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It’s Friday.  In the summer.  And, somehow I’m not thinking about getting home to the beach.  Instead, I am focusing on winter!?!  It’s true.  I’m actually thinking forward to January and the start of 2010.  Before you think I’ve lost my marbles, I’m in this mindset because we’re soon to begin planning for next year, and I keep finding myself dwelling on the changing nature of messaging for employees.

I’ve ended up in this mental conversation with myself because of a number of meetings and conversations I’ve had with folks lately.  It starts with some of the people in financial services who have had their entire world change this year, seemingly going from “hero” to “zero” overnight.  Then, there are the retailers and restaurant chains that are suffering and closing because of lack of sales while still others are going gangbusters because they offer reasonably priced items consumers crave during this downturn. And then there are the healthcare companies that continue to move along, doing their thing and seemingly holding steady.

So, if you’re wondering where I’m going with all of this, here it is:  take a step back and look at your business, at your people and at your performance.  Now ask yourself if it’s time to change the dialogue with your employees?  Is there something about your business that’s fundamentally different today than it was last year?  Is your business benefitting, suffering or remaining status quo?  What does the future hold for your organization?  Your industry?

Think about your internal communications channels, executive outreach and other activities as you answer those questions and determine if it’s time to change or adjust what you are saying and/or how you are saying it.  It might very well be time to inject new candor into what’s being communicated or to change how you’ve been talking about your business.  By conducting this litmus test and making any appropriate changes, you’ll ensure your communications are aligned with today’s realities and that you are sharing the information that your employees most care about in terms that make sense to them.  Why does this matter?  Because authentic, truthful and timely communications are an important (I might even argue the MOST important) component to building and keeping trust among employees.

It was interesting to read this week that the new CEO at Procter & Gamble, Robert McDonald, will expect his organization to develop much leaner and more efficient ways to build its brand. A report in The Wall Street Journal indicated that P&G is expected to continue with a marketing approach it styles as “the brand franchise leadership model,” in which it pulls together the best and brightest people from its advertising, marketing, public relations and digital firms to work together under a single leader. The idea is that this unified approach will yield greater collaboration, new synergies, lower costs and winning results.

This model has produced incredible results with best-in-class companies for many years. Its origins are with the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program at the Medill School, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., where many of the best marketers and communicators in our field have completed their graduate studies over the past two decades. What I value most about the IMC program is that it places great emphasis on the “holistic brand” — that is, ensuring that those who seek to market, position and extend the external brand don’t overlook the internal brand.

Fourteen years ago, the brand manager for one of the great credit card companies contacted me and said she had a challenge. Having brought her agencies together to devise an integrated approach to building the brand with consumers, she realized that no one had answered a critical question: “How do we mobilize our people to deliver on the ‘ethic’ of customer service that the card promises?” Our employee communications team was introduced to the larger team of advertising and public relations resources, and we created an integrated approach to helping employees understand what it would mean to “live the brand” through consistent, clear actions that matched with promise of the advertising and marketing that customers were seeing and experiencing.

Brand franchise leadership is not just another pretty model. In our world, it’s essential — and it works!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a company using Facebook as its intranet. Since then I’ve noticed an increasing number of people asking questions on Twitter about using public social networking tools for internal communications. Then, this morning, I read a NYTimes interview with Zurich Financial Services C.E.O. James Schiro where he discussed how he has been using YouTube to address employees as he travels to Zurich locations around the world.

So what are the benefits and drawbacks of using external or public vehicles for employee communications?

Benefits:

• Everybody knows YouTube – Most people have heard of YouTube. They’ve either uploaded videos themselves, searched for Susan Boyle’s performance, the evolution of dance, or told their kids to stop looking at videos and do their homework. Regardless of their level of knowledge, if someone says “our CEO on YouTube,” the vast majority of employees will know how to access it. There’s no teaching people how to log in, setting up a separate password, etc. They can click and watch.

• Great recruiting tool – Since not just employees, but the entire world can see what you’re saying, it can serve as a way to speak about the culture of your company. This can be a great recruiting tool and some companies are using social media to enhance recruiting efforts.

• Reflects your culture – Not every CEO would be willing to address employees and be followed by a singing employee (see above). So it definitely says something about a leader and a company who is willing to do something like that.

• Can’t beat the cost – Once you get a digital camera to record the videos, using YouTube to broadcast them is free. That’s cheaper and less time consuming than working with IT to share videos on your current intranet or setting up a YouTube-like enterprise solution.

Drawbacks:

• Watch what you say – For those who appear in the videos, they need to be careful not to divulge proprietary information or disclosures that run afoul of SEC rules or those of other regulators.

