The Melcrum Blog

How's this for your first 100 days... [updated]

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

Barely into your fourth month as CEO and you announce talks on the biggest financial merger in Australian history, with the proposed new company being the biggest bank in Australia (which would demote the long-term #1 to #2 spot) and a combined employee force of over 35,000 including over 50 internal communicators - all in a time of disruptive and uncertain economics.

This was what happened here today as new Westpac CEO, Gail Kelly, in the job since February, announced merger talks with former employer, St. George. It's sent shares into overdrive.

And, it does seem that mergers are all the rage at the moment. Last week we had the collapse of the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo! deal. The week before we saw the Delta and Northwest Airlines announcement that will create the biggest airline in the world, and this week we'll also see policy holder approval for BUPA to buy MBF (Australia's largest healthcare fund) - creating the largest healthcare firm in Australia.

In times of uncertainty, is consolidation your best bet? Anyone care to have a bet on what's next?

Update: And so, 24 hours after talks were announced, the merger has been agreed. Mighty fast work.

Coping with barbecue abuse

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

I was having a chat recently with a friend whose company isn't best loved by the general public. The situation isn't all that great at the company either. Lots of in-fighting struggles were one factor, historical actions yet another.

What happens when my friend goes to events and someone asks who he works for? It can get pretty uncomfortable, so much so that he no longer answers the question directly and lies and mashes it into a simple, "I work in IT" (that's often enough to put most people off asking anything else). If they go further he uses the name of a fictional consulting company. In fact, his actual job is nothing to do with IT. One time he's even said he sells metal piping.

What if you work at Motor-Co, and a new acquaintance takes offense to an endless series of problems he's had with his car.

What if you work at Software-Co and another friend has endless problems with their computer. Sure it's not your fault, but the often unwarranted frustration is against the company. It rubs off and can often be demoralising (being verbally bashed at a barbecue is not my idea of a fun Sunday).

The effectiveness of services, products and companies we see and rely on every day is deeply ingrained in us. When your company is in the public spotlight, be it for good or bad reasons, there's a duty to prepare and train employees for these situations, correct?

Email activism, laziness, informal networks, and a whole load more

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

Since I chimed in one of his blog posts way back in 2007, fellow Sydney resident and pom Matt Moore and I have chatted frequently about social media, enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management. Matt is a knowledge manager at ASIC, soon to be independent consultant, and formerly IBM and Oracle, also being internal comms manager at the latter.

Last week, Matt invited me, Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon and IBM social media evangelist Luis Suarez onto a podcast interview, the focus of which was to be Luis's email detox program and the topic of email overload in general.

I don't think he calls himself one, but in my mind Luis is an "email activist". Someone taking the bull by the horns and shooting down unnecessary emails, demonstrating where and how you can defer conversations and host them on different channels - be it instant messenger, blogs, wikis and so on.

Luis has been on this detox for almost three months now, and by challenging each and every person who sends him one, he has managed to reduce the number of internal emails he receives by over a third. Pretty impressive. He's posted regularly on it, including charts (super organised!).

There are some notable points in the conversation:

• Luis works at IBM but email overload problems are just as apparent there. Luckily they have the software infrastructure to be able to change channels effectively.
• In reference to Gen Yers and other younger generations, email politics - the CC and BCC game - may become irrelevant. Luis says whenever people start playing that game with him he brings the conversation out into the open, saying there's no place for it in a professional environment, especially among your own team.
• Email is not appropriate for project development and collaboration. Not appropriate at all, yet we all do it.
• People are not lazy. Luis says in his detox experience, people think email is an easier option but when you look into it closely you're actually making more work for yourself. Again, I agree that people are not lazy in most instances. The laziness factor is surely symptomatic of a deeper problem, that is, we're just so damn used to working with email that digging out of this entrenched way of thinking is going to take some time - and concerted efforts by people such as Luis.

For me this conversation presented some clear examples of where social software tools can be of value to business:

• Improved, more fluid employee-to-employee communication.
• Easily searched and easily found project histories and conversations by way of using project blogs instead of chaotic email threads that branch off into dozens of fractured conversations.
• Rapidly developed project plans created and edited on wikis or simple shared, hosted documents, instead of sending round, and losing track of, endless word documents.

