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January 26 2012
Guidelines for a spin free world
We’ve been talking for a while about social business; how new norms brought about by technology should be embraced by organisations wanting to evolve, and the need for organisations to stand for more than sheer profit. Aside from the huge cultural shift and new platforms, for me an important ingredient of social business is language.
At risk of sounding like a naive puppy, language is pretty mega. It can set a stuffy, bureaucratic business apart from a dynamic, free-flowing one, and those that wield language effectively can influence far more than those that cannot. It’s the currency of gossip, meetings, press releases and marketing. If a business was a body, language would be the blood. Or piss.
Business language is rubbish. Brands spout guff with alarming ease, and whole organisations can thrive on made-up words and well-placed adjectives. I imagine that most (or both) of you reading this will have rolled your eyes when on a conference call, or felt a part of you die upon reading some particularly puffed copy. ‘Bullshit bingo’ is a commonly used term for a reason – we are all surrounded by language which sounds great but means little.
What if this was no more? What if we can the adjectives, lost the hyperbole and only said what actually was? A little while back I gave a talk to our charity clients entitled What if businesses couldn’t lie?, in which I posed the same question. Then more recently, I saw the term ‘Weasel words‘ when reading something random on wikipedia. Weasel words are part of a cracking style guide written by the wiki community, and help keep entries factual, rather than full of spin and speculation.
Example:
Puffery
… legendary, great, eminent, visionary, outstanding, leading, celebrated, cutting-edge, extraordinary, brilliant, famous, renowned, remarkable, prestigious, world-class, respected, notable, virtuoso …
Words such as these are often used without attribution to promote the subject of an article, while neither imparting nor plainly summarizing verifiable information. They are known as “peacock terms” by Wikipedia contributors. Instead of making unprovable proclamations about a subject’s importance, use facts and attribution to demonstrate that importance
What if such a guide governed all company comms? What if meeting rooms contained buzzers so that offenders would be shown the error of their ways? What if advertising was based on function rather than desire? To be honest, I think this extreme would also be pretty rubbish – the creative use of language is one of the best things about communicating. Could we meet in the middle?
My utopian vision is for businesses that communicate honestly. If a business, and its employees, is honest about its intentions, its successes and its failings, clear guff-free language would be essential.
What do you think? Do business needs to eschew spin and guff to evolve? Or is it an essential part of commerce?
Peacock photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bbmexplorer.
January 22 2012
January 17 2012
Social Business Sessions London
Another experiment
Today we’re starting another little experiment: Social Business Sessions. And, if you’re interested and your heart is in the right place, we’d like to have you along. (There are only 38 places).
Social Business Sessions will happen every six weeks or so. Session #1 will happen on Thursday 9th Feb, 10 am – 12 pm, somewhere in central London.
The whole thing will hopefully happen through the Social Business Sessions Meetup group, to keep the overhead of organising it low for me and any other helpers who emerge.
Purpose
To provide a regular forum where we can share ideas, experiences and models for helping organisations become more social. And, in doing so, create new connections that lead to community.
Participants
We welcome people from a diverse range of backgrounds: academics, consultants, researchers, do-ers. Really. It can’t just be the social media marketing gang. We’d miss so many opportunities to learn. So bring the randoms and the crazies, people with passion and ideas, not some fool from your team that wants to dick around out of the office :)
Principles
- Open, because we each have a piece of the answer
- Diversity FTW – we will seek to have as many female presenters as male, and actively welcome people from different backgrounds or with alternative approaches
- You create the value – there’s no money, no team, nothing but us and our clever brains, so we welcome energy and reject snark
- No spam – no one will be actively promoting themselves, other than venue providers who get a thank you at the start and end
Plan on the morning
- Coffee and chatting
- A few punchy lil’ presentations to stimulate discussion (invitations have gone out to some good, different people to get things started)
- Group discussions
- Ends at 12 pm
Why do this?
There is a growing community of us that are working in the field of social business.
But it’s early days and so from my perspective there are some opportunities to:
- Accelerate our collective and individual learning by sharing more
- Be clearer about what we all mean by social business
- Build the market together, by building a community here in London / the UK
So that’s it really. If you fancy it, come along. It will be what we make of it. It may fail, it may not. We’ll see!
