The Melcrum Blog

Employee engagement 2.0 has arrived courtesy of Google

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

If you thought Google employees were the most engaged in today’s cutthroat and recession-riddled corporate world, think again. Despite receiving more than 700,000 applications a year to work for the planet’s most forward thinking Web 2.0 outfit, the company has seen hiring slow, been forced to cut back on some of its infamous perks such as afternoon tea and its annual ski trip and has even seen some of its most talented Googlers jump ship to competitors such as Twitter and Facebook.

So what has it gone and done? Well being the most advanced and innovative algorithmic genius in its class it’s gone and done what it’s best at doing - created an algorithm - but this time has taken employee engagement 2.0 to an entirely new and never-before-seen level. It has produced an algorithm so advanced and so ingrained in the employment and engagement process that it can supposedly crunch employee data such as appraisals, salaries and promotion history and decipher who among its staff is the most unhappy and who among the 20,000 engineers, developers and nerds it employs is the most willing to leave. Not only does it know every move we as web users make online, it can now pry into the work-life habits of its own and work out who should stay and who should go. It’s hard to fathom but Google’s boffins know the answers before their staff do.

Currently in a test phase, the system, if proved effective – and it would have to be faultless considering the information it gathers and the consequences it could have on people’s lives – could forever change the way businesses and their internal communications departments around the world vet and engage or even dismiss their employees.

The web giant has so far, however, discovered one key trend. Those of its employees that feel underused are more likely than others to leave. But the further it looks into the problem and examines employee reviews and pay histories the more I can imagine it will uncover more detail about how its workers think, behave, and react to certain emotions and situations. The key element will be to determine whether or not this research is effective in engaging more staff, unearthing those that are unhappiest and crucially, considering the economic times we are living in, what result this has on the bottom line. Could this be the ultimate tool, the Holy Grail, that we’ve all been looking for, to finally and accurately measure how we can effectively engage our employees and return a healthy profit in order to keep share and stakeholders happy? The possibilities, as with anything this company seems to do, are endless.

Google’s engagement algorithm – why now?

• Crunches data from employee reviews, promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula to identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to leave.
• Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula that is still being tested.
• Google says the algorithm has already identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.
• Current and former Googlers said the company is losing talent because some employees feel they can’t make the same impact as the company matures.
• Google's algorithm has been described by one HR commentator as “helping the company get inside people's heads even before they know they might leave”.
• In recent weeks several top executives has left the company including advertising sales boss Tim Armstrong and display-advertising chief David Rosenblatt, Doug Bowman, engineering director Steve Horowitz and search-quality chief Santosh Jayaram, both of which have switched sides to Facebook and Twitter.

Best job in the world campaign signs up for Oz SCM

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

It’s what many of us strive for all our working lives, need to fulfill our ambitions, and hope to secure so that one day we can tell our children that we were there. No, not a change to dress up as a clown and compete on Deal or No Deal, I’m talking about getting the job of your dreams.

It happened to one British man last month, who from a pool of 34,000 hopeful global applicants, won the opportunity of a lifetime. Branded and marketed as ‘the best job in the world’, Ben Southall, a 34 year-old charity fundraiser from Petersfield in Hampshire, became the new caretaker of an Australian tropical island. Sound idyllic? Well it gets even better. His six-month £73,500 (AUS$110,000) contract includes a three-bedroom beach home, a swimming pool and golf cart, while his job description is to simply explore the islands of the Great Barrier Reef, swim, snorkel, make friends with the locals and generally enjoy the tropical Queensland climate and lifestyle. He will, however be expected to do some work, and in the true spirit of the Web 2.0 age we live in, will report back to Tourism Queensland (TQ) and the world via blogs, a photo diary, video updates and interviews. And this is where the business brains at TQ have come into their own.

Amid the worldwide recession tourism in Oz has fallen downhill faster than a jet propelled Koala on roller skates but this campaign has already generated massive amounts of publicity, PR and interest all around the world, and all for very little expenditure. And from an internal communications point of view it has served as a vital tool to boost employee engagement within the organisation.

More importantly, Tourism Queensland has agreed to speak about its great success story at our SCM Summit Australia on 15th to 17th September 2009 in Sydney.

