Freedom and Responsibility at Netflix

Up until last September I’d never heard of Netflix. Then I stumbled across these slides which set out the key aspects of their corporate culture. Every now and again I return for a quick refresher to see how my own appreciation of the slides has changed.

It hasn’t. I love so much of what Netflix stands for. Especially the value they place on communication as a valued colleague behaviour (slide 11).

I recommend spending 15 minutes reading the whole slide deck. And stick with it – I almost stopped reading at slide 6 where they made a crude reference to Enron’s core values. If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard Enron’s core values used to highlight the danger of having a lovely sounding value statement that has no grounding in reality blah blah blah.

Persevere and you will be rewarded. Here are some of my personal highlights:

Some companies tolerate brilliant jerks – for us the cost to teamwork is too high
(slide 34)
Good processes help talented people get more done – bad processes try to prevent recoverable mistakes
(slide 61)
Netflix vacation policy and tracking – “there is no policy or tracking”
(slide 68)
There is no clothing policy at Netflix, “but no one has come to work naked recently”
(slide 68)
Netflix’s expenses policy – “Act in Netflix’s best interests”
(slide 71)
No bonus, no stock options, no philanthropic matching – instead pay big salary and give staff the freedom to spend it as they think best
(slide 106)

If it all sounds a little fanciful take a look at their 5 year graph. Looks to me like they’ve been riding out the global recession pretty well!

Don’t bother me while I’m at work

I had a very interesting chat today with a colleague who objects to the fact that we recently installed poster holders on the back of every toilet door in the building, strategically positioned to catch the attention of anyone seated therein.

He accepts quite happily that when he is out on the lash he expects to see toilet advertising. He’s fine with that; that’s quite legitimate and makes commercial sense. He does not accept however that his employer should use similar tactics to try to grab his attention when he is in a state of temporary captivity and at his most vulnerable, with his trousers wrapped around his ankles.

And he wasn’t getting precious about us intruding on his ‘me time’ in trap two. Investigating his stance further it became clear that he just doesn’t want to be ‘spammed’ when it’s not on his terms. “Don’t bother me while I’m at work” he said, “send me an email so I can delete it if the subject does not interest me”.

The content carried over the last few weeks on ‘Loo Media’ promoted a company donation of £100 to every member of staff to give to a charity of their choice when they sign up for payroll giving, and a reminder that any member of staff who introduces a graduate to the company’s graduate programme would win a bounty of £500 if subsequently selected.

It’s hardly propaganda is it? It’s not like we are trying to ram our core values down his throat.

What struck me most though was the ‘don’t bother me while I’m at work’ line. Would he prefer to be ‘bothered’ when not at work? Of course not.

He seemed oblivious to the fact that ‘bothering’ him while he was at work is precisely what any reasonable employer would seek to do in an effort to make his work experience more fulfilling and rewarding. His attitude was you pay me to do a job, I do my job, that’s it. I don’t ask for you to communicate with me, so you have no right to communicate with me.

What next I wonder. Maybe an opt out clause in every new starter’s contract, giving them the option not to receive any form of internal communication? Perhaps an unsubscribe button on every corporate email? I know – how about a 15 yard exclusion zone preventing any manager from violating his personal space?

I guess it’s just been one of those days…..

Harvest and amplify the positive outliers

I’ve was reading up on positive deviance (PD) over the weekend. Whilst the terminology is new to me the sentiment is certainly not and it was really quite exciting to discover someone with far more experience in the field thinking along the same lines as me.

Before continuing though just a word on what I mean by change. Organisational change is situational. It happens when something starts or stops: it could be structural, economic, technological or demographic. I think what most of us mean by organisational change is really transition – the psychological process that accompanies change and invariably extends over a period of time.

Things can and do change quickly, people do not. This is important as change management for me is really all about transition management. It’s about addressing the complex and very challenging people issues rather than the more straightforward situational ones.

With figures almost mirroring the failure rate of mergers & acquisitions, it’s generally accepted that organisational change initiatives fail more often than not. Poor communication is often blamed in both instances, so my own profession can take a bit of a shoeing at such times.

