the magic of involvement how to build trust, activate brand, & create communities for action
Š2010 The Involvement Practice, LLC
Employees’ experience determines brand experience. The idea of “brand” is now synonymous with “experience.” A brand today is our cumulative experience with and perception of an entity. Not surprisingly, the single largest determinant of brand experience is an organization’s employees. Whether an airline flight or a hospital visit, grocery shopping or buying shoes, the way we perceive the employees we are interacting with has a far greater impact upon our brand perception than years of magazine or television advertisements. This recognition has led to a wave of investment in what has become known as “employer branding” or “internal branding,” or what traditional branding firms have come to call “brand engagement.” Placing employees at the center of the brand equation has changed the way leaders think the single largest about their organizational cultures – and the ways that these determinant of brand experience cultures create rewarding employee experiences that in turn translate into positive and enduring customer experiences. is an organization’s employees. Despite this awareness, the path to “employee-service-profit chain” success is mired in obstacles. Current corporate culture is still largely governed by command-and-control, industrial-age practices that are a source of alienation to today’s workers. After all, there’s a reason why we all find the television program “The Office” so immediate and funny – because in it we see the absurdities of our own work environments and reporting structures mirrored back to us. What’s worse, the power of these legacy settings and structures to estrange employees has been heightened by nearly two years of recessionary malaise in which budgets and bonuses have been cut, friends fired, and promises broken. If employees are distrusting and alienated from their organizations, what are the chances that they will provide customers and colleagues alike with a positive brand experience? More importantly, how do you get your employees to rebuild their trust and engagement with the organization so that brand behavior and business strategy align? ©2010 The Involvement Practice, LLC
Involvement: engagement’s pearl of wisdom. Engagement – whether brand engagement or employee engagement – is a term that entered the corporate lexicon with great fanfare. Yet for many leaders, both the meaning and meaningfulness of engagement remain unclear. This lack of clarity helps explain why so many organizations eliminated engagement programs during the current recession, just when they needed them most. Based on extensive experience with employee and brand engagement programs, it has become clear that the jewel within the engagement paradigm is involvement. We all intuitively understand what involvement is and how powerful it can be from experiences we have had throughout our lives. When people tell us something, we often forget it. Yet when we become involved in something, we feel it and own it on a deep, emotive level, the memory of which can last a lifetime. Whereas engagement can come across as nebulous and soft, involvement is tangible and real. Unlike so much of today’s engagement and change management that relies on telling people what to think and do, involvement is a change strategy based upon genuine participation and human interaction. Involvement is about moving beyond functions, roles, business units, and titles to become a community of individuals building connections with one another. Building relationships through involvement is how trust grows, and when trust increases relationships are strengthened. The involvement approach holds that the ability to create solutions to organizational issues is widely distributed throughout the organization. Involving the whole system to address systemic issues is at the center of the involvement paradigm. No one is as smart as everyone. As author James Surowiecki points out in The Wisdom of Crowds, “Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant – better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, and even predicting the future.” When the whole system is
involved in creating a solution, then trust, ownership, and belief become abundant. In essence, involvement is an innovative way to mobilize human energy in the service of an organization.
©2010 The Involvement Practice, LLC
Designing for involvement. While many times the question of involvement begins with brand, it is more synonymous with change. Each time we come together, whether it is an off-site, a training session, a town hall or on a social media platform, there is an opportunity to further a culture of sincerity, authenticity, and belief in leadership. If these gatherings are conducted in a way that evokes people’s optimism and makes them feel trust in their environment, then whatever the content of the gathering, the participants will leave more committed and willing to invest than when they arrived. Designing programs for increased involvement often requires a major departure from current practices. In many organizations, key meetings are all about the PowerPoint. In these companies, a good meeting can be characterized by a bullet-rich PowerPoint, no disagreement amongst attendees, and one in which time is not wasted on “feelings”. The focus of the meeting is entirely upon PowerPoint content as opposed to the involvement process. When designing for involvement, a powerful group process is absolutely essential. Yet many leaders still regard process as “valueadded,” as if process and content were somehow separate and contrary questions. The belief is that if you make a good presentation and ask for people’s buy-in, then you have succeeded. ©2010 The Involvement Practice, LLC
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Involvement demands that we go beyond trying to sell people and gain “buy-in,” which is just another sales-oriented concept. Involvement requires that meetings and interactions take on a deeper meaning than merely to cover content and decide something. Meetings are an important place where commitments and relationships are either offered or denied. Every brand activation program and change effort requires a meeting at some early point to move the initiative forward, and it is often the experience we have in that meeting that influences whether we decide to commit to the change or simply to give it lip service. Involvement focuses on the social structure of how we come together, and the ability of that structure to create personal, emotional, and authentic connections, to determine the real, human outcome of the event. You cannot have a high control, leader-driven meeting to introduce a high involvement, high-commitment change effort. In today’s business environment, if a leader wants brand values and cultural change to be supported, even embraced, the leader must focus less on a statement of strategic objectives and supporting data and more on honest conversation, high involvement, and strong, high-trust relationships. This explains the growing popularity of social media programs in organizational communications.
Because they represent an overlap between our lifestyles and careers, social media platforms have an involvement-driven authenticity that is inherently trust-building. ©2010 The Involvement Practice, LLC
Aspiration & Involvement: a powerful combination. Everything starts with an organizational desire to be more than you are today. When an organization aspires to improve performance and elevate achievement, more often than not the path forward lies with their people. Before inviting employees to become involved, make sure that you have developed a story they will find compelling. At the same time, remember that how you tell the story and who you involve will determine who will listen. The words and images you use frame thoughts, and thoughts express connections. Connections enable people to tell themselves stories about what their brand stands for, and what they stand for. The experience of the meetings carries the message of the culture and most critically, it is the quality of this experience that determines whether people leave the meeting with a sense of optimism and a genuine desire to make something happen.
As Fortune 500 employee engagement and employer branding programs continue to overlap with performance improvement efforts, integrated strategy work and execution will be increasingly focused on involvement.
There is almost always a direct correlation between high involvement levels and high-performance cultures. Involvement creates belief, passion, commitment, and identification. People feel a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves. Employees come to work with the sense that they stand for a brand that matters.
Š2010 The Involvement Practice, LLC
Like never before, organizations are hungering for ways to adapt in order to survive in an historically turbulent global economy. This adaptability requires people and process-oriented innovation. Involvement-driven activities create new combinations of functions, services, and products or eliminate outdated ones. In this way, involvement is the fuel for the innovation engine. The genius of involvement is that it creates a critical mass for innovation and change. Critical mass is akin to a tipping point: the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable. It is the threshold that every change program strives to reach. Finally, remember that the reverse side of involvement is resistance. Given what has taken place in the business world over the past 18 months, many organizations are loaded with resistance. Not only are those who are uninvolved in the change process not advocates, they are often actively oppositional. Use involvement to befriend and convince detractors, and make it their responsibility to get involved if only to voice their concerns and improve the brand vision. Involvement provides a stealth mechanism for embracing resisters and bringing them into the fold. Through involvement, an organization can make their brand the ultimate manifestation of their vision.
When an organization is rich with involvement, its people, values, services, products, and image cannot help but align. When that happens, we are reminded that culture is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Jonathan Willard is a Senior Consultant at The Involvement Practice.
Š2010 The Involvement Practice, LLC
A recognized thought leader in brand involvement and global organizational communications, he has helped to create several brand culture benchmarks at the world’s most admired companies.
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Š2010 The Involvement Practice, LLC