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Last week I wrote for the Collaborative Innovation blog about the fact that perhaps you do not need a culture of innovation, since innovation has been an integral part of the culture of modern humans for thousands of years. This implies that you need to remove the barriers for innovation if you want to increase innovation within your company — not build new structures for it.

Another important Human 1.0 characteristic that most companies are not leveraging enough is social learning. Humans are the only species that are predominantly social learners. We learn by observing others. It is genetic and also part of our culture. Think of a baby that mimics adults before they can sit, walk,or talk — in fact they do it almost instantaneous after being born. That is the hardwired social learning system that humans have had for eons at work.

Where else could you leverage this innate human characteristic?

1. With your customers
   We mimic what others do and adopt the decisions of our tribes as our own. Some call it herding. The key here is to make visible how others make buying decisions to similar people who have not yet made those buying decisions. Amazon does a great job at that — how many books or other Amazon items have you bought because their system told you, after you purchased an item, that “others who bought this item, also bought this?” It works — we tend to imitate others that are like us. How can you make the way others buy your products and services visible to prospects that are like them? Think about it. Traditional reference programs are a step in the right direction, but in this digital and interconnected world, there must be much better ways to do that.
2. With your employees
   Many companies go through massive change management programs without ever leveraging the social learning for which we are hardwired. We mimic people who are successful — that is how we learn new things. So if your change management initiative is intended to produce certain new behaviors, make sure you reward and recognize those that are exhibiting that behavior, and make it easy for others to observe this behavior leads to success. Granted, in the real world it is much more complicated than that. For starters, behaviors are an externalization of shared beliefs and values — and so the right set of values and beliefs have to be in place for the proper behavior to show up in the first place. But once you have that — too few companies leverage the impact of the observability of success. Worse than that, many companies have a total dissonance between what they say and what they do — they may be encouraging a collaborative culture, while at the same time rewarding bullying management tactics by promoting the bullies. Guess what, this will inevitably lead to a bullying culture because we are social learners.

Do you have any other thoughts on this topic — write about it.

Many companies have employer brands (that part of the brand that you show to prospective talent) that are different from their consumer brands (that part of the brand that you show to customers and prospects).

In fact research that we conducted in partnership with The Society for New Communications Research found that almost 20% of companies have an employer brand that is different from their consumer brand. And almost 70% of those that said there was a difference between the brands, also said that their organization was not attempting to make them similar.

Worse than having a different brand is when organizations show prospective employees a different organizational brand during the recruiting process as compared to the brand they experience after they are hired – they account for 15% of all companies that participated in our research (1,000+).

Having an employer brand that is different from your consumer brand may in fact not be such a great idea, and here is why:

1. A consumer brand promise in embedded in a company’s culture and how they behave behind the firewall

With more and more employees interacting with customers and prospects, your internal culture will inevitably become part of your perceived brand promise.

As John Kennedy, the head of corporate marketing at IBM said during a recent CMO 2.0 Conversation: “It is this whole intersection between not only what marketers promise and how a product may or may not perform, but also what the company is like behind the brand.” Or as Phil Clement, the CMO at Aon said during another CMO 2.0 Conversation, when he described how Aon spent two years building the brand from the inside out before taking it out to the marketplace, convinced that their consumer brand is in fact an externalization of their internal values and beliefs: “And then (we) spent about two years building consensus around the company that those characteristics were true, and built credibility around them, so that when we started to talk the talk, the employees and teammates and colleagues would be walking the walk.”

And these are not the only CMO’s that believe that, so do the CMO’s at SAP, Kimpton, Con-Way, and Macys.

2. The numbers show that is a bad idea to keep them separate

The same research study mentioned higher found that companies that show a unified employer and consumer brand can expect the following benefits compared to those that maintain separate brands:

• 1.6X higher employee satisfaction
• 3.5X higher employee loyalty
• 2.7X the number of self-directed employees
• 1.7X the number of new employees who have a positive impression of the company
• 1.5X the number of employees who are proud to tell others that they work with their organization
• 1.5-3X being more attractive to recent college grads

Those numbers are even worse for those organizations that show a different organizational brand during the recruiting process than they really have once an employee joins the company.

It pays to have consistent brands!

Today we released preliminary results of the Social Workplace Trust Study, a study that was co-sponsored between Human 1.0, The Great Place to Work Institute, The International Association of Business Communicators, and The Society for New Communications Research. We will post the recording of the webinar in which we previewed a sneak peek of the results tomorrow, and you can find a copy of the deck we used on Slideshare.

