Today’s the day that CEC has been counting down to all year… No, it’s not the renewal date of your CEC membership – it’s our Christmas party (at least, it is in our European HQ, where I’m based). I must say, I’m looking forward to it, and most of the CEC crew assures me that they are as well. However, in speaking to several of my friends from other companies, I’ve been struck by their negativity, cynicism, and trepidation at the prospect of navigating an event that one of them described to me as “the most socially awkward of the year”.

Of course, for CEC’s audience of loquacious communicators, “social awkwardness” isn’t an issue – we’re good socially! But remember – not everyone else is. What happens at one of these parties when you’re stuck between the weird lady from the IT help desk who’s pushed past you at the coffee machine all year, the social recluse  from Finance who prefers spreadsheets to his own family, and the spotty graduate whose name no one can remember, but is irritatingly keen to impress?

This, of course, leaves you with two options. One is to politely excuse yourself and head for the bathroom, the bar, or – if things have got really bad – home. The other is to use your skills as a communicator to enable some social interaction between your colleagues.

Building Social Connections

And funnily enough, this is something that CEC can really help with. One of the things we often get asked is how communicators can encourage peer sharing among employees. As companies become more complex, organizational barriers increasingly prevent employees from connecting, sharing and learning with each other. And, interestingly, the same principles that will help a couple of socially inept guys from IT to open up at a Christmas party will also apply to creating an organization in which peers open up and share their expertise with each other.

1. Base Conversation in People’s Personal Interests

The problem: One of the most trying aspects of a work function is that a lot of people just end up talking about work! Funnily enough, this isn’t what helps build connections.

The Solution: Search for people’s personal interests. Try asking Sue, the lady from the coffee machine with the sharp elbows, a personal question:

“Sue, didn’t you go on holiday to Tanzania last year? Tell us about it…”

Sue will be so much more likely to open up and chat than if you ask her how her week at work was – CEC members, check how Sabre Holdings got more than 69% of their workforce actively participating on their internal networking site by humanizing virtual interactions and basing connections in staff’s personal interests.

2. Tap Social Motivators for Sharing

The Problem: So you’re all standing around – Sue’s chewed your ear off about as much as you can bear about Tanzania, and the talk is falling into another lull. You notice that Horatio, the spreadsheet fan from finance, hasn’t had much opportunity to share during the conversation.

The solution: People always want to look cool or feel smart. Tee people up to discuss things they’re proud of and watch them roll! Ask Horatio:

“Horatio, I’m thinking of running the London Marathon next year. I heard you ran it recently, and got a great time. Do you have any tips?”

Gently massage his ego, and, sucking in his gut to show all the weight he lost in training, he’s good to go for another five minutes. Mitre do something similar – they filter connections so that staff are only pinged with requests for peer sharing if they’re amongst the most knowledgeable in the whole company on a specific topic. So, if their staff get asked for help, it’s not  burdensome – it’s a compliment to their knowledge of a topic, and an opportunity to demonstrate their expertise.

3. Create a Safe Space

The problem: How many times have you seen awkward conversation between senior staff and their direct reports? No one’s comfortable – the team members don’t open up fully, fearful of saying the wrong thing and getting a black mark against their name, and the senior staffer looks awkwardly as if they’d rather be anywhere but there.

The solution: Lose the hierarchy. If you’re a part of a stunted conversation across different levels of seniority, why not break the ice by getting the senior staffer to open up – thus setting the tone for others to chip in.

“Boss, did you know that Clive here shares your passion for stamp collecting / tiddlywinks / ultimate frisbee?”

Watch your boss and Clive the timid graduate hit it off, forgetting the hierarchical divide to discuss their shared interest. Leading communicators understand that hierarchy stifles peer connectivity, and ensure that social interactions occur on a level playing field. Check CEC’s Principles for Enabling Peer Sharing and Learning, and think about how best to leverage existing employee interactions for peer sharing.

