This week’s top story discusses how to motivate employees, build an emotional connection to your brand within them and eventually make them enthusiastic brand advocates.

Warning: The following may strike some as crude examples, but they’re meant to be illustrative only. Can there be any better example of an employee with an emotional connection to his job than assistant football coach Aaron Feis, who shielded students from bullets during last week’s terrible incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Schoolin S. Florida? A Douglas grad, Feis was described as having great pride and loyalty toward the school and its students. Feis displayed his emotional connection this past Valentine’s Day and paid with his life.

 

On the other hand, members of gymnastics and Olympics governing bodies who allegedly ignored and/or downplayed complaints of misconduct against Dr. Larry Nassar would seem to be examples of employees without an emotional connection to their jobs.

For Amanda Atkins, head of internal communications at Slack, a cloud-based workflow solution, employees with an emotional connection “are proud…[and] passionate and have skin in the game...they feel they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. It’s much more than coming to work and collecting a paycheck.” The way they talk about your product and company to the rest of the world is “grounded in those emotions.”

Adds Jessica Bauer, internal communications manager at Dropbox, emotional connections go beyond creating social advocates of your employees. Based on research, she says, emotionally engaged employees are more productive, increase retention and reduce turnover. Such employees also lead to increased sales and profits, not to mention bettering a company’s reputation, which helps when attracting top-tier talent.

Getting Started

OK, how do you instill these emotions in employees? Atkins and Bauer emphasize different thrusts. Atkins points to the following:

• Hands-on Experiences: Depending on the industry you’re in, employees can familiarize themselves with products before they’re released to the public. This can motivate employees to want to get behind a product, she says, again, creating a feeling that the employee is part of something larger than himself or herself.

She gives the example of a program at Victoria’s Secretwhere employees, friends and families were encouraged to sample products before they were sold to the public. A former employee there, Atkins says each product was sent to the employee’s desk via an inter-office envelope. “It was like Christmas Day when one of those envelopes arrived,” Atkins says, recalling that employees would gather around the recipient’s desk to ogle and compare experiences.

The program was an excellent way to create an emotional connection in employees, particularly for those without product-facing jobs, such as IT workers.

• Product Input and Feedback: As in the above, with the product in employees’ hands before release, their input and feedback should be solicited, she says. “This can build a personal connection.”
• Personal Experiences:Perhaps you have an employee with a very long tenure, or one who’s contributing in a unique say or who has a fascinating story. “Being able to pull out these stories and share them broadly builds positive emotional connections for the entire employee base.” This makes employees feel that they’re part of a robust, diverse, exciting team that’s responsible for putting good into the world, she adds.
• Customer Connections: This can be big, particularly in industries that, on the surface, seem to lack excitement. For example, Atkins mentions working for
• Liberty Mutual Insurance before joining Slack. “Getting employees excited about [an insurance] product, especially one they don’t work with directly can be a challenge.” The solution was relaying stories where customers’ lives were rebuilt with the insurer’s help after disasters, she says. Putting such stories together for employees makes them realize the importance of what the company does and that’s reflected in how they speak about the brand to the public, she says.
• Storytelling: Atkins stresses it’s not merely telling stories about what your product is, but what it does to help people’s lives, perhaps how it changes their lives. This again can help staff see beyond the borders of their day-to-day job.
• Creativity: Atkins admits some products are more conducive to this approach than others, however, with creativity “I guarantee” you can find examples and stories that will help build emotional connections within employees, she says.

Examples at Slack

Atkins puts many of the above suggestions into practice at Slack. For example, all of the company’s employees use Slack—email is not used—in beta or alpha and they’re encouraged to submit comments on what’s working for them and what’s not via a dedicated feedback channel.

More than that, employees from “anywhere in the company” can bring up an idea based on their experience or what a customer is telling him/her and can see the result of their input.

As you can see in the graphic at the bottom of page 2, an employee “f” mentions in a dedicated channel that a Slack product lacks time zone adjustments and so frequent travelers need to amend their appointments when they move across the globe. By the way, the commenter at the top of the conversation identified as “Stewart” is Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield (photo page 1), who says he, too, is frustrated with the timezone situation since he’s a frequent traveler.

While the issue is resolved via a tech fix, the more important thing for this discussion is that the employee sees that his/her input resulted in a better product. (How many times have your opinions been solicited at work or elsewhere and you’ve seen the results of your input?)