Maybe that is why what Jerry Sternin has to say on the subject resonates with me. His experiences led him to conclude that “the traditional model for social and organizational change doesn’t work, it never has. You can’t bring permanent solutions in from outside”. I know I’m not alone in expressing the following sentiment: all too often change consultants ride into town, offer their wisdom, collect their fees, and then head off into the sunset to refine their models, do a bit more research and write another book. Meanwhile the company reverts to form.

Jerry and Monique Sternin set the PD ball rolling after their work with Save the Children in Vietnam in the 1990’s where they used it to great effect to tackle child malnutrition. The Sternins’ approach was based on the belief that in every community there are individuals whose exceptional behaviours or practices enable them to get better results than their peers using exactly the same resources.

The real challenge is to find a way to ‘infect’ the rest of the community with their behaviours and practices. The Sternins found that such infection took place where new behaviours were encouraged rather than knowledge taught: “Once you find deviant behaviours, don’t tell people about them. It’s not a transfer of knowledge. It’s not about importing best practices from somewhere else. It’s about changing behaviour. You design an intervention that requires and enables people to access and to act on these new premises. You enable people to practice a new behaviour, not to sit in a class learning about it.”

In Vietnam, the Sternins proved that PD worked, and their groundbreaking work has since served as a model for rehabilitating tens of thousands of children in 20 countries, and PD is now being applied around the world to change behaviour in a variety of other social and organisational situations, such as the spread of AIDs in the Third World and ethnic conflicts in Africa.

Here is a list of the steps set out in a Fast Company interview with Jerry Sternin that I have been reading.

Don’t presume that you have the answer – start by listening, not talking.
Don’t assume you need to go cross functional – the aim is not to produce a lively conversation among diverse individuals. Everyone in the group that you want to help change must identify with the others in the group and face the same challenges and rely on the same set of resources to come up with answers. If the group feels that you’re going outside to where things are culturally different, then it becomes another way to impose best practice, and you’re not using PD.
Let them do it themselves – let the group discover, on their own, a better way to do things. Raise questions, but let the group come up with the answers on its own.
Identify conventional wisdom – before you can recognise how the positive deviants stray from conventional wisdom, you first have to understand clearly what the accepted behaviour is.
Identify and analyze the deviants – single out what exactly makes them successful.
Let the deviants adopt deviations on their own – enable people to practice new behaviours, not to sit in class learning about them.
Track results and publicise them – publish the results, show how they were achieved and let other groups develop their own curiosity about them. Celebrate success when you achieve it. Chip away at conventional wisdom and demonstrate what can be achieved through PD.
Repeat steps 1 to 7 – make the process cyclical. Deviation from the norm can quickly become the norm, at which point the chances are that PDs have discovered new deviations from the new norm.

I really like the sound of this approach.

I’m not going to rush out and start evangelising as I have yet to read any compelling evidence about its success in a hardcore business setting. I suspect every company has positive deviants lurking around somewhere. It could be the sales team that consistently outsells the rest despite making fewer calls. It could be the Finance team that consistently has the lowest churn rate in the company and the highest engagement scores in the annual staff survey. It could be the Help Desk team that always receives the highest number of customer commendations despite being the most under-staffed.

I like the look of PD as it does not make assumptions. This has to be a good thing as change management can be very formulaic and in my book there can never be a one size fits all solution to successful organisational change. Just because a particular approach worked in company A, it does not follow that the same intervention will work in company B.

And instead of focusing on solutions PD seeks to identify underlying successful behaviours already inside an organisation and leverage them.

That sounds pretty powerful to me.

The soft stuff is the hard bit

I went to a very interesting breakfast ‘roundtable’ this morning, hosted by People in Business (PiB). We were there to talk about Employee Communications During Mergers & Acquisitions and to mark the launch of a book by the same name written by PiB’s Jenny Davenport and Simon Barrow.

There were a few grim faced, hardened old M&A advisors at the table and some of the things they said got me thinking about their trade.