Related CEC Resources

-          Principles for Peer Sharing and Learning

-          Principles to Drive Participation (Sabre, Sprint, Aviva, TD Bank)

-          Peer Learning Platform (The MITRE Corporation)

The various changes and related stress that employees have faced over the past few years may not impact engagement today but it does have a great impact on their engagement capital—a look into engagement that includes employee perceptions of the past, present, and future.  Creating an organization with high engagement capital is a top priority of both Communications and Human Resources team.  How aligned are your current efforts?

Consider this: both functions have traditionally focused on improving the “manager” as a critical channel to relay messages and drive engagement. While the manager may be critical for present engagement, over 50% of employees have experienced a change in manager in the past year. Communications and HR are both discussing tactics for scaling the impact of the broader organization on an individual employee to improve past and future engagement and reduce reliance on the single manager.

Compare these two models below (on the left Communications’ model of agility and on the Right HR’s model of diversified agents):

The goal and approach of communications and HR is more aligned than it may ever have been in the past—and more and more communicators have been asking about how to work better with their HR counterparts. Communicators: check out these 7 HR focus areas and the agents most important for building this type of engagement capital:

Peer-to-peer support across the organization is hands down the most critical agent in driving these HR priorities as well as critical to communications’ goals of improving personal connection and alignment to strategy.

Jump start your conversation with your HR partners by posing these 5 questions:

1. How could we incorporate more peer learning into our corporate intranet and HR sites?  (Read more)
2. How could we scale opportunities for peer recognition employees’ immediate team? (Read more)
3. How can we enable our employees to define and protect the values of our organization? (Read more)
4. How can we reinforce the importance of proactive learning and a problem-solving posture with new employees? As well as stress these values in development conversations? (Read more)
5. How can we partner to build leaders’ comfort with empowering their employees (Read more)

CEC Related Resources:

• Cross Functional View of Roles on Driving Enterprise Agility
• Change Management Topic Center
• Principles for Peer Sharing and Learning
• Peer Learning Platform (MITRE)
• Building a Change-Ready Organization

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Why is Cross-Functional Collaboration So Hard?
• Disappointed by Internal Social Media? You’re Not Alone
• Peeking Down the Hallway: What’s HR Doing?

Through my conversations with communicators who’ve recently worked on safety campaigns, I’ve found that their first step is often to build awareness of safety policies and procedures.  In the more effective campaigns, communicators help employees to build personal, often emotional, connections to safety issues.  For example, several companies have seen significant reductions in accidents by helping employees consider how an injury could affect their families and friends, often through victim storytelling and subsequent dialogue sessions.

While effective in some situations, this tactic is best used when the safety challenge can be solved by awareness alone.  A common challenge cited by communicators is complacency.  In these situations it’s often not that employees don’t know how to work safely, but rather that they’ve performed the same tasks over and over, without incident, and have developed bad habits or have lost appreciation for the dangers of cutting corners.

But what if there is a more complicated challenge to address – say, between productivity and safety — where an awareness campaign alone won’t work?  Here are a couple communications tactics that will help:

(1) Help managers be better listeners to the frontline.

Let’s give our frontline employees some credit.  After all, these individuals are in the best position to know what it’s like to work in dangerous environments.  Doesn’t it seem reasonable that they would have some promising safety ideas?

One thing that communicators can do is to help managers shift away from a one-way, top-down communication approach to a two-way, engaging conversation.  What if instead of saying, ““Be safe, wear your hard hat!”, managers asked, “Where do you see the next accident occurring in our facility?” A question like this is much more likely to spark productive dialogue and can easily be embedded into safety walks, team meetings, and other manager/employee conversations.  At the very least, it will get people talking about the barriers that they face when trying to improve safety.

(2) Celebrate the successes and “almost successes.”

Many communicators use internal communication channels to celebrate instances where employees speak up to prevent an accident.  While I’d agree that this practice sends a message that the organization wants employees to speak up if they know something is unsafe, some companies take it a step further.  What if an employee is unsure, but thinks something might be unsafe?  As a way of empowering employees to stop the line and voice concerns, some companies communicate examples of these types of situations, even if the concern turns out to be a false alarm.