It's all pretty obvious, but when you hear about someone actively working to change the behaviours of a group of people, it's quite intriguing.

Also mentioned somewhere is IBM Atlas, a Lotus Notes-based software program that takes your IM conversations, blog posts etc. and analyzes the links and references to provide a social network analysis and determine topic experts and informal networks among employees. Identifying these networks is an increasingly important capability for businesses and the internal comms departments who, similar to marketers on the web, are looking to communicate by informal channels and determine influential people in an organization.

Much of the above comes down to improving, or better exploiting, communication and information - something Capgemini said last year could be worth £140 billion a year in the UK alone. I guess the hard part is finding more people like Luis.

Podcast files
Matt has listed the full index of the podcast and split it into three sections (originally planned for 30 minutes but went on for a fair bit longer). We spoke on Skype and the quality is not perfect in some places, but it's easy enough to keep up.

Part 1 (16:48, 4.0Mb)
01:00 - Luis describes his email detox moment in 2007.
03:10 - Luis challenges his email correspondents within IBM.
06:10 - How do you bring people round to the post-email world?
11:00 - Where is email appropriate?
13:00 - Instant messaging & social networking.

Part 2 (20:23, 4.8 Mb)
00:00 - Patrick raises the infrastructure question.
03:00 - Luis brings up wikis.
04:10 - Luis talks about discussing the detox with his team.
07:55 - The laziness issue.
09:00 - Do we love email?
10:00 - Alex mentions email overload.
11:00 - Generational issues.
13:00 - Patrick raises the politics question.
15:00 - Luis busts the whole thing wide open.

Part 3
00:00 - Alex agrees with Luis on email politics.
01:20 - Humans as political animals - in public or in private?
03:00 - Should we be selling tools or solutions?
06:00 - Applying social software to business problems.
08:00 - The email detox workout video.
10: 00 - Wrap up & next steps.

Will social media uptake see a hit in hard times?

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

There's a powerful contradiction in internal communications at the moment.

On the one hand, we see lots of stories on the topic of employee engagement. We're all very aware about it, it's been written about a lot on this blog, and it's even starting to gain traction in the mainstream press here in Australia and New Zealand. Engagement is everywhere. You may very well be sick of the term by now.

On the other hand, economic turmoil and downturn, job losses... could all signal the end of companies worrying about being employees being engaged, tough recruitment and.... spending time writing blogs, collaborating effectively or building networks on FaceSpace.

Earlier this week it was Melcrum's former head of research, Kieron Shaw, who first mentioned this, and it's kept me thinking.

In tough times it actually make more sense to be 100% focused on having the right people and talent, making sure everyone's "operating on the same page", building networks, and giving their all and more for their company. The added pressure of keeping your job gives everyone a kick in the right direction, but "do what you do even better and you'll emerge from the tunnel at some stage" seems to be the recommendation from experienced people.

Isn't the whole point of improved internal communications, ultimately, to improve the bottom line? Isn't all of the effort and work of improving employee-to-employee communication, collaboration, efficiency and more using social software also, ultimately, about improving the bottom line? In hard times should you not be looking to further improve these things?

There is an element if idealism here. I appreciate that. Belt tightening and "fat trimming" (a hideous phrase) are often necessities for shareholder driven companies facing profit warnings. Maybe the answer to the above is "yes, but the majority of our business can be better achieved if we focus on maintaining other areas."

However, if things were to go as bad as some are predicting, this will indeed be the first downturn/slowdown where the web and the richness of global communications, internally and externally, will be a critical factor in revival. There's even some suggestions that as fast as we end up in slowdown, we'll be able to communicate our way out of it because of the scale and quality of information available.

If your company and its employees disappear into a toughened shell, reducing collaboration and communication – and reducing innovation, engagement and business productivity as by-product – well, is that the right path to choose this time round?

The Police is a tough job, so why isn't employee engagement more researched and invested in?

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

There's quite a thought provoking news article on the Hub this week regarding engagement levels in the New Zealand Police.

Following an extensive, three-year Commission of Enquiry, there have been numerous recommendations for improvement including "improved internal communication" "improved, structured training" and the carrying out of an extensive engagement survey, for which they employed the help of Gallup at a cost of NZ$187,500.