In the session later in the year you’ll hear about:

• How the campaign spawned around 200,000 blogs, 43,000 news stories and over AUS$120 million worth of publicity.
• How the campaign was developed.
• How social media channels were used to spark global interest.
• How external interest was used to create engagement and enthusiasm inside the organisation.
• How Tourism Queensland has re-energised its culture and brand.
• How to harness successful brand initiatives to drive employee engagement.
• How to make the most of social media tools and channels.
• How to equip senior leaders to manage intense media interest and act as brand ambassadors.

Are you working on a groundbreaking campaign, if so we want to know? And what, in your opinion have been the best employee engagement campaigns of recent years? Let me know by either replying to this post, by emailing me at james.bennett@melcrum.com or by Twittering to @Melcrum

Is Facebook dead as an internal comms tool?

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

Opinions on social media are constantly divided within the internal comms profession, and as communicators fall into two very distinct dinner parties.

We are either tank top wearing old schoolers, who haven’t ventured musically further than The Everly Brothers and stoically maintain that by overly focusing on Facebook, for example, we are ignoring the core values of comms. Or we fall into the new generation of 1980s retro dressed twentysomethings who, when they’re not Tweeting on their iPhones or downloading a Ricky Gervais podcast, tell their more traditional peers that they are in fact missing out on the biggest evolution in communications since Sir Tim Berners Lee decided to turn the Filofax into the World Wide Web.

I questioned our loyal audience on our Linked In Melcrum Communicators Network as to whether they thought Facebook was dead as an internal comms tool? Naturally I realise I was preaching to the converted. If you responded online then you were already in some way gripped by some form of social media and had signed up to Linked In, which is, in my opinion, as good a professional-to-professional comms tool there is online.

We as communicators, however, rather predictably and equally healthily have mixed views. It seems that most of us have considered, or even used, Facebook as a comms tool but with wildly varying degrees of success. We have never been afraid to test it out as a means of communicating with colleagues, but following a short period of experimentation perhaps realised there were either better tools already in place or that we would rather use other social media sites. Or, as some of you mentioned, even wait for the next big online buzz to hit our screens.

Haroon Bijli, an online marketing and communications professional at Tata Consultancy Services, says Facebook still remains a “useful means to keep in touch with employees who are not on the internal network, work from client or home locations, or who are always on the move.” He has a point. It is extremely tough to constantly communicate and get those key messages to remote workers. Of course, you could use Instant Messenger or Blackberry Chat, for example, but it’s difficult to argue against your workforce using a resource that has 200 million users, many of which belong to your organisation. The again, unless they are connected to the internet 24/7, you have no way of reaching them other than simply giving them a simple phone call, which defeats, or rather obliterates the purpose of communicating with someone.

Bijli and others, however, argue that FB will not replace the corporate intranet and that it serves as more of an add-on, a bonus that can complement the internal resource whenever necessary. Again this can often be true. Facebook has done wonders for social media, and opened our eyes to its possibilities. But corporate it is not. The only time it can perhaps swivel its zombie biting, strawberry throwing head towards anything resembling professionalism is when people from the same company organise events, or create common groups, be they sporting, charitable or simply after work clubs where employees can get together and constructively socialise.

Mark K Curtis, an internal communications practitioner, backs this up and explains that Facebook would never truly work as an effective internal comms tool because its main mandate is to connect people socially and that any messages from employers to employees would almost act as an intrusion of privacy. It would be a bit like the boss coming round uninvited to your birthday barbeque dressed in his favourite Bermuda shorts and string vest.

“Facebook discourages multiple accounts. Therefore a user would need to give an employer the ability to post messages to their personal Facebook page. This may not be appropriate or something people would be happy to do with a social mesh. And employees have a right to keep their personal lives private. “They may be happy to subscribe to one-way channels though such as RSS – widely available on mobile phones and PDAs these days. This is certainly a question we shouldn't be afraid to ask,” he adds.

