Engagement in what?

Writing for The Guardian, this article by Ivan Robertson discusses the importance of employee engagement in difficult economic times. It's the second half of the article that really got my attention, in which he talks about calibrating engagement strategy to achieve particular results.

So many people talk about employee engagement as an end in itself. Thinking of it in that way has some value (better than not doing it), but it is simplistic and vague. Just like PR, if you 'do employee engagement' for its own sake, you'll be lucky to see much ROI.

Employe engagement becomes really powerful when it is used like any other communications practice, to achieve strategic organisational goals.  As Ivan points out (in more academic terms than I) the practice of engagement has a lot of levers it can pull on and an experienced strategist knows which areas to work on to achieve a particular result.

What this means (apart from being generally good news) is that a company should be reviewing its engagement strategy as often as it reviews its strategic goals. In the article Ivan gives the example of 'getting people to support and help each other' as something engagement can help to achieve. But even if the goal is the rather colder 'increase operating margin by 5%', the engagement practitioner has some levers they can pull to make it happen.

My number one piece of advice for anyone about to embark on some employee engagement work and wanting to get the most out of it, is to ask, 'Engagement in what?'.

Bad news can be inspiring

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Posterous who I have a (totally unused) blog account with. The email was a very well worded apology that their servers had been hit by Denial of Service attacks and had buckled, and gone down. They came up again an hour or so later, but it seems the Posterous team and users continued to fight major problems for the rest of the week.

Now I don't actually use my Posterous account so I really didn't care, but the email caught my eye because it was such a brilliant use of 15 lines of text. The email came from the CEO and he used the space to apologise to his customers, tell them how hard they worked to fix the problem, and advertise the solutions they have found which make Posterous even stronger and better than before.

So far so smart. But it gets smarter. The CEO finished the missive by saying that he had 'never been prouder' of the Posterous team. He went on to name 3 of the key protagonists (Garry, Vince and Jackson) who had busted their guts, working nights and weekends and pointed out exactly what their contribution had been. Amazing! Remember this is in a letter to customers, not an internal pat-on-the-back email.

Beyond being a nice thing to do, this is such an astute move. Sachin Agarwal has turned what sounds like a hideous and demoralising week for his team, where one thing after another went wrong, into a complete victory. He has made them the heroes of the Posterous story and in doing so further embedded their personal involvement with the company. As a customer of course, I'm nothing but impressed. It sounds like they have a great team, they work together well, they know their stuff etc... In other words, this short, clever piece of communication satisfies every stakeholder.

Do you know of other examples of companies using a bad week at work to inspire their employees? Or companies who name and fame their employees to their customers when they've gone above and beyond? Do you do this in your company? Tell us your stories...

Communication for Inspiration : Give your team Obama skills

Yesterday I read the following irritated tweet from an editor at one of the national newspapers.

‘My desk phone is broken. IT man has taken it away. And a replacement? "Oh, we haven't got any". Marvellous.’

The cause of the frustration humming through this little tweet, isn’t I don’t believe, the lack of a phone. The quotation marks speak volumes. The frustration has come from the way this impediment to his working day was communicated. As an afterthought. A fact - unsoftened.

Its not what you said, its how you said it.

This is the case with so many examples of dissatisfaction in the workplace. All kinds of things happen at work, some good, some bad, some challenging. But the thing that people get emotional about - for better or for worse - is the way they’re communicated.

In some cases people don’t see it as part of their job to manage the experience of those working with them. These people won’t be ultimately successful without realising their mistake and changing their minds about this. It will often take a manager to point it out and might require some coaching to find a new way.

Other times, the will is there, but there’s a barrier which stops people from understanding each other. What works in one department is foreign to another. I remember one halleluja of glorious understanding in a meeting between a production team and a design team, when they suddenly realised that they had two different concepts of what the word deadline meant. Genuinely. Once they each understood the pressures on the other team and why they thought about deadlines differently, they worked out some new language that worked for them. Conversations and relationships improved dramatically.

And it can be even harder for those who find themselves in senior leadership positions. Having got to the top of their particular tree they suddenly find themselves on another steep learning curve. They have new pressures to face, new responsibilities and overwhelming claims on their time. Simultaneously they become very visible, everyone listens to what they say, comments on it, judges it. Engaging communication is a big part of their job and if they get their communication style wrong, the impact on employee motivation can be huge.