Interested in learning more about safety communications? Join us for our upcoming webinar.

CEC Related Resources:

• Crisis Management: Our Latest Observations
• Avoiding Crises: How to Build a Preventative Safety Culture
• Building a Crisis Communication System

CEC Related Blog Posts

• What’s Worse than a Crisis?
• A Culture of Safety
• Communicating Before and After Crises

By Kirsten Robinson

Imagine that the competitive landscape surrounding your company is dramatically shifting. As a senior leader, you know that the company needs to shift its strategic direction and that it will take the entire organization to effectively respond to these changes. How do you get employees to lift their heads up from their immediate role and consider the broader picture?

In order to help employees become more change-ready, Saudi Aramco implemented strategy dialogue sessions with employees to personalize information—and with great success. Recognizing that traditional communications channels for sharing such information were unlikely to broaden employee perspective, the company’s strategic communications team partnered with senior leaders to create a “Speakers Bureau” made up of passionate advocates from the business. Within group dialogue sessions, these peer speakers share their personal connection to corporate challenges—giving employees tangible, credible examples to emulate.

Saudi Aramco’s personal connection modeling is three-fold:

1. Present employees with information on market trends
2. Share speaker’s personal connection to issues
3. Prompt employees to make their own connections

CEC members, get more in-depth details on how Saudi Aramco helps employees become change-ready by enabling them to personalize information.

CEC Related Resources:

• Personalizing Market Information for Employees (Saudi Aramco)
• Information Needs Assessment Process (ConAgra Foods case)
• Key findings from Building a Change-Ready Organization
  

Alas, you can’t change the past or recapture time lost, but you can do something about the rest of your 2011. You can make a commitment to spend more time being proactive and thoughtful in your role instead of feeling reactive and at the mercy of change—change in your team dynamics, your industry’s environment, your business partner’s expectations, or even your office coffee! And, we at CEC can help.

We took a look at the top tools and templates downloaded and used by your CEC Communications peers. These tools have helped your peers get their jobs done faster and more effectively, and they can help you do the same!

Download a tool, give it a try, and share your feedback (right here on this blog post) on how we can improve certain tools. See below the jump for the Top 5 Tools for Communicators.

Top 5 Tools for Communicators

1. Communications Metrics Selection Framework
   Selecting appropriate metrics is a difficult process for any communications team. This tool provides a framework for potential metrics, organized by stakeholder audience. Use these examples to guide your thinking on metrics selection for your function.
   If you’re interested in our latest research on measurement, check out our Communications Measurement & Reporting advice which details how leading communicators are winning points with business partners by planning upfront what success against communications objectives looks like and how it will be measured.
2. Social Media Strategy Builder
   Most companies dabble in social media without a clear purpose. Fortunately, the path to a great strategy is pretty straightforward. Your “right answer” will be based on the relative importance of the core things you can do with internal and external social media.
3. Dialogue Workshop for Managers and Leaders
   This PPT deck will help you run a dialogue skill-building workshop tailored to a specific business context. Specifically, the workshop will give managers hands-on practice in planning and executing a comprehensive dialogue strategy to support a shared business objective
4. Intranet Strategy Tool
   The intranet can do three things: feature content, organize content, and generate content. The best intranet strategies focus on improving one of these capabilities to drive maximum benefit. Use this tool to pick the functionality that’s right for you.
5. Facebook Toolkit
   This toolkit provides communications professionals with an evaluation checklist, strategy template, success metrics and operational guidelines to setup a Facebook page for Corporate Communications. This research also contains Facebook policy guidelines from Kraft Foods Inc.

That said, safety often comes at the cost of efficiency (and sometimes a little bit of fun). In parts of our lives there is still someone there to demand a certain level of safety from us—be it a traffic cop, a TSA security guard, or a Mom (yep–she’s still around!). But at work, even if it is a small part of a manager’s role description, no one can be a full-time “safety cop.”