Find out more and to sign up here: http://www.meetup.com/Social-Business-Sessions-London/
January 16 2012
Making the internet dirty
What if the internet were a physical thing? A great big warehouse perhaps? It would be huge and bewildering complex for sure, but what would it smell like? Would you wash your hands after touching it? I would. I think it would be filthy, and all the better for it.
Everyday we hear mega numbers about how many breadjillions* of data are being uploaded every minute to video network X, and how many vistors site Y has. Numbers we simply cannot comprehend as outside of the comments/likes/views we see, the sites and networks themselves remain pristine. Pixels don’t gather dust, and whites remain white.
What if you knew the latest YouTube viral was actually viral, covered in the fingerprints, coughs and human detritus of the millions that have watched it before you. What if the video warped and crackled at the punchline, like VHS tapes used to when you rewound that funny/violent/sexy bit over and over? Sounds odd but this chap uploaded and downloaded the same clip 1000 times and it ended up like this:
How cool is that. He’s no longer him. He’s the mess of the internet, speaking like the Predator.
And what if you measured the popularity of a blog not by Pagerank or Technorati rating, but by its grubbiness, how well-thumbed it was? This is all a continuation of a theme I was interested in a while back, the idea that ‘designed deterioration’ could make people treasure virtual objects more and therefore avoid needless creation/uploading.
As much as a dirty internet sounds repugnant (imagine the physical evidence that would accumulate on YouPorn), I think it could also be a thing of beauty. It could replace measurement, it could signify quality, and it would reflect the physical world. Also it would encourage digital lifespans – personally i’m uncomfortable uploading photos to Flickr knowing that they will remain long after my death, so would love the option to upload for X amount of time, or until X number of people have seen it.
If you think of the internet as a river of data, are we building a ridiculous reservoir? If we are to encourage an internet where information, experience and time are all sacred, is physical proof a necessary measure? Or is the internet’s strength the fact that it is not physical? I like to think there’s something in this, otherwise I’m wasting my time, so would love your thoughts.
Photo used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Flickr user mykreeve.
*when I am king breadcrumbs will be my currency. Breadjillions will be the highest magnitude. I am a wally.
January 15 2012
January 11 2012
How can a brand gain trust in social media if it doesn’t trust its employees?
Corporates are starting to recognise the external forces that compel them to engage with their customers online.
They are expressing the desire to embrace the opportunities that social media offers and many display an appreciation that they need to change their business structures to allow better collaboration, internally and externally.
But many corporations still will not allow their employees to access social media whilst at work.
In fact, according to research by Prozkaur, 70.7% of employers actively block social networking sites at work (survey undertaken Aug 2011).
This figure seems a little high to me, but other estimates still show a significant number of businesses restrict access.
Research by www.shrm.org found 43% of companies still block access to social media on company-owned computers or handheld devices and a survey of over 1,000 CIOs by Robert Half Technology showed 31% of companies prohibit all access.
Whichever you believe, this is still a significant amount but what is the rationale?
Broadly speaking, companies limit social media access for two reasons:
- They regard open access to social media for all employees as a business risk. Typically, the main risk concerns centre around security and reputation and the legal threats associated with these.
- They consider that unfettered internet access will have a negative impact on employee productivity.
Source McAfee
Lets unpack these assumptions and see if they stand up because, in my opinion, the limitations that they impose provide a significant threat to a businesses operating in 2012 – certainly bigger than the threats they posit as reasons not to allow access.
1. Open access to social media for all employees is a business risk
Firstly, I wholeheartedly agree that access to social media can pose a variety of risks to business but locking down access does not necessarily mitigate this risk.
A total ban on employee internet access suggests to me that the company concerned has not undertaken a through risk assessment, meaning that they do not have firm understanding of the nature of these risks and do not have controls and processes in place to mitigate them.
