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The Secret to Creating and Retaining Happy and Productive Employees

Note from Mack: Today’s post is actually the issue of Backstage Pass that I sent to subscribers last Friday. I wanted to give everyone a taste of what they are missing by not subscribing to the Backstage Pass newsletter. If you want to subscribe, click the image at the bottom of this post. Each new issue goes out Friday morning. 

 

Today I wanted to talk about a topic that I am extremely passionate about; Giving employees the skills they need to succeed. Next week we will talk a bit about how you can do this with your customers, but this week I wanted to focus on improving the workplace skills of your employees.

Think about the last time you received an employee evaluation. You probably receive an evaluation from your boss once a year, maybe twice. And if your company is like most, your boss will tell you the areas where you are doing well, and the areas where you need some improvement. There will likely be some talk about how you have the potential to reach this level, if your skills improve.

Notice there’s one crucial aspect missing: The company doesn’t have a plan to teach you those skills that you will need to take your career to the next level. Maybe if you’re lucky, your company will give you a small ‘self-improvement’ allowance, where you are budgeted some money that you can spend on attending a conference, or purchasing training materials like a webinar. But the reality is, you’re on your own if you want to improve your skills and grow as an employee in your field.

I think we can do a lot better. I want to talk about how today.

Follow the Nick Saban Model

Nick Saban is viewed by most as the best college football coach of modern times. His Alabama teams have won 6 National Championships in the last 11 years, and are the current title-holders. What’s remarkable about this accomplishment is that Saban has won all these titles despite frequent turnover among his coaching staff, and often losing players early to the NFL draft.

Consider running back Najee Harris. When the 5-star recruit came to Tuscaloosa in 2017, he was at the bottom of the depth chart. In his 4 seasons at Alabama, he had 3 different running backs coaches. Normally, that’s a recipe for disaster when it comes to player development. Yet when his career at Alabama concluded in January, Najee was the starting running back, he had won the Doak Walker Award given to the best running back in the nation, and he finished 5th in the Heisman Trophy voting, the award that goes to college football’s best overall player. Oh, and he won 2 SEC titles and 2 National Championships, in 4 seasons at Alabama.

How is Alabama football able to flourish in an environment of constant player and coaching turnover? Could your business sustain and grow if your employees and managers were leaving every few months?

 

What makes Alabama football different?

The secret to Alabama’s success is player and coaching development. Alabama only signs recruits that it has evaluated as being potential starters. These recruits will typically start at the bottom of the depth chart, as Najee Harris did. But Alabama’s coaches sign recruits that it believes can be taught the skills they will need to become starters. Then Alabama’s coaching and support staff gives those players every opportunity to succeed. They are given state of the art medical support, nutritional support, weight training and coaching. The facilities are world-class, and on par with anything you will find in the National Football League.

As for the coaches, Saban hires position coaches with the idea being that they can be molded and promoted one day to being coordinators. For instance, if Saban hires a defensive backs coach, he hires that coach with the thinking being that eventually, this guy will be my defensive coordinator. So after a season or two as defensive backs coach, the current defensive coordinator will leave Alabama for likely a head coaching position at another college. Saban then promotes the defensive backs coach to defensive coordinator. The advantage to this approach is that his new defensive coordinator is already familiar with Alabama’s defensive players, so the transition will be much smoother.

Both the Alabama players and coaches are given all the tools they need to improve their craft. Access to this skill development prolongs their time spent playing and coaching at Alabama. Players who might leave Alabama as juniors to enter the NFL draft, are more likely to stay for their senior season. During their senior season, their skills will continue to improve, and as that happens, their NFL stock will improve, which means a higher draft position and a larger salary. Coaches that join Alabama as a position coach can gain the skills necessary to be promoted to coordinator positions, which eventually opens up even better employment opportunities for them at both the collegiate and professional levels.

But it all starts with having the foundation in place to develop the skills of the players and coaches. This results in increased productivity from both the players and coaches, and it results in both the players and coaches staying in Tuscaloosa longer. The investment made into facilities and resources for the players and coaches more than pays for itself.