Karen Drury, the owner of fe3 Management Consulting says FB was never a corporate tool in the first place suggesting that it is took “lacking in control” for the majority of senior managers and was and still is time consuming to sort and search for the right information. Michele Egan, senior communications officer at The World Bank goes so far as to say that Facebook has “never” and “never should be” been a tool for internal communications. “What would be more interesting to find out,” she says, “is whether the features that make FB such an effective social networking tool are being adopted inside the organisation in any way”.

Curtis adds that one of the main challenges of social media is not the technology or its place at the heart of internal comms, but finding management and IT personnel that have the passion to support these new and often exciting channels. “In my experience the implementation of social media – even strictly internally – can be slow and the politics heavy. This is short sighted because, not long from now, employees are going to look at the management of email as cumbersome and ineffective – which many studies already suggest that it is.”

I tend to agree. Whether Facebook is or isn’t an effective tool to use within internal comms teams, is perhaps not the question. As Curtis concludes, the tools that Facebook, Linked In and Twitter employ can be extremely effective communication methods.

“The scalability and popularity of social media suggests that internal communications professionals must recognise its potential, particularity if they intend to be effective business communicators with the employees of the future. No one likes to be left behind.”

Then again, I’ve just received an email in my inbox informing me that Dr Twitty is now ‘following me” on Twitter. Some things are better off being left behind.

Ever considered infecting your employees?

By Sona Hathi, Assistant Editor, Melcrum

After much anticipation, Melcrum hosted its third members-only event in London last week. Members from all over Europe joined their peers for breakfast at London's New Connaught Rooms, to network and learn more about Melcrum's latest research into peer-to-peer communication.

The audience heard case studies from the new report Viral Communication in the Workplace, how organizations including easyJet, Pfizer, Sun Microsystems and Deloitte have "virally infected" employees with enthusiasm and interest in change programs and new initiatives.

There were presentations from 3 experts in this area of research, (who you may have heard us raving about for sometime now):

* Kieron Shaw, internal communication specialist and former head of research at Melcrum;
* Dr. Leandro Herrero, CEO of The Chalfont Project consultancy and pioneer of Viral Change™; and
* Nigel Edwards, UK communication manager, Pfizer.

The topic is one that has definitely created a buzz among internal communicators. It throws up a number of questions and concerns, as some of the ideas around viral communication and viral change are quite radical. But these companies have proved that it does work. For example, Kieron highlighted a case study from the Dutch healthcare company Novo Nordisk . The company kept secrets and withdrew information from employees, bar three small secret societies - sounds unthinkable right? "Surely that's bad for morale?" I hear you cry.

But no, it created an unimaginable amount of curiousity and interest among the workforce, in what the organization was doing. Interest that a standard corporate email, or cascade process would be hard pushed to create. It did cause irritation among some employees, but isn't negative interest better than no interest at all?

Leandro Herrero, is perhaps the most passionate guy on the topic of viral change - after all, he literally wrote the book on it. So it was fascinating to watch this Spaniard present in his signature, energetic way, on how organizational structures are changing from hierarchical to those of clusters. He says that viral change programmes cannot be led. Leaders need to remain in the background and let the message spread among the clusters in the workforce - like a virus that infects every employee.

Perhaps the quote from him that stuck out to me the most was:

"Organizations need to talk less and do more. The best culture change management program is where the words 'culture', 'change', 'management' and 'program' are silent."

Nigel Edwards, UK communication manager at Pfizer talked about how the company gave a selected number of employees video cameras to take home and make candid diary clips of their journey in the first 3 months of a major change programme. The clips were distributed to the entire workforce, resulting in the company gaining more trust from employees. I won't go in to any more detail but it's an excellent case study and you can read more on the Hub, or in the report Viral communication in the workplace.

There was a challenging Q&A session at the end of each presentation. Here's a sample:

Q: We might be most influenced by "People like us" but how credible is the information that comes from our peers?
A: No one's saying that leaders have no part to play in this. The initial corporate message still needs to come from the CEO, but employees then need to have the opportunity to discuss it, as many times as they wish, with their colleagues, talk about how they feel so that they then internalize the message. It's about giving them the platform to do this and making it very explicit that the company actually wants them to be honest and is actually interested in their opinions. Pfizer have demonstrated this very well.

