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It sure does. Yes, thanking someone in person is the best way if that’s what makes sense. But it’s not so black and white in today’s business world.

What if your choice is thanking someone in person two weeks from now or sending a note via the intranet or emailing seconds after an employee does something great? Oh, just pick up the phone and call, you say? What if the person is simply unreachable? Is a voice mail better than an email? I don’t know for sure, but I know that I’m not alone in intensely disliking long voice mails. I feel like I have to listen just because I don’t want to miss something important, even though it’s pretty rare for people to leave big news on a voice mail.

Of course, I’m not saying that online recognition should completely replace all other forms of recognition forever. Online recognition has the best results when it’s part of a comprehensive recognition program that includes all sorts of interactions – from formal memos to live town hall meetings and informal discussions.

Here are three reasons to expand your recognition program online:
1 – If you operate on a global level, your employee relations program has to operate on that same level, and technology is a big part of that. The bottom line is that employees appreciate recognition, and when they feel appreciated, they’re more likely to leave your customers with the same feeling.
2 – Online communications are preferred by younger generations and by some older ones. I’ve been with many clients who keep checking their emails while saying something like, “I’m sorry. I have to check. I’m waiting for my boss to tell me how the launch went.” When the email comes through, they say, “Oh, she said it went great. That’s a relief. Now I can move on and focus on what I’m doing now.” Another lesson: Sometimes any communication is seen as recognition.
3 – The world operates on immediate gratification these days. Just as your customer wants whatever it is they want immediately, employees crave almost immediate gratitude for getting the job done well.

What qualifies as online recognition? Tribe works with a number of big global brands to launch micro-sites for giving global “shout-outs” up and down the ranks to sharing stories that make heroes out of employees who don’t usually win the spotlight and providing training for managers on how to make the most of online recognition.

Do you have someone who pushes back on recognition programs?
We hear a lot of, “Managers just need to say thank you. We don’t need a program for that.” Actually, not all managers are created equal. Some have a natural talent for recognizing people, and some don’t. Having multiple methods for making sure someone gets the recognition they deserve is a good way to hedge your bets and make sure everyone wins.

There are tons of books on recognition, but an interesting read is The Carrot Principle about a ten-year study of 200,000 managers and employees. This research says that companies in the top quartile for employee recognition, as determined by the surveyed workers, “earned a significantly higher return on equity, return on assets, and operating margin.” (You can read all about the study in The Carrot Principle, out in 2007, a New York Times best seller. The second version came out last year.)

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You might want to check out your brand’s recruiting program to help you judge the engagement level at your office. I’ve had a number of brands talk with me in the last few months about how they’re either losing good people or not attracting the same caliber of person that they’re used to having apply for jobs.

We’ve been talking with leadership and employees at brands that are having people who they kept on through the recession leave for other opportunities. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do,” employees are telling leadership. “I’ve worked really hard for you for a long time, and now I want to explore my options.” Leadership is telling us that they expected people to leave, but not these people. “We need to keep the people we have right now,” said one manager. “We’ve got to start engaging them.”

This dynamic is part of the legacy of a recession. Leadership has been focused on the numbers for the last couple of years. Employees have had their noses to the grindstone to execute work handed to them.

In both cases, people are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and making changes accordingly, meaning that leadership is turning up the focus on engagement and employees are becoming more discerning about their current work situations.

If you’re seeing a trickle in qualified applicants, or people aren’t banging on your door anymore to see if there are jobs, then you might want to explore the issue further to make sure you’re competitively set for the future.

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It’s always interesting to me when the leadership of a company says that engagement is high and all they really need to do is keep the momentum going. It’s interesting to me for two reasons:
1. That’s not really any easier than improving engagement. And the idea is that it will be easier to maintain. Just like any relationship in life, the employer/employee contract doesn’t go on autopilot.
2. It’s often true for leadership, but not the people who report to them. It’s too easy to think your personal professional experience is the same for others. Leadership is often more engaged because they can see clearly the vision and big picture and their role in it.

I’ve had more than one brand call and ask if we can do anything to improve morale at their company, without their leadership knowing anything about it. But leadership has to know about it because they’re central to its success. Research has shown that organizations actively seeking to improve employee engagement, including through the use of formal and informal recognition, financially outperform their competitors. The results of Watson Wyatt’s Human Capital Index Study show that better Human Capital Management (as measured by a composite HCI Score) is correlated to improved financial performance:
• Low-HCI companies: 21% total return on shareholder value
• Medium-HCI companies: 39% total return on shareholder value
• High-HCI companies: 64% total return on shareholder value.