This creates a risk gap. Employees may not be aware they have a responsibility for their personal actions in social media or of the etiquette around engaging online with customers in their own time (and there are numerous examples of social media crises that have occurred when employees act naively in social media, including the GoDaddy CEO posting his big game hunting on YouTube and Twitter, the Honda employee that posed as a customer to promote the company or the Lloyd’s employee that was fired for comparing her salary to the Lloyd’s boss’s on Facebook).
In my opinion, educating and providing governance for all employees is essential and with a solid set of policy provisions in place, the opportunities that social offers business, far outweigh the risks.
You might argue that full employee access is simply not necessary in your business as you have specialist teams that are trained to engage online.
For sure, many corporates begin their engagement journey by opening access to a small subset of employees to engage with the public on the company’s behalf (usually restricted to marketing and PR).
I would argue that this represents only the first step on a business’ journey to socialization rather than a longterm strategy. Moreover, selective access ignores the fact the additional benefits social media access provides to employees: understanding the industry landscape, establishing authority, listening to customers, networking with prospects and colleagues, researching competitors and tracking new ideas and innovations.
By restricting access for the remaining employees you are limiting their ability to bring the benefits of this insight to your business.
In our day-to-day lives we recognize the need for digital inclusion and the UN has declared internet access is a human right because it is considered a basic form of communication now. Whilst I am not suggesting that business is violating employee rights by failing to provide access, it does seem that the idea of restricting access is looking increasingly Draconian.
2. Unfettered internet access will have a negative impact on employee productivity
The fact is that evidence doesn’t support this view (McAfee report that the opposite is in fact true and “many organizations that do not restrict employee usage report positive results from social media tools including enhanced communication and increased employee productivity).
What this indicates more than anything is that the culture of the companies that lock down access for this reason is such that they do not trust its employees.
This attitude often pervades even into internal comms systems and restricts the adoption of collaboration tools and internal social networks.
This is such a shame and such a massive lost opportunity for business. Yes, connecting and engaging online can often look like ‘wasting time’ or ‘socialising’ but it could also be ‘knowledge work’ or ‘networking’ depending on your perspective.
Social networking is about creating relationships (whether internally or externally) and genuine human relationships require some informality and even fun to make them worthwhile.
If you trust your staff to manage these relationships and let them have the conversations they want then you are more likely to create a genuine community. A company whose culture allows its employees to connect and engage freely (internally and externally) and has a structure that supports the free flow of information throughout the business, is more likely to:
_ build and participate in successful online communities
_ obtain honest feedback and genuine insight from its customers or employees
_ make unexpected connections across customer communities or business silos
_ spot new industry trends and opportunities ahead of the competition
_ create genuinely new and innovative solutions to problems
_ have employees that are happier, more motivated and more loyal
So if neither assumption really holds water, why do companies see the locked down desktop as an insurmountable barrier?
My guess is that because the real reason for limiting employee access to social media (and by virtue of this limiting access to customers and each other) is cultural.
This is coupled with the traditional slowness of large corporations to adapt to change which means that they are often simply behind the times.
Many large companies simply do not trust employees to act in the business’ best interests. This simply cannot be good business as it signals a fundamental disconnect between the business and its staff.
This means that the change has to come from the top down so that management actively seeks to align with staff so that they will happily act as ambassadors for the company.
Once trust is established, engagement becomes a natural process and restrictions can be lifted with minimum exposure to risk.
Without this change many businesses will find that they continue to have only piecemeal pockets of social media activity bubbling up in their organisations, which will limit their strategic vision.
Ultimately, they will lose the competitive advantage of being relatively early adopters in this space and begin to be seen as relics of the old way of doing business.
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/s3a/4406984166/sizes/z/in/photostream/
January 09 2012
Black Mirror – what would it be like if everything was recorded?
Channel 4 recently commissioned three programmes from the great Charlie Brooker, a series of dramas collectively named Black Mirror looking at exciting and dark outcomes of technology. They are all ace and well worth watching on 4oD, but the one that stood out for me was the last, called The Entire History of You.
The Entire History of You is set in an otherwise familiar world (no space ships or lizard overlords), with a simple but mega twist. Everybody (well, almost everybody) has a small implant (known as a Grain) behind their ear, allowing them to record, playback and store everything that they see and hear.