Many companies, particularly those in the energy/utility, manufacturing, and other heavy industries have been asking us about how to increase awareness of safety goals within their organizations. What is most critical for communicators, however, is to understand our role in helping employees align their everyday behavior to these safety goals—independent of a manager being there to remind them to use the handrail, drive more carefully, wear a helmet, etc.

Through a large quantitative study, the CEC identified the two main factors that mobilize employee behind company goals: their level of personal connection and their feeling of peer-to-peer support.

1. Personal Connection: The best way to drive employees’ personal connection with safety priorities is through improved dialogue between line managers and employees to drive an understanding of how these priorities impact employees’ daily role.

The Communications team at ITT supported front-line manager/team conversations around company goals (e.g., safety and quality) by engaging employees and managers in more interactive communication. Through an audit of the current barriers to success against these goals, they realized that a communications breakdown was getting in the way of their success. This simple addition of dialogue helped realign their plant culture around performance goals that included both safety and efficiency. CEC members: read the full best practice here.

Also, see how Nordea uses this simple “workshop in a box” as a prep session to help mangers see the benefit of and feel comfortable discussing safety goals with their teams.

2. Peer-to-peer support: One key driver of engagement with goals stems from a sense of support from direct colleagues.

Peer recognition can be a strong driver of employee-to-employee engagement. See how the Communications team at TD Bank created social norms around peer support by creating a simple but high profile way for employees to celebrate one another’s contributions on the company intranet. Visible recognition of employees encourages other employees to also align their behaviors and support one another toward company goals (like safety).

Alternatively, internal ambassadors of safety goals can act as champions of these priorities and spread awareness of them at a grassroots level through the organization. Allstate created an Ambassador Movement based on the idea that every company has a set of supporters around specific initiatives, who, when given the opportunity, will be more vocal about their support.

For your organization, this may be creating a safety team to equip a select group of employees to act as champions in favor of these goals.

What are you doing in your organization to drive a culture of safety?

Related CEC Resources:

• Driving Behavior Change Topic Center
• Mobilizing the Workforce Key Findings
• Help Leaders Learn to Dialogue Trainings and Tools

By Rebecca Canan

Every week we get questions from CEC members about internal social media. Who does it well? How do they get employees to actually participate? Have they been able to tailor and use SharePoint?

These are all great questions and well warranted. Indeed, we’ve found that “peer support”—defined as the opportunity to access and share ideas and best practices with peers—is a major driver of building an agile, highly motivated workforce. Communications can directly increase peer support by providing internal social tools that map to employee needs and preferences.  However, this isn’t always easy to do.

I recently had a chance to talk to a few members of the Communications team at UniCredit, an international financial institution with more than 161,000 employees. The team there is committed to this idea of peer support and is in the midst of launching a company-wide platform aimed to increase collaboration to reach concrete business results and “IOR,” which stands for Impact of Relationships, and isn’t exactly the reverse of ROI as it may seem. Find out more about the team’s effort and their “obsession with usability” in the interview with UniCredit’s Head of Corporate Culture, Monica Poggio, below.

CEC: Ciao, Monica. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Our CEC members are VERY interested in internal social media…it’s great to speak with a company – especially one in the highly regulated financial services space – that has a success story to share.

Let’s start with a quick overview of what you’re doing with internal social media…why did you decide to offer it to employees? What need is it meeting among your employees?

Monica Poggio (UniCredit): UniCredit’s banking group is the result of many mergers and acquisitions. These began in the 1990s, with several Italian banks, followed by additional banks in Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe.

Within the context of this series of integrations of many banks, we have striven to develop our identity by promoting a common culture and ensuring consistent Communications across our Group. We believe this process is critical to our success and enables us to generate valuable synergies.

For these reasons, UniCredit introduced OneNet, an internal social media tool accessible to all colleagues. Based on a Web 2.0 platform, OneNet is designed to:

• facilitate networking, knowledge sharing and online collaboration within our organization

• offer user-friendly new features and Web 2.0 tools that facilitate and accelerate internal processes.

CEC: Did you have to make a case to get the resources for this? If so, can you tell us what part of that business case or discussion really helped people see the value?