So what’s to be done? Well over at One Magnolia we had a think about this little problem and took as our muse, the disarming Barack Obama. What would happen we wondered, if Barack Obama were on our leadership team, or indeed manning an IT service desk. We think the answer is that the people around him would be all fired up, full of energy, and that they’d get an awful lot done! As a result of this pleasing fantasy, we’ve developed Communication for Inspiration. A training course that takes the example of the greatest communicators of our time and makes their brilliance accessible for use by business leaders and managers.

The point isn’t to turn everyone into Barack Obama and Richard Branson of course. It’s to help leaders and managers find their own superpowers when it comes to engaging their staff. We give them the tools and make them easy to use.

The course finishes with a brainstorm on the ways for leaders to create a communication culture throughout their company. One person inspiring others through their communication is great, but a whole company doing it, the whole time, is better.

Call us on 07921 484 385, or email info@onemagnolia.co.uk to get course details of Communication for Inspiration : Give your team Obama skills.

Everyone has a story

As some of you may know, I'm in the process of launching a new engagement consultancy called One Magnolia and I'm hugely excited about it! At the heart of this new business are two beliefs:

1. You can't achieve business objectives, long term, without employee engagement.

2. Employee engagement happens one person at a time - everyone has a story, and that story is key to their motivation in life.

I came across this a few days ago; a new collection of the six word stories which Ernest Hemingway made so famous with the chilling, "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn". I love it and it made me think about all the stories there are out there, and how they affect us at work. Watch the video, and then (if you don't mind sharing) tell me, what's your story? Mine starts with a magnolia tree...


Six-Word Memoir book preview from SMITHmag on Vimeo.

Getting it Right: Pret A Manger

If the key to success in property investment is, ‘location, location, location’, then Pret would tell us the key to a happy and productive work force is, ‘recruitment, recruitment, recruitment’.

Head of Communications, Jay Chapman, is passionate about employee engagement and is frequently asked for the key to Pret’s success. She tells me she’d love to have a scary sounding formula to impress people with, but in her mind it’s all pretty simple stuff;

“If you treat your employees well and involve them in the decisions that will affect them, they’re much more likely to be engaged in carrying out the effects of those decisions.”

RECRUITMENT

Top of her list, (and the point she keeps coming back to) is good recruitment. “Pret probably have the world’s most over qualified sandwich makers. They are largely made up of those who have come to London for a couple of years to improve their English, but who when they return to their own countries, are set to become architects, lawyers and journalists”. Pret aren’t necessarily just on the look out for people with degrees; however there is one quality which is an absolute must if you want to join the team – happiness. “You can’t hire someone who can make sandwiches and teach them to be happy,” says Jay, “So we hire happy people and teach them to make sandwiches”.

Pret invest a lot in their very ‘on-brand’ recruitment process to make sure that their business is filled with “Pret people” from top to bottom. Handled badly it could be oppressive, but in this case I don’t think it is. From the first interview until far beyond, Pret actively encourage employees to bring their own personalities to work. Part of the score card which Pret gives to their mystery shoppers (the results of which affect employee bonuses) includes a reward for personality shining through. This is the antithesis of the old attitude of slapping a “Happy to Help” badge on someone and telling them to smile - you’ll find no clones here.

Jay believes this investment pays off one hundredfold. 60% of staff at Pret’s head office began life on the shop floor – and they know the business inside out. Incidentally, ‘head office’ is just an easy way of describing what Pret people refer to only as, ‘Hudsons Place’. This isn’t just a nicety either; the people at Hudsons Place truly don’t believe they are any more important than the people on the shop floor – they’re just fulfilling a different function. This attitude of respect, treating everyone the same and as you find them, seems to run throughout Pret. It colours my entire interview with Jay and I suspect it comes from the top.

Jay talks frequently about one of the founders, Julian Metcalfe, the man who co-founded Pret in 1986. She describes him as both brilliant and exasperating, damning in censure and generous in praise. I am reminded that engagement at work isn’t the same thing as having an easy job (I get the impression that there are occasions when one could cheerfully strangle Mr Metcalfe) but about loving what you do, and knowing why you do it.