Using a nifty handheld remote, they can scroll through childhood memories, old sexual conquests, and in the case of the protagonist, immediately playback painful work meetings and awkward social situations. Using ubiquitous screens, you can even play back your recordings so that others can watch.
I won’t spoil the programme by going into plot details, but the premise has been floating around my head for the past few weeks as I think we’re not too far off the world portrayed.
The ability to replay old memories
While I cannot replay old memories from a first person perspective as the characters in Black Mirror can, I can go through old emails, my Facebook timeline, old social profiles (ever look through old MySpace/FriendsReunited messages?) and create a rich recreation of the events/happening/feelings of that time. With replies/comments/likes I can see the thoughts and interactions of others, and with hindsight spot themes that weren’t apparent at the time and foresee events that happened thereafter.
The ability to hold others to account
Being able to replay experiences means that the characters in the programme cannot escape old mistakes, and this is something that again already is possible with digital technology. As Will mentioned in an old blog post that stuck with me, for anyone in the modern world the following is true:
You can find photos of me, playing with friends, making rude gestures, drunk, sad, alone, with friends, high, doing things I shouldn’t be, wearing preposterous clothes.
With the amazing and increasing amount of data we provide through our social networks, we are arguably reaching a point where by any action, thought and interaction will be logged. What this will mean from a societal and ethical viewpoint is yet to be seen (imagine the issues presented to employers/employees, politicians/voters, families and so on), but I think Brooker has hit upon a potentially world-changing issue – ultimate accountability.
The constant distraction of previous events or the experience of others
Throughout the programme, characters are seen to be reliving experiences from ten minutes or ten years ago, and also at points collectively analyse one anothers memories. This again feels familiar; sitting around a pub table with four people viewing Instagram, liking the updates of others on Facebook, or reviewing old emails.
Over Christmas I was repeatedly alarmed by the inability of my friends and family (I include myself in this issue) to experience any kind of event without logging it somehow using a smartphone. For who? What makes us film a performer at a concert? Or check-in to mundane situations on Facebook or Foursquare? What is so boring/amazing about our lives that forces us to augment it so constantly?
To conclude, I’d again recommend you watch Black Mirror if you haven’t already, and I’d congratulate Brooker for a fantastic achievement. If you do watch it, or have already, I’d love to know if you agree with my thoughts above, and if you have any other parallels to draw?
January 08 2012
January 03 2012
Mass customisation
Over the Christmas break I listened to one of the always excellent Peter Day Global Business podcasts*. He was discussing ‘mass customisation’, the idea of producing items at scale but that are personal to the customer, with the chap that coined the phrase, Joe Pine.
I hadn’t heard it before, but the Dell example explained it perfectly; Dell are a great example of mass customisation – you visit their site, decide exactly what type of PC you want using a wide number of options. You then pay for your machine, Dell build it, and you receive it. Simple, and obviously an idea that has made Dell a large amount of money.
Peter Day and Joe Pine went on to have all sorts of interesting discussion about how this turns products into services, but what really blew me away was the role that digital could play in mass customisation.
Smart campaigns like the Old Spice Man and the various Orange The Feed examples are all perfect evidence of how digital can take a large brand but make it special and bespoke for individual people. Those are mega cool examples, and make me excited about what the big advertisers will achieve in 2012 now that they seem to getting to grips with digital.
Then my brain jumped to social business, something that we’re excited about at NixonMcInnes. As people, customer, employees and supporters come to expect more from the business in their lives, how can mass customisation, fuelled by digital, play a part?
For one, the idea that large employers could relinquish draconian IT policies and allow smart, educated employees to choose their own work technology. Why get lumbered with a creaky old laptop when your best work is done on a smart phone? Or why pretend you need a Blackberry when you’re most productive sat at a desktop surrounded by smart colleagues? What if major banks, retailers, pharmas etc allowed ten of thousands of employees to mass customise the IT set up?
And then of course there is the onward march of cool technologies like 3D printers and real-world internetz. The immediate possibilities for mass customisation are evident, but imagine a world where millions of energy customers have Twine type devices throughout their home, informing the likes of EDF or British Gas of relevant activity and allowing for smart, customised services. Then imagine the social layer you could add on top of this and (to me at least) it begins to get really exciting.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with this but wanted to write it anyway. I’ll keep mulling it over but would love to hear any others thoughts on whether you’re interested in mass customisation? Or perhaps you think it’s already here?
