Four things that make companies great in 2014

Forbes recently published the Glassdoor 2014 Best Companies to Work For – one of the intriguing lists that gets the full attention of engagement and communication pros like me. We want to know how to get our clients on those lists, yes – but also we want to find the secret to creating happy employees, and being happy ourselves! We’re not alone –  ‘best company’ lists and articles usually get a lot of traffic.  Everyone wants to know if there are better jobs or better companies out there.

In the spirit of improving the companies where we already are,  I borrow from Erika Andersen.  In a recent blog, she quotes Samantha Zupan, a spokesperson for Glassdoor, who says:

“…we see employees across all 50 companies speak favorably about mission-driven company cultures, opportunities for career advancement, great colleagues and challenging work environments…”

Andersen agrees with us when she says these four elements come up time and time again her engagement-related work. She says, “People want to build and work for companies that 1) have a strong positive culture, firmly grounded in a meaningful purpose, 2) offer real chances to grow professionally, 3) provide the opportunity to work with people they like and respect, and 4) offer work that requires them to stretch their brains and skills.”

Here is more explanation of each of these, adapted from Andersen:

A strong positive culture, firmly grounded in a meaningful purpose.  ’Culture’ has, too often, come to mean ‘perks.’ But while a ping-pong table in the break room and coupons for burgers are fun – they’re not the core of a great culture.  What people are looking for is an environment that supports and rewards excellence, honesty, mutual support, and fair dealing; where people get great results and they’re treated well….and neither is optional.  Truly strong cultures are supported from the C-suite on down: the employees report that their boss – and their boss’ boss, and so on – live by the espoused values.  People also want to feel that their strong culture exists to support meaningful work.

Real chances to grow professionally.  Although great companies focus on providing substantive growth opportunities for their employees, this doesn’t necessarily mean ‘career pathing’ in the traditional sense. Good managers in excellent companies look for ways to match employees’ skills and passions with the organization’s needs.  They do this through good old-fashioned observation and conversation.  They observe what needs to get done at the company that’s not getting done, or not getting done well.  They talk with other managers and leaders to find out about new initiatives or projects that might need people.  They observe  what the employee is good at doing.  They converse with the employee to find out what he or she is interested in learning or doing, and how he or she would like to see his or her career unfold.

The opportunity to work with people you like and respect. This one has both a universal and a personal aspect. The universal: excellent companies generally have a firm “no a**hole” rule. They don’t hire people who are dishonest, narcissistic, abusive, prejudiced, lazy, etc. Beyond that, “people you like and respect” is more individual.  For instance, some companies tend to hire fun-loving, informal, uninhibited people.  Other companies hire more serious, reserved, intellectual people.

Work that requires you to stretch your brain and skills. Human beings are wired to overcome challenges; it’s a deep survival mechanism that has allowed us to successfully adapt to new environments again and again over the millenia.  So it makes sense that we want this in our jobs, too: we like to figure things out, to get good at things, to crack codes and solve problems and make breakthroughs.  Great companies don’t assume that people are slackers who just want to do the least possible to get by: they recognize and call upon this built-in human attraction to challenging work.

It seems simple when you lay it out like this: a great company is a place you can do great things while having a great time, with others who want the same.  But it’s not easy to create this simple, powerful thing – it requires real focus and consistent effort on the part of the company’s leadership to build the needed structures, processes and systems; to hire the right people with the right attitudes and the rights skills; and to inspire and hold people accountable every day to the high standards you’ve set.

But that investment pays off tremendously: you end up with a company that attracts the best talent, creates excellent products and services, and figures out how to do it better, faster, and smarter than the rest.

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Employee Engagement is the most important issue for organizations

The Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) and Globoforce recently released the findings and report of its annual employee survey.

Their key findings:
In the SHRM/Globoforce survey, 803 HR leaders and practitioners shared their practices
and perspectives on engagement and recognition and their impact on performance.
Some of the findings include:
1. Employee engagement is the most important HR challenge facing organizations.
2. Employees are more motivated and perform better when rewarded through praise
and prize.
3. Stand alone years-of-service awards are often an ineffective type of recognition.
4. Leveraging the collective recognition across a company provides a clearer picture of
employee performance.
5. Crowdsourced feedback can make performance reviews more effective and enhance
manager and employee appreciation.