Q:We've known this stuff for years, we know that employees talk and that we need to tap into what they're saying, i.e. the water-cooler conversations - so what's changed?
A: Yes this is true, but the communication tools we have access to now, make it both easier and more urgent to understand informal employee conversations, and pick out the key influencers to help spread messages about organizational changes.

Q: Our organization has a rigid corporate culture, would a viral communication method still work?
A: (Nigel Edwards) If yours is a command and control organization, then you should probably avoid something like this. Employees should be trusted to sit in the driver's seat, while leaders should be able to sit back and enjoy the ride! "There has to be will and freedom to operate if this is to be successful," says Nigel

I could go on writing about this forever, but I'll stop there. Peer-to-peer communication is a vast area of internal comms that is even more exciting now that we have excellent communication technology to encourage it. What are your thoughts?

Sona

P.S Watch out for the next Melcrum members-only event in London in Feb 2009. More events across the country are planned for the near future.

Fancy lending me five thousand bucks?

By Annie Waite, Global Editor of the Internal Comms Hub, Melcrum

No? Ok, maybe just one then?

Why am I asking YOU, I bet you're wondering? Well, looking at the Chicago RedEye paper last week, the headline "Need cash?" on p3 inevitably caught my eye. The article explained about a growing trend of peer-to-peer lending online. Currently leading the websites offering the facility for such transactions is prosper.com.

A bit like the classified ads of publications like Private Eye or The Oldie, the prosper.com system lets people who are, for one reason or another, on the scrounge and desperate or brave enough to query if anyone out there is rich and generous enough to lend or give them the funding they're after.

What sites like prosper.com do is take the money-lending practice online, out of the dusty crevices of the more traditional areas.

For communicators and other businesspeople, one of the potentials of this trend lies in the social developments and qualities associated with it. For borrowers, the benefit of this method over more traditional money-lending services is that they'll generally find lower lending rates than traditional methods, and for lenders  there's the chance to feel a slight philanthropic twinge when they help out someone in need. From the RedEye:

"The opportunities for social connection appeal to users, said Prosper co-founder and CEO Chris Larsen. Borrowers can appeal to lenders to look past a couple of late payments or spotty credit history, while lenders enjoy the satisfaction of seeing their money help someone in need."

I'm not saying it could happen even in the next year, but surely there's a chance for such an application to be built into sites like The Communicators' Network or Facebook at some time in the future? Ie. I think, from checking out your profile, you seem like someone I can trust. Fancy one of our reports? Well, how about we swap it for one of your webinars - type of thing? Anyone think it'll catch on or could it fall victim to shock stories on the Hub news  of broken communicators' television sets from bailiffs being called in for unpaid loans?

Soundtrack to the blog: Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) by Pet Shop Boys.

What to say when you boss asks to be your friend on Facebook?

By Robin Crumby, Managing Director, Melcrum

What would you do if your boss asked to be your 'friend' on Facebook?

Can you say no without damaging your career prospects?

Dozens of readers of Lucy Kellaway's FT column 'Dear Lucy' responded to this thorny question. They offered a wide range of advice for this (ficticious?) 26 year-old female working in advertising. Her concern being that she had some rather revealing photos of herself on her profile and was uncomfortable about mixing work and pleasure, but didn't want to offend her 'cool' boss.

Should she:

1. Set up a new Facebook account just for work?
2. Change her privacy settings so that only her real friends can see her full profile?
3. Ignore the request altogether and hope he forgets all about it?
4. Be honest and say you like to keep friendship and work separate, so no thanks?
5. Leave Facebook altogether to avoid similar situations happening again?
6. Turn it into a joke and tell him to get a life!?

As comments to my post on this blog suggested (Facebook: for business, pleasure or both?), trying to keep work and play separate is artificial, unrealistic and even possibly 'in denial' (but I take comfort that I'm not alone here in wanting to preserve a space online that's 'just for friends'). As someone explained off-line, isn't it rather like having a separate e-mail address for friends, or a phone that's just for friends, and why would you do that, when online privacy settings exist just for this purpose.

As more brands embrace Facebook for customer and employee engagement, it seems time's running out for Facebook as a 'place for friends'. In the meantime the great Facebook debate will no doubt rage on.

