Employee engagement - A lesson from 100 year ago

You know how sometimes the most obvious things are looking you in the face? I've been looking for examples of employee engagement stories. The bad stuff, and I mean really bad, cringeworthy examples of ill conceived communications, the well intentioned ideas that backfired or the complete and utter miscalculation of some of the bosses, we have all probably come across at some point. You know exactly what I am talking about. And, of course, to get a bit of balance, the stories about the truly amazing stuff too.

And then I remembered..... how could I forget? 

I am a direct product of one of the greatest employee engagement stories of all time. The story that created one of the world's largest companies and boxes full of household name brands that have become intertwined with virtually everybody's life. If you having been thinking that employee engagment is about just being being a bit more  cuddly, or that it  might be a 'nice thing' to put a few bits of gym kit in the basement for your staff, o rmaybe put in a shower, I am here to tell you that you really don't know the half or it. 

I am a child of a village called Port Sunlight, created over 100 years ago to look after the workers for the Lever Brothers soap factory, by one of the greatest social philanthopists the commercial and industrial world has ever see. It is still there, in all its pristineness, just a twenty minute drive from the Pier Head in Liverpool. A magical, inspiring place of space and calm that sets the benchmark for how to treat and nuture your talent; your employees. 


Growing up in the village a bit like going through the wardrobe to Narnia It was just a perfect place to grow up but, more than that,  it raised my expectations and lifted my eyes to new horizons and, maybe most of all provided me along with the humanitarian lessons, that a staff’s welfare isn't just a nice thing to do and think about, but has a bottom line effect that can help create, and this is not to any degree hyperbole, an empire. The Unilever Group now includes the ultra brands of the likes of Lynx and Ben & Jerry’s and employs hundreds of thousands across the Globe. All because of palm oil and one man's vision of how to add value to it.

Today the village is still very much as it was. Although there are naturally more cars it still is remarkably peaceful. The wide vistas, pavements and green spaces are all still their, manicured and coiffured. The buildings, columns, walls and the numerous nods to a world history of architectural styles are devoid of any graffitti, anywhere. At the centre of the village, the hub holding the glorious spikes of its structure together, is the stunning war memorial, one of the most glorious and moving examples of the art form built anywhere.  

The outdoor swimming pool, heated to almost tropical delights by the factory, in which thousands of us Sunlight children learnt to swim, is now a garden centre. But pretty well everything else is still there as it was when it was built 120 years ago - although the slopes we rode our bikes up and down and the statues and fountains we climbed over, seem a lot smaller these days.

There are hundreds of stories that feature the founder, William Hesketh Lever and his wife Elizabeth, and what they did on a day-to-day basis for the welfare of their staff, but I think one story epitomises what they may have felt about what was the right thing to do.

Imagine it is the early 1900's. The factory has blossomed since its opening in 1887, and new demand means they are opening their first factory overseas in Brussels, so what does Lever do?

He shuts the factory and the village for a weekend. He takes 2000, yes that's 2000 of them, on a trip. That's pretty well everyone in the village. They are used to the paid for annual trips to indulge in the delights of Blackpool, the garden parties in their own home, the birthday presents for every child, often delivered by Elizabeth herself. This time, they are given an adventure few would ever dream of. The employees are all given colour coded tickets to board specially hired colour coded trains, (you could do that in those days), to take them to the English Channel, then by ferry to Ostend, where this small victorian army is collected up by more painted trains. On their arrival in Brussels that are wined and dined at a string of restaurants across the city and then given a tour in a fleet of 300 wagons and landaus before the opening ceremony that evening. The village's own 40 piece orchestra play to entertain them.

This was in 1900. Can you imagine challenges of this logistical feat? They did have the help of another famous company, that is still going strong, one Thomas Cook, but even so? Can you imagine asking your board to write that cheque? And why did he do it?

It was I believe pretty simple really - he realised that, 100 years before we ‘invented’ the concept of work life balance, 60 years before the UK’s welfare state and free health care, 100 years before the creation of the EU and maximum working week directives, that the single most important factor in creating a happy and willingly cooperative and productive workforce was to build within it a sense of belonging.  And he also was always mindful that you cannot build anything with people who do not care and that his own personal wealth arose from their labours.

