Tag: Engagement

Tools, Trust and Toilets

I and many others attended Neil Morrison and Matthew Hanwell’s social media session at #cipd11 this morning. Loads of good stuff being shared and a healthy dash of British toilet humour thrown in for good measure. Here’s a summary of what I heard and learned. I’ll focus on Neil’s thoughts for now and cover Matthew’s later today.

Numbers: Neil started showing us some huge numbers, in the hour to follow 5,000 blogs would be written, millions of tweets sent. These numbers show us that social media is not a passing trend.

Control: Can you control what goes on social media? No more than you can control what people think and say, so don’t try to.

Fear: maybe around loss of reputation? So an employee tweets a ‘bad day’ message and gets sacked for it. The story ends up in the Metro and the company are embarrassed. Who made the bigger mistake? Ever seen an acceptable newspaper use policy? No – so why do you need one for social media?

Fear: what about loss of productivity. To suggest this shows contempt for your employees. If you have a productivity issue, social media is not your problem.

Fear: IT security perhaps? Emails spread viruses much more than social media, perhaps you should ban email instead?

HR as the Sheriff: Your first job as sheriff is to make sure HR don’t write a stupid policy on social media. Your second job is to make sure IT don’t write an even stupider social media policy. Done that? Good – now throw away the badge.

Lead the way: HR best placed to lead a connected conversation between employees, customers and others.

Learning: Neil told us that social media is an invaluable part of his continuous professional development. It gives him ideas, a place to share concerns, do more thinking and learning, helps with business leads and recruitment.

Easy: Social media is easy and those who tell you otherwise are resitaint or trying to sell you consultancy. At Random House where Neil is Group HRD, their approach to social media is organic, or as Neil put it, ‘slightly disorganised’.

Tools Trust and Toilets: Random House allow staff access to all social tools. If they didn’t, staff would just disappear into the toilet and tweet from there! We’d rather trust our people, foster adult to adult relationships – trust beats control every time.

Courage: courage is knowing what not to fear. Social media can help you empower, educate, encourage and experiment.

Thought provoking stuff from a bright HR Director. I hope many in attendance at this busy session go on and follow Neil’s lead.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

When Nicky Brimmer of O2 first took to the stage to talk about ‘Turning customers into fans: linking employee engagement to customer service’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous poem started bouncing around inside my head. Nicky sketched a picture of O2 and Telefonica, Fortune’s number one most admired company, 295 million customers and 285,000 employees. Can you really love that many people? Let’s try and find out.

O2 was born out of BT back in 2002 and Nicky told us that when BT floated what was then BT Cellnet ‘we were at the bottom in every respect’. Customer satisfaction, quality of service, you name it. A decision was made to use the new start to build a new culture, new values. O2 wanted to be known as bold, open, trusted and clear. As a former BT employee I spent time managing the relationship between BT and O2 and I enjoyed the challenge. I admire the way O2 managed to shake off BT’s arrogance and forge something new, too often the pull of the familiar wins out. And if proof of their continued desire to learn is needed, O2 are one of many companies joining the Stop Doing Dumb Things unconference later this month to explore more ways of connecting employees, customers and community better.

Nicky told us more of the history as she took us along the O2 and Telefonica timeline, and I’m going to focus on some of the stuff that O2 are doing to better connect customers and employees. O2 call it creating fans, which doesn’t sit well with me though I can see how it fits with O2’s image.

We were shown a brief campaign video which showed six ways that O2 people could love what they do:

helping customers, simplifying, connecting customers to things they love, making it fun, great value, and change for the better.

These things manifested themselves in different ways.

Customer feedback and insight is fed back to staff quickly. O2 has the means to get store specific feedback back to the store within 24 hours. I like this and at the same time I would hope that at least some of that feedback is experienced in the moment through dialogue between customers and employees at the point of sale and service. Customers are invited to address senior management meetings directly with their challenges.

O2 people test O2 products before launch, not only to see how they work, but to familiarise themselves with them and act as sales advocates post launch too. And if O2 people come across a customer problem down the pub or anywhere else for that matter, they have access to a simple text based help system which helps resolve customer issues more quickly.

Nicky talked about the importance of HR, Brand and Internal Comms working together to make great connected experiences for customers and staff. Good to hear – I’d like to learn of more companies forging strong collaborative links like this in pursuit of better service. Heres a replay of an O2 customer service story we featured on here back in 2009.