Why is it that M&A advisors are not subject to qualitative measurement around the long term value created by the transactions they advise on?

Seems to me that they are simply measured on the total fees they manage to acquire in any given year. Check out this list of 2009’s top ten M&A advisors to see what I mean. I had a hunt around for a top ten based on long term sustainable value creation and couldn’t find one.

There is plenty of research which suggests that M&A activity fails to create value for the companies involved more often than not. The failure rate of mergers and acquisitions is similar to that of any large corporate change initiatives – around the 70% mark. And in both cases, it is the so called soft stuff that is widely recognised as the root cause of failure. Insufficient attention to the people agenda, clashing cultures and poor communication in particular.

If the M&A advisors know this, why is it that they don’t do something about it – or at least advise their clients to? It’s because their focus is on getting the deal done. Their priority is to sell the financial and operational value of the deal to the analyst community and institutional shareholders. And these guys have a short attention span. They are looking at the share price graph on the day of the announcement. They are not really interested in how well the company will be performing in 5 years time. And the advisors are interested in getting their fee – which is obviously paid upon completion, not incrementally on a long term performance related basis.

The same can be said of executive search and recruitment. How many head hunters are measured on their ability to fit the right person into a senior leadership role in a company on any long term success metrics? How many would be willing to accept that they got it wrong? None of course. It’s a numbers game, and their job is done once the offer has been accepted and their cheque is in the post.

Actually, I believe that the clients get it. Companies are far more likely to instruct external specialists to conduct cultural due diligence than the advisors. PiB said as much today when I asked them how many of their clients came from advisor instructions. The answer was just one out of the 26 significant M&As they have been involved in. In all other instances it was the company or companies involved in the transaction that called them in.

PiB also mentioned that recent research conducted by Brewin Dolphin indicates that these same PiB clients have outperformed the FTSE 100 index by 68% since the relevant transaction.

So why am I banging on about this?

Because I am communications professional and I believe with all my heart that the role we have to play in the day to day running of a business, and in particular at times of major corporate change, what we do or don’t do has a serious impact on company performance.

Internal Communications is all about creating a climate inside an organisation where the major factors that influence employee engagement can thrive: respect, trust, openness and recognition.

We represent the conscience and the consciousness of the company and no-one is better placed to advise and deliver on the hardest bit during times of change – the soft stuff.

Internal Communications on Linkedin?

I recently started a discussion on my company’s group on Linkedin about using the site as an Internal Communications channel. The main strands of the feedback were:

We don’t need yet another channel to have to keep an eye on
Fear that ex-staff are also part of the group
Fear over security features on the site
The lawyers said no!

I was somewhat surprised at the push back until I realised that it was my fault for not positioning the idea quite as I had intended.

My own considered definition of Internal Communication is likely to be very different from everyone else around here – after all, I’m the only one who thinks about it all day every day, and occasionally wakes up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night thinking about it too…

Most people not immersed in the dark art would naturally assume that Internal Communication is communication exclusively within an organisation. The fact is, these days with the speed, ease and penetration of digital and mobile communication, there is growing convergence between internal and external communications. There has to be.

One reason for this is simply because staff are participating in social media channels like Facebook and Twitter in ever increasing numbers. And just as we can’t and shouldn’t attempt to regulate what they say to their friends in the pub or their family across the dinner table about what it’s like to work here, we should not attempt to do so online either.

Most staff are natural and willing advocates of the company they work for, and rather than trying to script them with carefully crafted words, or banning them from contributing to certain online communities, or threatening them with disciplinary action if they cross some digital line, surely companies are far better off working hard to constantly improve their experience at work.

The growth of social media channels is making even email look very slow and cumbersome these days, and communications professionals have to assume that anything broadcast internally has the potential to reach the outside world within seconds – and spread across the globe just as quickly. At best, IT security measures can only ever hope to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted and provide the necessary evidence to invoke disciplinary procedures.

Of course there have to be some rules and there certainly has to be some advice and guidance. But demonstrating trust in people and creating a climate of authentic advocacy through increased transparency, openness, humility, honesty, integrity, personal growth, professional development, meaningful work and fun looks to me a lot more effective and rewarding.

