High employee engagement is easier to achieve than you think, a fast track option to improve productivity, reduce costs, improve customer experience, and make your workplace a happier one.
6 steps (see below) are all it takes to find the yellow brick road to:
high employee engagement,
high levels of productivity,
killer culture that delivers higher customer satisfaction, greater efficiencies, less costs and ultimately knockout return on investment on shareholders’ funds, and
happiness, success, satisfaction, fulfilment, self-actualization for everybody involved in the organisation.
Low engagement is unproductive, unfulfilling and unprofitable – a lose/lose/lose for ALL stakeholders.
Low Engagement is a Failing not a Reality
If you have low employee engagement in your company, from a handful of employees to 50,000 or more employees, it’s the leader’s fault!
Employee engagement Has been analysed, re analysed, investigated, researched and assessed over and over and over again for two decades but, instead of addressing the core problem, operational people have been attacking the symptoms and not solving the problem.
Engagement is very simple.
The two main reasons why employee engagement becomes sub optimal.
The major reason absolutely, unquestionably, is employees not getting along with their immediate supervisor.
This can be solved by creating an environment that encourages and promotes camaraderie between supervisor and his team. Supervisors do not deliberately set out to offend people. Almost all of the time it’s because they’re frustrated, ill-equipped unappreciated, unfulfilled, somehow lacking in support that they need to do their job properly.
So, the problem falls not with the supervisors not getting along with their employees but with the leaders who are not empowering the supervisors to get along with their employees.
…and where does this come from?
Each comes from the key reason that research has identified to be the second most important reason or cause for employee engagement: Absence of a purpose, mission, vision, identity, intent or values!
If you fix your MEVPIV, you fix everything !
I don’t want to hear any more complaints from any high -level executives, boards of directors, c-suite VP’s, complaining about employee engagement when the tools are readily available at their fingertips .
If any organisation, from government to NFP, suffers low employee engagement among employees, it’s all because the boss isn’t taking charge of MEVPIV.
That’s the core reason. The whole reason. And the fixable solution.
If you’ve just inherited knew leadership of an organisation that has low employee engagement don’t try and cover it up with surveys and promises, recognition and rewards can increase silos, inefficiencies, dissonance and internal politics… tactics come later – micro-problems can be fixed later. Right now, will you have to concentrate on the six variables of the MEVPIV.
If you want help implementing a MEVPIV, let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Regardless, if you agree, disagree or can embellish, I welcome comments below… .
Trained marketers understand that marketing is more than advertising and promotion: That it is the management of exchange; and to manage exchange, trained marketers know they have to adapt to environmental change .
In strategic marketing terms, Covid-19 is very simply a change in the business environment in which we manage exchange (in which we market our goods and services). Those who refuse to accept this will perish. Those who willingly adapt will prosper!
Prospering in a Covid-19 market
The 8P’s of Marketing STILL apply in the Covid-era.
Develop or alter your offerings in terms of product or service,
Make changes in processes,
Modify the way you manage people,
Review message, media and investment in marketing communications and promotion,
Strategically, you will definitely need to:
Accurate identify the new segments that Covid-19 has created in your market
Identify the new segments and which of these are attractive to you
Repositioning and target these new, attractive segments
Monitor competitive activity
Abandon “old” ways.
Operationally focussed decision-makers and untrained marketers will desperately claw for marketing communications and promotional hacks, hoping these will eb enough of an answer because they have worked in the past. They may or may not test new media, but sheer good fortune may be enough to survive.
Many will likely bemoan the situation, blaming Covid-19 for downturn in sales rather than their ability to adjust and capitalise on a new set of circumstances.
Covid could be landmark opportunity for many different companies for Trained Marketers with Smart Leaders
Trained marketers know that a SWATT from a SWOT .
Trained marketers know that they have to review and respond to the PESTLEED that applies to their organisation .
Smart leaders realise that they have to change and change now because the environment has changed.
Smart leaders will be looking at their resources and be matching these to capabilities and market opportunities… reviewing what business they are in and what business they should be in.
It Really All Comes Down to Leadership
Leadership is required to engage and align the teams .
Leadership is required to reorganise and refocus the organisation.
Leadership is required to maintain morale 2 exercise initiative to embrace innovation.