Monica: A business case wasn’t requested for the decision. The project is born thanks to the cooperation between Communications and the IT team, meeting  common needs in terms of innovation and ideas generation.

OneNet is shaping up as a powerful tool  in a further cultural shift we’re trying to introduce. We want to move from a “serving” culture where online platforms encourage people to react to requests…to a more proactive environment where employees speak up and work together, being protagonists of knowledge sharing and achieving common goals and changes together.

CEC: What technology platform are you using?

Monica: SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft).

CEC: What did you learn as you were customizing the SharePoint tool?

Monica: Dedicated resources and specific skills are needed. That said, the new version of software (SP 2010) is more user friendly and it’s really appreciated by our employees.

Usability is our obsession, so one of our focuses is to provide a positive and intuitive user-experience to our colleagues. This is why we’re investing in customization and tailoring the platform to our needs. OneNet moves from one “beta version” to another. Based on the user-centered design methodology, in which features and interactions are always open to discussion, OneNet is constantly changing to fit user needs and company requirements. Our goal is to leverage our new communities and growing user base to foster a social media culture within our Group.

CEC: How did you initially roll it out?

Monica: Since September 2009, roughly 17,000 employees have been invited to take part in the network, and more than 50 communities have been formed.

Colleagues who were included in the first phase of the project were drawn from two populations: the Group’s Operations and ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Factories and the UniCredit Women’s International Network. We then progressively incorporated other colleagues into the network and into communities related to their work.

We even created a community for the leadership team of our Group, to increase senior management’s  engagement, helping them to make these “toys” their tools.

The current extension model is based on a progressive opening of communities across the organization (vs. introducing everything all at once).

CEC: What is Communications’ role in managing the tools? How do you see that role evolving?

Monica: Communications’ key role is to manage and coordinate OneNet across other internal digital channels to create a seamless experience for users.

In the first phase of this coordination, we created a committee with Communication team and a team  in charge of community creation and support for the Group’s Operations and ICT Factories (one of our pilot Business Unit). We learned from this model and we’re going to replicate it in all the Business Units. Thus, Communications will serve as a competence center and provide counsel on solutions and tools that meet community owners’ specific needs.

Eventually, we want this to evolve into a governance structure in which OneNet will be managed by a hub-and-spoke model – that enables Communications to serve the needs of these online communities effectively via customized “counseling” services. Over time, our role will be to provide advice, share best practices, create guidelines, and explore new trends that assist in the successful adoption of internal social media.

CEC: Are you partnering with IT at all?

Monica: Yes, IT is a fundamental partner in the success of OneNet. They’re not only our developing partners, but the IT team is also one of the first business units piloting the tool to support its daily work.

CEC: What metrics or outcomes will you look for as you evaluate success?

Monica: We measure the success of the different communities by setting KPIs with the community owners. The KPIs are both quantitative and qualitative.

Traditional ROI should not be the only measurement for Internal Social Media, which is often best evaluated in terms of the strengths of the relationships built.  ROI is always joined by IOR, Impact of Relationships in terms of:

• Innovation – employees’ ideas that drive business value (e.g., crowd-sourced ideas that have a concrete impact)
• Productivity and Efficiency – your stakeholders find ways to bring the business together (e.g., one environment to manage one corporate client vs. emails/personal folders)
• Loyalty – giving employees the empowerment to bring their knowledge together (e.g., share experiences to get a common business solution)

CEC: What advice do you have for other CEC members hoping to do something similar?

Monica: Based on our experience, I would highlight the following success factors:

• Commitment and sponsorship are mandatory;
• Communications should be viewed as a function that provides internal counseling and support vs. as the group “owning” and “filling” the internal social media channels
• Link internal social media to a business or operational need

We have plenty of lessons learned in the last year and a half: overall we’re receiving good feedback and achieving positive results through daily business support for our colleagues and great participation in the network (for instance, a big online crowdsourcing event with 6,000 employees, who were generating concrete ideas to improve customer relationships and improve employees engagement).