*If you’ve not listened to one before I thoroughly recommend them; usually no longer than 45 minutes and they always contain a couple of real nuggets relating to the big world of business we all live in.
Photo used under Creative Commons License – from Flickr user Toyota UK.
January 01 2012
December 25 2011
December 18 2011
December 15 2011
Social media and behaviour change: applying theory
Understanding why people behave the way they do, and designing interventions and communications to elicit new, more positive behaviours is an established discipline – but using social media as part of the mix is relatively new.
I’m convinced it has the potential to be hugely effective, because our behaviour is often defined by our interpersonal relationships and our perception of social norms – both things that are an inherent part of the social web.
From a research perspective, the massive volume of personal and conversation data we publish to the web everyday also gives us a gold mine of information that can help us understand individual’s online behaviours and attitudes – more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional research methods.
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to talk at the Charity Comms ‘Communications and Behaviour Change’ conference in London, and talked through tools, case studies and applied theory around social media and behaviour change campaigns.
The slide deck is below and notes are published on slideshare, but I thought I’d share some of the useful bits around applying a couple of the established theories of behaviour change to social media.
Stages of change and Facebook games
The Stages of Change theory states that people go through a continuum of phases – from being completely unaware of the need for change, before eventually changing and maintaining a new behaviour (although they might wander backwards and forwards for a while).
The RSPCA Think Pig Facebook game and campaign we produced is a good example of how a social game and associated Facebook page can support people through this sort of journey.
The wider campaign aimed to improve the standards of pig welfare by changing consumer behaviour – getting more people to buy higher welfare meat – and we wanted to find a way to introduce the issue to an audience who wouldn’t engage with a traditional ‘education’ piece.
A simple Facebook word game provided a highly shareable, fun and addictive way of engaging directly with the right people, and introduced the issues in a light way. Playing the game meant joining a community and initiating a relationship with the RSPCA, which gave us an opportunity to continue helping people along the journey towards change:
“I’m unaware there is a problem” (pre-contemplation)
We were able to introduce the issues, through game play, while people were getting something of value back (the fun of playing the game).
“I need to do something about this” (contemplation)
Once they’d become part of the community by liking the associated page, the campaign would drip feed information on the issues, to start them thinking about the need to change.
“I know what I’m going to change” (preparation)
Providing direction and useful tools – like recipes and other real-world assets – made buying the right products much more easy.
“I’ve recently changed my behaviour” (action)
Encourage the audience to self-report – share their new behaviours – through Facebook updates.
“I haven’t relapsed” (maintenance)
In order to maintain an individual’s new behaviour and to continue drawing new people in, the RSPCA used the long term contact through Facebook page to keep up engagement with the existing community over time.
It’s a very broad and simple framework for understanding and promoting behaviour change, which you can combine with a detailed understanding of your audience to effectively move people along a journey.
Social Cognitive theory and online communities
Broadly speaking, Social Cognitive theory states that people learn by observing others – what they will and won’t, or can and can’t, do – and this influences their willingness and ability to change.
Rather than a continuum, it’s more like a number of factors coming together – a belief in the benefits of change, a perception of the social norm and self-efficacy (an individual’s belief in their own ability to change their behaviour).
The Virgin Media Pioneers project is a great example of how these kind of social influences can be created and used to bring about real-world change, using online communities.
Pioneers was originally conceived to help young people, from disadvantaged backgrounds, to start their own businesses (its audience has become much wider over time). It was based on research that showed while around half of young people would like to start a business, they are five times more likely to be unemployed.
Enterprise UK’s study also showed that people in this particular group were unlikely to have the support or contacts they needed to start a business, and less likely than those from better off backgrounds to know an entrepreneur. The theory was that if we could help them develop increased ‘entrepreneurial social capital’, they would be in a better position to go it alone, and generate benefits for them, their community and ultimately society as a whole.