So, when good leaders and properly trained marketers work synergistically with each other, there is always a silver lining to a grey cloud.
Feel free to comment. It would be interesting if anybody who can tell us a story of how they’ve adapted and changed, could respond.
The ONLY people that Qantas & Virgin SHOULD be sacking are the incumbent Board of Directors!
The lack of strategic competence demonstrated by the Board and executive management of Qantas and Virgin is NOT new.
American Rail ignored change in the demand for transport when cars went into mass production: Instead of adapting, they threw their hands up and said “bail us out!”, too. The buggy whip industry shook its head in dismay and began sacking staff and winding down.
Closer to home, Australian car manufacturing industry kept making cars people didn’t want (did anyone ever own a P76?) in the face of diminishing sales it universally closed up shop when a glaringly attractive industry in electric car manufacturing was staring them in the face! HAD they possessed the least amount of strategic foresight and competetence they CPULD have been producing electric cars at the very kernel begibning of Tesla’s reighn.
Sadly teh promisnanc eof oeprtaional corporat ecancer, and teh absence of strategic talent, in all eth examples above, dominated.
Probably the most expensive mistake of the 21st century is perceiving marketing as meaning advertising and promotion.
How the business-world came to close itself off from the science of marketing strategy, the vast and rich knowledge base that makes profitable businesses spark and explode, is a matter of debate…
What has created a world that doesn’t understand the meaning of the word, Marketing?
Is it tertiary marketing education devoid of real world worth, now that academics have significantly displaced practitioners in teaching?
Is it because the efficiency of the medium that is the internet is so profound that the aggressive snake-oil hawking of digital promoters, describing themselves as marketers, without understanding anything beyond rudimentary marketing communications tactics?
Is it because the leaders of sophisticated marketing organisations are hording the knowledge because it represents such potent and potentially sustainable competitive advantage for them if they keep it to themselves?
Is it because the marketing professional has fought off mandatory accreditation and control… so that anyone can say they are a marketer without challenge?
Or could it be that middle management and senior executives who have lobbied so hard to rise above their peers in corporate organisations, shout down anyone with knowledge that might interfere with their planned career progression?
Is this due to the fact that over 50% of business executives working in marketing lack ANY tertiary qualifications in the discipline?
Where Did Marketing Go Off the Tracks?
Perhaps, in the ‘80s, if the marketing professional has screamed “wrong” when the term, “direct marketing” was incorrectly coined to describe direct response advertising, the nonsensical term, “content marketing” may not have be adopted and a more accurate phrase to describe “online publicity promotion” might have formed? The same goes for “search engine marketing” which really is “prioritization of search engine ranking”. (At least somebody tried when they coined the phrase “Search Engine Optimization”.)
Poor lay people are left in a soup of confusion daily when terms sprout such as “Influencer Marketing” which is simply utilization of group opinion leaders to disperse information utilization in context with the multi-stage mass communication model.
Whatever the causes, the cost is incalculable!
How much damage is done when people are unaware that they must balance the 8P’s of marketing scientifically if they are to protect their companies from sub-optimal profits?
How destructive is it when quality executives are appointed to roles they THINK they can handle when they are simply ill-equipped with inadequate training and knowledge to make strategic marketing decisions?
How profound are the losses as the commercial world graciously accepts the dominoes that are retail chains collapsing world-wide, without even questioning that these occurrences might be a clue that the leadership models in business are faulty?
How corrosive is it when employees simply leave their jobs in frustration because their corporate guidelines are soiled by silos, blurred by secret agenda, eroded by office politics, undermined by poor morale?
How much worse does this make frustrated middle management as they vent on their own staff because they are fighting a losing battle with the same demons they are creating because of complacent leadership and corporate governance?
Even though Gartner, Inc, have made $4B a year reminding us that employee engagement has been consistently around 25% of all employees since they began surveying it in 2002, where is evidence of quality internal marketing?
History will tell a sorry tale.
How they will giggle in decades to come when the historians recall the anecdotes of 21st century business people ignoring the lessons of history only to repeat the mistakes.
Students of Marketing in the future may shake their heads in disbelief when they discover that the body of real knowledge was not in universities, but secreted away in the coffers of just a few large companies and consultancies, remaining virtually known except to only to a few outsiders.
Incidentally, on the topic of academia worth and value to the business world…
Is Academia Failing Society BIG-TIME?
