Internal Communications

Trust is a must

Our Yammer network is growing by the day and as time passes my excitement about its potential for increasing the speed and quality of collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation across the company rises.

So naturally I get very protective when something happens that potentially undermines our continued use of my new favourite application. One of the issues I know causes some discomfort among senior executives everywhere is the issue of trust and confidentiality. So one thing you don’t really want to see on Yammer is open discussion about commercially sensitive information that needs to be kept in a closed loop.

After many thousands of conversations and contributions on our network since it was brought to life last year I have yet to see anyone cross this boundary.

Actually this comes as no surprise to me. I have long believed that when you trust people to behave appropriately they do. Secrets fuel gossip, speculation & rumour, which quickly spreads around as people who feel excluded and unworthy probe and speculate. This can be very disruptive in any work place – and sooner or later they become open secrets in any event.

And because people have no stake in them (and they only have half the story) they are far more likely to say or ask something inappropriate in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In my experience the more stuff you try to hide, the greater the risk you run of it leaking out. On the other hand, if you treat people as adults and trust them with information, they will repay your trust and respect the need to exercise discretion and moderation when talking to the outside world.

Of course there are some things that need to be kept secret. But I think that too many companies have a tendency to overplay the secrecy card – and this can have a seriously detrimental effect on organisational culture and effectiveness.

One of the guys at work had a bit of a rant on Yammer a few days ago on this very subject.

More on this tomorrow. Trust me, it’s a good story…

Celebrate good times

I love celebrations. Last week we celebrated the company’s 10th birthday with cake, champagne and jelly beans at all of our offices in the UK and abroad. It was a real joy to see happy smiling faces everywhere as we celebrated a decade of incredible achievement. On 9 June 2000, Betfair ran its first market on the Oaks at Epsom, where £3,462 was traded between 36 customers, watched over by just a handful of staff. Ten years later the company employs over 2,000 people spread across 30 locations around the world, and deals with more daily transactions than every European stock exchange put together.

And for the next month we are celebrating the most amazing festival in the sporting calendar. We are at our core a sports betting company, so the World Cup is a big thing for us, and we have been preparing for it for years. It’s only fitting therefore that we have a bit of fun and pay homage to the 32 teams battling it out in South Africa.

While the media are banging on about the cost to employers of World Cup distraction as staff absenteeism and lack of attention rises incrementally in line with England’s success on the pitch, and companies ban access to footy websites and make the flying of the Cross of St George a disciplinary offence, we have been encouraged to fly the flag – and more.

Our offices have become a sea of colour, creativity and noise to reflect the energy, excitement and diversity of the World Cup. Our staff in London have self organised themselves into 34 teams and given their bits of the office a bit of a makeover. There are 34 teams because two non-qualifiers that narrowly missed out on a trip to South Africa, Ireland and Egypt wanted to get involved.

My team is representing the Cameroon. Which is great, because the Cameroon have a rich heritage when it comes to World Cup celebrations!

Don’t be fooled into thinking we are all just on one great big World Cup jolly. Au contraire, this is going to be a very busy month for everyone as we mobilise to meet the demands of dramatically increased customer activity.

However, I work for a company that recognises the importance of celebration as well as the value of having a bit of fun while your nosed is pressed firmly against the grindstone.

Don’t just sit there feeling hard done by – check out our current vacancies and get involved!

Delivering Happiness

Next week sees the much anticipated publication of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a couple of advance copies a few weeks ago on the understanding that I would review the book on Riding the Ripple and give the other copy away to one of my readers. 

It’s a bit like being gifted tickets to Super Bowl on the understanding that I turn up for the game. Why would I not want to write about one of the people on planet earth that I most admire? 

As books go, I’ve read better. But as a real life example of how a very different kind of corporate culture can become the driver of unprecedented commercial success, it really doesn’t get better than this. 

Tony Hsieh is no literary genius; he is just a straight forward, straight talking chap who possesses bucket loads of intellect, emotional intelligence, drive and humility. 

Oh and he happens to be CEO of one of the last decade’s biggest internet sensations, Zappos.

On the face of it, Delivering Happiness is an archetypal story of rags to riches – and as a self confessed Sunday Times ‘How I made it’ addict for donkey’s years, I’ve read hundreds like it.