PEOPLE AND PRODUCT

The staff at Hudson’s Place are very clear on Pret’s values, and on what the business needs them to do. Jay tells a great story about a new delivery trolley that was being trialled, the prototype of which had been hanging around the office for a couple of weeks. When it came to be needed for a meeting, no-one could find it anywhere although it had been seen earlier that morning. Eventually someone found Julian on the top floor where he had taken the trolley to try it out. He was wheeling it round and around trying to take sharp corners with it, furious to find that it was difficult to manoeuvre. “Our people will be using these all day every day! We have to get them stuff that works!” That prototype was quickly re-designed.

Passionate about his business and the values that underpin it, the founder’s influence permeates the whole company culture. “Julian believes that you should invest in your product and your people,” Jay tells me, “that’s about 90% of your business: if you do that well, the other 10% will take care of itself”. This ethos probably explains the fact that, to this day, only 0.4% of Pret’s revenue goes towards marketing. There isn’t even a marketing department, with the function being looked after by the communications team. Jay is hugely frustrated by the large companies who spend many millions on advertising, and relatively little on their staff and services. It seems to her to be a short term view, which results in neither engaged employees nor happy customers.

Pret’s customers though, are very happy. On average, 60% of feedback received by the Pret a Manger customer service department is either positive or neutral.

Let’s think about that for a minute. Most people only ever bother to get in touch with a company if they’re really aggravated by something. For 60% of contacts to be neutral, (like a suggestion for a new recipe) or full of praise, suggests that Pret have not only succeeded in engaging their employees but their clients as well. And why not? Happy, engaged staff = Happy, engaged customers; it’s not a big surprise. But what else are Pret doing to create such universal engagement?

EMPOWERMENT

It’s at shop level that Pret’s most differentiating behaviours come in to play. Firstly, and in my book most importantly, each team member is empowered from their first day at work to make their own decisions. If I go to the till at my local Pret and complain that I didn’t like my coffee, it is up to the team member I speak to, to decide how to resolve that. If I’m spotted struggling with bags and a pram, team members are welcome to leave their post and go and help. It’s a question of using the common sense and respect that Pret looks for when it hires people. Jay tells me, “It’s not uncommon to find that if you’ve been in to Pret for your lunch every day for a week, the guy behind the till will recognise you and decide to give you Friday for free. The manager keeps an eye on things, but overall the team members are empowered to make their own decisions”.

Empowerment doesn’t stop there though – we’re back to Pret’s recruitment process. Before their formal interviews, all candidates (for any position within Pret) are sent to work on the shop floor for a day. If the candidate is applying for a position in a shop, then the team who works there gets a say on whether said candidate will fit in with the team there. If the answer is no, the candidate isn’t hired. (All unsuccessful candidates that have worked in one of the shops get £30 cash for their trouble and a chocolate brownie!).

All successful candidates for Hudson’s Place roles do the same – visiting a shop close to them – and the shop team get a say on whether they would like the person to work for Pret. In this way the shop teams make decisions on who is the next Purchasing Manager, the next Customer Service Advisor and the next Property Director. On top of that, all new recruits spend a week or two working in the shop at the start of their induction.

THE RIGHT INCENTIVES

This culture of respect extends to salary. Having done her 2 week stint on the shop floor, Jay assures me that it’s a tough job and accordingly, Pret pay their staff well. They also use incentives generously and wisely, they know their audience and know what works. “If someone’s only going to be in England for 2 years, then telling them about the 3 year business plan isn’t going to excite them very much” says Jay smiling, “they need cash – and the odd party doesn’t go amiss either”. In fact there are all sorts of bonuses readily available for team members if they want them. I was astonished by Pret’s commitment to their mystery shopper scheme. A mystery shopper visits every single shop, once a week. Bonuses from the results of the report are available per person and per team – if someone gets mentioned by name they are sent a silver star, made especially for Pret by Tiffany&Co. The team bonus can add up to £40 per week, per person, and Pret love the idea of paying it to everyone, every week, because it means a job well done.

***

Before I leave Hudsons Place, Jay takes me on a very proud tour of the building. It looks like an inspiring place to work, both functional and full of character. Most impressive is the amazing café space on the 3rd floor which houses every kind of furniture used in the Pret shops, and gives employees a chance to try them all out and give their feedback.