For years I’ve have complained that the focus of Universities on “publish or perish” instead of “teach well and share knowledge” is a big mistake.
So, I couldn’t help capturing this post when I found it on the web recently…
Who cares about your PhD thesis?
Colin Riegels, Doctoral candidate: Law, University of Oxford
There is an old joke about this: only five people will ever read your doctoral thesis.
You
Your supervisor
Your two examiners
Your unlucky spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend who has to act as unpaid proof-reader for you
In 99.9% of cases, nobody else will ever read it or care what it says.
When I arrived at Oxford I went to the archives and checked out a number of completed doctoral theses in my field so I could read them and get a flavour of what they are meant to be like. In every single case except for one, I was the first person ever to check them out. And, in each case, they weren’t randos – I picked those ones because they were names that I recognised as people who went on to enjoy success in the field.
By the time I read this post, it had 203,900 views and been liked or shared over 6,100 times! Academia KNOWS its failings yet academia are ignoring (laughing at!) what most certainly will be its downfall!
I imagine historians of the future will share my disdain of unoriginal, regurgitated marketing theory being submitted as justification for their existence by the incumbent pure academics in power now, representing a fake body of knowledge, thrown up as a smoke screen to disguise it profound absence of advancement; too crammed with irrelevant and unusable findings that the “publish or perish” mandate has forced them to create.
I recently shared a Linked In comment, and in my keynote presentations and workshops discuss, a large & intense formal commercial study of selling skills, that showed only two significantly important factors determine a sales person’s success…
How hard salespeople work (calls, preparation, & face-to-face time in front of a prospect or customer, no ‘brass-plating’, procrastination, or poor time-management), and…
The distribution of speaking time between seller & buyer (the greater the percentage of time the buyer spends speaking, the greater the salesperson’s sales success, relative to team peers’ success).
As a throw-away I mentioned that increased average productivity across the whole team of salespeople occurs if they have access to, and understand, properly identified market segments but I probably DDN’T emphasize the point enough that If a company really understands its market segments and responds accordingly, then all the salesperson really has to do is take orders… the selling is already done before the sales meeting.
What Factors Interfere with Sales People being Successful?
Multi-national corporations, in the main, already know a about the world-wide crisis in employee engagement: With only 24% of Australian workers engaged, and with 202% productivity gains to be had from the 76% unengaged, employee engagement & organisational alignment has become TOP priority, particularly in the wake of Millennials displaying even greater need for engagement, than generations past.
An issue that doesn’t receive enough attention is that 18% of any workforce is made up of “disengaged” employees – ones that deliberately want to “sink the ship”. and THAT is seriously lose sales and detrimental to future opportunity!
If silos are known to exist, any decent leader should be tearing them down, YESTERDAY!
But how often do we hear about disconnects between Sales & Marketing teams?
I’m betting silos between research and other departments even interfere with distribution of segment identification and recognition… that information isn’t shared, synergy is lost, and sales results end up being suboptimal across hundreds of industries.
It is an easy bet for me, I have uncovered plenty of situations just like this over my consulting career, from doing marketing audits, deficiency analysis and even in competition analysis… through to ‘war-stories’ from delegates to my workshops who confess this goes on far too often.
Often the problem stems from CEO’s who are too busy with distractions… too complacent towards improving productivity, too cynical to believe that a small investment in correction will deliver a significant ROI, or just fearful that they might be “exposed” as less than 100% competent.
How Badly Do YOU think Silos Interfere with Sales People being Successful?
I’d be interested in any comments, observations, cases in hand, or thoughts readers have as to silos, sales productivity and leadership, relevant to these thoughts.
By the way, I use an approach that has helped FMCG, transport & big pharma grow corporate profits by as much as $250M p.a. that can be used to help all sorts of businesses… If you want to have a peek, check out: http://bit.ly/OpAudit
When the Ford Motor Company of America was losing hundreds of $1,000,000 a year in the early ‘80s they called upon W. Edwards Deming, who had previously consulted broadly across industry in Japan, to come in and provide them with ways to improve their quality .
Instead, he questioned the company’s culture and management, citing that 85% of quality problems were the result of failure in management to engage their employees.
