Tag: HR

Social workplace – Nokia style

Earlier today I provided a summary of Neil Morrison’s talk on social media in the workplace. Neil was teamed up with Matthew Hanwell, HR and community Director for Nokia, and what follows is a summary of what Matthew had to say.

The good old days: Remember when telephones were introduced to the workplace? How about email? and the internet? Yep – folks were fearful of all of them too – and now we couldn’t work without them. Matthew recalls joining Nokia 14 years ago and you needed manager approval to have an internet browser installed on your PC!

What’s it for?: Why does Nokia suport the use of social tools in the workplace? Because they promote openness, participation, interaction and engagement. We learned of one employee dissing the new CEO’s strategy via Nokia social tools. That employee is still working there and once criticism is out in the open you can deal with it.

Feedback: Matthew spoke a lot about colleagues being able to vote, rate and review each other’s content. That sounds like a great idea – immediate peer recognition and feedback is cool.

Social Dialogue: The HR team were persuaded to open a channel where all things raised by employees would have a response within 24 hours. This service became hugely popular attracting 100k hits per month.

Values: The Nokia values were posted up – this caught my eye ‘Assume the best intentions of others’. Love it!

Tweet meet: Senior management meetings get tweeted so now the conversation has moved from ‘what did you lot discuss?’ to ‘how can I help with…?’ Sounds like a good way to speed things up.

Questions from the floor:

Negative sentiment: someone asked Matthew how do you deal with the negative stuff that some staff post. Quick as a flash the reply came ‘it’s so much better to have it all on display – every one can engage and agree, disagree – we have dialogue together – as well as just at the water cooler’.

More negative sentiment: How do you see social media fitting in with Nokia’s well documented financial problems? Simple – together we have more dialogue, openness and transparency. That seems to be helping us improve things more quickly again.

Toilets (again): What is the return on investment from your social media? ‘Why does no one ever ask what’s the ROI on toilets? They impact productivity too y’know!’

Matthew also focussed a lot more on tools that Nokia have developed to promote the use of social media. I chose not to focus on these because I felt the principles offered you more insight. The tools are just that – tools.

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.