This is the first installment of a special series focusing on
measurement as it relates to a particular aspect of public
relations.
With the competitive environment growing ever more challenging,
businesses need to leverage their employee assets to the greatest
extent possible. Communications can play a major role in
cultivating employee beliefs and attitudes, but determining what
works and what doesn't work in a particular corporate environment
requires a best-practices research effort.
Such a program for employee communications should have:
- A means to provide upper management with feedback quickly and
easily on what employees see as timely, critical issues facing the
company. - A means for periodically determining the extent to which
employees are aligned with corporate goals and are enthusiastically
engaged in pursuing those goals.
Let's examine each of these points in greater detail:
Cultivate feedback. Top management is notoriously
isolated from the rest of the company, yet it is employees who see
how business strategies are playing out in the real world. A
best-practices research program identifies and compares various
approaches for providing this feedback. One cost-effective tactic
is weekly polling via intranet or e-mail asking one question: "What
one business issue would you like to bring to the attention of top
management?" Staff members can analyze results easily. Be sure the
sampling technique gives all employees the opportunity to
participate within a reasonably short period. Follow-up on a
feedback program is critical.
Determine alignment and engagement. A best-practices
research program provides insight into the extent to which
employees are aligned and engaged with the organization.
"Alignment" typically refers to employees knowing the goals and
objectives of the business--at the overall business level and down
through the organizational hierarchy to the employees' own
organizations.
What's the best way to build alignment? It varies by company. It
may be a series of staff meetings, televised company-wide meetings
or electronic publications. Probably, it's a combination. A
best-practices research program enables communicators to understand
how well each program is doing in building awareness of business
goals and organizational relationships.
Companies typically obtain these data via periodic company-wide
employee surveys. At GM, for example, a Global Employee
Census is conducted every two or three years. All employees are
given the opportunity to complete a 100+ item survey that
systematically captures employee awareness of goals and objectives,
priorities of the company, organizational relationships and so
forth.
The other key communication function is to facilitate the
building of employee "engagement," referring to the extent to which
employees support and endorse the business and its goals. The
underlying assumption--borne out in several studies--is that
greater engagement leads to greater benefits, including greater
creativity; greater enthusiasm; lower absenteeism; lower turnover;
and more initiative that carries over when speaking with customers,
investors and other key people.
A study conducted by AT&T found that customer-service
reps who exhibited greater engagement with the business and its
goals were more successful in retaining customers and in selling
additional services than were service reps who were less engaged.
It was clear that greater engagement led to more dollars to the
bottom line.
After implementing a series of engagement programs, use surveys,
e.g., to measure the extent to which participation in--or even
awareness of--such programs have impacted employee attitudes toward
the company along with job-related behaviors. You might be able to
use such measures as absenteeism rates and employee turnover to
determine the effectiveness of your programs. A little creativity
here can save you a lot of measurement money.
Contact: Bruce Jeffries-Fox is president of Jeffries-Fox
Associates, a Cape May, N.J.-based PR firm. He can be reached at
609.884.8740 or at [email protected].