While the Ford executives were waiting for a prescription of what they should do, Deming broadened their focus with the question, “Do you have constancy of purpose?” The Ford execs were annoyed he wouldn’t’ give them an answer they wanted, but it was the beginning of the turn-around for Ford. Similar scenarios were experienced in that era by Dow Chemicals, Procter and Gamble, AT&T and the New York times.
It takes a courageous management team to accept the answers they want are NOT those they need… and Australian executives are not immune.
Too many C-suite executives dismiss the power of Purpose
Purpose statements give people their reason to get out of bed in the morning. Purpose statements give them a reason for being. Purpose statements provide direction for participants within an organisation.
It’s not enough to have a mission and vision, but there many companies that still just rely on those two guidelines. It is absolutely imperative, and organisations possess a balanced and structured MEVPIV: They need a mission, yes! They need a vision, yes! But, they also need a purpose. They also need “identity(or intent)”. They also need values which reflect the ethos of the organisation.
Since the 80’s, employee engagement and team alignment has grown in terms of perceived importance… but management often treats the symptoms rather than the disease with reward and recognition programs, team building programs, evaluation feedback processes and other tactics, when all the need to do is develop a sincere and appropriate MEVPIV to choke off the feed-line of discontent and inspire a “killer culture” and “preferred employer” status.
At relatively low cost, with enormous returns, MEVPIV development will inevitably become mandatory for future organisations, particularly as millennial employees swing for more than gross salary motives.
It remains to be seen if boomer and y-Gen senior management can adapt and adopt quick enough…
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[NB: W Edwards Deming was a statistician schooled in mathematics and physics and who evolved into military planning and ultimately into changing culture. He understood the 6th “P” of marketing (Processes) and how important they are to the marketing mix: It was he who originally said, “If you haven’t got a process you don’t know what you’re doing.)
Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) is credited with having first suggested a round Earth. Aristotle (4th century B.C.) agreed followed by Eratosthenes (3rd century), endorsed by Ptolemy (1st century), Bede (7th century), and publicised broadly from 13th century, onwards). They were well aware the Earth was round, having calculated with relatively good precision its circumference in the early 9th century.
Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell said, “With extraordinary few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.”
Yet people still do believe the earth is flat! So, I guess it is to be expected that people still believe in Value-Based pricing.
However, I do find it surprising (if not cringe-worthy) that the hawkers of the value-based pricing theory still rule the roost in terms of pricing consulting, pricing speaking and pricing webinars.
What’s worse, practitioners surprisingly are still making flawed pricing decisions based on limited knowledge and integration with other areas of the marketing mix.
In response to the frustration of seeing this happening all around me, I penned a book called “Advanced Pricing Strategy”, published by Bookboon.com, suspecting that it would be adopted with relish by people who wanted to really take advantage of advanced pricing strategy .
However, figures from my publisher indicate poor take-up.
In order to rectify my Casella’s Curse (in case you don’t know what Casella’s Curse is, it is having knowledge that no one else will accept or believe in) I would urge anyone, interested in really utilising modern pricing strategic knowledge, to get hold of my e-book .
Full of diagrams and modes, 90 minutes’ reading can save decision makers from fatal pricing decisions.
I believe that you can get it for free, if you subscribe to my publisher’s website. Here’s the link and good luck.
When you take a product to market, don’t you think about the price?
When you take a product to market, don’t you think about the actual product you’re trying to sell?
When you take a product market, don’t you think about which market you’re going to choose to sell it in?
When you take a product to market, don’t you think about whether you might get someone else to sell it, instead of selling it yourself?
When you take a product to market, do you think about whether you can do it by yourself or whether you need help, and (if so) who you need to employ to help you?
When you take a product to market, do you think about how you going to sell it?
When you should take a product to market, do you consider how much you need to announce, that you have something or value… or maybe about how you going to convince people who know what it is you’re selling that they need it?
Will you take a product to market, don’t you first of all think about whether or not anyone will buy it?
When you take a product to market, don’t you think about who might be the likely suspects that will want what you are offering?
When you take a product to market, don’t you think about other people who are selling similar products, and what makes yours a better choice?
Then why do so many people believe that marketing is just advertising and promotion and selling?
For the first time in many years, industry associations need to step up and prove themselves worthy!
As member driven organisations, representative associations who count businesses as members, need to address their responsibilities to their members.