But actually I haven’t. I have never read anything quite like this before, because Tony Hsieh is a one-off. 

  • How many people do you know who would turn their back on trousering $8m in order to chase a passion?
  • How many CEOs do you know who’s core beliefs on human interaction are heavily influenced by the very tribal behaviour experienced in rave culture?
  • How many companies do you know that prefer to create interesting stories through delivering amazing customer experience instead of paying for PR?
  • How many companies do you know that rely on word of mouth and spend the money that other companies would spend on advertising on customer service?
  • How many companies do you know that communicate with their customers and staff at the same time, over the same channels? 

I will be examining these and other themes in the book over the next few weeks. For now I hope I have whetted your appetite for Delivering Happiness sufficiently that you’d like to take a shot at winning yourself a free copy. 

All you have to do is RT any tweet you see from me mentioning  Delivering Happiness and then DM me and tell me how many posts on Riding the Ripple mention Zappos, and how Tony Hsieh pronounces his surname – is it Shay, Sigh or Shy?

Alternatively you can just buy it on Amazon!

The art of corporate apology

My infatuation with Zappos reached new heights at the weekend. Nailed on to undermine morale, there is nothing worse than working in an environment where the grapevine consistently beats formal and informal communication channels, especially when things go wrong and there is no acknowledgement.

Too many companies operate in a climate of unnecessary secrecy, either in the belief that you can keep a lid on major foul ups (which you can’t) or because they have yet to learn the art of corporate apology. This applies equally to the internal and external audience by the way.

Internally, without acknowledgement there is no learning and the most powerful thing about making a mistake is the shared learning opportunity it presents. Honesty and openness when a clanger is dropped should contribute to that particular clanger not being dropped again. Ignore it – or God forbid try to cover it up and you will be punished. Maybe not immediately, but your time will come.

I’m very blessed to be working for a company that gets this, and whilst it may not quite be up there with Zappos, it’s not far off.

So, back to the incident/communication that prompted this outpouring of love and goodwill.

How does this rate for speed, transparency and humility in the face of a customer pricing mistake that cost the company a $1.6m loss in the space of 6 hours last Friday?

http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos/2010/05/21/6pm-com-pricing-mistake

It’s beautiful is it not?

Should this be on the intranet?

When one of your Exec sends you an email with the subject “Should this be on the intranet?” and the body text comprising a paragraph on an external accolade recognising the achievements of one of your Business Process Improvement team’s recent projects, what goes through your mind?

Is he suggesting that this is good news that should be shared with the rest of the company? Or could he perhaps be questioning the appropriateness of the wording of an existing news story.

Wrong numberThis happened to me earlier, and like a half wit, I plumped for the former. The thing is I spend a fair bit of my time encouraging our senior leaders to contribute intranet news stories as well join in the online discussions that accompany them.

So when the said email popped up in my uber congested inbox, it never even crossed my mind (not a long journey at the best of times!) that he was suggesting something already on the intranet may not be as suitable for publication as the author had intended. So what did I do? What do you think? I hastily fired back a cheeky email saying “You should read the intranet more often 😉 I published a piece on this last Friday”. I even included a helpful link to the story I was so sure he had missed.

Yep – you guessed it. I was wrong. Very wrong. And once alerted to my wrongness it was so bleedin’ obvious I still cannot quite believe I didn’t see it.

Some people may leap to my defence by suggesting that the email lacked clarity. I don’t buy it. I write for a living. For my interpretation to be correct, the email title would have had to have been “Shouldn’t this be on the intranet?”

So I’m sitting here right now somewhat bloated by enormous helpings of humble pie, recording this afternoon’s minor  cock-up for posterity, promising never to take anything for granted ever again, and taking some small comfort from the fact that just the act of writing this down has made me feel a bit better – and is damn site cheaper than paying for therapy!

Professional Development in Internal Communication

Not so long ago I completed an online survey at the invitation of Internal Communications (IC) recruiters extraordinaire VMA Group. Designed to gather independent information on salary benchmarks, skills requirements and key career development trends within the UK IC industry, the survey was completed by 250 senior IC practitioners. 