So, am I saying that you’ve got a problem you don’t know about? Absolutely not. Here’s what I’m saying:
• Leadership needs to be sure they’re not just talking to themselves. When you’re close to the nucleus, you immediately understand things faster than people further away.
• Traditional surveys don’t always tell the whole story. Show me a survey where people don’t inflate or deflate the truth for one reason or another. I’d love to see it.
• Be sure people of all ranks and geographies get equal billing. It’s easy to subconsciously and subjectively dismiss findings that don’t appeal to what you want to hear or that can be easily explained away.

The beauty of being a leader is that you can have a far-reaching impact. Value your employees and they usually return the favor by doing their part to make your brand a success.

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A lot of companies we work with are using their intranets to leverage their corporate brand and communicate their culture. After a couple years of being numbers focused, leadership is recognizing that engagement plays a key role in future success.

So, if you’re giving your intranet a tune-up to align it – and employees – with the company’s vision, then consider the following:

- What content will be on the site?
- You don’t want to bog employees down with another task.
- Your first shot has got to be your best shot.
- Recognition should be a part of it.
- It’s all about engagement/teamwork.

What content will be on the site?
People sometimes like to separate engagement and tools from HR materials. A separate HR portal may be a more inviting resource for a spouse to find answers to family-related HR questions

You don’t want to bog employees down with another task.
The price of entry for a successful intranet is that the site must be easy to navigate and user friendly. If it’s not, then it will become another part of the communications clutter that employees often have to weed through to get the information they need to do their jobs. A common barrier for communicators looking to leverage this channel in their organization is that people don’t want to add another task to their already busy day unless it benefits them.

Your first shot has got to be your best shot.
Your first shot is your best shot at getting employees to interact with employees – and leadership – on your intranet. When employees check out a website for the first time, it’s like they’re visitors to a foreign country. They’re seeing everything fresh and new for the first time. If the experience is not good, they won’t travel to that destination again without a lot of hand-holding and convincing. We’ve even worked with some companies who walk away from or shelve a technology indefinitely to get rid of bad juju.

Recognition should be a part of it.
Employees crave recognition and visibility, and social media can be a great tool for promoting both. Don’t be afraid to call out achievements and success stories from across the business. Nothing will make employees jump on board faster than seeing leadership actively supporting the new channel.

It’s all about engagement/teamwork.
Start by interviewing employees and leadership about what they want from the new tool. Then, deliver content and tools that align what employees need with the organization’s business goals. When you strike that balance, employees want to use the site, and, when they do use the site, they’ll be working toward fulfilling the purpose of the company. You’ll really start to see results when employees are having conversations and solving problems that otherwise would have gone unanswered.

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Before you can effectively communicate change to employees, you need to understand their point of view. And although employee surveys are the most common way to collect data, they don’t necessarily get at the heart of what employees feel about the brand. At Tribe, we take all of our clients through the Discovery phase to get a better understanding of the people behind the brand. Here are three suggestions for developing more engaging questions for employees:

• Employee interviews. Interviews with a dozen employees in a variety of functions is a great starting point. From these interviews, we ask questions that will reveal what employees want most in terms of content and how willing they are to share their voice. From there, we develop strategies to close that gap. Qualitative interviews tend to reveal much more valuable information than a bunch of numbers from a poll. And by asking questions in a different way, you can often get a more “real” response, not just someone repeating back to you what they think they’re supposed to say.

• Leadership interviews. How well does leadership see their vision being communicated to employees? When it comes to a new project or initiative, ask questions that will help foster a greater understanding of what motivates management to not only becomes engaged with a project, but become ambassadors for it. The most important group to interview may be the fulcrum group, that critical group of managers just under the leadership team who lead the general employee population. If the fulcrum group jumps on-board with your project, it’s much more likely to be a success. The findings in this phase will help guide future communications around the project.

• Communications audit. Once you’ve finished with interviews, it’s time to develop your communications strategy. Take a look at your existing channels and determine the best way to communicate your message. This often involves using multiple channels to reach different internal audiences.

Once the Discovery phase is complete, it’s time to develop tactics and content from the information you gleaned during interviews. Communicating change is more likely to be successfully if you anticipate and explain any hurdles that employees expect to face along the way.