This wasn't just a one off either. Change is not a single event. The list of events and goes on and on. I have scores of stories about the ideas and initiatives, of his innovation and sometimes down right cunning; how he introduced a maximum 36 week for  all female staff - this was in the 1890’s for heavens sake - free medical treatment in their own hospital, workers education programmes, it just goes on and on. Although undoubtedly driven by pure benevolence, he wasn’t just being Father Christmas, it was also had a pragmatic bottom in too. Something he was very, very aware of. 

He makes you feel a tad of ashamed with our miserly efforts, and IC managers worrying ourselves to death about whether the intranet works.

History is often a useful reference, but don't we we all need a 'root's story anyway?


Please feel to post your example of the good or bad internal communications or employee engagement   below,  anonymously if you like or give is us link to something, or just share.

Blogging About

I’m having a great time right now, putting together the final chapter on my book, and the workshop that goes with it, which looks at communication strategies and tools for innovation amplification in an organisation. What I call Speed Duck Herding.

It has a little bit of everything. Basically, I walk readers through a four-step system for improving their internal communications generally but specifically for ideation and new knowledge. The same ideas work for any communication goal if I’m honest, but as it is supposedly about creating and promoting innovation I thought we best focus on that.

1. Research. This is the essential but sometimes tedious part of finding out what people probably already know or suspect and would normally pay a huge consultant's fee just to have a sanity check. What you get back is ' nobody in the warehouse has a clue what the sale departments are doing'. ( Sales don't know what they are doing anyway so no surprises there) That sort of stuff: we do introduce the concept of simplifying it using a Map of Engagement™ and lines in the sand.

2. Planning. The even more tedious part which lays out what we are going to do although it is basically is the same for each programme, just the copy and paste and change the name of the project. It is that generic. I can actually write it in a paragraph but most people seem to think that they need 50 pages of analysis and justification for any document to be worth anything. They don't feel as if they are getting their money's worth unless there are at least five appendixes. Common sense is as common as a politician’s apology.

3. Implementation. Now this is the fun part, where we talk about the development of the stories and beautiful questions, the ways to get them out there into the social software and all the social media, intranets and all the fun stuff that really floats my boat.

4. How are we doing then? The necessary stuff about measurement- to look at gaps, impact and essentially gives the bullets for the gun that gets the budget from the board for the next phase.

I’ve passed this new the chapter on to a few colleagues for their input. I had thought that the implementation and soclal media part would be of most interest, but I'm surprised at how hungry people are for information on the 1, 2 and 4 processes.

And, as usual with my writings, I'm learning as much as I am teaching. For example, one of my network was telling me about what is happening in their company were they have a policy where any employee can blog . . linked to their intranet, (clever people) .and about 30 % of them are bloggophiles which is a pretty remarkable take up. They use them to share information, swap ideas, get the word out about something, anything. From baby news, holiday and car sharing to asking and looking for specific solutions. All sorts of reasons.

But their bosses are using it in a different way I hadn’t heard of before. They are a multi site operation; have 200+ retail outlets and are using a variation of the 'management by walking about principle'- a really effective tool started in the 80’s and used with great effect by managers with imagination. Definitely so in this case, as rather than burning petrol, they are popping on with the odd comment, to employee's blog sites. They read the comments, and see what people are saying and add to the discussion. Just a brilliant use of social networking to get a real dialogue going throughout an organisation that bypasses the upward and sideways filters that so often get in the way of the real story.

The process has been gaining momentum on the back of just one story of it working in practice. One casual employee, a student who just worked a few hours a week, posted on their shop blog site a low level complaint that the stock was not being labeled clearly enough and the codes were all over the place. Wouldn’t it be easier to put a photograph of the content on the outside?

Operations director talked to their suppliers about labeling, and just asked the question, was it actually doable? And it was so. Now it is being phased in across their suppliers as part of prequalification. This saves them hours of frustration, clipboards, climbing up and down ladders to read code at 10 pt size from ten feet. It makes the retail managers jobs a whole lot easier more fun and requires less training. Its is so easy to misread a 12 figure code number so they are adding images to their ERP system and stock control and ordering system. You do it for your client on your web site, why not for your own colleagues? Of course the IT department had a kitten fit about bandwidth- No Surprises there then) Derrrr. . God knows how much money time and effort it saves them but importantly it shows how sometimes the obvious can be overlooked. The scary part is that this idea that would have been missed. The Saturday girl comes up with the beautiful answer.

