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I am as guilty as anyone of listening to the rumour mill. Information just seems so much more exciting when it’s a little bit illicit.  Whether it’s while you are making a cup of coffee (or tea for us Brits), grabbing lunch, or passing each other in the corridor, these informal exchanges with colleagues are the most powerful flow of information in your company. So, who are the most influential nodes in your employee network? How can we leverage the conversations already going on for our strategic advantage?

CEB has been partnering with Rob Cross, an expert in all things to do with social networks, to better understand the answers to some of these questions. Rob has developed a scientific approach of mapping influence across organizations and highlighting those individuals who hold disproportionate power – those who excite and build energy, and those who kill it – within employee networks. We are excited to host a webinar with Rob on the 20^th July to share some of the themes from his work.  CEC members can register for the webinar today.

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I’m a strong believer that Corporate Communications should lead a company’s intranet strategy.  Unlike other possible leaders in IT, HR, or the business units, communicators highly value—and are measured on—employee engagement.  The intranet has quickly evolved into a key instrument to achieving this engagement through functionalities that promote connectivity, collaboration, and productivity among employees.

That said, in most organizations, the Communications function has yet to embrace the mindset and activities necessary to transform the intranet from “digital landfill” to “employee productivity tool.”  Communicators may say they want the intranet to boost employee productivity and engagement, but then focus on superficial fixes, primarily improving the intranet’s function as an internal news distribution service.   Sharing internal news is important, yes.  Optimizing the intranet to do only that, however, is short-sighted.

How do you know if your heart is in the right place, but your activities are not? Ask yourself, “Do we…

• Focus improvements on the “look and feel” of the intranet—such as logos, layouts, typefaces, buttons, boxes, menus, etc.?
• Rely on annual “intranet satisfaction surveys”?
• Track and depend on broad metrics such as clicks and views on news stories? Read More »

As the English football team returns home with their tail between their legs, you can hear a collective sigh of relief from most of us tortured fans. We no longer have to go through the anguish and frustration that is watching a team of individually talented (and very highly paid!!) footballers fail to gel as a team.  The World Cup has yet again reminded me of how important teamwork and peer support are in driving success.  The anxiety felt by the millions of England supporters on sofas and in pubs everywhere is probably a similar anxiety employees have felt with all the cuts, layoffs and change companies have been going through over the past 2 years—a sense that everyone is looking out for number one and not each other.

So how are engagement levels faring as we start to see the first green shoots of recovery in the economy? I took a look at CLC Human Resources’ engagement survey across over 145 organizations and 204,000 employees worldwide and picked out a couple of trends that show that we’re not out of the woods yet:

• Engagement is still at risk—With 21.6% of employees in the “disengaged” category, it’s clear that this is a problem with real roots. The low levels of discretionary effort coupled with high levels of intent to stay are causing very real performance issues for a lot of companies. Read More »

Still in need of vacation plans? Come to DC!

Summer can be a corporate communicator’s worst nightmare. Naturally, employees are less engaged in their 9-5 during the summer months. We’ve all got:

• family vacations to enjoy (endure);
• baseball games to watch (have you seen this kid Strasburg?!);
• barbecues to host;
• and, for we DC folk, jazz in the sculpture garden to sweat through.

This month is especially challenging for you, corporate communicators. Beyond the typical noise and distraction, you’re competing with the most watched event on the planet—the World Cup. Look to your right and left. Your colleagues who suddenly have earphones on in the morning are not listening to soothing, motivating Enya. They’re likely plugged into ESPN360.com or Univision to follow the action. Basically, no one is listening to you.

So take a break, right? Let people have fun for a few months, and reboot your engagement efforts when the sun starts to set earlier, the kids are back in school, and Q4 madness is in full swing?