On my way out, I look again at the comfortable space I was whisked through on entry. Like the rest of the building, the colourful reception is a study in internal branding and a brilliant channel for engagement. A video plays on the wall, showing not a slick brand piece, but a collection of photos and videos of employee awards and achievements, pictures of parties and a rather unglamorous video tour round a soup kitchen. There is a note board hidden behind hundreds of congratulatory customer emails and on the front desk, “Britain’s Top Employers 2008” (Guardian Books) with a bookmark in at Pret’s entry. It’s a bit like being in someone’s lounge and seeing everything that they’re most proud of. Replace the note board for a fridge door, and the plasma screen for a mantelpiece covered in photo frames, and then you realise… you’re in the family home.

***

The differentiators: Pret’s recipe for success

Re-invest revenue in people and product

Empower your staff

Know your audience and incentivise them appropriately

Promote from within

Recruitment, Recruitment, Recruitment

Beach Blanket Babylon

On Friday myself and Lea, practised what she preaches in a tour of all the independent shops in the whole of East London (or at least that's how it felt). We were looking for a particular outfit, and when we finally found it, celebration with a glass of champagne was the only way to go.

So we headed to the very beautiful Beach Blanket Babylon in Shoreditch. Having arrived and settled ourselves into a couple of rather imposing thrones, we realised that not only did we need Kir Royales immediately, but we were also going to require some olives... and maybe cashew nuts too. Imagine our dismay then, when the waiter told us that they weren't allowed to serve bar snacks on Fridays and Saturdays.

"Really?" we asked, "but why?"

"Um. I don't actually know" said the waiter, very embarrassed.

"So if today was Thursday we could have some olives?"

"Yes. I'm really sorry. You can have a side dish from the dinner menu if you like - how about broccoli with almonds?"

Eurgh. We politely declined. Having had this otherwise perfectly pleasant experience, I looked up Beach Blanket online and had a look at some reviews. They're pretty harsh. Almost every post on the site I looked at, awards the restaurant just 1 star. And what's the first thing they slate? The service.

Now we didn't find any of the staff to be rude on our visit, but if they keep being put in situations like this, I can see why that would happen. Embarrassment quickly turns to defensiveness, and from there to surliness. If I were the manager, I'd try a couple of things to turn around the reputation BBB currently has for "surly, inattentive, slapdash" staff.

1) Inform - Explain to your employees what you're trying to do and why.

2) Involve - Even better, consult them on policy. See what the people who talk to the customers every day think would be best.

3) Keep your promises - If you say you're going to do something, do it. Create a trusting environment.

4) Let Sam have olives!

Living the brand at Abercrombie & Fitch

This weekend I went to the new Abercrombie & Fitch store in London, for the first time. I know, I know everyone else has already been there and done that, but may I now please join you all in your astonishment? Its amazing, surreal, wrong and oh so right.

For those of you that haven't made the pilgrimage yet, Abercrombie & Fitch - Savile Row, is a shop second and a brand experience first. No wait, that doesn't put it strongly enough, the Innocent Village Fete is a brand experience. The Abercrombie & Fitch store is a living advert.

The shop itself is housed in a huge and imposing mansion, complete still with marble fireplaces and library shelving. As you walk up the stone steps, drawn by the palpable sense of smugness inside, you realise you have entered the brand. You'll have seen the actual adverts, black & white shots of sculpted boys and beautiful snap-thin girls living a teasingly homo-erotic Amercian dream. Well there at the top of the steps is one of each. The girl in her A&F uniform of size zero blue jeans and grey skinny rib vest and the boy, tanned and stripped to the waist. Behind them is a HUGE print of one of the adverts, but I have to say its not really that the eye is drawn to.

Around the corner and into the darkness, and the thumping music, and the scent of aftershave which I'd love to say was lingering on the air but I'm pretty sure was pumped through the air-con. And then we just stood and looked, as various beautiful clones came to ask us "Hi. How are you?". Up on the balcony overlooking the house was a size zero/skinny rib dancing to the music, and she remained dancing in exactly the same way, in the same spot for the entire time we were there. I found myself wondering if they have Abercrombie dance classes for all their staff. If they don't they really should - Danceworks is just down the road, they could sell branded dance classes hand over fist.