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The Gap: In large companies across the country, there’s a major communications gap.
In recent research with large employers nationwide, we found a troubling gap between what management thought employees knew and what employees said they did. In interviews with management-level people in Fortune 100 and other large companies, Tribe heard glowing reports of the vision the leadership team had formulated to lead the company to increased stability and growth. In most cases, management also indicated that they felt employees had a good understanding of their vision.

When employees don’t hear about the vision, they assume there is none.
When we asked employees about management’s vision and plans for how to move the company forward, the reports were much different. Some comments included:
• “I don’t think they have a plan. It worries me.”
• “Leadership has a plan but nobody knows how to execute it.”
• “We don’t know what’s going to happen over the next few years.”
• “I think it’s more likely they don’t have a plan.”
• “They have a plan at the higher levels, but nobody at lower levels knows about it.”
• “I don’t think our top three leadership has a plan and that makes me nervous.”

It’s a problem that doesn’t have to be a problem.
The problem is not that corporate management does not have a plan, or even that employees don’t support that plan. There’s a plan in place for moving the company forward, possibly a brilliant one, yet employees are often completely unaware of it. Some earlier research we did indicated that employees want more communication from the top, not less. Even if the news is not great news, employees feel less anxious and more confident in the company’s future when high-level management keeps them in the loop.

The solution is easy: Communicate from the top down.
Some CEO’s feel giving an occasional town hall meeting or speech to employees means they’ve checked the box of top-down communications. For better employee engagement, morale and productivity, not to mention progress toward company goals, a solid communication strategy might include a leadership blog, a regular presence on the employee website or internal portal, or a monthly update to employees. These communications vehicles don’t have to be difficult or time consuming for management.

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The 2009 Inspire Awards for Internal and Employee Communications winners were just announced. According to their website, the competition drew one of the largest number of submissions ever. It’s encouraging to see so many companies make an effort to engage employees. Submissions came from all over the globe, so it’s a great snapshot of what’s happening in the world of internal communications.

The winners are facing the same issues that many companies deal with. For instance, American Express was recognized for engagement around an experiential promotion to “rebuild organizational trust at American Express.” Many top companies are facing this very same issue as they come out of the recession. Tribe’s research has revealed that there is often a gap between leadership’s vision and employee understanding of how that vision plays out on a day-to-day (or project by project) basis.

Qualcomm, Inc. won an award for most inspirational piece for their 2008 Annual Report about People. This is a separate piece from their corporate annual report and centers on celebrating and connecting employees. It’s one more step towards giving employees the recognition they crave, and employees who feel unappreciated are likely to be disengaged from their work.

Unfortunately, the site itself doesn’t give in-depth information on many of the pieces described. But you are able to browse images of many of the award winners, so it’s definitely worth a look.

We’re hearing from many companies that attracting top talent will be a huge issue as the recession comes to an end. One manager for a global brand said that when recruiting became an issue, leadership realized that they had to invest time and energy into improving their culture. While many people right now are just happy to have a job, that won’t last forever. Some companies are starting to worry that employees that have just been waiting it out will leave once more companies are hiring again. If so, companies like the Inspire Awards winners are probably positioned to capture that top talent down the road.

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Now’s the time to help your employees get out of the recession rut. And the business can’t move forward if your employees aren’t.

Is your company losing money because people are in a holding pattern?
Corporate employees across the country are experiencing a resigned sense of stagnation. Tribe fielded research in the first quarter of 2010 with corporate employees in three generations, Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y, and found a lethargic do-nothing spirit among workers of all ages. Typical comments from respondents include, “Nothing’s getting better or worse,” “I’m just going through the motions,” and “I’m sort of stuck in neutral.” When asked if they thought it was more likely they’d be promoted or fired in the next year, 77 percent responded “neither one.”

Management has a plan, but employees don’t know it.
One internal communications manager with a Fortune 100 company described a dangerous divide between the great majority of employees and those at the top with clear plans for how they’re transforming the company for more profitability. When asked if he thought the management at his company (a global brand) had a strategy for recovery, he said, “No, I don’t think they have a plan. It worries me.”

During qualitative interviews, many top leaders revealed that they thought employees understood the business reason behind layoffs. In reality, employees aren’t always so clear on the reasoning behind many changes. One reason for this is that employees have trouble separating changes caused by the recession from necessary changes that need to happen, recession or not. The recession is becoming the scapegoat for necessary business transformations to grow the business.