Wrong. (I humbly suggest.) Read More »

Springtime means new energy, new chances, and a fresh outlook.  I’m a sucker for spring cleaning—and pretty much any opportunity for a new start.  (Case-in-point: I was the Catholic school kid who actually looked forward to going to confession.)  Spring in DC especially brings out this tendency in me—the cherry blossoms are in full bloom and the sun is finally shining after a very snowy and cold winter!

I think spring is also a great time for Communications to do a bit of cleaning and starting-over. To inspire your spring cleaning spree, I wanted to give you a few tips and ideas:

Spring Cleaning Checklist

• Clean out your list of projects. If you’re like many communicators, you have a habit of piling on activities and to-do’s without asking yourself, “Is this just clutter?  What’s the value of doing this?”  To strip out the inessentials, just copy this easy idea from PepsiCo.  Each year PepsiCo‘s Head of Communications challenges staff to fill out a worksheet with activities that they believe no longer merit Communications’ support.  This simple exercise has “turned off” ~15% of work volume for their function.  CEC members can access that worksheet here (page 15). Read More »

In retrospect, it seems pretty funny that social media’s permanence was debated in the not-so-distant past.  (“It’s a trend.” “This will all blow over.” “Make it stop.” Etc.)  It’s clear today that social media has created a paradigm shift in how people communicate—and consequently businesses as well. It’s important for Communications to evolve with the times, of course, and CEC has seen quite a few members make fantastic use of blogs, video, Twitter and wikis both internally and externally.  That said, I’m personally fascinated by the notion that communication behaviors originating in social media can create a ripple effect on in-person communication.  So why not get creative in adapting our in-person employee communications to better tap into the same motivators that draw people to social media?

In that spirit, here are 3 social media features that can be re-imagined for the “real world” of any employee—wired or not:

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By Lisa Schievelbein

Deep down, every communicator is a voyeur.

 How do I know?  For the last few months, Kayleigh and I have been analyzing the organizational design of CEC member teams, and let me tell you—communicators just love peeking at org charts. They have different reasons for this, but I think one is particularly powerful: a hope that some formula for success can be found in the neat boxes and lines on a PowerPoint slide.  (As you can imagine, the let-down factor is inevitable.)
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Economics writer Tim Harford wrote an interesting opinion piece in the Financial Times last week, urging readers to “Listen to the bearers of bad news.”  Though politicians were the primary examples, the piece’s fundamental message—“any leader needs frank advice, and the biggest obstacle to receiving it is often the leader himself”—applies equally to business. Harford says as much, citing the reality television show Undercover Boss.

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For $3 million dollars per 30-second spot, Super Bowl advertisers gave us Betty White, talking babies (again), Danica Patrick (again), a Google wedding, and more late-night wars (why would Leno appear in a competitor’s commercial?), among other sophomoric hijinks. Those were my favorites in an otherwise uninspiring line-up. But even when our marketing brethren aren’t so funny, I see several ways that communicators can help their organizations get more out of any significant investment in advertising: Read More »

Frustrated by employees who refuse to use the intranet? Tired of writing news stories that employees never read? Ready to give up on the intranet altogether and revert back to email blasts? (Someone out there raises a hand.)

Believe me, after 50+ conversations with CEC intranet managers, I can tell you that you’re not alone. I’d also suggest that the right approach to improve usage rates takes a page from the Marketing handbook: think of employees as your intranet’s customers, and learn more about what they want from this product. A great technique is a user profile exercise—describing clusters of employees based on how they currently (or could) use the intranet to get their jobs done.

Last week, Rick and I hosted a webinar on this topic, alongside a truly leading-edge practitioner—Jamie Parry, Manager of Intranet and Electronic Media at Chevron. Jamie talked about Chevron’s process for clustering 62,000 employees into 10 primary groups—such as “New Talent,” “On the Road,” and “International: Unwired”—whose goals and behaviors on the intranet are similar. From that analysis, Jamie is focusing on the most important intranet improvements that will drive intranet usage among these groups. Pretty cool, huh? If you want to try something similar, here’s a quick guide to his process: Read More »