With the social upheaval of the “Covid era”, existing markets and their segments have changed… New markets with unknown segments are waiting for new needs, wants desires and behaviours to be recognised and better serviced.
Any industry association that is not prepared to invest in servicing their members should reconsider their purpose, or “get off the pot”, so to speak.
The true measure of leaders of the multitude of industry association and bodies across the country will be how determined they prove they are to justify their existence and be of value to their members.
This, in part, might be measured by how enthusiastically and rapidly they throw themselves into market research… discovering the new market and consequent segments that Covid has procreated and sharing that knowledge along with commercial recommendations to their membership.
While optimistic that many either are already commencing or on the verge of commencing this activity, I am fearful that a vast number are sitting on their hands, minimising their activity and keeping a low profile and I pity the industries whose members are represented by such woeful inactivity.
Has COVID-19 inadvertently exposed the truth about Qantas Management or does it say more about its shareholders?
In the wake of COVID-19, many companies have panicked; reacted conservatively or closed down… thrown their hands up in misery and blamed the corona epidemic for their demise. Could it be though, that the slant towards the operational focus in senior management has resulted in exposing a lack of true inspirational leadership?
In the days when strategic decision-making led business growth, the analysis tool of choice used was a SWAT. Not a SWOT. The “A” represented adapt-abilities rather than the later onset of “O” which represents opportunities. When rapid change hits – operational folk MUST move aside for strategic thought to work. It may be that an ability to juggle the figures, bloat this month’s sales by pushing forward next month’s sales, and other operational proficiency has been at the cost of strategic talent.
Instead of companies’ leaders choosing to find new markets with new products they have assumed that the end of their business is unavoidable… Not their fault but caused by the Covid virus affecting existing markets that were being satisfied with existing products.
What about new products for the new markets Covid has created?
Strategic marketing is all about satisfying the marketing concept which is finding consumers with needs and wants that you are able to satisfy.
For example, Qantas (recognising that passenger travel is down and passenger volumes were disappearing) could have converted a number of planes into freight planes in recognition of a new demand and higher volume of freight being consumed through Internet purchases. Teams of service personnel could have been re-purposed…. as could multiple divisions…
Mind you, the temptation to take the lazy option, call upon vote-hungry politicians to bail you out, is understandable, it is just not very admirable.
Still while the shareholders continue to vote in a Board of Directors who demonstrate poor finesse in fulfilling their mandate to act in shareholders’ best interests… this kind of leadership will prevail.
Is it lazy management, lazy governance or lazy shareholders that are really to blame for Qantas’ poor response to the Covid-created change in business?
The headlines are reading #Target failed… but the TRUTH is their board of directors failed to perform… They must have known three years ago this was on its way… they sat there and watched, doing nothing proactive to stop it… more than corporate incompetence, this is criminal corporate neglect!
Good Corporate Governance is NOT killing off brands by doing nothing to make them better! Ask any Target shopper and they’d tell you what was right with Target, what was wrong with Target and how to fix it!
Westfarmers board, Michael Chaney, Rob Scott, Vanessa Wallace, Diane Smith-Gander, Wayne Osborn, Sharon Warburton, Tony Howarth, Jennifer Westacott, Bill English, Mike Roche, J P Graham and P M Bassat took home well over $16,000,000,000 in directors’ fees alone…
… if they had only spent just $250000 in market research and product development strategy, they not only would have saved the Target brand, but the careers and income stability of tens of thousands of Australian workers, not to mention lost brand equity for Westfarmers shareholders future ROSF (return on shareholders’ funds).
When are the corporate watchdogs going to do something about poor corporate governance in this country?
If I was a still a stakeholder in #Westfarmers, I’d be cleaning up by lobbying for and voting in a new Board!
Are the RIGHT people in Qantas and Virgin equipped to be in charge?
The lack of strategic competence by the Board and executive of Qantas and Virgin is NOT new.
American Rail ignored change in the demand for transport when cars went into mass production: Instead of adapting, they threw their hands up and said, “bail us out!”, too. At the same time, the buggy whip industry shook its head in dismay and began sacking staff and winding down.
Closer to home, Australian car manufacturing industry kept making cars people didn’t want (did anyone ever own a P76?) in the face of diminishing sales it universally closed up shop when a glaringly attractive industry in electric car manufacturing was staring them in the face! HAD they possessed the least amount of strategic foresight and competence they COULD have been producing electric cars at the very kernel beginning of Tesla’s reign.