So why did we release a sneak peek of the findings?

We truly believe that there is so much in the data that the more we socialize it with people who have an interest in the topic the better the findings from the study will be. If you are interested in discussing the data with us, please contact me at francois [at] human1 [dot] com.

So what are some of the high level findings?

Finding # 1 – most respondents believe that the best way to learn about a company is through social media and that the accuracy of information about a company is higher in social media than on company websites.

The people who agreed with the statement “One of the best ways for a person to learn about a company is by using social media” outnumbered those that disagreed by a factor 1.5X. When we asked the same question from heavy users of social media, that factor became a whopping 15X, and when we asked the question to people outside of the marketing and communication functions, that factor became 2X.

The respondent who agreed to the statement “What I read about a company on social media is more accurate than what I read about the company on its own website” also outnumbered those that disagreed by a factor 1.5X. When we asked the heavy social media users, that factor became 5.5X, and without the communication and marketing functions, the factor became 2.4X.

Finding #2 – if you treat your employees as adults, instead of as children, you can expect a work environment with higher trust, higher loyalty, and higher employee self-esteem.

Treating an employee as an adult encompasses many cultural traits – including risk, trust, hierarchy, passion, and a set of human-centric belief systems. We used the answers to 5 questions from the survey as proxies for determining whether employees were treated as adults or children. The subsequent findings were amazing.

People that are treated as adults are 3.3X as likely to trust management, they are 2X more loyal to the company, they have 1.7X as much job satisfaction, they take pride in talking about their work with others that is 2X that of people treated as children, and 1.5X as many people who are treated as adults consider themselves having larger social networks than others. Now can you see the benefits that companies who treat their employees as adults must be gaining in terms of talent acquisition and retention, increased innovation and word of mouth?

Not only are the benefits not incremental, they are totally non-linear. If you treat an employee as an adult, not only will they participate in conversations about their company in social media by a factor 3.3X compared to those treated as children, with 1.5X as many of them having larger than average social networks, they will buzz more to more people – and therein lays just one of the exponents.

We also found a clear link between treating employees as adults and passion. The factor there is between 2X and 12X – that means that people who are treated as adults are 2-12X as likely to be passionate at work. Now if you are familiar with some of John Hagel’s work on passion, he found that people who are passionate at work are 2X as likely to tackle tough problems and have social networks that are 2X as large as those that do not have passion at work. Again, can you see the benefits in terms of knowledge flow and innovation?

We have many other findings, including how management actually does live in a “bubble”, how there might be an employee engagement gap, how many companies still discourage the use of social media, and how they fail to use social media to humanize their brands.

Another key finding is how companies expose themselves to significant risks and liabilities by not providing training or “guard rails” on the proper use of social media to their employees.

Again, those results are preliminary. We are still conducting qualitative interviews and cross-tabulating survey results, but if you would like to get involved and make it better before we release the final findings, please be in touch.

A few weeks ago, Ed Moran and I conducted a webinar, hosted by Monster.com (disclosure: Monster.com is a client of Beeline Labs), about Social Talent Acquisition. Unfortunatelly, and as is often the case with webinars, we were not able to get to all the rich questions that came from the audience. This is the reason for this post. If you have any comments about our points of view, we would love to hear them.

Q: How would you recommend using social networks to recruit high volumes of candidates, like call center roles?

Social Media allows you to change the nature of the relationship you have with potential candidates from a transactional and episodic relationship to an ongoing relationship. In that vein you really need to shift your thinking from staffing a big  call center once to setting up ongoing relationships with a large number of people who are motivated by “wow-ing” the customer.  The next time you need to staff up a call center, those people will act as an army of volunteer recruiters for you. That could involve setting up a community for people to network with one another, or engage with them on someone else’s platform if that is where they already hang out.

Q: With all the choices of social networking, the difficulty is not only managing the social network but knowing it is working – especially when as a Recruiter we are looking to fill a position by 30 to 45 days.  How can we approach social networking knowing it is working?

First off, chances are that if you have a successful social environment, whether a community or a network, you will not be “managing” it. Most successful social environments are run by the users and members, even when they are sponsored by companies.

Social recruiting and talent acquisition is NOT about recruiting in social media – it’s about leveraging the social for which humans have been hardwired for tens on thousands of years as part of the talent acquisition process. If you recruit in social media you may have some success, but the biggest benefits will come from turning the process into a social process – one which can expand beyond online communities and social networks. Turning the process into a social process means finding others, who’s job it is not to recruit, to help you find the right talent for the opportunity you are trying to fill.