Now I remember one CEO who used to complain to me that 'his door was always open' but no-one ever came through it and I was trying to explain, tactfully, that the door works the other way too. He has legs. His staff, no matter how affable he thinks he is are just plain scared. That is how it works. The beauty of blogging about is that with just a few minutes every day any manager get a feel for the mood, problems and general well being of her of his ecosystem. Identify problems and eliminate some of those worst practices that have a disproportionate effect on company morale. You can’t be everywhere but the benefit of employee blogging gives the opportunity to at least have the opportunity to absorb and understand in a way that zillions of reports and PowerPoint files and spreadsheets just cannot do. And most importantly to provide a continuous feedback and constant noise rather than an annual engagement survey which is basically a historic document as soon as you receive it. But you have to start somewhere.

Of course, it will only work if employees are allowed to blog in the first place . . . so it probably won’t catch on anytime soon.

But I’m going to have to add another bloody chapter now, just in case it does.

Facing the face to face communication challenge.

Employee engagement Part 2
Extract from Defrag your business

Change management's biggest challenge is inertia. I’m not telling you anything that isn’t blindingly obvious here. I can’t count the number of times I have wanted to run from a meeting room screaming “why don’t they get it?’ But we always have to remember it is a fair and human position. They haven’t heard or really probably listened to your story yet. Or, more likely we just haven’t told it well enough. We are all guilty of making assumptions, it is just part of the human condition for the majority of us and is heavily weighted by the simple fact that bad news has far more speed and penetration in transmission than good news. And it will come from lots of different directions. One of Steven Wright’s, my favourite comedian, questions is ‘What is the speed of dark?’ I can tell him that its it is twice the speed of light.

The key skill in any face to face communications in my opinion is in employing techniques to challenge, as gently as possible, the assumptions people have made.

This is hugely important in coaching the news deliverers, the steps in the cascade and vital in any internal communication or change mangement process.

Over the years my colleagues and I developed what we call our ‘Ass’ breaking questions. What do I mean?
Well, before we start though bear in mind that:

Some people make assumptions.
Some people speak without thinking.
Some people are full of BS.
Some people are nothing but talk.
Some people use invalidated, vague, baseless arguments to prove their points.

We have to use techniques to challenge them - to identify the hidden assumptions and avoid mindless acceptance.

You do this for two reasons:

1. YOU gain clarity on their motives, intentions and beliefs.

And probably more importantly

2. THEY gain an opportunity to restate, reform and rethink their ideas. In other words you give them an opportnity to find a dignified way out.


Here are seven examples of common situations and dialogues where you can use them, some are painfully obvious:

THEM: “I can’t do that!”
YOU: “Why not?” or “Says who?”

THEM: “I never thought I’d say this, but…”
YOU: “Why did you never think you’d say that?”

THEM: “Well, they say that…”
YOU: “Who’s ‘they’?”

THEM: “So, is this your full time job?”
YOU: “Yes. Why do you ask?”

THEM: “I’ve been calling you all week and I’d really like to get together to talk about a business opportunity!”
YOU: “What is your positive motivation for wanting to meet with me?”

THEM: “I heard/read it was terrible…”
YOU: “Who’d you hear that from?” or “Where’d you read that?”

THEM: “I dunno, this seems pretty expensive?”
YOU: “Compared to what?”

Here are a few others you may want to think about using; Some require a little more skill in presenting as you can imagine.

1. Is that always the case?
2. How do you measure that?
3. How did you arrive at that?
4. So?
5. Why do you believe that?
6. What do you plan to do with this feedback
7. Why?
8. What’s (really) bothering you?
9. What’s your point?
10. When did you decide this?
11. What would happen if you didn’t?
12. What’s your proof?
13. How do you know that’s true?
14. Where’s the evidence?
15. Are you sure that’s true?
16. What stops you??
17. Can you prove it?
18. Why did I receive this email?
19. Why do you think that happened?
20. Why is that so important to you?
21. Why was I put on this list?

All these questions, if the delivery is right:

Catches their attention.
Causes them to stop and think.
Causes them to clarify their remarks.
Causes the REAL motives and beliefs to surface.
Causes you to better understand where they’re coming from.

The delivery is all important. Framing these in anything that remotely suggests an aggressive or condescending manner will have the opposite effect.