Related CEC Resources

• Intranets and Internal Social Media Topic Center

Today, most pools are entered, scored, and paid for through sites like ESPN and PayPal, and the afternoon games are easily accessed through online video sites and even on your iPhone or iPad. But just as surely as the inevitable winner bases their picks on a preference for Blue Devils over Bulldogs are you confronted with an annual set of statistics estimating $1 – $4 billion in lost productivity during March Madness and dire warnings of federal gambling statutes. As communicators, often charged with promoting awareness of and compliance with corporate policies, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of policing our communication tools to prevent  these legal or productivity risks. A compelling case could be made that those efforts would be misplaced – in fact, let’s go out and encourage participation in the office pool. No sporting event brings the country together quite like the NCAA tournament.  The Super Bowl only involves two cities; college bowls amount to a corrupt, elitist patronage system; golf, NASCAR, and hockey remain a bit niche; and baseball’s just boring. But everyone has a connection to at least one school in the NCAA tournament, and every school has a shot. Even better, the simplicity and unpredictability of the bracket format make the event accessible to non-sports fans, and the compelling narratives behind the teams keep everyone rooting for a Cinderella story.

For communicators, this is GOLD! We should be looking for just such opportunities for our employees to connect across functional and geographic boundaries. Just talking brackets today, I found out that one colleague went to school in my hometown (‘Nova!) and another shares my enthusiasm for statistical formulas to support picks (see Ken Pomeroy).  These connections actually make it much more likely that my fellow Nova fan will just approach me directly if she needs to know what the CEC is working on; or that I’ll know a true stats geek if I need support analyzing a member’s benchmarking data.

Indeed, it’s these personal connections that are the pre-req for the peer-to-peer support we know is so important to employee engagement and alignment with corporate priorities.  For example, when we studied the best-practice internal social media tool from Sabre, we found that 80% of the early dialogue on the site was personal in nature, but that over time it shifted to be primarily professional. We believe that the professional benefits of peer support cannot be realized without those more human interactions, and NCAA tournament pool is one of the easiest ways to generate those connections.

Technically, federal law prohibits sponsored gambling, but those statues aren’t enforced for office pools. Indeed, in many states, as long as no one profits from the pool (i.e., all money is paid out) and everyone has the same odds of winning, you won’t run afoul of any laws. On the flip side, consider this:  If the NCAA tournament could generate just 1% more in personal connections and peer support across enterprises, we would see a 0.1% in productivity benefit according to CEC research, which for a $1billion company nets you about $6.5 million/year. Using an annual U.S. GDP of $14.7 trillion, that ratio equates to about a $95 billion economic benefit from our office pools.  You really wouldn’t be doing your patriotic duty if you didn’t encourage them!

So, now that we’re all free to share, who do you have?  As always, I’m picking Duke!

Successful recruiters are being more than just thorough as they weed through an increasing pile of applicants. They are re-strategizing how to capture the attention of the highest performers in the marketplace (between jobs or not) to lure them into their organization. This often starts with a look at the organization’s unique employee value proposition (EVP.)

What makes the job worth it in the eyes of your employees? What motivates them to not only show up  but to put in the extra effort to succeed at their jobs? And how would they describe their experience to a potential employee?

HR may use employee engagement data and say the EVP is centered in good benefits and attentive managers, but the true value proposition of your company for potential employees lies is in the eyes of your current employees. The key to a winning employee value proposition comes down to understanding employees values and then translating their story to potential hires. To define and translate this winning EVP, the HR Recruiting team needs Communication’s help.

4 Roles Communications Can Play in Creating a Winning EVP:

1. Employee listeners: A winning EVP is defined by employee voice and feedback. Leading communicators have an always-on listening system to gauge the pulse of the organization. This deep understanding of employees allows Communications to understand the topics employees value in their day-to-day experiences — topics that may not jump out in survey results.

• Check out how Best Buy’s Listening System gives communications an ongoing pulse on employee needs and values.