The full report is attached.  Enjoy!

shrm 2013 report

Rewarding and Motivating Your Brand Ambassadors

 

 

 

So now you have your brand ambassadors nicely organized and trained. Let’s remember that they have their “day jobs,”

 

 and might need a bit of encouragement to remain at your branding beck and call! Here are some ways you can keep their loyalty:

 

• Send regular updates to all your brand ambassadors about the status and successes of your various organizational social media platforms. Include contest results, crises averted, issues managed, meaningful comments from audiences, examples of how your overall strategy is being met – whatever you think will resonate best, in short soundbites and interesting visuals.
• Meet with your ambassadors regularly, as we discussed in a previous post. In between meetings, send small tips and techniques emails as you come across them.
• Ask for ambassadors’ advice as you face new audience or messaging challenges.
• Thank them often and publicly for their help and time in moving forward such an important organizational set of initiatives.
• Call on a subset of your ambassadors (a group of 5-8 people) to be your go-to experts in specific subject areas that come up often, are particularly troublesome or strategic for your organization. Ask these to monitor the social media landscape to see who’s writing about the topic and who’s responding and in general, the tone and intensity around the topics. Also ask this group to respond to outside blogs and other social media platforms on behalf of the organization. This group should also expect to be alerted in case of an organizational crisis so they can help you and your team respond.
• Consider a “Brand Ambassador of the Year” award and give it to an employee or group of employees who have engaged with you and your team with the highest level of commitment and perhaps have shared a lot of their time and expertise in helping the organization meet goals via social media. (Hint: the first year, you might want to give a collective award to all your Ambassadors and in subsequent years, to individuals.) Make it as big a deal as your company will support – maybe find a time to present it in conjunction with other human resources awards or at a meeting of company leaders. This will serve the dual purpose of elevating the importance of branding programs overall, to your company.
• You also can consider smaller, tangible rewards for one-off special help any Ambassadors provide – such as gift cards, treating them to lunch, things like that.
• Develop a comprehensive rewards system that awards points at different levels for contributing content for blog posts, Facebook posts, tweets and other items important to your program. Ambassadors can collect prizes once they gain enough points. This has to be managed so content is high quality and not just spewed out in order to gain the points, obviously – but this type of system has worked for many other employee programs!
• Remember to copy Ambassadors’ supervisors on all thank you or recognition messages – this could serve their overall career goals well, and earn unending goodwill toward you!

I’m sure many of you have other ideas to add here – let’s hear them! Thanks and let me know how it goes!

All the best,

Jaya

Ambassadors – Two Tracks

Now that you’ve thought about who to tap as your “social media ambassadors,” let’s get them organized. I recommend two levels, if you will.

1. A smallish (no more than 20 people) core group of influencers in your organization and among key stakeholder groups, all of whom possess the qualities listed in my last blog (at least most of them). These people typically are higher level managers in the organization/

2. A broad-based group of employees from across your enterprise. This group doesn’t have to be limited in number.

Here’s how you could engage each group:

Level 1 Ambassadors (Core influencers)

• Contribute content to company blogs
• “Assign” each to a company social media site for monitoring and contribution
• Use influence to gain further buy-in within the company
• Contribute content to external social media sites relevant to audiences
• Share effectiveness of social media work with stakeholders
• Help to align social media use with overall communication strategy

 

Level 2 Ambassadors (broad group)

• Add company social media platforms as their bookmarks
• Ask co-workers, professional colleagues and network, friends and family to read and contribute to company social media
• Read and comment on company blogs
• Alert communications if organization is mentioned online in other platforms and blogs
• Contribute to external blogs
• Become members of online communities relevant to organization
• Follow and engage with influencers in the organization’s industry
• Display organizational alliance in all personal online interactions

 

All ambassadors will need to be trained about how to do all of this well, within company and legal parameters and according to communication strategy and standards.  In my next post, I’ll give some ideas about how to do this kind of training and what it should include.

 

I hope this is helping you so far – would love to get your comments!

Jaya

 

Who’s the boss? The role of the leader in groups

With organizations practicing participative management, decision by committee, collaborative strategic planning, employee-driven change, and other initiatives  where consensus is king, tt can be difficult to tell who’s in charge.  Yet we all also know that without the buck stopping somewhere, very little actually gets done.  To address this tension between the need to get things done, and the value to include all voices, it is first important to clarify who’s in charge, and how they are defining their role.

Experts in organization development (OD) suggest that group leaders think about adopting one of these key roles, to start:

1. Make sure there is balance of among values held by individuals in their group, including his or her own (Hultman and Gellerman, 2002)
2. Provide the technical expertise related to the situation or problem (Block, 2000).
3. Manage decision making for the group (Hultman and Gellerman, 2002)
4. Adopt a consultative  approach, which involves others for input and advice, and the leader retains the power to decide. (Vroom and Vroom, 1973, cited in Bunker and Alban, 2002)

So, which one or combination seem right to you? Which have you seen succeed, fail, or have a neutral impact? We’d all like to hear from you!

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References:

• Block, P. (2000). Flawless consulting: A guide to getting your expertise used. (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.
• Bunker, B. B., & Alban, B. T. (2002). Understanding and using large system interventions. In W. Burke, D. Lake & J. Paine (Eds.), Organization change: A comprehensive reader (pp. 667-682). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
• Hultman, K., & Gellermann, B. (2002). Balancing individual and organizational values: Walking the tightrope to success. (pp. 97-135). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.