• Can’t control comments – Often just as or more entertaining than many YouTube videos are the comments that people leave. That can be daunting, particularly if an employee chooses to air dirty laundry. However, I think that on a site like YouTube, you have to take the comments with a grain of salt since it’s open to anyone and users can be (somewhat) anonymous . That said, the inherent unpredictability is a drawback.

• Remember when you said… – Whenever it’s up for everyone to see, people can pull up your words if you don’t stick to them. And the same publicity that lauded you for being “cutting edge” can bury you for being “disloyal.”

I would love to hear your feedback on whether you agree/disagree with the points above, or have others to add. Is this an emerging trend, or will tools that achieve the same objectives emerge for use behind corporate firewalls?

This clearly isn’t for every company, but is it a viable solution for any company?

Lately it seems like everyone is buzzing about new technologies and how they may be applied to employee communications.  Whether it’s clients debating the need for social networking capabilities as part of an intranet redesign or sharing insights about allowing commentary on internal blogs, it seems like everyone is trying to figure out the new communications mix.

Recently a member of a professional organization I’m involved with requested examples of CEOs twittering, because this person’s CEO asked if they should start doing that for their organization and for their people.  The subsequent dialogue was interesting with people espousing the benefits of the technology and others questioning what the CEO had to say that warranted its use.

As an observer to the debate I tended to net on the side of “what do you have to say” being one of the deciding factors, but truth-be-told, what I really thought was “know your DNA.”

Do your employees have access to the technology that would warrant Twitter appropriate?  Does your CEO have anything – let alone that much – to say?  Is your CEO committed to keeping up posts or is this just the “shiny penny” du jour?  Is your CEO credible with employees so that they’d even care what s/he has to say?  Or is your CEO simply an early-adapter wanting to hop on the next digital bandwagon?

That’s part of knowing your DNA: what are the demographics of your employee population? How do they access information?  Are they truly engaged in your business and business plan or are they more task- or shift-oriented?

For example, are you considering migrating to an all digital strategy in hopes of reducing budget?  Maybe if your employee population is 100% online then sure, an all digital strategy might work for you.  But if a significant portion of your employee population is in manufacturing and rarely, if ever, has access to a computer, no matter how much you save, you won’t likely drive increased engagement.

We’re fortunate enough to work with a variety of companies across many industries and time and again that’s what we ask ourselves – what is the DNA of this organization?  Once that’s known, decisions on what technologies or other tactics to use are relatively simple.  So get to know your DNA.  If you know what you’re working with it’s easy enough to design the right approach for employee communications.

Related link: ExecTweets

There’s a lot of talk about President Obama’s first 100 days. Is he on the right trajectory? Will the country start to see real change taking shape by the end of April? There’s also a lot of debate on how important the first 100 days even is. For example, check out “The Folly of the ‘Hundred Days’” by David Greenberg in The Wall Street Journal and Michael Watkins’ response on Harvard Business Publishing’s site.

Regardless of where you fall on this political judgment, the concept of the first 100 days is an important one to consider from a communications standpoint. At the end of the day, first impressions matter. With any significant corporate change, we, as communicators, play an important role in shaping that first impression.

Whether it’s a new leader, a new strategy, a new brand or a new organizational structure, employees will make a judgment early on as to how successful the new “it” will be. We can help by:

1. Setting expectations upfront about what is expected to be accomplished and by when.
2. Educating employees about the challenges ahead.
3. Communicating frequently about progress, using a variety of vehicles to get your message out there and maintaining a consistent story across the board.
4. Speaking the truth. Regardless if the message is good news or bad news for employees, make sure they are hearing the truth.
5. Taking a pulse of the employee response along the way to determine if you need to modify the business and/or communication strategy.

I look forward to seeing how the first 100 days plays out, both for my personal well being and my professional life. In addition, this is a good time to take a step back, see how I am personally reacting to President Obama’s first 100 days and apply those learnings the next time my company/clients are facing a significant change.

I love Todd Defren’s post discussing user review sites. I think it highlights the benefits that come from empowering users with a forum to provide feedback along with the areas that concern many internal communicators when considering incorporating such interactive features within their companies.

So where is the acceptable midpoint? I think there is some insight in his ten points that can help internal communicators incorporate and manage more direct feedback within their own firewalls. One theme he touches on is the concept of “self-policing” that pervades many sites. Often, executives express concern that employees will air grievances that are irrelevant or based on a very particular set of circumstances that doesn’t have relevance to other employees. As we have seen in the marketplace, other commenters often chime in and express these opinions and defend brands and products. In like manner and without prompting, the same thing happens in the comment section of Intranet blogs. The added incentive internally is that in many cases, employees have to be accountable for what they say because their name is attached to the post where on the internet, avatars create a self-constructed shroud of anonymity.