I agree that we should not be in the business of creating more places where people are expected to have to visit to find information or provide give feedback. That was never in my mind. I know how hard it is to drive traffic to a single very accessible source already, let alone encourage them to contribute to discussions and leave feedback.

My thinking here was simply that where you have an existing pervasive channel it feels like a lost opportunity to ignore it just because it is external. It would only ever be a complementary alternative place for people to find out what is going on and have their say in case they were finding it hard to find their way to the single source of corporate truth that is the intranet.

The presence of ex-staff is a complete bonus! I’d like to think that most people that have moved on from the company still love the place. Academic institutions and many large companies make an effort to keep in touch with their Alumni and so should we. Plus their perspective on issues has real value. They are just as likely as current staff to be customers and investors.

Oh yes – nearly forgot. It came as no surprise that Legal would be so dismissive. I think it’s time to go and talk to them!

Semantics

I’ve found myself compelled to contribute to a few online discussions recently, both I hate to admit, sparked off by nothing more that my own intolerance. One here and another here.

You see I have this thing about arguments seemingly based on nothing but semantics. It winds me up a treat when people start arguing about the meaning of words and hold up long lists of alternative dictionary definitions as reasons why current terminology needs to be re-defined.

My own industry is full of it. Many of my peers* seem determined to find alternative labels and terminology that more accurately reflect exactly what we mean by Internal Communications and Employee Engagement. In one recent discussion on the Employee Engagement Network, ‘syntropy’ was held up as the contributor’s ‘terminology for the antithesis’ of the ‘malpractice’ of managers and consultants who disengage employees in ‘the Entropic Enterprise’. Make of that what you will. I gave up trying to work out how that would help anyone understand what a disengaged employee looks like after getting bogged down in medical glossaries in search of a spot of clarity.

An article I came across in an in-flight magazine the other day may help to illustrate what I’m somewhat inelegantly trying to say here. The article, which explored the evolution of music, began by defining the word ‘music’ as “an art form with the medium of sound based around vibrations”.

Now what bloody use is that to anyone? Music is music. We all know what it is. We all have our own opinions on what constitutes good and bad music. But it’s still music.

I have to confess I couldn’t be bothered to read the rest of the article. The attempt to define ‘music’ was too big a turn off to draw me any further into the story. I was disengaged.

*Maybe not quite peers. Consultants seem more prone to this activity than in-house practitioners, who I consider to be my true peers.

A personal perspective on Internal Communications

Hands up those who think that the primary role of Internal Communications is to craft and deliver corporate messages?

I’d like to think any communications professionals reading this have kept their hands firmly pointing to the floor. I’m sure I’m right on this. I’m just as sure however that a significant proportion of senior executives across the land are tempted to raise their hands if they haven’t already thrust them up towards the heavens.

I believe that the primary role of Internal Communications is to create or at least contribute to a climate where people are increasingly receptive to receiving those corporate messages in the first place.

Communication does not take place until the intended recipient receives and accepts the message. You can shout as loud and as often as you like, but if no one is listening you are not communicating.

Every so often I come across people who believe that if you craft an email containing all of the relevant points you wish to get across, once you have hit the send button you can put a tick in the ‘communication done’ box. As George Bernard Shaw famously once said “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Yep – I buy that.

A big part of my job is to educate and support those around me who believe they have communicated when they haven’t – as well as to undertake all manner of activities to increase the likelihood that when a corporate message is sent out there is a natural demand from the recipient to accept delivery. I don’t want to see people hiding behind the curtain when the postman knocks on the door.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. The horse will only drink if it is thirsty. The job of Internal Communications is to create thirst.

This is where things get a touch more complicated. Every organisation is different. There is no one size fits all approach that will work from one company to the next. The sort of things I mean will usually involve varying degrees of getting down and dirty, lots more listening, creating more opportunities for conversation, finding the right balance between push and pull, and equal measures of transparency, openness, humility, honesty, integrity and fun.