How could your business better develop its employees and managers?

One of the frequent ‘perks’ offered to new employees is the ability to pursue work-related education. Maybe you can attend an industry conference once a year, or maybe your employer will give you a ‘book fund’ to buy 5 books during the year which will improve your skills. While this can be helpful, it’s truly not the same as having a system in place that educates employees and gives them the skills to not only increase their performance in their current position, but to also put them in a position to be promoted one day into higher positions within the company.

Let’s go back to your annual employee evaluation for a minute. What if you were being evaluated by your boss, Sarah, who is the current Director of Content. Your current position is Content Marketing Manager. Sarah asks you if you would one day be interested in being the Director of Content. You are thrilled at the prospect, and Sarah tells you that if you want to make that move, you need to work on this list of skills. If you had a training system in place for your employees, Sarah could then focus that training program on the list of skills you need to develop in order to one day be promoted to Director of Content. Sarah, as the current Director of Content, is working on training for her own set of skills, as she one day wants to be your company’s new Chief Content Officer.

Let’s now look at an example of a company that’s used such a training program to increase the skills of its employees:

Dell creates the SMaC U to turn its employees into Social Media Superheroes

In 2010, Dell created the SMaC U or Social Media and Community University program to give its employees the social media training it needed to connect with customers online. Amy Heiss has a wonderful writeup of where the program was in 2015.  Here she is talking about why SMaC U was created and some of the impressive results Dell saw:

Finally, a brainstorm hit. Every person already has access to superpowers – we just had to help them unlock those hidden strengths. We could show them how to amplify their voices, how to communicate instantly with millions of customers, and how to build relationships faster than a speeding broadband connection. We could teach them to use social media.

So, the Social Media and Community University (SMaC U) program was born. Now, our business is filled with superheroes. Their powers are strong.

Our sales superheroes have buffed up with a 69 percent year-over-year increase via social media. Our customer service heroes are battling the forces of customer dissatisfaction with a 98 percent first-time resolution rate on over 4,000 cases a week in social media. Our talent acquisition heroes are shining the Dell-signal into the sky, with 36 percent (up from 19 percent) of all external hires coming from employee referrals since adopting social media best practices.

This is such a smart endeavor because it’s accomplishing two key goals at the same time:

1 – It’s giving Dell’s employees vital social media skills that will help them do their current jobs as well as grow in their positions

2 – It’s helping Dell’s employees better connect with customers online. By giving Dell’s employees a better understanding of how to use social media tools, Dell can more effectively connect with its customers via social. This leads to more positive Word of Mouth, faster problem resolution (so that lowers customer service costs), and it improves brand perception.

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How can your business launch a training program for your employees?

So if your business wanted to create a training program for your employees, what would that look like?

First, let’s think about what you want a training program to accomplish. Here’s some possible goals:

1 – Reduce employee turnover

2 – Increase promotion among current employees versus hiring new employees to fill open positions

3 – Reduce the amount of time it takes to fill an open position

 

As you can see, the most important aspect of a potential training program is first identifying the skills that your employees will need training for. You can start by auditing your workforce to see which positions experience the highest turnover rates. Then you can analyze what’s keeping your business from promoting current employees to fill those positions. Once you have your training program in place, the amount of time it takes to fill an open position should decrease as a function of the program existing.

What’s the best way to deliver training for your employees?

There’s two main sources of training for your employees:

1 – Outside subject matter experts

2 – Internal subject matter experts

If you go with outside subject matter experts, you could have these experts come to your company and deliver training in person, or via live or recorded video (And, I do offer training for companies, you can learn more here). I think when you are just launching a training program for your company, it makes more sense to lean on training from outside subject matter experts to create your training material for you. Plus, bringing in outside experts to train your team can be a perk for employees and give them an incentive to want to participate in the training.

As your training program matures, you can shift more of the training from outside subject matter experts, to your internal subject matter experts. This will be a cost-savings that you can realize.