We took this research and worked with Virgin Media and Enterprise UK to design a strategic digital approach to the problem, which centered on an online, video blogging community.
The community members (initially recruited from partner organisations like the Prince’s Trust and given video cameras and broadband connections) were able form new networks outside of their immediate geographical area and blog their personal trials and tribulations of trying to start a business.
The project has been a great success and is still going strong – and looking at how we can apply elements of social cognitive theory to it shows how, as an online community project, it’s managed to be successful in creating changes in behaviour:
“What’s telling me to change?” (Reciprocal determinism)
We targeted the right audience, through picking the right channels and used the right messages based on an understanding on their personal situation - partnering with youth organisations, using the right social networks providing incentives for the first wave to join and become active.
“Am I able to make this change?” (Behavioural capability)
The first wave of Pioneers were given broadband connections and video cameras, but everyone was provided with videos and blog posts from experts on how to market their business, and there were offline training and networking events, all with the purpose of showing them how to take that first step.
“Can I really do this?” (Self-efficacy)
The audience didn’t necessarily have the support they need or the confidence required to start a business – but building an online community created networks of geographically disparate people with similar interests and values, that supported each other (creating ‘bonding social capital’).
“If they can do it, so can I.” (Observational learning)
As the people in their networks begin to make a change (succeed in starting a business) or as the community manager promotes the stories of people like them, who they can interact with, this provides more proof and reassurance that it’s within their capability, that it’s almost a new norm.
“How can I celebrate my achievement?” (Reinforcements)
Building your social network allows you to share your story (not just the successes but the failures too) and get feedback from the community through comments, video responses, likes etc. Celebrating success also helps to influence others in their network, perpetuating the cycle of change.
Hopefully this is a useful look at how you might apply behavioural theory to something that’s still, by some, considered to be a relatively new area. The full slide deck is below, and if you have any thoughts on any of the issues, or have your own experience of using social media for behaviour change, let me know.
A guide to Facebook’s new private messaging feature
Facebook is testing private messaging between Pages and Fans.
Background
Currently, all communication between pages and fans appears public on the page. This new feature will allow brands to respond privately to visitors of the page (this doesn’t have to be just fans who have ‘liked’ the page).
Description
- Alongside the ‘like’ button on a fan’s comment, a ‘message’ option is now available:
- Page admins are notified of new messages under the ‘notification’ tab on the right-hand side of the page, under the admin section:
- It is impossible for page admins to proactively send a private message to visitors unless they have already commented or sent a private message.
Why?
- The new feature makes it easier for brands to interact on a more personal/ direct level with fans.
- Brands can now take continue difficult conversations and complaints in private.
- It will become easier to ask for and manage personal contact information from fans within the same platform.
When?
At the moment, this is just a trial and only available for a limited number of pages. Facebook are not giving away anymore information currently.
Take-away
This small development is quite key for brands who have been challenged with the need for one-to-one communication on Facebook since pages were available.
At the moment, brands have to give fans an email or telephone number in order to directly communicate with a fan. This new feature will further enhance the customer experience of customers who went to Facebook with their issue.
What should you do?
Use it! (as soon as you can)
There are lots of ways that this new feature could benefit your brand. However, having public conversations is also beneficial to you and your wider community. So it is all about getting the right balance.
December 13 2011
Guide to new Twitter and Twitter pages for brands
December 11 2011
December 08 2011
NixonMcInnes Academy: We love training
This is a good time for training at NixonMcInnes. A very good time.
We’ve always been into training. We rather enjoy it. We love to share, and we’ve always understood the best training isn’t about overwhelming people with buzzwords and technology, but about involvement, participation and understanding. That why it’s particularly cool that we recently announced the launch of the NixonMcInnes Academy. The cunning plan is to build on all our training experience and make it available to organisations that may not be one of our regular clients.
We have some wonderful trainers at NixonMcInnes, covering a range of themes from general overviews of the social media landscape to big inspirational stuff that gets you excited and makes your brain hurt. We’ve got specialists in sectors like not-for-profit and financial services, so we often tailor training courses to suit particular needs and organisations.