However, there is one thing that can be applied to every enterprise regardless of size, age and location; and that is the need to enlist the unequivocal support of your line management community. I sit firmly in the Larkin & Larkin camp.

No amount of leadership summits, executive workshops, CEO breakfasts, engagement surveys, podcasts, blogs, Twittering, Yammering or firing out all-staff emails can make up for a tuned out line manager who does not regularly engage with his or her team on the important corporate issues of the day.

A word in your Shell-like

The Times today carries a story of the names and telephone numbers of up to 170,000 of Shell employees and contractors being sent by email to human rights groups and environmental activists, supposedly by a group of disaffected staff who were pressing for changes within the company.

I’d say the truth around this story has yet to be established, however regardless of whether this represents, as reported, the actions of a group of disaffected staff seeking change (which feels very unlikely!), or the actions of a single rogue ex-employee it will probably be a while before we know.

The story interests me primarily because it is a timely reminder to those who argue that social media should not be allowed in the workplace because of the increased risk of intentional or accidental reputational damage. The same arguments were widely articulated in the early days of email – and who could seriously suggest these days that email has no place in business and commerce?

This is not a technology issue. Today’s story illustrates how the means of spraying information around the globe in minutes has been with us for donkey’s years. Social media technologies may speed up the spray from minutes to seconds, but this makes no real difference to the outcome. And security measures merely provide a way of mopping up after the damage has been done. They will never prevent such occurrences from taking place.

No – this has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with human behaviour. Last Friday’s Twitter storm involving Vodafone UK was very interesting. The storm turned very quickly into a storm in a tea cup and went on to illustrate to me the enormous potential that social media has in enhancing and protecting corporate reputations.

Had the employee sent his homophobic comments in an email to 8,000 people the story would have gone viral over a period of days and weeks and it would have attracted far more mainstream press coverage. Because this took place on Twitter the whole world knew about it in minutes – but they got over it in hours.

In my opinion Vodafone handled the incident magnificently. They could have gone quiet and said nothing (the route favoured by far too many corporate media relations departments) or maybe spun the story by blaming hackers or technology failure.

But no – they swiftly identified the issue as one of human behaviour and apologised openly and elegantly and as a result the story no longer has legs. In my opinion Vodafone controlled the incident beautifully by demonstrating agility, openness and a touch of humility.

I think there are lessons for us all in there somewhere.

Asda’s Green Room

I’d heard great things about Asda’s Green Room, an online portal where Asda staff can get together to find out what’s happening around the company as well as share their own stories, pictures and videos. What excited me most about it was that anyone can join in. The whole shebang is exposed to Asda customers, shareholders, media – anyone with a passing interest in Asda can and is encouraged to take a look around.

Given that I’m hugely interested in what I see as the inevitable convergence of internal and external communications, driven primarily by growth of social media, I had huge expectations when I paid my first visit. First impressions were mint. It looks great and sounds great. So I scratched beneath the surface a little. I have to say, by the time I left I was feeling pretty disappointed.

OK, so it has only been going for about 5 months. Actually 5 months in social media is probably the equivalent in several years in real-time. There are some signs of genuine interaction with ‘colleagues’ (that’s what Asda call their staff) and customers who have commented on the stories posted by the Green Room team. However, many stories have attracted no comments at all.

When you consider that Asda employs over 150,000 people in the UK, 90,000 of whom who are part time (and therefore presumably have a bit more time for social networking) this does not feel like success.

Lifting the bonnet slightly, I then saw that the Green Room’s own Facebook site has only 200 fans and despite almost daily updates, 2 ‘like its’ were the only sign of interaction going back to November 2009. I didn’t see a single comment on any of the wall posts during this time. The Green Room’s Twitter channel only has 51 followers (52 now – hi Steve!).

Please don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love what Asda have done here, it is ground breaking stuff – truly. I’m just a tad disappointed that Asda colleagues do not appear to have embraced the portal with as much enthusiasm as the very capable Green Room Team clearly have.

Watch this space – I intend to find out why.

Riding the ripple

To create waves it sometimes helps to begin by riding the ripple

Employee Engagement