2. Brand builders: A differentiated brand is necessary to capture the attention of top talent. Leading communicators synthesize the attributes employees value and define an employee brand that differentiates their organization.

• Use the Corporate Brand Performance Assessment to gauge stakeholder perceptions of your brand and identify opportunities to differentiate it from competitors’.

3. Story tellers: The company’s EVP needs to be something that is accessible beyond the bounds of the company Web site. Leading communicators start by telling the story of their EVP (in partnership with Recruiting) via employee blogs and videos on the careers page of the Web site; however, they also motivate employees to actively speak about the EVP within their own networks and on channels beyond the ones managed by Communications and HR.

• Check out how Allstate’s Ambassador Movement enables employees to speak about the company with their personal networks and provides employees with these tips for engaging in online conversations about the company.

4. Brand enablers: A winning EVP is something that is constantly being experienced throughout the organization. Leading communicators make brand messages more likely to flow by simplifying how employees can “live the brand” within and outside of the organization.

• ­Read how Vodafone’s Brand Action Workshops help employee turn brand concepts into personally relevant actions.

What are some creative ways your team has partnered with HR to bring your employee value proposition to life for current and potential employees?

The utility industry is experiencing its own “curious case” at the moment.  While the American workforce as a whole gets older – a trend that may accelerate in the U.S. with the raising of the social security retirement age – many of our utility members report that their workforce is rapidly getting younger, perhaps due to a set of private retirement benefits that allows for more turnover.  In the movie, Benjamin ultimately connects with those who appreciate him as an individual more than an age.  For utility members to seamlessly transition their workforces, so too must they embrace individuals over demographics. 

The specific questions that manifest most frequently from members about a workforce that’s getting younger is: how do we reach them? Should we use social media?  Will they care about our culture or strategy?  And how do we facilitate connections when vast differences of age or experience may not reflect differences in authority or level?  On the flip side, people wonder how do we retain information from departing individuals and inspire them to help those coming in?  Just like the few characters who successfully connected with Benjamin, the answers are concerned less with the communications preferences of Gen X, Y, or Z, but rather the sources of individual emotional connection that will inspire engagement and alignment.  To get there, organizations must first pursue the following:

1)     Identify the sources of shared values with individuals across your workforce:  Yes, you have engagement surveys and other data, but all that will tell you is how they react to your construct of what’s valuable.  Many utilities report learning much more just hanging in various break rooms, service trucks, or in the case of a non-utility member, Best Buy, literally setting up a chair in a well-trafficked area to make yourself available for questions and comments.  Those little moments of insight into the values of your workforce will serve as a much more solid foundation for a communications platform than the hippest social media center ever. 

2)     Provide a sense of ownership or investment:  Those entering the workforce don’t want to simply inherit a set of policies and procedures, they’ll want to make an investment in and take ownership of the organization they are inheriting.  Similarly, those departing will only share what they’ve accrued when they can own that transition of knowledge and experience.  Leading functions are therefore creating more opportunities for interactivity among their workforce to discuss corporate strategy and values; hence, allowing new team members to provide their own ideas of how to align with broader goals while providing veterans the chance to show off their knowledge as more than the manifestation of a staid set of financial reports and corporate strategy documents.  Peer-to-peer recognition platforms have been a particularly potent way to recognize the best of new and old ideas. 

The broader point is that age will not tell us what we need to create an impact as communicators. We see a workforce getting younger and we immediately make assumptions about their values and preferences, but The Curious Case of Benjamin Button reminds us that such perceptions can be dangerously wrong.  Those utility companies that begin by listening and asking questions and then creating opportunities for new voices to mix with old will ultimately transition best.  Consider this memorable exchange as you seek to adjust your communications to new workforce dynamics:

Daisy (Benjamin’s ongoing love interest): What’s it like growing younger?
Benjamin Button: Can’t really say, I’m always looking out of my own eyes.

So, utilities, what’s it like growing younger at your organization?

Related CEC Content:

Best Buy’s Employee Listening System

Principles to Drive Participation in Peer-to-Peer Networks