This evening I popped along to RIBA to see the survey results presented back to a posse of grim faced IC ninjas eager to find out how the industry has fared since the last survey in 2008. So what if anything has changed? 

Salaries have remained pretty static, with modest uplift at all levels broadly in line with inflation. Given the economic backdrop over the last 2 years I’d say this is a good sign for the industry.

 One of the most interesting changes was around reporting lines. Since 2008 the three notable changes are:

  • The number of Heads of IC reporting directly to the CEO has doubled, from 4% to 8%
  • A 10% increase in Heads of IC reporting to the Head of Marketing
  • A significant reduction (11%) in the amount of Heads of IC reporting to Corporate Communications

 Team size was interesting, in particular the fact that 25% of IC teams comprise just one person operating alone. There was no figure for 2008 to compare this figure against. I’ll ask VMA tomorrow if they have this.

Another interesting finding was the difference between the top 5 skills deficits as perceived by IC practitioners versus those of their employers: 

IC practitioners Employers
Coaching senior leadership Strategy setting
Social media development Coaching senior leadership
Change management Influencing
Influencing Writing
Strategy Setting IC theory

Interesting to see that Social media development does not feature in the employers’ wish list. Personally I think that this is a reflection on the relatively slow recognition of the game changing nature of social media channels and actually IC practitioners are ahead of the curve here. I’d expect to see it higher up this list in the next survey.

To finish off this whistle stop tour of the survey findings, what do you make of this one? In 2008, 19% of respondents felt that their senior executive team were key IC advocates. In 2010 that figure rises to 30%.

Could this be an indication that employee engagement and the role IC plays in increasing it has become progressively more recognised by senior executive teams as an important and relatively low cost differentiator of corporate performance during harsh economic times?

I’d like to think so, but then I would wouldn’t I!

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!

Predilection for negativity

Human beings seem to be wired for negativity. Research conducted in 2001* determined that 62% of every known ‘emotion’ word in the English language was negative versus 38% positive. The same study examined hundreds of articles on psychology and concluded that for a wide range of human behaviour and perception, bad is stronger than good.

I guess I touched on this a few weeks ago when I had a pop at Dilbert fans.

When people are shown photographs of bad and good events, they spend more time looking at the bad ones. When people learn bad things about people they remember it more than the good things. Marital problems and skin conditions sell magazines. Misery, depravity and dysfunction attracts viewers – just ask Jeremy Kyle.

I’m going to make a conscious effort to avoid gratuitous negativity on this blog. Not completely; that would be unreasonable. If I can achieve two thirds positivity versus one third negativity I’ll be happy as that will represent a positive contribution to blogosphere and I will be doing my bit to combat the human predilection for negativity.

I will lose readers for sure. I read the other day that two out of the top 3 global HR blogs for quality and influence are the ‘seasoned and cynical’ Laurie Ruettimann’s Punk Rock HR, where ‘team building is for suckers’, and My Hell is Other People, written by an anonymous British HR Director. I had a good look around both and they are without doubt a damn good read – but not because of their rosy outlook on life!

*Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer & Vochs (2001) “Bad Is Stronger than Good” Review of General Psychology, pages 323-370.

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.

Just turn up

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…..

Say that again in English

Just 6 weeks ago I blogged about our use of Yammer. Since then another 60 members of staff have signed up and I’m delighted to report that our network is getting busier and busier.

However, the reason why I’m revisiting our Yammer story right now is because today one of our technical team chose to share the following message with us:

“Mockito 1.8.3 is out – http://code.google.com/p/mo… It just added in the ability to auto inject mocks which reduces boilerplate for your dependency injection code. Along with deep stubs, the argument capturing and native BDD support I’d say that it’s currently the best mocking framework for java.”

Now I’ve been working at Betfair for the last 18 months and I know that the company is widely regarded first and foremost as a technology company – and I consider myself reasonably tech savvy.

However when I read the above I first assumed it was some kind of Dilbertesque parody. When I followed the link I continued to believe it was some kind of bizarre technical satire. But the closer I looked, it began to dawn on me that it was genuine – as was the text reproduced above.

Do engineers really talk like this?

If they do then I’m in trouble. I think it may be time to enrol in some evening classes in tech speak – or perhaps Google have a technical translator app?