Internal social media tools make it possible to quickly capture high level feedback. But to get deeper insights, you need to be asking more probing questions through some short telephone interviews or sounding boards. And experience tells me that folk are more likely to speak candidly when talking to an independent third party. We are certainly seeing an increasing demand for this service.
We conducted presearch of this nature recently, in the run-up to a client’s leadership event. Through this, we identified the top five topics participants wanted to find out about, then found that none of them were covered in the draft agenda. A complete disconnect.
However you conduct your research, it is important to play back the results as early as possible to leaders, speakers and content creators alike. This will help them to shape, align and potentially even fully inform their messages.
Without this research, communicators and conference presenters might be sitting in dark windowless rooms, having dark windowless thoughts about what to cover.
The outcomes of your presearch can shine a new light on proceedings. Speakers can be genuinely more ‘tuned in’, authenticly position their content as meeting the needs of participants, and use examples in their presentations that are relevant to their audience. Although your core messages might stay the same, in the case of regional road shows, there will be more ways to finesse elements of your content to meet local needs.
Investing in ‘presearch’ can really pay dividends for the business, its communicators, speakers and the colleagues they seek to inspire. Miss the opportunity, and you run the risk that your colleagues will be quietly uttering the question ‘what are you talking about?’, but this time of their leaders, reacting to content that doesn’t connect.
Involving informal influencers in shaping and sharing your company’s stories, can be transformational
With the Winter Olympics drawing to a close it has been a great few weeks for stories. The Canadian figure skating duo, Virtue & Moir, melted hearts, with their ice dance to the ‘Moulin Rouge’ soundtrack. The story of their golden comeback, to become the most decorated figure skaters in Olympic history, has been shared worldwide. That’s the power of story.
Fortunately, you don’t need to go as far as The Games in South Korea to secure your own powerfully golden stories. Your precious resource has nothing to do with shiny medals. It has to do with a person. A person called Gold, Bill Gold.
OK, so in your organisation Bill Gold will go by another name but, trust me, you’ll have multiple Bill Golds in your business. And by identifying and investing in them to become one of your chief storytellers, you can get your corporate or change stories to spread throughout your organisation in authentic and inspirational ways.
As luck would have it, I discovered my Bill Gold and his value, early on in my communications career. If you haven’t yet met yours, let me share this precious nugget with you now.
I was at a conference, when I noticed Bill. I didn’t know him but, as a participant, he was hard to ignore because of the enormous influence he was commanding. When Bill agreed with something presented, he nodded – then everyone around him nodded. When he disagreed, he shook his head – then, following his lead, all those around shook theirs.
Subsequently, I asked a senior leader who the guy was. “Oh, that’s Bill Gold,” she said. “If you want something to happen around here you’d better get Bill on-side.”
Bill wasn’t senior management and had no aspirations to be. But with his vast personal networks, he was influencing colleagues at all levels. What I learned that day was the power of getting him, and those like him, on-side. I’ve been doing just that ever since.
The Bill Golds of our world can be prickly, even cynical, so they are often overlooked as ‘official’ communicators. But involving them in shaping and sharing your company’s stories can be transformational.
By embracing them as storytellers, you transform both the story and the teller. The teller becomes an advocate and their story more authentic when shared.
There’s power in story. There’s power in Gold. And, at Axiom, we help businesses harness and develop both, to organically spread their own powerfully golden stories.
In all organisations, you’ll find informal influencers whose voice carries further than the organisational chart would ever suggest.
Partnering with these people can help your messages become more real, more relevant and indeed increase their reach. So how do you recognise them? They are often the ones who ‘hold court’ in meetings, are popular lunch partners and have huge networks. The first one I ever met was called Mr. Gold and with his help we created the Gold standard in communications.
Use this simple tip to ensure ownership of the key messages, and improve the quality of cascade briefings; build a session into your next conference to get participants practicing how they are going to bring the main points to life and make them relevant in their part of the business.
Read more about Axiom’s communication change and strategy.
How to paint a picture of future success for your organisation and get your people telling stories about how their hard work makes a difference
Experience tells us that staff contribute more fully to business performance when they know how the work they do day in and day out fits into the grand scheme of things. Yet all too often, when asked how their work contributes to achieving even their team’s goals, never mind the company’s, they complain they can’t see the wood for the trees.
If we consider the wood to be the context in which teams and individuals operate and the trees to be the content of their work, they need to be able to see both the wood and the trees. Indeed, if you extend the metaphor, they might also benefit from understanding the forest too, if you think of that as the marketplace in which the business operates.
What’s needed is total alignment between the actions of every member of staff, wherever they work, and the delivery of business objectives. Jack, on reception, needs to be able to explain how his making customers feel welcome and valued helps Jill, the sales director, achieve her targets. And Janet, in R&D, needs to be able to articulate how her latest innovation helps John, the managing director, create new markets.
Creating a laser straight ‘line of sight’ between an individual’s daily tasks and the longer-term goals of the business is often as tricky in a small start-up as it is in a large established business. So how can you do it
Although it’s better than nothing, sharing a spreadsheet as part of an annual objective-setting session is one way forward. But it’s hardly likely to get people throwing back the duvet and racing in to work on a daily basis.
But there are some serious signposts for a better way forward:
Paint a picture of future success for your organisation…
Get your people telling stories about how their hard work makes a difference…
If you can combine the impact of a visual image with the power of storytelling, then you create a super-channel – a channel that our clients call many different things: big picture, rich image, learning map. What they all call it is successful!
