Tag: strategy

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Engagement

Employees as Volunteers? Or Volunteers as Employees?

If your organization relies on paid employees to get its work done, would you treat them any differently if they were volunteers?

Other thought leaders have shared their views on this topic, including:

Here are my thoughts to build on this management discussion. The key difference between these two sets of workers are that volunteers “aren’t bound by the same command and control requirements that employees have.”  This means volunteers can voluntarily choose to offer their time and services to what they consider a worthwhile organization. They can also voluntarily choose to withdraw their time and services  when it no longer suits them. Even though employees are in contractual work situations, they can also choose to stay or leave an organization. Unlike volunteers, however, employees may need to stay for their paychecks even though they would prefer to leave — engagement for payment purposes only.

If your organization relies on volunteers to get its work done, would you treat them any differently if they were employees?

As I’ve found in my work in the nonprofit sector, the presumption that all nonprofits value volunteerism is not necessarily the case. Some nonprofit managers only give lip-service to their volunteers despite benefiting from their time and skills. These managers can take advantage of their volunteers’ passion for the mission for only so long before those volunteers get frustrated and leave.

What matters to employees and volunteers is being treated with respect while getting the tools and information needed to effectively contribute their time and talents. Whether an organization is profit-driven or mission-driven, the quality of workplace engagement depends on its culture and values including how its people are treated, regardless of their paid or unpaid status. Both employee engagement and volunteer engagement are critical – neither should be taken for granted.

 

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Marketing Training & Development

Marketing Animal Rescues & Shelters – BlogPaws 2014

One of the reasons I love my work is that I get to meet dedicated nonprofit professionals and volunteers eager to share their stories. They’re also eager to learn how to further their respective organization’s mission in the marketing workshops I teach.

The volunteers and employees from a variety animal rescues and shelters who attended my recent BlogPaws 2014 Conference session, Fundamentals of Nonprofit Marketing: Building Share of Mind & Heart for Your Rescue/Shelter were no exception. These people involved in animal welfare are most passionate and inspiring. While rescues/shelters benefit from showcasing cute and appealing animal images in their marketing and social media outreach (i.e., the “aww … ” factor), they face intense competition from other rescue/shelter groups doing the same. They also run the risk of “wearing out people’s compassion.”

Animal Rescue/Shelter Marketing Challenges

In their efforts to save animals and find them “furever” homes, animal welfare volunteers and employees are challenged with service demands that often exceed their resources. Yet they manage to do what they can to:

  • educate the public about animal welfare, including raising awareness of animal abuse
  • advocate for spay and neutering
  • obtain the necessary support of volunteers, pet foster parents, donors, veterinary assistance, community sponsors and partners
  • communicate via social media to support their special events and the important work they do.

Intentional Marketing

Like many nonprofit organizations, animal rescues/shelters strive to maximize their mission with minimal resources. With this mode of operation, marketing is often a casualty — ” Marketing? Who’s got time to do marketing?!” But being a well-kept secret won’t sustain an organization. That’s why building and maintaining brand awareness through marketing needs to be intentional, and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It starts with understanding that each point of personal and/or media contact between the shelter, its stakeholders, and the market-at-large (e.g., every phone call, shelter visit, special event, email, letter, press release, Tweet, Facebook post, etc.) impacts the public’s perception of that shelter’s brand. Recognizing people’s individual and collective impact on the brand, intentional marketing then focuses on how best to ensure its brand contacts are as positive as possible.

Employees and volunteers who run animal rescues/shelters are already intentional in their commitment to help animals. By marketing intentionally as well, they’ll be able to continue their valuable work.

“Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.” —  John Muir

 

Categories
Engagement Marketing

Internal Marketing Goes South

I was honored to be one of three speakers from the U.S. invited to participate in the 6th International Marketing Congress: Marketing from the Inside, hosted by Asomercadeo, the Colombian Marketing Association. My Atlanta-based colleagues, Debra Semans and Ron Strauss, and I journeyed to Medellin, Colombia, recently to share our perspectives on internal marketing and internal branding. Stershic presentation at AsomercadeoMore than 400 business professionals gathered at the Congress to focus on the strategic impact of internal marketing in organizations “where there is a synergy between the areas of marketing, communications, human resources, and senior management.” Speakers addressed the elements of employee engagement, corporate culture, corporate social responsibility, marketing’s relationship within the organization, and leadership on brand-building.

For me, the highlight of this conference was learning that the core business concepts that my North American-based marketing colleagues and I advocate are becoming more universal in practice. This revelation was reinforced in the following themes repeated frequently during the conference:

  • People are the central axis of a company.
  • Employees and customers need to feel valued.
  • Organizational culture nourishes the brand.
  • Marketing, Human Resources, Operations, Finance, and all other areas of an organization need to work together as a team.
  • CEOs talk about human capital, but few actively engage them.

