Archive for the ‘Internal Communication’ Category
Boosting the Bottom Line Through Retention
Tags: business, cognitve elaboration, Higher Education, mentoring, Non-Profit, retention
Posted in Business Development, Communication, Higher Education, Internal Communication, Non-Profit on March 1st, 2009
A New York Times article raised an interesting question. Is the GOP losing a generation?
Americans identifying themselves as Democrats outnumber those who say they are Republicans by 10 percentage points, the largest gap in party identification in 24 years.
I wrote shortly after Obama’s election that he had garnered a 66% share of the 18-29 demographic or about 16 million people. Brand loyalty is created as a result of cognitive elaboration (thinking about it) by an individual. Since 16 million young voters assigned a positive attribute to Obama and ultimately the Democratic Party, chances are good the large majority will live a life loyal to the democratic brand. It is a fundamental principle of positioning.
The challenge before us as communication practitioners is not only gaining market share but also retaining those that are loyal to our brand. Higher education needs to retain the students enrolled. Nonprofit must retain core individuals who are active with time or money. Business must retain clients and key employees.
Higher Education
A top down approach to staff and faculty mentoring of students creates a family environment and identifies potential problems before they arise. International or minority students are an extremely high at risk demographic. Faculty and upper classman who reach out to the new students, prior to arrival, are sure to create a bond. It is this sense of inclusiveness that will tie the student to the university well beyond their four years.
Non-Profit
Shifting money from salaries to other priorities sends managers into a never-ending downward spiral of dealing with frequent turnover. An alternative approach is paying more to gain stability, maturity, and the skill sets to sustain long-term initiatives. Retaining those grass roots organizers and donors will be enhanced as the time manager spent on training and retraining staff can now be devoted to personally strengthening key relationships.
Business
Engaging your new clients is very much like higher education. Your account executive should be communicating with the client between projects and not just during the projects. Personal client engagement by senior executives creates an environment of partnership instead of a vendor status.
Employee retention may not be an issue today, however there is a way to thwart key staff turnover when the economy heats up again. Authentic engagement, mentoring and training by senior management today will pay dividends in the future.
None of us can afford to lose a generation of students, customers or employees. How we manage our human relations with stakeholders will ensure that we don’t fall into a chasm of disconnect and disinterested.
Tripping In The Dark
Tags: Brand Evolutionary, Brand Promise, Internal Communication, Vendor Relations
Posted in Customer Service, Internal Communication on February 16th, 2009
I had an interesting discussion over coffee with an executive in the waste management industry. We were talking about brand promises. Specifically, how do we ensure our front line people faithfully deliver the brand promise everyday?
He shared with me a story about how his wife had tripped in dimly lit hallway of a local restaurant. Her fall resulted in broken bones and a period of unconsciousness. (Since her husband is a reader of Mind Share, I’ll take this moment to wish her a speedy recovery.)
The restaurant manager sprung into action, calling an ambulance and assisting in everyway he knew how. He gave the husband his business card and said the restaurant will take care of everything. If the story had ended here I would be writing to tell you how this restaurant manager epitomized customer service and ultimately the delivery of the brand promise.
Unfortunately, and perhaps unknowingly, the restaurant brand took a decided turn for the worse. After the trip to the emergency room, doctor visits and follow-up care, a representative of the restaurant’s corporate office/insurance company contacted the executive. The first words out of the representative’s mouth were, and I paraphrase here, “Sir you must have misunderstood the manager. He did not say that we would take care of everything.”
With one phone conversation the brand perception of this restaurant changed. This brand damaging event did not need to happen. Failure to provide brand education to everyone in your organization and your contract suppliers can wreak havoc on your reputation.
Training every employee in the proper way to treat a customer is essential. Training your vendors to deliver your brand promise is a completely different challenge. When we partner with a third party supplier it is critical that we have the brand promise discussion as a component of the overall deliverables. Here are few a thoughts that can help reduce the odds of getting that angry call from a loyal customer.
- Make sure project managers, supervisors and all front line people understand the brand promise.
- Empower your team to make decisions quickly and remedy mistakes before they escalate.
- Coach staff on how to be empathetic to a customer’s pain.
- Timely and regular communication, internally and externally, can actually turn a negative situation into a positive experience for your customer.
- Senior involvement tells your customer that they are important.
- Secret shopping your vendors is a great way to audit the delivery of your expected products and services.
We all spend a great deal of time, thought and resources to ensure that our brand is communicated. Sometimes we forget customer touch points extend far beyond the sales, marketing and project managers. The last thing we need is for one of our customers to trip over failed communication because we kept a department or vendor in the dark about our brand promise.