Like Kodak, that also didn’t have the talent in leadership to cope with change and entered bankruptcy in 2012; Blockbuster Video, which went belly-up in 2013; Borders, one of the largest book retailers in U.S that refused to accept change and died in 2011, Qantas and Virgin are currently being led by those who are incompetent in adjusting with appropriate strategy.
Sadly, the prominence of operational corporate cancer, and the absence of strategic talent, in all the examples above, has thwarted opportunity.
You can BET the Board of Virgin and Qantas exhibit one (if not all) if the symptoms of Corporate Cancer.
Lucky GE had a Leader with Strategic Wisdom
If the leaders if Qantas and Virgin had been running GE between 1981 and 2001, they’d be calling for handout and still making light globes and electric toasters.
Fortunately for GE shareholders, Jack thought strategically… Quotes like these seem to have escaped the abilities of Virgin and Qantas leaders…
“Change before you have to.”
“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.”
“It is better to act too quickly than it is to wait too long.”
“You can look at the situation and feel victimized. Or you can look at it and be excited about conquering the challenges and opportunities it presents.”
… and more.
Qantas and Virgin Must NOT be bailed out…
… at least not with incumbent Board and executive management… regardless of how much money you give them , they are literally fancy overheads with no appropriate talent in adapting to new realities.
The Covid-19 experience is a prime example of what happens when a company is loaded with operational people, who lack the strategic skills necessary to cope with new circumstances.
Too late for Virgin? But there’s still time for Qantas
The ONLY Commercially Sensible Way Forward
I think it may be too late for Virgin, but not for Qantas. The first thing shareholder HAVE to do is vote in a Board that exhibits a balanced skill set for strategic thinking. And they should do it preferably before 9:00am Monday!
Like Welch did for GE, they should focus on true capabilities, adaptabilities and alternative opportunities…
With on-line commerce booming… what’s to stop Qantas converting passenger “freight” to parcel freight?
With huge telemarketing centres, sale support teams, catering competencies, cleaning competencies, and more… why can’t Qantas diversify to where new markets and new segments are screaming for services? With an abundance of people versed in service, why not put these to new tasks which they are potentially suitable?
If Joyce treated his employees with respect and recognized the latent talent within, he could call for business plans from his people and cherry-pick the best… he’d be flooded with golden opportunity.
But no, it’s better to sit quietly on $8M a year sand focus on the easy option, the last option, the “watch Rome burn” option, than to man-up and lead like a leader should.
Will the Government Fold or Be Strong?
It will be interesting to see if the government will bend at the knees or opt to embrace tough love.
I fear taxpayers’ money comes too easy to politicians who prefer to grandstand on “saving the airlines” rather than looking after constituents better by letting natural forces apply.
It will be interesting to see how much courage the political leaders have in the wake of the spin that Qantas will apply to hack off a generous gratuity to further sponsor their poor management team.
The future will tell… but what will be interesting is how history paints commercial wisdom of decision makers in the “Covid era”.
The modern “Marketing Concept” is “using the resources of your organization that can be competitively utilized to satisfy the needs or wants of an identifiable and reachable target audience.
So, EXPERT marketers that understand their job is, “The holistic, integrated management of exchange” are equipped with the understanding to self-determine if a business should be closing for a lock down, staying open despite a lock down, of actually redeploying resources and responding to a lock down to satisfy new and unsatisfied needs in the market place.
Think!
Can you do something for those in need?
Can you deliver new things that a group of people of organisations now want?
Can you reorganize your resources that satisfy new markets? Increased demand? Can you develop new products that people NOW want?
Can you develop new products for new markets?
Most good marketers will recognize the Ansoff matrix
Internal Marketing Comes First
Remember, you’ll get no-where fast if you don’t have support, engagement and alignment within your organization.
Does your response of effort to adapt fit with the organizations’ MEVPIV?
For ideal employee and stakeholder engagement and alignment
If not then leadership has to be called into question. and if your leader’s cant embrace change before its too late, get out early.
If leaders are onside, remind them that internal marketing is necessary and leadership has to be overt. Call for enthusiasm, alignment and encouragement from everyone and ask for (and respect) contributions.