The point is that we should always

Challenge irrational thoughts.
Challenge programmed knowledge.
Challenge people's positions.

It helps both parties. Vocalising an argument is the best way any individual can fully come to grips with almost any situation and reach that state of acceptance, the warm fuzzy feeling, which needs to precede their buy in to your idea.

Let me ask you, if you have any other 'Ass breakers' then please post them here. I’m running out of questions with one of my current clients. For them the sky is pink and the sea is made of custard and that is view the CEO and it filters across the whole of the organisation. If he is reading this listening he knows who he is. Sometimes, even with all these little skills and tricks and experience you just have to shake your head and walk into the sunset.

Copyright Rainmaker 2008

Give them new eyes, not new landscapes

Employee engagement Part 1
Extract from ‘Defrag your business’.

I’ve been working on one truly inspirational and breathtaking web based project for over eight months now. It is just mind boggling and humbling to come in every day and see what the boys and girls have achieved. No-one can say that web technology hasn’t taken massive leaps forward over the last few years. Except, that is, if they look at one specific area. Intranets. Almost without exception they look exactly the same as they did five years ago. While the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true Web-based applications are part of our daily out-of-office lives we haven’t seemed to connect to the benefits and opportunities they provide. Sure, they may have added a few tweaks and funky functions but actually fundamentally not much has changed.

I find this both bewildering and exciting. Exciting as being in exactly this business it presents me and frankly my business with tremendous opportunity. Bewildering because the power and potential is passing by with scarcely a nod or glance.

Intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see lots of them, I’m working on three of these audits at this moment. With some glorious exceptions that I can count with my socks off there is little to suggest that intranet teams, (where the intranet it is actually seen as a key lubricant for internal comms programmes), are utilising the true power of intranets and adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” Web to develop the concept of two way communication and engagement and all the fluffy pink stuff we put into our mission statements.

Sure, forums, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto some intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us, the social bookmarking Web site. The opportunities for social computing applications on intranets are huge.

Some enterprising companies are starting to use Wikipedia to develop an in house internal knowledge banks.( arguably more useful is actually a failure bank but that’s another story) These tools are used so not much for communication but stitches into the ‘at least we know where it is when we want to find it’ principle. But the true asset value of a company is its knowledge repository. It is 60% and more or your net worth if you believe Harvard Business School. Can you think of a better reason than giving the management of knowledge flow, its retention and acquisition in your organisation anything less than 150% support and making it your number one priority? I can’t think of any either but amazingly although Internal communications, innovation and differentiation features in pretty well every survey of corporate priorities, and even more annual reports, few pay it more than lip service. Why? Because it is hard to do and few know really where to start. ‘We tried the intranet thing but it doesn’t work ‘is probably the most often used phrase I hear. So you give up do you? Or, do you just get better at it?
The commonest .net2 deployment are blogs used by collaboration and project documentation but even these only have even now a tentative deployment. Which is frankly bonkers.

Imagine, just for one dizzying moment, that the CEO has a blog for a new product and then, just imagine the impact and discussion arising from 40 sales people dealing with the inevitable launch issues and how quickly these issues would be flagged, fixed and customer facing people made aware of solutions.

Imagine him feeding back by video with a small thank you and identification and appreciation. It really isn’t hard this stuff but lets not get too giddy here.

As I keep saying, there is nothing common about common sense.

So, why have so many intranets become covered in dust and moss?

Frankly, because it is not that big signal on the corporate radar simply because on the face of it there are few metrics that can get put on the spreadsheet for the weekly meeting that get the juices going. It is true to say that the benefits (and costs) are largely hidden. But if you have to pick one try just this one. Staff retention. Then look at the incurred costs for loss of knowledge and recruitment and training. Now that is truly scary. It can wipe of the profit for a business unit in no time. One loss alone will pay for the tweaks in the intranet that may (I would say probably) alleviate much of the frustration in allowing them to do their jobs effectively. Which, if you are still awake, is cited as the number one reason individuals leave jobs

If you can’t measure it then you can’t do anything about it. Its blindingly obvious and one of the true clichés in business. I don’t know why I even have to mentioned it. This position is reinforced by the often prevailing view that it is just good money chasing after bad. The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now? Many executive teams, optimistic about the intranet’s potential in its early days, now wonder what all the noise was about. While there certainly are productivity tools online—that’s just a matter of common practice in the workplace anyway—the innovation and the knowledge sharing that was supposed to flow from the intranet just never materialised.