Q: can you give more specific feedback on how a company would start posting/using social networks to recruit employees?

We answered part of this question in the previous answers, but the key here is to start establishing meaningful relationships with people who potentially could help you find the right talent in the future. It could be that those people already hang out on social networks like LinkedIn or FaceBook, or maybe in more specialized communities like the ones sponsored by Monster.com’s Affinity Lab communities. It could also be that they do not have a place to hang out yet in which case you may have an opportunity to host them on your platform.

Q: How do you recommend developing social network policies, especially for employees? We need to create some type of framework so users know what is allowed and what is not allowed.

Telling your people how to behave online or in social media should not be all that different from telling them how to behave on the phone, email, or in face-to-face situations. Another factor to consider before putting out intimidating or restrictive social media policies is that most customers purchase your products and services based on TRUST – and how can you expect your customers to trust you if you cannot trust your employees.

When putting together corporate social media policies, it is a good thing to understand what others have done and also to include those employees who are active in social media in the process of crafting the policy.

Q: Which social network would you suggest for solely recruiting for a non-profit company?

Again, maybe it would be better to look at this problem from a different angle. What is the non-profit about? Is it like Love 146, which fights against child trafficking, or is it like Mensa, an organization for highly intellectual people? People with a passion for those different causes will not likely hang together and so there is not one place where you will find them.

When trying to engage in social media you need to find the tribes and where they hang out. You also need to be human-centric to a fault, and not wear your company or organization-centric (in this case non-profit) hat.

Q: Working for a real estate company, it’s hard to provide incentives in terms of reciprocity. Any advice on how to appeal on a national level for the recruitment of sales agents?

While not claiming to be real estate experts you should be able to find reciprocity everywhere. Think of the last party you went to and the conversations you had with people – if you remember them, then those conversations were reciprocal – based on value going both ways. If you don’t remember them, then it was probably a conversation that either did not interest you (non-reciprocal from your point of view) or with a people who could not stop talking about themselves.

Q: How did Fiskars communicate out of the scrapbooking community?

We interviewed the CMO of Fiskars who explained the program in detail here.

This morning a friend of mine forwarded me an email from one of the many companies which are encouraging their customers and prospects to start monitoring their employee’s web usage.

That drove me to do a little research on how many companies are already monitoring their employees’ email and web usage. Depending on which survey you look at, it looks like between 60% and 75%+ of companies are actually tracking employees’ web usage (some are capturing every single keystroke) – with about 50% of companies firing employees for email and ‘net abuse.

That means that at least 60% of companies are not ready to have their employees engage in social media. If you cannot trust your employees to do the right surfing, then how can you trust them to engage in social media on your behalf?

I understand that there are inherent legal issues related to employees visiting inappropriate sites. What I don’t understand is how this is somehow different from an employee bringing in, and leaving on his desk, an inappropriate magazine. Now companies didn’t develop policies to search people’s bags upon entering the company in the morning. So why do they think that they should monitor people’s keystrokes? How is this somehow different?

If you “spy” on your employees, even if you are transparent about it, you will create a culture of distrust and anti-loyalty – not to mention all the other bad behaviors that come with big brother spying. The difference between a company spying on its employees and a country spying on its citizen are not all the different – and there are some gruesome lessons to be learned from the latter.

So again – if you have a “spying” culture you distrust your employees’ reading habits and how they spend their time. You will therefore distrust their ability to engage with customers on your behalf or you will put so many controls over it that it will sound 100% inauthentic. Think of people willing to speak in public in dicta rial countries – they have zero credibility, as most people assume that they are shills for the regime.

If this is your company culture, you risk to forever miss the boat when one of your competitors which trusts their employees to do the right things and not be stupid will find a way to humanize their company by having their employees engage in conversations with their customers and prospects.

Many companies seem to have legal departments that put up huge barriers to adopting communities and other social media programs that include employees, customers, prospects and even detractors. In fact some put up barriers so high that nobody can do anything in the space. Now, if your competitors cannot find a way to overcome those objections either, you may be ok, but if they do and manage to extend their business processes to leverage the power of the internal and external crowds, it may be “game over.”

Typical legal objections include the issues related to brand protection, engaging hourly workers as part of internal communities, the threat of liability for what employees say in public, having employees socialize online instead of doing work, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, and more. While most legal departments will claim that their situation is very unique, at the end of the day the issues are fairly common among many companies.