From 5,000 respondents the results ranged from mixed to pretty bad, with half as many engaged employees and twice as many actively disengaged employees as the general working population of New Zealand. This put the NZP in the bottom quartile for Gallup clients surveyed worldwide.

Areas that Police officers were positive about included camaraderie, respect for colleagues, variety of the job, and the satisfaction of catching criminals.

Negatives included terrible leadership, workload, not receiving recognition for good work, lack of resources, poor future outlook of the organization itself and public perception of the job.

For this story I also managed to speak with a former officer who left the NZP several years ago having experienced much of the above.

"They've got a real culture problem and there's very little desire to think freely or try new solutions. There's also a real problem with the way senior officers are rewarded for cutting costs. If they can save money by using 4 people to do the job of 8 they're given huge bonuses, while individual hard work isn't rewarded at all. It doesn't take long for people to get fed up with working like that."

The former officer said the engagement survey was a good step, but should have been done before. "I left several years ago and since then most of the people I worked with have left too. Those that remain say it's a case of same old, same old."

I have had several experiences of friends and family being in the police force (or "service" as it's now been politically corrected to in the UK) and none of them have reported an easy life. There's also been more than one instance of a broken marriage from quite a small sample size. It's long, hard, unsociable hours, traumatic in many respects, and you socialise and share experiences with your colleagues more than anyone - at-home partners included. And then there's endless, endless paperwork which is terminally frustrating.

In organizations and jobs such as this the overall job satisfaction pros have to outweigh the day-to-day cons by some margin. You can imagine all the positives mentioned being pretty strong elements of an officer's psyche. Yet, being rewarded and having faith in your leadership to direct you (and the organization) must be more important here than anywhere else bar the armed forces.

You know what, though? This Gallup survey is reportedly the first ever specific, organization-wide employee engagement survey done by any police service in the world.

That's amazing, and not in a good way.

Employee magazine becomes sacrificial lamb

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

If you've been following the UK Black Belt Dojo recently you'll know that Steve Evans, Internal Comms manager at easyJet, has been the guest blogger for April.

Steve has done an excellent job and he's been posting about the battle to save the easyJet staff magazine, Fresh, which has undergone a fair bit of improvement recently but was in the crosshairs due to some difficult times for the airline.

Alas, Steve's battle has come to an end with the CEO's culling of the magazine, despite staff protestations and excellent feedback. Here's a list of Steve's posts on the topic:

1. Is the employee magazine uncool?

2. What would you do?

3. The end is near...

Chin up, Steve, and thanks for the superb and candid posts during your guest blogger spot.

Dead tree or USB?

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

We were discussing in the office today a development for the IABC's International Conference in New York this year (as normal, quite a few members from Team Melcrum are going).

It being 2008 and all of us being more concerned than ever about the damage we're doing to the planet, the IABC is not providing conference packs, well not the dead tree kind anyway...

Going Green: Protecting our environment The book of speaker handouts and conference directory will be available on a USB flash drive provided to all attenders, eliminating 365,000 pages of printed material, or approximately 43 trees.

The conference brochure uses paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and sourced from responsibly managed forests. Online conference registration and confirmation is offered, and exhibitor kits will be distributed electronically.

Flash drives only, saving 365,000 pages of printed material (or 43 trees) with paper from managed paper resources.

Mightily impressive, I think you'll agree.

Now, the question is, how will this go down with those attending? Do you love your weighty tome conference packs, or long for everything on USB? Do you love to write notes on the slides or, is a blank, A5 notepad and downloadable presentations (not even USB sticks) plenty enough thank you very much?

Answers on a postcard...

Spend $4 Billion? Do we really need to?

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

There was quite a lot of coverage last week on Forrester's new Enterprise 2.0 report, which states that corporate spending on blogs, wikis, RSS etc. could top $4 billion (internally and externally facing sites) in 2013.

Out of all the commentary on the topic, discussion on Euan Semple's blog and a column by Dennis Howlett seem to say it best.

From Euan:

"I find myself telling people more and more that if they are spending loads of money on this stuff they are almost certainly doing the wrong things."