And O2’s award winning CSR efforts focus on how O2 people can get involved with volunteer activity in their local communities. A simple and powerful way of strengthening connections in the neighbourhoods where you work.

Nicky closed telling us that O2 simply sees employee engagement as ‘good business sense’. And she shared some honest views on challenges too. O2 are working on allowing employees to use their own technology to do their work, and are considering some kind of financial trade off for people who use their own equipment to fulfil O2 work. Nicky described this as both a ‘great idea’ and a ‘struggle’. She also freely admitted that whilst customer churn has reduced since the link between employees and customers has been strengthened, more recent figures are not so good. And I get the impression there’ll be no knee jerk reaction to that – which is encouraging. Maybe there is love in the air after all? I’d love to know what you think.

Bad behaviour rocks!

Some of you know I run a little group over in LinkedIn land called ‘Is Bad Behaviour Killing Big Business‘. Julia Briggs joined the group just recently and in response to the group title she offered this:

‘Ah, but I love bad behaviour……because for independent consultants and ‘baby’ entrepreneurs like me it gives us huge opportunities.

Every time a recruitment agency hacks off a client or a candidate that’s another reason why my business venture will make it. And as an interim, every time a client does something jawdroppingly ‘stupid’ they needed someone like me to come in and sort it out.

So, I do hope we get to celebrate bad behaviour in this group and turn it into opportunities. For those of you in the IIM group you may have seen what was a spectacularly bad tempered and very dumb thread where members criticised a potential client’s opinion of interims……no thought of engaging with the potential client, or taking on board what he said (feedback is a gift)……and every time this happens I just thank my lucky stars.’

To which Jonathan Wilson replied:

‘So… bad behaviour may be killing big business by inspiring new business. Creative self-destruction where capitalism meets Marxism in Schumpeter’s neo-liberalism. Heady stuff full of opportunities for caring opportunists. Great stuff!’

And Ian Sutherland added:

‘There seems to be something here about conscious and unconscious behaviour. To me Doug’s point is often about bad behaviour being unconscious and then breeding further bad behaviour and indeed vindicating it.

Julia’s optimisim (and I do believe that every challenge presents an opportunity if you have the right mindset) is based on recognising bad behaviour and trying to do something about. Business these days especially big business (and previously successful business) has a huge organisational inertia. My guess is that in 90% of the cases that is just fixing the immediate mess (I’m a manager get me out of here!), but every now and then there will be a real desire to make things different and better.

Being conscious that it is bad behaviour is the start.’

And back to Jonathan again:

‘Very much so, Ian, and it raises interesting questions about the different perspectives of the self-employed (like most of us) and the employed. People express their real values very much more by their actions than by their words and the fit between them says most of all.

I don’t think anyone goes to work to do bad things, or to do things badly, but they will do things and allow things that they do not really believe are good things to do because they want:

to stay employed (for the money or the security or the company)

to avoid conflict or embarrassment with their boss or in front of their peers.

(I know from other research that intelligent, skilled people would rather risk death than embarrassment and have died as a result, taking hundreds more with them)

As businesses get bigger and older (a key transition is with the departure or death of the founders so the firm becomes entirely run by agents) it becomes less clear what they stand for and they lose the guiding light, “What would [the founder] do?”.

When firms become publicly owned the managers simplify (simplisticise?) the aim of the company as being to make money, because money is the most obvious (though often erroneous) abstraction of the concept of value. And because we delegate the management of the owning of shares to other agents (fund managers, insurance companies, pension funds) and they want to show they are doing a good job the focus on money and apparent profit is intensified and made even more short term. One year is a ridiculously short time to assess a company or a strategy, but public companies are made to report and be judged on their financial results every three months. This affects their behaviour quite negatively. When in order to incentivise them, senior managers are given bonuses (just for doing the job) based on that financial performance the perversion becomes destructive.

As you say , Ian, big companies do have immense inertia from their physical presence, established customer base, license to operate and their brand. And so some of their employees, up to and including the CEO, sometimes tend to tend undervalue that and take it for granted, even appearing to believe that they have an eternal right to do what they do. This then leads to the arrogance and complacency that eventually brings them down, but it is usually a long, slow corrosive process leading to an apparently sudden, shocking collapse.’

I love where this conversation is going, so much so I wanted to share it beyond the group. Thanks to Julia, Jonathan and Ian for giving me (and I hope now you) lots of food for thought. I’d love to know what you think about some of the points raised here.