And don’t forget…
Act, don’t react: Plan strategically – don’t just embrace reactive tactics
Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.
Think through your strategy. Consider all the implications. Determine contingencies and prepare for them.
YOu marketing plan should not be more than 20 pages, and consider ALL aspects of the marketing mix, and make sure your market research, analsysis, and information is right!
Successful marketing coordinates the codependent parts of the marketing mix, optimally.
If you’re transitioning to a virtual office, opting to have your employees work from home, you need to accept the innovation also demands change in management accent.
When you employ, recruit and manage workers who tele-commute or operate from remote offices… regardless of the reason, you must ensure they are engaged and productive.
Many businesses employ workers who aren’t ready to accept going remote
Remote work is a matter of culture. Experience tells us that emergency change to working remotely in response to a crisis doesn’t always work out. You need nurture a buoyant attitude and positive disposition to help them be truly productive.
That’s why “transition to remote” needs to address the very core of your business.
A remote work force needs to be aligned. The team must be tune with their core contribution to the organization, its mission, its vision, it’s very identity and ethos.
The Fast-track path to Leading this Transition
Leaders must be diligent and sensitive to their workers’ needs. The team must be committed to, and included in, your organization’s values, ethics, intent.
They must both be aware of, and connected with, your objectives, the strategy you believe will achieve those objectives, the tactics they’ll use or are using and the tasks you need them to complete.
More than ever before, kinetic leadership will stimulate employee engagement. Now is the time, as you ask your workers to adopt a more independent work environment and adapt to the accompanying self-discipline and independent motivation needed to be productive.
How trustworthy they are will reply on how their leaders to inspire motivation, enthusiasm, and dedication to work.
Learn More or Get Help
As with any organization, sometimes the operational demands of everyday business have let the strategic sheen fade on engaging MEVPIV.
It only takes a mater of days to create, adopt and initiate a new MEVPIV that can increase productivity by 202%
For other organizations the employee engagement issue has been top of mind and in the things to do list of priorities.
If you need to prioritize this component of your leadership, be it strategic input, implementation or anything in between, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll see if I can help you find an answer or at least a sensible direction.
It only took Forbes 3500 years after the activity was first employed to discover “Influencer Marketing”… or so you might assume if you read a recent Forbes article published that insinuated the concept is radical, breakthrough and new.
It is such an awkward and silly expression, but curiously adopted by the masses. A range of people, from those who are non-discriminating and tolerant of lay-person interpretations, to opportunists who don’t know any better, have coined the phrase to attract their audiences to consider their opinion.
Those that “know” are aware that “Influencer marketing” is a means of describing promotional communication messages through celebrities and opinion leaders to deliver awareness, create interest, distribute knowledge, inspire liking and preference to coerce the recipient of that information to buy. This is done because it is human nature to follow and to trust those to who you believe you rely upon for that opinion.
A lay-person definition of the expression, “Influencer marketing”, being the means of describing the dynamic between a Group Opinion leader (GOP) and how they work within the context of the Multi-Stage Mass Communication model, has been extensively taught in Marketing courses around the world for the past 50 years.
Infamous snake-oil salespeople, political leaders and political institutions, throughout history, and recent and modern operational marketing communications specialists, have all utilized “Influencer Marketing” to help achieve their goals.
A Digital Expression?
The immature or forgetful among us who perceive the world didn’t exist before the internet and social media, may limit their thinking of Influencer Marketing to highly followed and liked, online, group opinion leaders:
Does it work?
Yes, I think many people, including me, have bowed to some authoritative opinion at some time in our buyer-decision-making lives. 🙂
Having survived the test of time, the tactic, that being using the influencer of a GOP to “bend” their followers’ behaviour, is proven.
How to Embrace, Apply and Implement “Influencer marketing”
I am joining forces with Entrepnr for their upcoming Influencer Marketing Asia virtual summit taking place on February 25-26, 2020.
I’ll be one of an array of their speakers sharing ideas, inspiration, and some tips on influencer marketing in Asia.
There will be in-depth presentations, case studies and extensive discussions from top influencer marketing practitioners, see https://www.influences.asia for more details.
The summit is only a matter of a few weeks away. There are still tickets available, and if you are interested in attending this great event, I have a discount code that will give you a 30% off discount.