And from Dennis Howlett:

"They [Forrester] make the implicit assumption that major players like IBM and Microsoft will subsume Web 2.0 software into existing collaborative offerings. They argue that a combination of factors such as commoditzation, legacy and the marketing muscle of the incumbents will serve to make Enterprise 2.0 products 'fade into the fabric of enterprise collaboration'.”

With all of the big software vendors gearing up and spewing forth collaborative software bolt-ons for their systems, you have to wonder if this is the way it's going to be. In 2006 and 2007 (perhaps looking back this was the time the first concrete suggestions for social media/software behind the firewall emerged), the overwhelming majority said that you don't need to spend fortunes on this technology. If there was one "rule" this was it: "Do it cheap".

Now, with the emergence of "Enterprise 2.0" and many people recognising the business value of social software tools, you can imagine the vendors licking their lips at the thought of other businesses needing yet another reason to spend lots of money.

Ultimately, many businesses are tied to the systems they have. Some of them are average, some are pretty good, some are fantastic. Whatever system you have it shouldn't necessarily mean you shouldn't look at some of the low-cost alternatives (Confluence, Wordpress etc), which can often do just as much if not more, and most of the open source/free/cheap applications are designed with the user and social software in mind – not adapted to do something, the way a lot of enterprise social software is.

Surely, testing out some free stuff on a secluded, secure server is easier to get approval for than a $100k system upgrade, not to mention less of a risk if it doesn't work.

McDonald's issues new uniforms in a "Mark of respect"

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

Designed by Bruce Oldfield – suits and blouses for managers, two-tone for the kitchen including polo shirts, and currently it's only for the 67,000 UK McDonald's employees, not in the States.

"A move to look more healthy" and, "pushing towards Paul Smith" believes Guardian assistant fashion editor Hadley Freeman, while McDonald's is quoted on the BBC as saying its new designer uniforms are "a mark of respect for staff in a challenging job".

What do you think? Is this but a small part of making employees feel good about their work? I've never really thought Macca's clothing was bad. Out of the ones on the left I'd say one looks alright the other less so, but it's certainly not the worst public corporate uniform by any means. My first ever work experience slot when at school, aged 14, was at a supermarket. The polyester trousers, lairy orange check shirt, and matching polyester waistcoat..... well, it wasn't something you'd want to wear down the pub.

Hadley Freeman could be right. With its push towards healthier meals and improving public perception, a new snazzy uniform may certainly reflect positively on the business, but it has to be part of a bigger puzzle, right?

Case in point: One of my favourite Australian companies is Virgin Blue, the interstate and NZ wing of Virgin. Superb service, good prices, a sensible check-in system, happy staff and pretty cool uniforms (stylish, fitted white shirts on top for both males and females). Virgin Blue's culture is reflected in everything they do and it's pretty impressive.

McDonald's is clearly making long-term, company-wide changes and improvements in order to maintain itself. It will be interesting to see what else they have in store for their employees.

(Picture via the BBC)

In-flight calls not going too well...

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

An article on The Register indicates that Air France's trial of in-flight mobile calls is experiencing a few difficulties. Given my previous thoughts on the issue I can't say I'm too sad about it.

The New York Times reports that Air France passengers were able to make calls, though most had to make a couple of attempts and incoming calls failed to connect at all.

But even when a call was connected the quality was far from ideal, with one passenger being told: "It sounds like I'm talking to a small robot" - which is a concern as bad sound quality may result in passengers raising their voices, and thus generating exactly the kind of nuisance that has prompted Lufthansa to say it won't be deploying the technology.

Teething problems obviously, and no doubt they'll be worked out as the technology improves (Qantas is using a different manufacturer also).

It does make me wonder, though. Do people really want this service, seriously? Will people's ambivalence to the idea become fury once they've been on a couple of flights with 50 one-sided conversations going on at once?

Some people don't seem to think so. Coming at the idea with a positive approach is Ryanair's head of communications:

"We are not concerned about the noise because our cabins have never been quiet places. People are constantly coming up and down the aisles selling scratch cards or food and we believe there is a market for this."

I would honestly like to see some proper, large sample research on this. I don't believe people want in flight calls, not the vast majority anyway, and those that do aren't really thinking about it properly.

And, that business about scratch cards – it has to be a misquote, right?!