Another highlight of the trip was experiencing the ultimate in southern hospitality. Cristina Jaramillo Lopera, Academic Leader of the International Marketing Congress, and Asomercadeo’s leaders and event staff were most welcoming and accommodating. Truthfully, I was apprehensive about traveling to Medellin given the area’s reputation and that fact that I don’t speak Spanish. Cristina graciously hosted us on a wonderful tour of Medellin. The city and country-side are truly beautiful; the city is also aptly recognized as Innovative City of the Year.  I was impressed with its public access to arts & culture. The strong sense of pride that residents and businesses have in Medellin and Colombia is palpable. And I look forward to returning someday.

 

Categories
Engagement

Keeping Employees from Becoming Invisible

New employees are easy to engage. Companies welcome new recruits with open arms as they explain the company’s mission-vision-values and goals, outline employees’ work duties, introduce them to their managers and co-workers, and perhaps even assign them peer mentors. I’m simplifying the onboarding  process here, but  new employees receive a fair amount of attention to engage them from the start.

This level of attention wanes the longer employees are on the job, and that’s when the potential for becoming invisible sets in. To illustrate, I often ask attendees in my internal marketing workshops about their job descriptions. Less than one-third typically respond that their job descriptions are up-to-date. In some companies, employees only get reminded of their fit within the organization and what’s expected of them during the annual performance review – an event about as welcome as a root canal.

Gradual descent into disengagement

It’s not that employees are clueless about their roles or that managers are purposely keeping them in the dark. (I know, I’m giving employees and managers the benefit of the doubt here.) The reality is that marketplace changes – including increased competition, evolving customer needs,and financial pressures – also prompt changes in company goals and strategies. Yet revised strategies and adjusted expectations of employees don’t necessarily filter down to everyone in the organization. With managers struggling to cope with limited resources, information overload, and demanding bosses, who’s got time to update job descriptions? Or keep employees in the loop by addressing their questions and concerns in staff meetings?

To learn what’s going on in the company, some employees will take the initiative to approach their managers. Over time, however, these employees may become frustrated and disengage if they have to continually seek out company and job-related information. Meanwhile, other employees will:

  • Tap into the company grapevine to get information
  • Hunker down and keep doing what they’ve been doing until they’re told differently
  • Grow frustrated and eventually leave or retire on-the-job.

To prevent employees from becoming invisible and disenfranchised within the company, managers need to proactively share what’s happening in the company and why. They also need to reinforce employees’ alignment and fit within the organization, including how their efforts individually and collectively contribute to the bottom line.

“Don’t make your employees guess about whether they’re doing enough or fulfilling [the company’s] expectations… Make people feel like they are in the loop,  and they’ll feel more engaged… ”
– Alan E. Hall

 

Categories
Engagement

Gather Round: A Staff Meeting Template That Really Works

This popular post shares a practical and engaging staff meeting agenda. It’s been updated from its original posting in 2009.

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With e-mail dominating internal communications, staff meetings are becoming a lost art form. Here’s a meeting template that helps engage employees and minimize their passive participation.

I initially developed this template for an advertising & marketing firm that needed to bring together its creatives and administrators (aka “the suits”). With the creative staff at their desks and the account execs meeting with clients or media reps outside the office, casual internal communications was no longer effective for this group of 12 employees.

The following agenda (approximately one hour in length) was used in the agency’s staff meetings held twice a month. This template can be adapted by other organizations to suit their needs.

  1. What’s going on – agency principals share strategies, policies, and organizational updates with time allowed to address employee questions and concerns.
  2. Business development updates – account execs, sales and/or administrative staff members discuss:
    1. New clients and prospects,  including which account execs are involved so staff know the key agency contacts if a new client or prospect calls.
    2. Expanded client opportunities, soliciting employees’ ideas and suggestions on “what else” can be offered to help clients achieve their marketing and sales goals.
    3. Analysis of lost business to understand what happened with any terminated account.
  3. Campaigns in progress – creative and media staff members briefly share creative work and, if needed, changes or updates to existing campaigns.
  4. Lessons Learned – one or two employees voluntarily share a recent work-related experience:
    1. Favorite Mistakes (things we did that we don’t want to repeat)
    2. Favorite Catches (good things we did that we hope to do again).
  5. Wrap up/next steps – summarizing any follow up action items.

Implementing this meeting template resulted in a more informed and cohesive staff that better understood the firm’s business.They also expressed a better appreciation for how their individual and collective efforts contributed to client service and satisfaction.