I think that what this also demonstrates is that with every week, month and year that passes, more and more employees are becoming comfortable with interacting in this format, to say the least. Some employees may be annoyed that they cannot interact with their colleagues and employer this way. So the question, in my mind, is not is this a viable solution. That question has already been answered: yes it is. The question is how do you deploy this technology internally in a way that fosters the exchange of ideas and viewpoints within you company that will drive engagement, business aptitude, collaboration and productivity.

Related post: Connecting Employees

Anyone who has worked in Public Relations is probably familiar with the phrase it’s PR not ER!

ER being Emergency Room – in case you weren’t familiar.

It’s been a phrase of limited comfort over the years – when you need to take stock and ground yourself – normally uttered in howling pain when the stress becomes too much and the client isn’t happy or the pitch isn’t selling or you are in Cinderella mode again, slaving away till way past midnight.

Well, I think that ER finally is the new PR.

ER being Employee Relations, that is.

Employee Relations is becoming increasingly more important to organisations as they steer their way through the uncertainty of today’s new Alice in Wonderland world order.

Understanding what impacts employee attitudes, what makes them tick, what interests them and how to keep them engaged is growing in importance. So too is telling the story of the great work of employees and their workplace – take the rise in Great Place to Work submissions as evidence, and the perceived kudos in getting listed.

I have stated before in this blog that I believe the heady days of “CEO as Brand” are over – the trust and confidence that we may have felt for the few and privileged has been irrefutably damaged. What is credible now is this new interest in what I’ve called “Employees as Brand” or “Employee Culture as Brand” – it’s nothing new but the levels of interest in it is growing and how it is being played out in the media.

With a businesses tangibles spiraling downward, intangibles are now a company’s greatest asset.

This press conference explosion by Jim Mora is a classic, often replayed when current coaches have on-camera meltdowns following games. The centerpiece is, obviously, his disgusted, dismissive reaction at the question of whether his team would make the playoffs. It remains so popular, in fact, that clips of it were more recently used in the Coors Light advertising campaign that featured fictitious press conferences with questions from a group of journalists random dudes.

I included this clip for two reasons. First, I think of it (and laugh) every year this time as the NFL playoffs are nearly upon us. The second reason is that if you take the “P” out of playoffs, you have layoffs. And it seems that some companies are reacting to the question of layoffs in the same disgusted, dismissive way that Jim Mora reacted to the playoffs.

In previous posts, we’ve discussed the implications of a shortened work week. We’ve also talked about layoffs that are a result of the economic slowdown. As companies look to save money without losing valuable talent, they are also exploring alternatives to layoffs as this article from The New York Times discusses.

Regardless of whether your company opts to find alternative cost-cutting solutions or decides to lay employees off to reduce labor expenses, it is imperative to communicate openly and honestly to all employees. And even if you’re not making cuts, you should still discuss the impact of the economic situation on your business. Remember, your people want and need information and you should be a source for them in addition to blogs, newspapers, friends, family and the talking heads on cable news that they undoubtedly access for viewpoints on a regular basis.

Insidedge related posts:

It’s the economy, stupid!

In the inaugural edition of In the Know, Insidedge’s newsletter, Linda Kingman discusses how communicators can help companies deal with the tough times many businesses are facing.

Insidedge’s Linda Kingman recently sat down with Mark Ragan of Ragan Communications to discuss our work with The Dow Chemical Company in launching and maintaining an internal blog written by their CEO Andrew Liveris. The blog continues to be successful today, consistently generating comments from Dow employees worldwide.

Watch the video below and feel free to share your experiences, questions or comments about launching and maintaining internal blogs. What are some keys to success? Any lessons learned?

UPDATE: You can also read more detail on the Dow internal CEO blog on Ragan.com.

Our own Keith Burton’s recent video interview with PRWeek is the topic of discussion at IntranetBlog.com, from our friend Toby Ward at Prescient Digital:

“10 years ago in employee communications I found that we were moving away from the classic, traditional forms of employee communications . . . and to this new age that we’re in: moving away from regional and cultural change into an age of new commitment,” adds Keith. “And that new age of commitment means we have to use listening tools better, we have to use the technology we have today better than we have ever in the past. And that includes intranet technologies, as well as other forms of digital and social media.”