Disengaged at Work

33%: U.S. employees who say they’re engaged at work
20%: U.S. employees who say they’re managed in a way that motivates them to do great work
13%: U.S. employees who strongly agree that the leadership of their organization communicates effectively with the rest of the organization
Source: Gallup, State of the American Workplace (February 2017)

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Boundaries

Now that your employees are building their emotional connections to your company and its products, it’s critical to make sure they have guardrails within which they can share socially. For example, make sure it’s clear when something is ready to be shared, such as an embargoed announcement. It’s best to include a reminder about embargoes at the top of an announcement, Atkins says.

Another tip: repackage internal videos, photos, etc., so employees can share them publically. This provides employees with the messages you want “out there the way you prefer” them shared and makes it easier for them to be advocates, Atkins says. There are platforms dedicated to this, such as Social Chorus. Of course, you could share this material via email or intranet, too.

Communications with Employees

For Dropbox’s Bauer, one of the key contributors to creating the kind of engagement that leads to employee advocates is communication. Employees want to hear about company goals and how they are contributing to the firm’s success, she says. In general, the more informed employees are, the better they feel about where the business is headed. While communicating with employees seems an obvious tactic, it’s considered one of the more difficult assignments for PR pros.

Bauer faced these challenges in October, when Dropbox unveiled a rebrand aimed at emphasizing that the brand had moved beyond offering storage only to also providing workflow solutions. The rebrand also featured a redesign, incorporating a lot more color into its template.

The first step in communicating this effort to employees was deciding on goals. The goals were driving awareness and excitement among Dropbox employees globally.

It was decided to take a who, what, where, when and why approach. This meant making certain Dropboxers were provided context about why the redesign was needed and how and why it would matter to each employee, ie, why should I care about this? When, also was key, Bauer says. “You don’t want employees finding out things” via press announcements. “You want them hearing it from the company, perhaps their manager,” before it becomes public, she says.

3-4 Weeks

A tip: Timing is key. Mention a key event too early to employees and it might leak out to the public; mention it too late and you risk being unable to fully communicate it to staff. Bauer says Dropbox found “the sweet spot” to begin unveiling details to employees was 3-4 weeks prior to the redesign’s public debut.

When it comes to the best channel to announce a launch internally, there’s no one correct answer, she argues. For Dropbox, the best venue was during All Hands, a meeting held 1-2 times per month. “This also gave our executives air time in front of our employees,” particularly the CEO.

But Dropbox also had backups for employees who were unable to attend or listen in to the All Hands. So on launch day, a company-wide email memo was sent from the company’s CMO meant to reinforce the messaging, share assets employees could use and to increase excitement internally.

The Cascade

Before any of this occurred, though, a communications cascade was created, Bauer says. Chiefly this meant making sure all information was ready to be released effectively via the All Hands and later the CMO memo. To do this, she says, key mid-level personnel in all functions, who could help effectively explain the rebrand, were chosen as message ambassadors.

Spokespeople led briefings about the rebrand for the ambassadors. These sessions included frequently asked questions and talking points they could use to explain the rebrand to their teams. “We also gave them clear expectations about how and when they should reinforce the messaging within their organizations.

It’s important to note, though, Bauer considered these briefing sessions with ambassadors a “two-way street.” While “we communicated our messages” about the rebrand, “we also heard questions and concerns” the ambassadors felt their teams would raise. This helped communicators ready themselves “when the rebrand was rolled out” broadly to the full company.

Inclusive and Fun

Other parts of the cascade included having regional executives in 12 countries where Dropbox has employees host live satellite hook-ups of the All Hands. The executives not only preceded the All Hands with remarks, they also took questions after it was over, allowing the creation of a local take on the rebrand, she says. “We couldn’t contextualize what the redesign would mean for the office in Tokyo” as well as a Tokyo-based executive could.

Bauer also notes communicators considered the All Hands a campaign in itself, advertising it with a mix of factual and fun elements, including posters and stickers. Additional fun came through tee-shirts and SWAG, she says, as well as providing budgets for offices to hold celebrations around the rebrand. “We also provided images that they could share on their social pages and desktop background.”

Once the All Hands occurred, communicators’ work wasn’t done, Bauer says. A few days later there was another company-wide session solely for employees to raise questions and comments about the rebrand.

In addition communications designed messages to be sent periodically that provided news to employee about the redesign, including a monthly newsletter and a quarterly update during later All Hands. “Repetition is important,” Bauer says, to emphasize that the rebrand announcement “wasn’t just a moment in time…it’s a long haul” operation.

Other activities related to the rebrand, she says, will include “fireside chats” where the CMO will visit several locations, such as engineering and sales, which will re-emphasize the brand messaging and to answer questions.

The communications team will be measuring the results of the communications effort around the rebrand, Bauer says, and has prepared surveys for the All Hands and other sessions. She also gathers information informally via relationships she has made with managers in various Dropbox locations.

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