I do not think that there is one best practice on how to overcome those objections. Some companies find it easier to get legal involved upfront in the process, while others are asking legal to quantify the risks and then balancing those with the benefits or the risks of doing nothing. One good bit of common sense (as recommended in this BT case study) is to make sure that you do not overhype what you are trying to do and position it as something radically different from other programs. Many companies already have policies in place that cover things like email communications and acceptable behavior in public forums – which could possibly be extended to virtual environments without too much change.

What have you found to be working?

In speaking with many marketing executives in recent weeks it became apparent that many companies are still using their marketing department as a dumping ground for people who are no longer fit for other jobs – sales people who no longer want to sell, developers who cannot code anymore, or customer service people who are tired of hearing complaints.

I thought that this behavior had disappeared in the late 80′s or early 90′s, when many companies started to realize that marketing was actually one of the most strategic things a company could do – apparently not.

If you don’t staff your marketing department with the best possible people, then how can you expect them to deliver? You might as well get rid of it all together…

Have you noticed how many people talk about other employees as if they owned them? “I was talking to my marketing director”, “have you met my lieutenant?”, are common occurrences in corporate speak.

If the person you are talking about has some sort of loyalty to you, then that type of speak may not bother him or her. If there is no personal loyalty, that person probably resents being talked about in that fashion.

But even if there is some sort of personal loyalty – does it really belong there? If you answered yes and your are in a position where other people report to you I suggest that you get a good career counselor, as your world is about to be rocked pretty hard.

The answer is of course NO. An employee’s loyalty should first and foremost be with the customer – no matter what the person’s position in the company is. Next in line are their peers, followed by the product or service that customers are “hiring” from your company. As a manager, you don’t even make it on the list.

Oh, and by the way, just in case you did not get that memo either – those same people don’t work for you either. Hopefully they work for the customer, but whether you like it or not, they work for themselves.

[photopress:office_rumor.jpg,full,alignright]Many organizations worry about how employees feel about their management, their owners and their companies, and what they might say about them about it in public. The paranoia is so high that the number non-disparagement agreements that employees are asked to sign is at an all time high – with some companies going as far as making people sign non-disparagement agreements that cover their entire family.

Focusing on controlling what employees might say about you in public is a sure road to killing any possible enthusiasm and passion around your company, its products and its management. What companies should do instead is to focus on figuring out how employees feel about themselves in the context of being employed with the company. If you can help employees feel good about themselves, then they will automatically feel good about you and your company, and you would never need non-disparagement agreements.

Just like you cannot control what your customers say about you, you cannot control what employees will say about you either. In fact you should take a totally different tack – encourage your employees to talk about you, and deal with the good and the bad that comes out of that.

It is disturbing to see how technology-phobic parents and teachers can impose restrictions on all of our kids which can result in missed education opportunities, or worse strange behavior towards technology and the Internet.

One such example appeared on the BBC News web site today, where they report that teachers have called for web sites such as YouTube to be shut down as part of efforts to prevent pupils and staff being bullied. Wow – how dangerously stupid! I mean, cannot they just adapt new techniques to avoid bullying online instead of calling for the shutdown of those sites? I bet you the next thing they will do is to prohibit access to YouTube and sites like it for all the kids in the their schools – a really dumb move.

That is exactly what happened to my son. He has been to computer camp over summer for years now. The first year they let them do whatever they wanted on the web. Then they started prohibiting online games during recess times. It got progressively worse to the point that this year they can no longer go on the web. A computer camp without being allowed to surf the web – that is almost as bad as a tennis camp without tennis courts. What are they thinking?

I can just see some worried parents who have no clue what the web is all about, outside of the sensationalized (and disgusting) stories of the pedophiles who find their victims online as promoted by Dateline NBC and other such programs, asking the school to not allow their child to access the web for fear of being stalked or being approached by bad people. This being a very litigious society, the school lawyers are probably choosing to have all access prohibited rather than just limiting access to those kids whose parents are clearly clueless. And the unfortunate result is that kids like my son, who have been online since they were still in diapers, and who have learned how to stay out of trouble online, much like we were brought up to stay out of trouble offline, can no longer enjoy their computer camp and have to give up the learning that they are yearning for.

Sure there are bad people online, and while I am not sure how the online percentage of bad people compares to bad people in the real world, I suspect that the number is actually lower. But it does not matter, even if it is higher we cannot rob our children of the education that will make them competitive to meet the needs of a few Luddites. We have to develop methods to teach them how to stay out of trouble online the same way we thought generations of people to stay out of trouble offline.

[Tags: YouTube BBC online access education predators]