I Can See Clearly Now
Tags: commitment, jim collins, Leadership, Peter Drucker, right thing, standards of excellence, Vision, warren bennis
Posted in Higher Education, Internal Communication, Leadership, Non-Profit, Recruitment, Vision on November 24th, 2008
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.
This Johnny Nash song (listen here) always picks me up. So when I heard it the other day, I took a timeout from the task at hand. The lyrics got me to thinking about how leadership’s vision can help everyone “see clearly”.
Authors Jim Collins, Peter Drucker and James Burns to name a few, talk much about getting the right people on the bus in the right seats. Jim Collins specifically identifies one key trait that was held by all successful leaders, humility.
One definition of leadership for your consideration is that of Warren Bennis, Ph.D., “Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing.”
Doing the right thing for our businesses, employees, families and ourselves is not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would suggest that they are inextricably woven together. It defines the overall leadership quality of an individual. When you can achieve that balance in the leadership paradigm you have reached the leadership equivalent of nirvana.
Advancing the right thing requires effective vision and the ability to communicate. Henry Kissinger said, “If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.” It’s important to note that your vision is not the same as the company’s mission. The vision is where you are going. The mission describes who the organization is and what it does.
Behavioral research scientist and author Burt Nanus suggest that there are four characteristics of effective vision.
Attracts Commitment and Energizes People
People are willing, even eager, to commit to worthwhile projects. An effective vision inspires people by transcending the bottom line.
Creates Meaning for Followers
People look for and find meaning in their work lives. When groups and organizations share a vision, individuals see themselves not just as sales clerks or assembly workers or whatever else their job demands, but as part of a team providing a valuable product or service.
Vision Establishes a Standard of Excellence
Most people want to do a good job. A shared commitment to excellence provides a standard for measuring performance. Establishing a standard of excellence, helps followers identify expectations and provides a model for the distinctive competence of a group or organization.
Bridges the Present and the Future
By bridging the present and future, an effective vision transcends the status quo by linking what is happening now with what should happen in the future. This is why many are calling Barack Obama a transformational politician. His rhetoric has consistently linked the present with the future.
As James Collins and Jerry Porras explain in their book, Built to Last, organizations with a well-articulated vision that permeates the company are most likely to prosper and have long-term success. And isn’t that what we all want?
Look all around, there’s nothin’ but blue skies
Look straight ahead, nothin’ but blue skies
What’s Your Brand Promise?
Tags: american marketing association, Brand Promise, corporate culture, customers, execution, expectation, greatness, Internal Communication, promise, vendor communication
Posted in Branding, Communication, Copy/Content, Creative, Customer Service, Employer Branding, Internal Communication, Marketing, Recruitment on October 20th, 2008
The American Marketing Association describes a brand as a ”name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competition.”
I like to simplify that by saying that a brand is a promise. And since it is a promise, then it must also be an expectation.
It is critical that your brand promise is clearly defined and articulated to internal and external stakeholders. Stanford professor and author Jim Collins, speaking on how to develop the brand said, “First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn’t the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.”
In a down economy, buyers of products and services can’t afford to take a risk. They will stick to the brands that have kept their promise. Although noted here previously, it is worthy of repeating. A well-executed branding campaign delivers a myriad of dividends including:
Giving people permission to buy
Reinforcing preconceived notions
Establishing your promise deep in the subconscious of your audience
Helping you recruit and keep the best and brightest talent
Enabling you to charge premium pricing
Thriving during economic downturns
Easily extending into new markets
Branding is too important to leave solely to the marketing department. Branding is the delivery of your promise. It is why you worked those long hours in a garage before bringing your product to the market place. It is your vision. It is your passion. It is what gets you out of bed every morning. Whether you are the founder, partner or captain of the ship, it is critical that the team understand your vision of the brand promise.
Getting your organization to embrace, proselytize and consistently deliver your brand promise, starts at the top.
Define Your Brand Promise – According to Derrick Daye, managing partner at Brand Strategy, “the brand promise must meet three criteria in order to be effective. The promise must be unique, compelling and believable.”
Identity Must Support the Promise – Your logo, colors, tag lines, sell sheets, press releases, all must reinforce your promise.
Do Your Customers Connect - Assuming that you are targeting the correct customers and prospects, how does your promise affect them? Market research and your employees can help determine the relevance of the promise.
Internal Communication – Can your employees fully articulate the brand promise and the value to your customers? Have your new hires been fully educated on the brand promise?