The leader of a utilities business, referring to the success of his organisation’s big picture, said: “Eighty percent of our people who climb poles or dig holes are now aware of the business plan and their role in delivering it.”
Third-party employee research in a client from the medical devices world found a 24% improvement against the question “I know what I can do to help achieve our strategy.” And in an aviation client, 76% of around 2,000 staff said they had “a clear understanding of this company’s objectives and vision” – up 22% on the year before.
Unlike the annual objective-setting approach, a big picture can be prominently displayed as an image throughout your business and reinforced through all of your internal media. This will trigger your people to tell and retell the right kind of stories daily: forest, wood, trees, twigs, the lot. And you won’t even get a splinter trying to align them!
Find out more about Axiom’s approach to communicating the big picture.
Often, during times of change, leaders make the mistake of thinking ‘there is nothing new to say, so I’ll say nothing.’ Well, human beings hate a vacuum so they fill it, often with ill-informed gossip that slows down the change effort, perhaps even derails it.
So, fill the vacuum by continuously reinforcing the reasons for change and celebrate the progress that has been made to date.
Read more about Axiom’s communication change and strategy.
When facilitating conferences, I sometimes start with an icebreaker called ‘Point North’. I get everyone in the hall to stand up, close their eyes and, without talking, turn round three times on the spot. With their eyes still closed, I get them all to point North. Then I ask them to open their eyes. The inevitable result is a forest of arms pointing in multiple directions.
This little exercise serves to make the very simple point that, without adequate information, in this case, visual or auditory sensory input, it’s easy to get confused about where we’re meant to be going.
It’s something that applies to many large organisations – thousands of people are no doubt working very hard, yet their efforts are often not focused on what’s really important for the organisation’s success. ‘Point North’ sets the stage nicely for the work we often get participants to do during a conference to address this problem by setting and agreeing the organisation’s aspirations and goals, creating a common sense of direction and then creating the plan for getting there.
Indeed, that’s a fair summary of the nature of much of Axiom’s work these days. More often than not, we are working with clients who want to bring about major change in their business, often to implement a new corporate strategy. We help people at all levels in the organisation reach a shared understanding of both the destination and the route. It’s something I have recently come to think of as helping organisations navigate the strategic journey they want to take – in short, strat nav.
One of our favourite ways to achieve this is through our highly successful Big Picture approach. We depict an organisation’s strategy through a large-scale image that provides a visual analogy and supporting narrative for the journey being undertaken. The image shows where the organisation has come from, its current position, where it’s heading and how it’s going to get there. Crucially, it helps employees see where they fit in and how they can contribute to the journey.
In the past, we’ve illustrated company change programmes as missions into space, mountain-climbing expeditions, ambitious construction projects and major sporting events. But there’s always a common theme: a journey from the old ways of working to the new.
The Big Picture is so powerful because images can engage in a way that the written or spoken word may not. Professor Paul Martin Lester of California State University says people remember only 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they read, but 80% of what they see and do. And in this digital age, our reliance on visual stimuli is growing. “We are becoming a visually mediated society,” says Prof Lester. “For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished not through words, but by reading images.” What’s more, images are far more immediate and memorable than documents and presentations. They also work internationally across language barriers.
Once we have a powerful visual metaphor, we then write a supporting narrative about the company’s journey. Here, we are making use of the ancient power of storytelling. Stories have been fundamental to communication throughout human history. Today, neuroscience tells us that, while facts and figures stimulate two regions of the brain, well-crafted stories trigger seven.
Stories grab attention, are more memorable and convincing than simple information, and are much more likely to lead to action. They provide a narrative everyone can buy into and get passionate about and are easily retold.
We’ve combined storytelling with visual images in our Big Picture approach for dozens of clients. For Swedish surgical equipment maker Mölnlycke, we developed a campaign that envisaged its strategy as a sailing voyage. The visual analogy we co-created made a compelling case for change and provided a clear view of what success would look like and the challenges that lay ahead year by year.
Mattias Hakeröd, global HR director at Mölnlycke, told us afterwards: “Our people really liked this approach to explaining our strategy. It helped us overcome language and cultural barriers, and now everyone is talking about the strategy at all levels – including those who wouldn’t usually engage.”
Of course, the Big Picture is just one possible approach. We’ve just recently finished helping the UK arm of a major global merchant with a simple, pragmatic communication campaign executed against a very demanding timeline to help their people embark on a major two-year change journey. The organisation was announcing a radical new strategy that involved significant investment, merging and closure of branches and a rebrand. For some colleagues, change would be exciting and promising; for others, it would mean disruption and the threat of redundancy.
We worked with the top team to put together a management event, a series of briefings across the company and a range of engaging communication materials to persuade people of the importance of the changes and allay their concerns. At the outset, it was essential that we openly and truthfully gave colleagues the context – the market dynamics that made the changes essential, the long-term aims, the major milestones along the way – as well as helping them work out what it all meant for them at a local, individual, day-to-day level. The feedback we’ve had so far has been very encouraging – employees seem to be buying into the change plan and the approach to communicating it.
Whatever the method, getting everyone to be clear on the destination, engage in the journey and understand the detailed route map – that’s the task for communicators today. So maybe it’s time for you to work out how you’re going to provide a strat nav for your organisation?