Anyway, my point being, not only is every last detail in the environment completely on brand, so is every last member of staff. They are each of them beautiful and cool and casual and all very much in an Abercrombie & Fitch kind of way. They are hired as models who serve - but mostly they just stand (or dance) around and smile. In this case Abercrombie have no problem in getting their staff to believe in the brand. The staff ARE the brand...

The Abercrombie and Fitch store ought to be a beautiful segue between everything that is dear to me - experiential marketing and employee engagement. But perfection I fear, is in the flaws and it seems that no-one at Abercrombie has a single one. For me, they've gone a step too far, and alas for all the "model servers" were smiling, they didn't look all that happy. Perhaps we all need something to aim for to be happy in our work? After all how much pressure must it be to be hired because you're perfect?

Every Little Helps?

A friend of mine yesterday challenged me to find something good about Tesco's employee engagement policy. She (Lea, of the Unchained Guide) is fiercly anti-monopolies and as such not a fan of Tesco, however she wondered what someone who hadn't already formed strong opinions on the subject might think. Find Lea's original blog on the subject here. And my reply below.

I've never worked for Tesco, so like any relationship, I can only look at the one Tesco has with its employees from the outside and make guesses as to what it feels like to be in it...

I think its harsh to judge David Richardson for taking the opportunity to justify employee engagement spend when he sees it reflected in the bottom line. The quantative results of employee engagement can be hard to measure and if you have a direct correlation with sales performance that's going to leverage more cash from Mr CFO, I say go for it.

It seems to me on the plus side that Tesco have an exceptional commitment to Training & Development, available to anyone who wants it. If there ever was a glass ceiling there, they did away with it long ago. They also look to have excellent in-house comms and the structure in place to listen to their staff (and customers) as well as talk at them.

That said, its astonishing how much the Tesco recruitment site reads as if it was written for consumers, instead of prospective employees. Pretty much every sentance about employee welfare finishes with; 'because then you'll look after our customers'. Which isn't awful, its just very upfront about where Tesco's focus lies. In fact they even have a list of Stakeholders on their site and customers, not employees, are at the top of it.

The other thing that makes fascinating reading is the "Meet our People" section. All the employees biogs show them to be energised and motivated, but not one of them made any reference, even an obtuse one, to Every Little Helps. Almost without exception these people talk about fast promotions, professional achievements and the scope for them to go as far as their ambition will take them as fast as their ability can keep up. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. (In fact given the nature of Tesco's own expansion it makes perfect sense). Its just it makes me wonder if a single one of them actually buys into the brand.

Every little helps? What if I told you the slogan was: Tesco - MORE. FASTER. FOR EVERYONE.

Would you buy it?

Starbucks do it again

When it comes to talking about employee engagement you really can't do it for very long before you mention Starbucks. Its like trying to eat a doughnut without brushing the sugar off your mouth - not possible.

I went to the Starbucks website this morning, trying to find out about the termination of their HR outsourcing contract with Convergys - I thought I might find it at the back end of the site, perhaps under a media tab. However all thoughts of this were forgotten when I got to the site.

What do you think was on the very front page of starbucks.com? Was it:

A) Pictures of the latest cinnamon dolce mocha choca latte
B) PR blurb about fair trade coffee beans
C) A letter to its employees

C! Nothing except a letter to its employees, or partners as they would have it, on the front page of http://www.starbucks.com/. I could barely contain my glee at the brilliance of it. The letter is about the ruling by a judge in California that shift supervisors should not share in the tips of baristas http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-starbucks21mar21,0,50639.story . Have a read and see what you think. Starbucks think its wrong, and they're going to appeal.

In writing a letter to their employees on the front page of their website, Starbucks cover off 3 messages in one fell swoop.

1) You, our partners are our single most important audience.

2) Hello consumers, we think our employees are the most important part of our business. Isn't that refreshing? Come drink our coffee. Even though we're a massive chain, we're really just one big family.

3) Here is the information we want you both to know about our position on this ruling.

The benefits of employee engagement can be hard to measure, (although I'd argue that in Starbucks case they're clearly demonstrable) but when you remember that an employer that values its empoyees is appealing to consumers... oooh, its just win, win, win, win, win