Partner Communication – Do your channels understand your brand promise? And better yet, have you chosen channel partners that are aligned with your promise?
Corporate Culture - Does your corporate culture support the promise? Critical to success is that all members of an organization live the promise in thought, actions and deeds.
Measure Your Efforts - Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Internal surveys, customer benchmarking metrics and peer review, will tell you if you are moving the needle in the right direction
Top Down Execution - It’s your promise. Be sure that you align your communication and activities around your brand promise. Champion your promise with unbridled enthusiasm. You’ll find that it is a highly contagious way to ensure adoption and execution by your team
According to Collins, “focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.” If you stay true to your brand promise, which is uniquely you, then you are not guaranteed success but you will be on the right path to earning success.
Leadership, Clarity of Message
Tags: clarity, Communication, discipline, diversity, ethics, four agreements, good to great, Leadership, motivation, values
Posted in Communication, Internal Communication, Leadership on September 26th, 2008
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.
If every job description was as direct as this one by explorer Ernest Shackleston in an 1890 job ad for the first Antarctic expedition there would be no issue of getting the right people on the bus and most likely in the right seats. However, contemporary business dictates that leaders possess an intuitive understanding of the human psyche and the compelling motivational issues of each member of the executive team.
Understanding the individual executives motivation of beliefs, values, interests, fears, and moral positions provide leaders the strategic insight to maximize executives skills and to ensure that they occupy the correct seat on the bus. In an article on Motivation and Leadership (Leadership.org), a person’s motivation depends upon two things:
1) The strength of certain needs.
For example, you are hungry, but you must have a task completed by a nearing deadline. If you are starving you will eat. If you are slightly hungry you will finish the task at hand.
2) The perception that taking a certain action will help satisfy those needs.
For example, you have two burning needs -The desire to complete the task and the desire to go to lunch. Your perception of how you view those two needs will determine which one takes priority. If you believe that you could be fired for not completing the task, you will probably put off lunch and complete the task. If you believe that you will not get into trouble or perhaps finish the task in time, then you will likely go to lunch.
So how do Level 5 leaders align human resources with the strategic goals of the company? Understanding the motivation of the individual is key. Additionally, there are four tactical hiring strategies.
The first is to realize that a great organization embraces diversity. This is a tremendous challenge because from the moment we are born, we learn about our environment, the world, and ourselves. Author Miguel Ruiz notes in the book The Four Agreements, “Families, friends, peers, books, teachers, idols, and others influence us on what is right and what is wrong based on what previous generations told them.” These early learning’s are deeply rooted within us and shape how we interact and how we view the contributions of people different from us. People who embrace diversity are right candidates for choice seats on the bus.
The second hiring strategy is communication. A quote attributed to Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe says, “No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.” Effective communication of responsibilities and measurement metrics ensures that the right applicants will fill the job description for each given seat.
The third hiring strategy is self-discipline ¬- the self-discipline to wait, to be patient and conduct a thorough search until the right candidate is found. The second component of the self-discipline strategy is relative to the prospective executive. According to Jim Collins in Good to Great “great companies hire self-disciplined people who didn’t need to be managed”. Thus they managed the system not the people.
The fourth hiring strategy to ensure that the right people are in the right seats is to hire candidates who look beyond task and seek to find their unique contribution to the success of the company. They are not necessarily concerned with where the bus is headed today, but more with how can they keep the bus moving towards it ultimate destination.
Getting the right people in the right seats requires that a Level 5 leader be part psychologist, humorist, teacher, philosopher, and pragmatist. It requires a person who has the vision of greatness and the willingness to achieve that regardless of the time it takes to get there. Getting the right people in the right seats requires an entrepreneurial environment where executives are rewarded for risk taking within the framework of the long-term goal. Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent.
Kenneth Boulding in The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society states, “Leaders carry out this process (inspiring executives) by applying their beliefs, values, ethics, character, knowledge and skills.” Mahatma Gandhi said, “Every moment of your life is infinitely creative and the universe is endlessly bountiful. Just put forth a clear enough request, and everything your heart desires must come to you.” For the Level 5 leader the ultimate quest for filling the seats correctly is the clarity of message.
A Smile is the Shortest Distance Between Two People.
Tags: laughter, morale, productivity, revenue, workplace
Posted in Business Development, Communication, Employer Branding, Internal Communication, Leadership on September 10th, 2008
Recession? Economic slowdown? Market correction? It doesn’t matter how you categorize the current economy. The fact remains; it is very difficult to find anyone who is enthusiastic about the current market conditions. The resulting pressure to be more productive and profitable has never been more difficult.