Since I joined NixonMcInnes, I’ve loved getting involved in our training. I really have. There’s something very enjoyable about helping a bunch of eager people to grasp an idea they’ve been struggling with. And there’s that look on someone’s face when they come up with a great idea during a discussion.
I recently ran some social media training for WWF – a regular client of ours. The day was great fun, with a real range of abilities and experiences to mix it up (I like it when a group contains a few social media skeptics – it makes the conversation so much more interesting!).
We had some ace feedback too. Here are some of the comments:
The extensive content and the appreciation that people have very different perspectives and knowledge of social media was very well understood and addressed.
Useful and interesting course and the trainer set a good open two-way dialogue and atmosphere.
I feel a whole lot more confident to now get out there and use [social media] and also have some fun with it, be more creative.
I’m already looking forward to the next training dates in the diary: a couple of sessions planned for the first few weeks of 2012, including a trip to Dublin to run a course called ‘How to build a social media campaign‘ with Mediacontact.ie.
So if you want to talk training, please give us a shout. We love it. we really do.
December 06 2011
Happiness vs work
As many of you know, here at NixonMcInnes, in our attempts to prioritise people before profit, we measure happiness of the workforce.
As every ‘normal’ business should, we also measure how much chargeable work we’re doing.
I wondered – when we have tonnes of work to do, do we get stressed and unhappy? So, I mapped the two figures. I’ve protected our company financial data by converting monthly figures into an index against the lowest month in the data. Each point is one month, so we have:
The graph can be read in a few ways. We can see that in one month where we had 1.55x work, people were the least happy, at only 75%. However, when we had even more work than that, 1.69x work, we were 81% happy. If we add a trendline to the data:
It appears that initially, we like more work, but then it reaches a peak, and we get unhappy with too much work. Particularly if the final point was an anomaly, and there isn’t a big dataset. So we’ll keep an eye on that one. Should we be setting targets of work based on what correlates with our optimum happiness? I think more data is needed…
So, next I wondered if the monthly income targets we have as a company add pressure or reward to the workforce, by making us unhappy when we’re not meeting our targets, and happy when we’re meeting / surpassing our targets. We talk about the monthly targets on a weekly basis with the whole company, so we’re all quite conscious of how the company is doing. Remember, each point on the graph is one month’s data, but the horizontal axis here is what % of our monthly target was met.
Wow. OK, this is clear evidence in favour of my hypothesis. The green trendline shows that happiness peaks when we deliver 100% of our targets. If we go over our targets, we get stressed and less happy (because we have too much work to do?), and if we’re not meeting our targets, we’re less happy (because we feel we’re failing, and we worry about the implications?).
It’s also quite reassuring that the 100% target line is roughly in the middle of our data – i.e. we missed our targets for four months (four points are to the left of 100% line) but surpassed them for another four months (four points to the right of 100% line), so they roughly even out.
Has anyone got any alternative ways of interpreting the data? Or hypothesis on the connections between chargeable work, targets and happiness? And for the other companies measuring happiness – what datasets have you mapped happiness against and what have you found?
December 04 2011
December 02 2011
Our approach to Social Business & the Culture Shock book
I haven’t got long to write this, which is probably a good thing (for you). So here it is in short.
Much of the discussions about Social Business don’t quite click for us at NixonMcInnes. It all feels a bit tech-oriented, a bit cold, a bit process-y. (Previous rant on this here).
Tech *is* important and so is process (obviously) but for us at NixonMcInnes, culture eats both of those for lunch. Culture eats structure, strategy, platforms and processes.
So our approach to Social Business – and much of our work for the past 18 months has been in this domain – is led by People & Culture. Everything else falls into place around those.
As a happy accident, I am currently writing a book about this which represents much more of our worldview on the future of businesses in the 21st century.
I’m hoping it is going to be a good book, but we will have to see about that! :)
I’m writing the book collaboratively: I write a chapter each week, and also publish the previous week’s chapter and invite as much feedback and collaboration as I can get.
It has already been hugely helpful to have a distributed gang of people I know and – increasingly – people I haven’t yet met helping to make Culture Shock better than it otherwise have been.
Find out more here. Help make the future of business a bit more human.
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