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.
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.
How leaders and communicators can win hearts and minds in change management
Asking a group of people to change the way they’ve been doing something for years often triggers highly charged emotional responses, and they are rarely positive. Yet when tackling change management, so many organisations seem to ignore this. Instead they rely heavily on filling out logical but complex change templates and ordering people to do things differently.
Administrative processes and direct instructions have their place in change management, for example when health and safety compliance is needed. However, no amount of form-filling by leaders is going to inspire people to let go of their old ways of working and adopt new ones.
In fact, telling people to change just causes them to take a stand and doggedly cling to the status quo. When Kennedy said: “We’ll put a man on the moon by the end of the decade”, he inspired an entire nation as well as NASA. He didn’t then whip out a Gantt chart to prove his thinking!
However inspiring the carefully crafted vision for the future, nothing will actually change if people aren’t convinced that they need to move on from what they’re currently doing.
Sure, they might nod and smile when you talk about the desired change; they’re not politically naive or stupid. But the minute you walk down the corridor, they’ll crack on doing exactly what they’ve always done. As the American author Irene Peter wryly noted: “Just because everything is different, doesn’t mean anything has changed.”
In my experience, what really works is creating an environment where people identify for themselves that the way they are currently doing things is no longer the way forward. Better still, they start persuading each other and, even better still, they start telling their leaders.
So, your job as leader or communication professional is to paint the picture of success, then let people join the dots for themselves. That’s the way to win hearts as well as minds.
Creating ‘change from within’ takes thought and effort, especially compared to ordering people to change ‘because HQ want us to’. But the foundations you’ll create will result in far greater ownership and advocacy of the change. This way, you will build a more solid structure to support sustained change. Find practical examples of how to make this happen, in the early chapters of John Kotter’s The Heart of Change.
Now you’ve got your people fired up and passionate about delivering the change, perhaps even co-creating ways to deliver it. But, the gravitational pull of templates and form-filling at the other end of the project can still tarnish your efforts. Enter the ‘lessons learnt’ or ‘post implementation review”. Unfortunately, once completed, this is often consigned to the darker recesses of a SharePoint site never to be discussed or seen again. And the result? Little actually gets learnt.
While of course complying with the agreed and audited internal process, why not make heroes and heroines of your new-found champions for change in a very public space? Get them sharing their success stories on your intranet, acknowledging the challenges they’ve overcome in your internal publications, showcasing the difference they’ve made at your events and inspiring their fellow workers to new heights in their corridor conversations. All you are doing is bringing your lessons learnt to life.
And why wait until the end of the project? You can add real momentum to your change effort by celebrating success early and often.
Now that’s the kind of template I vote you do adopt.
Find out more about Axiom’s approach to equipping your organisation to communicate and lead change.
We’re all familiar with Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Emperor’s new clothes; a leader who thinks everything is fine and whose followers fail to point out anything to the contrary.
In the business world, this is not a ‘once upon a time’ fairy story. I often come across senior leaders who are out of touch with what really goes on at the coalface. Sycophantic or back-watching direct reports and multi-layer hierarchies are often to blame. But the biggest culprit of all is poor internal communication. The consequences for leaders, their people and the organisation can be severe: lack of alignment, mistrust, missed opportunities and wasted effort.
Encouragingly, research tells us that business performance improves when staff are heard and their feedback acted on – a key plank of internal communication. A Watson Wyatt study of 115 companies (2006, 2008) tells us that companies with highly engaged employees achieve financial performance four times greater than those with poor employee attitudes.
Here I highlight five successful internal communication solutions we’ve put in place over the years to drive open and candid dialogue between leaders and the workforce.
We often facilitate ‘elephants’ at conferences and events. We split participants into small groups and ask them each to discuss and pinpoint ‘the unspoken challenges that stop the organisation performing to its potential’. These are listed on Post-It notes or shared via iPads (without being attributed to individuals) and then prioritised for action planning. To stop the session turning in to a whinge fest, we add the caveat that ‘these must be things within our gift to solve’.
Good external facilitation helps reinforce that the process is truly anonymous and ensures that even politically charged content is surfaced. The resulting dialogue often creates genuine breakthroughs. With a large pharma we worked with some years ago, we uncovered some deep-seated issues relating to a merger that were subsequently addressed.
As senior leaders arrive for their tour of the building, introduce them to a cross-functional working party in a meeting room. This team are tasked with identifying and prioritising the barriers to business success locally and then creating five practical ways to improve performance. They do their thinking while the VIPs are being introduced to staff and the smell of new paint. As the tour ends, leaders hear the reflections and recommendations of the working party. Staff feel they are being heard and leaders get some concrete insights to act on.
Senior leaders are charged with working at the sharp end of the business, usually for a week, not just a quiet afternoon. The aim is to arm them with real-life evidence, not distant observations, on which to base their decisions and plans. They undertake all of the duties of colleagues at the coalface (as long as that’s not a safety risk). We often suggest they are shadowed by a member of staff. Their insights can be recorded via video and edited for use as part of an internal communication campaign. I’ve seen priorities shifted and projects repurposed or even dropped as a consequence of this activity, for example the complete rewriting of a retail company’s training programme based on what the leader learned about the need.
Sounding boards are representative groups of employees drawn from different functions, lengths of service and varying degrees of positivity vs. cynicism. In other words, a realistic cross-section of staff. We often put them in place during change programmes and leave them in place as the change becomes BAU.
Their task is to help shape how messages are positioned and delivered (not craft the actual messages themselves). Sounding boards provide excellent advice on how messages could be wrongly interpreted and provide recommendations on how to improve them.
Their feedback is shared with senior leaders, who might only be present at the top and tail of their meetings so participants can do their thinking in an unimpeded way, perhaps with the help of a facilitator. Participants often go on to become real advocates for the change programme. This is something we saw happen when we tried this approach at medical products company HARTMANN.
The rise of digital, mobile and social media have converged to present great new opportunities to connect leaders and the workforce. I’m really excited about the impact these technologies can have on internal communication. Axiom is working on an app to measure engagement, pinpoint who understands what, gauge the mood of the business, and provide a direct line for two-way dialogue between leaders and the workforce. We think it will help boost performance, productivity, focus and retention of talent. If you want to get involved in the early work on this app and shape it to meet your needs, simply reach out.
Try these internal communication techniques and your leaders will be dressed for success – well placed to make well-informed decisions and deliver enhanced performance through a better engaged, informed and motivated workforce. But fail to connect with the workforce, and the business will suffer. And, like the Emperor in the fairy tale, leaders may be open to naked ridicule.
A new app to help comms professionals drive employee engagement is due to be launched by the end of this year.
Powered by Axiom’s 25 years of hard-won specialist experience, Engage will be the first app designed specifically to aid employee engagement programmes.
The app can be used to gauge employees’ levels of understanding of key messages, canvass their opinions on the hot topics in your business and provide a channel for them to ask questions and propose ideas.
Engage gives you comprehensive and reliable data on how well your key messages are being received and understood and, over time, builds an engagement index for each of your audiences. And you get all of this in real time on your tablet or mobile.
For employees
For comms teams
For leaders
Engage is currently in beta with a group of comms professionals testing it in their organisations. If you are interested in joining our early-adopter group, call us on +44 033 3088 3088 or use our contact form. We can give you a free demo and tell you more.
Find out more at The Engagement Works.