Why? Well we could point to a range of contributing factors. Actually just pick one and you won’t be far wrong. Ill advised planning, design, not enough thought given to search and findability but in most cases its just simply down one major description often made at the beginning of conception- will will be its ownership. Who looks after it, nutures it and cultivates it. For the answer to that see Chapter 8. ‘What does a knowledge manager manage then?
’
Being more specific it is easy to blame IT departments. Too easily in most cases. Now I’m going to stick up for them, well for a minute anyway. It’s a s**t job. That is why they bring their own sandwiches, it is their one small pleasure. (Its really so they can play war games at lunch and not leave their desks). I

t is a close tie as to whether HR or IT departments get more bad raps. To be fair to IT they have probably invested time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and, unsurprisingly, are in no hurry to move in a different direction. They haven’t had their lunch yet anyway. Intranet software vendors aren’t exactly blameless either. Few are using .NET2, most use ASP. or ASP.net at best. which is five year old technology. Do you get the theme here? I can’t help thinking what is going to happen next few years and when are they going to make that leap. And then we haven’t even mentioned Sharepoint!!! Or bless it, Lotus Notes and making that compatible with their new ERP system.

Corporate IT staff and corporate coms staff, some of them, anyway—are largely under informed, if we can put it delicately, about what’s happening on the Web and often have a blind-spot that something they use daily actually could be relevant to them. They hold the belief, justified or not that ‘Our company would never sanction that’ so they don’t suggest or push their ideas forward. Its a self fulfilling prophecy and a depressing spiral. And any way, the IT department should be doing that. Who should be keeping on top of this - Can it really be the IT department’s responsibility, most of which are stretched pretty thin just keeping the meter fed, printers on line, drying out the latte in sales reps keyboards and coping with Mr. Gates First Tuesdays. And beating their previous best in Call of Duty 4.

Many communicators figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken? An interesting view from the delusions of competence. How do they know??? By definition, at least the ones I know, change is not discrete but is perpetual motion. It’s a classic mistake to look at the project having an end and walk away from it when it goes live and not put continuity and development factored in to its ongoing lifecycle. If it is put down on a shelf you can’t be surprised if it just gathers dust and gets ignored.

Trust in communications is developed through consistency, relevancy timeliness and accuracy. One intranet I recently was asked to look at had not had anything added to it for three years. That is not an intranet, it is a historic document. Is it any surprise I some times have to run out of meetings screaming.


Then we start talking numbers as you or somebody else from higher food chain undoubtedly obligingly point out. That there already has been an investment that been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for. It’s difficult for organisations to write off significant investments in order to start from scratch. But that doesn’t mean you should persevere with old tools tactics otherwise we would all still be pushing paper memos around. It is interested to see the metrics applied to measure its affect, success or return on investment. Generally it’s a big fat none, which is just plane daft. Its tricky yes, but hardly impossible.

The really infuriating thing is that none of this has to be expensive either to implement. SOAS such as Basecamp to name but one, or my current favourite Page flakes which has now demoted my I-Google as my home page costs peanuts or less than that compared to your ERP or SAP introduction. The effect though is disproportionately positive

There are some practical limitations too and by far the trickiest for most organisations, both public and private sector, is struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are an anathema to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content. But is that what they should be their role anyway? Is there an argument for loosening the approval processes in key areas? I’d argue, yes absoblinkinlutely yes. Should senior management really be a feared of any possible negatives and shouldn’t they be aware of them and manage them anyway? We live in a world of 360 degree reviews and employee engagement surveys, you carry out them of course don’t you? You don’t? Well you are in trouble then.

Or maybe you subscribe to the view I saw recently in a post from an HR VP which was a thinly disguised ‘You should be bloody lucky to work for us, just get with it’. And then to sweeten the message, guess what, we are having a pajama day next week just to show you how cool and cute we are. Erm, yeah. Really? Then I’d polish my CV. You will be needing it when your competition cream you into history or you get ‘outsourced’.

Just ask for this stuff, what can they say? No? Its just a word and won’t kill you. I’m hoping here that you actually have some form of innovation and idea management built into your intranet. No? Then start reading at the top again and pass this onto your boss.

Copyright Rainmaker 2008