They want to know what’s going on. Especially the younger employees.
Tribe’s survey asked “If your company could do one thing to make you feel better about where you work, what would it be?” The two most common answers, in almost equal numbers, were more money and more communication. New Generation employees offered twice as many comments as Boomers about wanting increased or improved communication.

One way to open communication is a leadership blog.
It’s relatively simple to establish a leadership blog, by the CEO or another top visionary. Tribe’s process for developing a leadership blog includes a topic matrix and editorial calendar, to give key topics the right visibility across the year.

The risk in not having frequent communication from the top down is that employees assume no news is bad news. A leadership blog can efficiently fill that vacuum of communication and help employees feel in the loop and on board.

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how powerful a video of your CEO passionately explaining the company mission can be for employees.

As blogging becomes more popular, so does video blogging (also know as v-blogging or vlogging). In internal communications, video blogs can give a face to top leadership in a more casual and friendly forum. A good example of this comes from eBay’s CEO John Donahoe. In a recent guest blog for the Wall Street Journal, Donahoe—flip cam in hand—interviews one of eBay’s merchants.

Donahoe’s video is a success because it comes across so genuinely. And rather than being a video about eBay’s CEO, it’s a video he made while interviewing a vendor. In fact, Donahoe only appears for a brief moment when he turns the camera on himself. You can also tell that there weren’t layers of approval behind the video—it’s just Donahoe behind the camera, interviewing this merchant about his business and his inventory. It’s much more interesting to see him make a star out of someone else than insist the focus be on him. Had this been a “big budget” film, it probably would have seemed very “put on” and much less sincere than what we see here.

While this video is very effective, it can be risky to approach video so casually. Simple things like using a tripod and choosing good lighting can go a long way towards making a video look more professional (and less shaky). For Donahoe, it works well in this context, but a different video with different messaging may lend itself to a more polished video.

Video can be a great tool for engaging employees because it truly gives leadership a face both quickly and candidly, and you can’t always get that through picture or text alone. If a CEO sets the example, it could even open the door to more active participation and encourage employees to use video more often in communications. And while we’ve heard employees voice before that they may feel uncomfortable watching video at work, the fact that the CEO is the one speaking can raise that comfort level.

For more on this topic, visit the “Professional vs. off-the-cuff videos for internal communications” discussion on our LinkedIn discussion group.

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More and more companies are seeing the advantages of integrating all of their data and processes into a single, unified system. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are the method of choice, and the most popular provider is SAP.

According to a survey conducted by Forrester Research, only six percent of 500 companies surveyed considered their ERP systems effective, while 79 percent said they were not effective or only somewhat effective. And five of the top ten Corporate Information Technology Failures cited by Computerworld involve ERP projects.

Here are five tips for successfully launching ERP at your company:

• Don’t try and implement it during your busy season. People need time and training to successfully implement ERP. It’s best to launch the program during your slow season so people can get a feel for it. Hershey learned this the hard way when they tried to launch SAP during Halloween. The new system was implemented so poorly that huge customers like Walmart simply ordered from Hershey’s competitors because they weren’t getting their orders. This resulted in a 19% drop in that quarter’s earnings.

• Put your best people on the job. Make sure that your implementation partner is giving you their best people. Request to see resumes, to make sure their consultants aren’t there for on-the-job training. ERP implementation requires a highly competent (and experienced) team on both ends, so you’ll need to be teaming your best people with theirs.

• Top management has to be involved with the project throughout. Top leadership has to communicate their vision for the project. Another company can’t just guess at your business objectives and implement changes. The project needs full support from leadership, and sustaining communications on the business reasons and benefits that the change will bring. Getting employees to embrace the project is critical to its success.

• Mistakes are costly. Customer orders aren’t processed, bills aren’t paid and bankruptcies sometimes follow failed implementations. This is one of those projects that you can’t afford to get wrong.

• You can’t just do things the same way. Many companies run into a lot of problems when they want to customize ERP. If you’re going to make the switch to ERP, be prepared to start looking at processes through the ERP lens. ERP is not a vehicle to run your current system that way it’s always been run.

This isn’t an IT project—you have to involve people from across the business for it to be a success, and the launch date is just the start. If done well, ERP can be hugely efficient and valuable to a company. If done poorly, it can be an extremely costly mistake that extends far beyond the cost of the project.

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