 

Categories
Customer service Engagement Featured Post

How to Engage Employees in Customer Care

When it comes to getting employees involved with customer satisfaction and retention, it’s not as difficult as some managers believe. Smart employees, including those who don’t have direct customer contact, have a vested interested in customer care. They get the reality that no customers = no business, and no business = no jobs.

Here are four critical keys to effectively engage employees in improving customer care.

Key #1. Solicit customer feedback from your employees. In staff meetings or in anonymous written form, ask employees to share what they hear from customers. You can use fill-in-the-blank type questions such as:

  • When asked what they like best about our company, our customers typically tell me …
  • When asked for ideas on how we can improve our products/service, customers tell me …
  • Recently, I heard about a customer’s (positive or negative) experience with our company. This is what the customer told me …
  • When people hear I work for this company, their typical response is …

Employees, especially those on the front line, have their ears to the market and need a safe outlet to communicate what they hear upward in the company. Their qualitative feedback is also valuable in alerting you to any changes in public perceptions about your brand.

Key #2. Solicit employee ideas on how to better serve your customers.  I once worked for a bank that received low customer satisfaction scores. Management responded by calling a meeting to share the results and then proceeded to berate the branch managers for the poor scores. And the bank wondered why their quarterly numbers didn’t improve while employee morale also declined! Yes, there were operational issues, but management didn’t want to hear about them. How much better it would have been for everyone if bank management had taken the time to ask branch team members some basic questions:

  • What gets in the way of your being able to provide quality service to our customers?
  • What can we reasonably do, given our resources, to overcome these obstacles?
  • In what ways can we better serve our customers?

Key #3.  Seek to strengthen workplace engagement from the inside out. Internal customer service drives external customer service. That’s why it’s important to engage the behind-the-scenes support staff who serve their fellow employees (i.e., “internal customers”). Encourage employees to work together to improve internal service and systems.

Key #4. Recognize your employees’ efforts in improving customer care. Acknowledge and reinforce employee engagement in improving customer satisfaction and retention in whatever way works best  in your organization.  And don’t forget to celebrate your success. (Not sure what to do here? Ask your employees.)

CAUTION: Employees feel respected when management asks for their input and listens to them. Nothing will shut down communication and trust faster than when employees see managers as just going through the motions to engage them. That’s why I advise you to proceed ONLY if you are serious about responding to your employees’ input and ideas. You’re not expected to implement every single employee idea you receive, but you are expected to explain which are feasible and which are not. Otherwise, you can forget about passing go and forget about collecting $200, as they say in Monopoly. Most definitely, you can forget about employee and customer engagement!

 

Categories
Engagement

How Many of Your Employees Will Be Looking to Change Jobs This Year?

“Preparing for Take-Off,” a global study on turnover conducted by The Hay Group, forecasts employee turnover will rise sharply in 2014. People considering a job change this year are encouraged by reports of a growing competition for talent spurred by the global economy.

If they haven’t done so already, executives and managers need to ask themselves: Who in the organization is most likely to leave? Hint: it’s not always the employees you’re happy to see exit.  And who is most likely to stay? It’s not always the top performers you rely on. What managers perceive as employee loyalty may simply be an employee’s lack of opportunity up to this point.

“With retention a growing concern for organizations – not just for key high performing employees, but also core employees – understanding the factors that drive commitment and loyalty is essential for managing increasing turnover risks in the months and years ahead. Now is the time for organizations to understand where they stand on and tackle these influences, to keep employees from taking flight.”  Mark Royal, The  Hay Group senior principal and co-author of The Enemy of Engagement.

 

Categories
Engagement

Will 2014 Be The Year of the Employee?

Yes, according to Josh Bersin’s predictions on talent, leadership and HR, based on the results of Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends’ latest global study. Bersin pronounced 2014 as “The Year of the Employee” in which “Attraction, Retention, and Engagement Will Really Matter,” and he’s not alone in his thinking. A renewed focus on talent management is echoed by Scott Hebner, IBM’s VP of Social Business:

“In a world were employees move from job to job at a rapid pace, when it comes to human capital, loyalty trumps everything. Organizations are searching for a means to not only recruit the right candidates, but more importantly retain and nurture that talent to become passionate, engaged and loyal.”

Forecasting a sharp rise in employee turnover in 2014, Hay Group senior principal, Mark Royal, advocates:

“To keep high value employees from leaving in search of more favorable work arrangements, firms must address engagement and enablement challenges.”