But what do you think? Is Facebook really a place where your boss and best friend can co-exist happily ever after?

Facebook: for business, pleasure or both?

By Robin Crumby, Managing Director, Melcrum

First off a confession. I'm a closet Facebook addict. I wouldn't admit to it publicly, but I seem to acquire Facebook widgets by the week and communicate increasingly with friends and contacts this way. And for the record, I admit to being a little old for all this stuff! I can no longer claim to be 20-something or even 30-something.

But I'm still puzzled about the business uses of Facebook. Rather like guest blogger Mark Darby said a few weeks ago on this blog, the juxtaposition of business and social networking is often uneasy. After hours photos in super-hero garb or 70's wigs don't always make the desired first impression.

Figures from Nielsen/NetRatings show that Facebook now has more than 6.5 million Britons signed up. More than MySpace, and representing an incredible 20% of all British internet users. For anyone counting, that's 541 per cent growth since December, according to the FT's maths anyway.

So chances are your employees' adoption of Facebook is at least similar, and depending on your demographic, even significantly higher.

There has been much debate on Shel Holtz's blog about organisations banning Facebook from the workplace as a giant waste of time, estimated to be up to 2 hours lost per day by some. (I find this figure hard to swallow too, though widely reported). And agree with Shel that blocking access is an extreme solution that erodes the trust between employer and employee.

So if Facebook is to be accepted into the workplace, and even encouraged for business networking, then are users really comfortable about having your boss, your client, your neighbour and your best drinking partner sharing the same online space? Or is this all just a little too, well, worlds-colliding-ly-intrusive? I'm not saying I have a secret life as a travelling circus act that I want to keep secret, I just would prefer that business contacts didn't find out that I have an unhealthy Starwars obsession, for example.

As artificial as it sounds, I would prefer to use Facebook for friends, and then a niche site like The Communicators' Network to meet my business networking needs. It means more log ins and places to go visit, but RSS or even e-mail is very effective at taking the legwork out of the process.

With more remote workers and an increasingly dispersed employee-base of the future, I am a firm believer that social media bring people closer together and replace a lot of the missing interaction with colleagues.

But I'm just not sure that one site like Facebook can meet all my needs. But what about you?

Facebook costing firms £130 million a day...

...so says a law firm. (Ah, the penny drops.)

Mike Huss, director of employment law at Peninsula called on all firms to block access to sites such as Facebook.

He asked: "Why should employers allow their workers to waste two hours a day on Facebook when they are being paid to do a job?"

He said that loss of productivity was proving a "major headache" for firms.

The figures that we have calculated are minimums and it's a problem that I foresee will escalate," he said.

Where on earth did they get a minimum average of two hours [out of a working day] from?

Spies start social networking

The Financial Times reported yesterday that US intelligence agencies will soon launch ‘A Space’, an internal communications tool modelled on social networking sites such as Facebook and the Communicators' Network.

Sounds like hackers have got a field day coming - Die Hard 5.0 shouldn't be too far away!

According to the FT article, the intelligence agencies have built an internal collaborative site called Intellipedia, based on Wikipedia and the CIA also recently used Facebook to recruit.

Big Shiny Thing comments on the issue with: "All those organisations busily banning Facebook and other new tools of collaboration and communication should take heed."

Soundtrack to the blog post: Super Furry Animals - She's Got Spies

The employee-facebook saga rumbles on

Neville Hobson comments on the Australian "business and facebook" story, as does Shel Holtz, it's also on the TV news and they're even talking about on Merrick and Rosso...

What's amusing is that on the radio (Merrick and Rosso is Australia's equivalent to Chris Moyles' show in the UK), they're having phone-ins and people are saying "Yep, I love Facebook - we still do e-mail and text messages but you can do so much more on Facebook such as create groups for events, get a list of people coming, RSVP and everyone can see if you're going..."

Then there was the delivery driver who said he gets up half an hour early just to check Facebook and then goes to work.

Following this sleep deprived fellow was a girl who said, "They've banned it at our work because we were literally spending hours and hours on it instead of working..."

Try as I might I don't think you can argue with the manager who pulled the plug on that last one.