One often-overlooked tool to aid productivity is Humor.
A study by Dr. David Abramis at Cal State Long Beach concludes “people who have fun on the job are more creative, more productive, better decision makers and get along better with co-workers. They also have fewer absentee, late and sick days than people who aren’t having fun.”
Laughter releases endorphins that are more powerful than morphine. How much more energetic and engaged would the workplace be if everyone enjoyed a daily endorphin high?
Integrating humor in the workplace is a strategy that enhances employee morale, enhances the customer service experience and re-energizes us as individuals and as a team.
Launch a Humor-Relations Program
A humor relations program starts at the top, doesn’t require a large budget and engages everyone within the organization.
First and foremost consider the Power and Purpose of Wit.
P-Place- is this right place and setting
P-Person – Is this the right person? Humor must be appropriate to all audiences, those in the room and those not in the room. One never knows the diversity, social or historical issues of the extended family.
W-Workplace-Does this fit with workplace ethics, rules and agreements?
I-Integrity-Does it uplift the integrity of others and myself?
T – Timing-How is my timing? Both comedic and professional?
Implementation Ideas
1. Even school administrators recognize the importance of recess. Breaks/recess is a great stress reliever. It allows employees to gain a new perspective and reduces boredom of tedious task.
2. Encourage customer contact representatives to employ humor. Southwest Airlines is a continual leader in overall customer satisfaction surveys. They employ a program encouraging professional yet playful attitude by its flight attendants. Example “Thank you ladies and gentlemen for flying with SWA today. I know all of you will want to give a big applause to a very special person on board today. He is 90 years old and making his first flight. Please join me in welcoming our pilot on board.”
3. Allow pets in the office occasionally. The documentation on the therapeutic effect of pets is endless.
4. Create a funny moments email from senior level executives – it shows that they are human, vulnerable and approachable both to internal and external customers.
5. Encourage bizarre random acts of customer kindness. Encourage staff to go beyond the normal. Give them perks to give unhappy customers. Give them rewards for providing alternative solutions.
6. Encourage people to laugh. Again, who would not want an office full of endorphin filled people enhancing the customer experience?
Phase in small components of a humor campaign – then observe the changes. Slowly you’ll find ways to integrate humor specific to your organization. Happy, productive people drive revenue. And that’s something you can smile about.
Internal Communication Is Good For Business
Tags: benchmarks, Internal Communication, profitability
Posted in Communication, Employer Branding, Internal Communication on August 1st, 2008
Internal communication is no longer a soft function or a feel good activity. It drives business performance and is a key contributor to organizational success. Typically, organizations identify the communication issue(s) and move straight to tactical executions of newsletters, rollout meetings, etc. This approach provides executives with:
- Little tangible proof of process improvement adoption
- Feedback
- Scoring a decisive victory over employee communication apathy
Without benchmarks, it is impossible to identify the hard cost of ineffective communication. There are intangible, but very real cost that impact process improvement execution and financial performance of an organization. Intangible cost drains include:
- Frustration and dissatisfaction
- Lost productivity resulting from ineffectively run meetings
- Missed business opportunities through poor cross functional understanding
AWARENESS
The better the employee engagement, the better the return on investment. Organizations that communicate effectively dramatically outpace organizations that don’t. Key components of an employee engagement program are:
- Define and communicate the who, what, when and where of the communication process
- Create a clear view or game plan so the employee not only sees the change but how their participation advances the business strategy
- Utilize communication vehicles that are relevant to the employee
- Educate, train and mentor managers to sustain communication strategy and tactics
BENEFITS
Watson Wyatt Worldwide – an international actuarial and human capital consulting firm reported in its 2007-2008 communication survey key findings that shed significant light on the cost and benefits of a fully optimized employee engagement program. More than 267 companies participated in the ROI study.
- Effective employee communication is a leading indicator of financial performance.
- Companies with the most effective employee communication programs provided a 91 percent total return to shareholders (TRS) from 2002 to 2006, compared with 62 percent for firms that communicated least effectively. Moreover, a significant improvement in communication effectiveness is associated with a 15.7 percent increase in market value.
- Firms that communicate effectively are four times as likely to report high levels of employee engagement as firms that communicate less effectively.
- The percentage of companies that are measuring employee behavioral change has increased almost 25 percentage points since the 2003/2004 study.
Communicating with employees should be an essential component of any business plan. Frequency is not as critical as consistency. It helps employees make the right decisions. It ensures that the company vision is coherent and shared throughout the organization. And in tough economic times, it is a cost effective way to grow our brand and bottom line.