Many HR researchers cite the growth of the global economy and technology in fueling strong competition for talent. Yet effective engagement is a challenge as Bersin notes:

“Companies have reduced costs, restructured, rationalized spending, and pushed people to work harder than ever. More than 60% of organizations tell us one of their top [concerns] is dealing with ‘the overwhelmed employee.'”

Competing for talent isn’t new. What I find most encouraging, however, is the renewed focus on attracting, engaging, and retaining people.

So will 2014 really be the year of the employee or just wishful thinking? We’ll see …

Categories
Featured Post Marketing

A Facilitator’s Top Three Tips for Strategic Marketing Planning

I recently shared why it’s important to commit time for strategic marketing planning.  Based on my combined experience as a marketer and planning facilitator, here are my top three tips for developing a successful planning session.

1. Be Mission-focused.

The basis for your strategic marketing plan is rooted in your organization’s mission. If your marketing efforts don’t support the company’s mission and goals, then don’t bother.

I post and review the company or nonprofit mission statement in every planning session I facilitate. Keeping the mission front-&-center is critical to helping participants avoid the situation that one executive described: “We spent more time focusing on what we could do rather than what we should do.”

2. Be Creative

Critical thinking and creative thinking are not mutually exclusive. To keep your planning process interesting, you can better envision and explore possibilities while engaging in “What if … ?” questions. For example: What if we had unlimited resources — what could we achieve? What if we could start over from scratch — what would we do differently? What would happen if our products, services, or brand disappeared — would we be missed?

You can also try a different perspective with this two-step scenario. First, you’ve been hired away by a major competitor’s consulting firm to help them assess your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Following this assessment, return to your current company role and consider how you can improve your marketing to gain and keep a competitive edge.

3. Be Realistic

Besides being mission-focused, it’s also important to recognize the scope of your organization’s capacity and commitment. In the course of creative and meaningful discussion, it’s easy to develop an extensive list of marketing ideas for consideration. That’s why I advocate planning participants develop and agree on a realistic set of two to four mission-focused marketing activities that support their company’s strategic goals. The worst possible outcome from a strategic planning session is for participants to generate an exhaustive laundry list of ideas and actions that overwhelm them. Seriously, it’s a small step from discouraged to disengaged.

For being realistic when it comes to marketing planning, here’s my favorite quote from Dr. Phil Kotler:

“Marketing is a learning game. You make a decision. You watch the results. You learn from the results. Then you make better decisions.”

Happy marketing planning!

Categories
Engagement Training & Development

When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Facilitator

Trust me, I never said that to my parents and teachers. But that’s what’s happened as my career evolved, and I’ve spent most of my 25 years with Quality Service Marketing developing and refining my skills as a facilitator.

What is facilitation?
“It’s a powerful way of working that gives everyone a chance to be an active part of the decision making process,” according to the International Association of Facilitators (IAF). It’s used in planning, problem-solving, creative thinking, input/feedback sessions, and other types of collaborative meetings. In my experience, facilitation involves establishing a base of mutual understanding … exploring possibilities and opportunities … communicating concerns … sharing and building ideas … setting clear direction and goals … and agreeing on next steps and responsibilities, including actions and follow up measures.

It’s about discovery
My role as facilitator is to guide the process of discovery that enables participants to determine where they want/need to go and what they need/want to do to get there. I start by learning as much about the group’s situation and culture as possible so I can develop the key questions and activities needed to effectively engage all participants in a comfortable, non-threatening environment. Then I get to serve in a dual, somewhat contradictory role: guiding the group in its discussions to keep on track and maintain focus, while also stepping back for those times when the group goes off in a different direction that’s critical to the discussion at hand.

The process is fascinating as I never quite know what the outcome will be, and I tell clients this upfront. For example, at one organization’s strategic planning retreat, board member discussion raised more issues than answers that needed to be explored further. With the group’s consensus, we suspended the strategic planning portion of the retreat, and the board then focused on identifying the critical topics that needed to be addressed before continuing strategic planning.

As a facilitator, I’ve also discovered many insights into group behavior, communication, and collaboration.

It’s about asking the right questions
Although they may not realize it, most of my clients intuitively know what they need to do in planning, problem-solving, idea-gathering or ideation. So my primary role as facilitator is to objectively ask the questions that enable them to discover and articulate the answers they need. The type of facilitation I prefer to use is Solutions-Focus, a positive approach to generating change that builds on what is possible rather than trying to fix what is problematic. (Special thanks to my colleague and solutions-focus mentor, Alan Kay, for introducing me to this approach many years ago.)

It’s International Facilitation Week
I’m proud to be an IAF member and celebrate International Facilitation Week the third week in October. I’ll share some of my favorite resources for facilitators in my next post.

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