This week Lane4 hosted an informal event for those clients of ours who are focused on employee engagement through sponsorship. Our session took a specific focus on the forthcoming London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It felt like a very meaningful step not only in Lane4’s journey in this space, but also the awareness of the sponsorship industry as a whole.
Three years ago 'employee engagement through sponsorship' meant, to put it simply, ‘free hats for every employee, offering tickets for the sales teams to win through incentive programmes and hospitality for key clients’. There is nothing particularly wrong with those areas of an internal activation programme, but they are scratching the surface of what is possible. The danger if this is all tha you do is that they risk disenfranchising all but the lucky few. How on earth can you hope to rationalise an £80m spend with an intelligent employee by giving them a free hat? What else might you be doing to help your employee base understand how the Games is relevant to their own daily working lives? How can the Olympics help them understand what their own organisations are all about?
Our conversation this week was focused on that final question. Very tellingly, thirty people from more than ten organisations were working it through together. Richard Lloyd – Head of Brand, People and Culture at BT talked compellingly about BT’s work in the area of cultural and behavioural change. The Games offers a metaphor for the journey BT and many other partners are on.
If this is an area you’re interested in, you might like to pop along to Sadlers Wells Theatre in London on 15th April at the Think Sponsorship event where we’ll be sharing more of the BT journey so far.
http://www.thinksponsorship.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=131
I am very interested in the area of generational shift in the workplace. By chance my career has effectively followed a generation from teenage years (interested in urban music, fashion and, occasionally, basketball) through to young adulthood (music, parties, technology and MTV). I now find myself at Lane4 as we support businesses in the process of understanding how to assess, engage and develop their newest and youngest group of employees. This is the population we call Gen Y.
We often find perplexing. They join law firms – but do not necessarily want to be Partners in ten years time. They turn down Graduate roles at McKinsey for the equivalent Cancer Research scheme. They ask for promotions and pay rises before they have any track record of achievement. And they are never, ever, afraid to challenge.
When I was at MTV, we spent a lot of time talking with brands looking to target Gen Y. We talked with them about the power of ‘’experiences’’ and the internet to position their brand . We ran focus groups to demonstrate the importance of nurturing word of mouth among influential populations to drive trend leadership. We showed them videos of teenagers talking about poster advertising (‘’I never look at it’, ‘’It’s just brands paying to target me’’, ‘’Talk with me, not at me’’). We talked about how the internet would change the rules of the game. Often this was anathema to a marketing industry which revolved around making expensive thirty second adverts.
It is interesting to reflect on where we stand today, six years on. Those eighteen year olds who we talked to in focus groups are today’s high potential talent. They are saying exactly the same things as they were when in the focus groups, just now they are saying it to their employers. ‘’Talk with me, not at me’’. The biggest change has been the coming of age of the technology which now facilitates this. We might not like it, but facebook, linked in and the like are now part of our working lives. This is a generation who will send an e-mail to the CEO. Not only that, they will expect a reply.
I was at an excellent session yesterday morning run by Communications Management. It looked at the potential impact of a Conservative government on British business. What I found interesting was the extent to which the Conservative Party, like Obama before them, are aiming to embrace technology as a means of engaging this population. The Conservative Strategy Director has apparently spent an awful lot of time at Google HQ in the last year understanding how technology can be used to engage its users and influence decision making. Generation Y is going to be a hotly contested area of the election. It strikes me as a fascinating battleground. For Gen Y effective communication is bespoke, two way and authentic. It is not top down, manufactured and impersonal. It will be fascinating to see to what extent the Main Parties’ campaigns genuinely pick that up in the next few weeks and months. My advice to British industry would be to watch closely. The next few weeks might offer some useful learning to those corporate organisations struggling to understand how to engage, influence and retain their future corporate leaders.
Two months into the year, and our economy continues to be in a very interesting yet slightly perplexing place. Traditional indicators of the health of our market-place do not provide a consistent picture.
Of course prospects for the public sector and the overall size of the national debt cast an ongoing shadow over the UK market at the beginning of the year. We all recognise that something needs to be done, and yet we have a curious interlude until the General Election until anything major actually happens. Britain’s biggest businesses claim that 56.6% of gross profits went back to the Government in the form of different types of taxation last year. That is an extraordinarily high figure. We tend to think of the government as having an equity stake in our banking sector alone, but the practical reality is that their ‘dividend’ flow comes from each part of the 'private' sector.
The challenge of public debt aside, there is a brighter news. Recruitment in the UK is on the rise. I met a provider of assessment software the other day who described a very promising uptake in demand from January. The prevailing mood at the Best Companies Awards Ceremony (where we were delighted to come 5th) was one of cautious optimism. This definitely stronger than last year, although less because of any broader confidence in the economy than a feeling that we are collectively wiser about how to tackle this uncertainty than eighteen months ago.
This sense of 'confidence from experience' we felt in the SME market last week is also mirrored in our corporate clients. They are increasingly leaning to practical action not just despite, but also because of economic circumstance. Certainly the strategy houses are very busy indeed with a blend of growth strategy and due diligence work. The strongest businesses are plotting for significant market share growth in the next eighteen months. We notice them being far clearer around their strategy whether we experience double dip or slow growth scenario. They have built plans which will operable under either set of economic conditions.
This environment creates a really interesting shift in our client conversations. Three years ago we might have been asked about (for example) a pre-diagnosed leadership development programme for a 150-strong Directorate. Often it needed a lot of probing to identify how this related to the future strategic intent for the business. Today our conversations start earlier and far broader in scope. Questions like ‘’if this is our strategic straw man for the next 5 years, how will this impact our people strategy? How do we cascade the imperative for change and the behaviours we require? How will that impact on our employees, our customer service levels and the way our customers talk about us? How will we know if it is working?’ This is where we love to start a conversation.
Economic uncertainty remains in the UK, but it seems to be driving far less strategic uncertainty than twelve months ago. Our clients are clearer about a future vision and purpose. Or challenge is to respond to that.
Posts