So in general, identify the skills that your employees need, the best way to deliver training on those skills, and in what format. You can continually reassess the progress of your training program and adjust as needed, which will make it even more effective and efficient.

 

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Research: CMOs Say Social Media Budgets Are Surging, But Finding Solid Results Still a Struggle

Companies are spending more on social media marketing according to CMO Survey, but they also continue to struggle to see quantitative results from their digital efforts.

The survey of 324 marketers sheds light on where CMOs will be focusing their budgets and attention in 2019.

  • Spending on digital marketing will increase by 12.3% over the next 12 months, while spending on traditional marketing will fall by 1.2%
  • Currently, digital marketing accounts for 44.3% of all marketing budgets. Over the next 5 years, digital spending is forecast to increase to 54.1% of total marketing spend.
  • Spending on Social Media is expected to increase by 66% over the next 5 years

Even though spending on Social Media is surging, marketers are struggling to show the actual business impact of its Social Media efforts.

The CMO Survey found that 39.3% of respondents could not show any business impact from using Social Media. Another 36% said they are seeing a qualitative impact, with 24.7% seeing an quantitative impact.  In short, that means 25% of marketers can show the ROI for their Social Media efforts.

So obviously, companies won’t continue to increase spending on Social Media without being able to show a return on those dollars. Digging deeper into the numbers, I believe I spotted two reasons why some of these marketers are struggling to prove the effectiveness of Social Media for their companies.

First, one of the questions posed to respondents was “How Effectively Does Your Company Integrate Social Media?” The question was scaled from 1 to 7, with 1 being “not at all effectively” and 7 being “very effectively”. When it came to “integration level for linking social media to marketing strategy”, the score was 4.2.  When it came to “integration level for integrating customer information across purchasing, communication, and social media channels”, that score was 3.5. So while companies are doing better at integrating its social media strategies into their larger marketing strategies, they continue to fall short when it comes to sharing customer information and communications across the enterprise. This hurts overall marketing effectiveness and can lead to a disjointed and inconsistent service experience for the customer.

Second, only 3.9% of marketing budgets are devoted to employee training and development. This amount actually represents an 8% decline over the last 6 months. What’s worse, for B2C companies, that figure is only 2.8%.

So you can see how these two areas would be related, to a degree. First, I’m a big believer in equipping your employees with the proper training and skills they need to do their jobs effectively. It increases employee productivity, as well as their satisfaction with their work. And research has shown that just a 10% increase in the efficiency of your social media strategy nets a 2% increase in revenue. Corporate training is a smart way to increase production and employee satisfaction.

Check out the entire CMO Survey here. It’s got a ton of great takeaways on where marketers will be focusing their attention in 2019.

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Now I Get It: Three Tactics For Incorporating Learning Into Your Social Media Content and Training

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One of the most important traits of good content is that it helps teach its audience a core lesson.  Too many ‘experts’ focus their content on ‘let me tell you what I know’ when they should be focused on ‘let me teach you what you don’t know’.  When your only frame of reference is what works for you, then you can’t effectively teach others how to succeed.  The best teachers are the ones that can share a successful case study and then relate the core teachings to your business so that you can learn how to apply those lessons to your unique situation.

Over the last decade I’ve created content here, I’ve spoken at hundreds of events, I’ve given workshops and training sessions for companies, and even written a very successful business book.  These are three traits I’ve discovered for creating content that also facilitates learning for your audience:

1 – Case studies alone don’t teach anything. So many ‘teachers’ miss this, but if you are trying to teach a new concept to a group, probably the worst thing you can do is simply use one case study to illustrate the concept in action. What happens when you do this is your audience won’t learn the concept, they will learn the case study.  They will be able to explain what the company in the case study did, but since that’s their only reference to the concept in action, they won’t understand the concept itself.  Instead, you want to use a mix of case studies and hypothetical scenarios.  Instead of just explaining a case study of how Chick Fil-A used hashtags to reach moms, you want to also explain how a babyfood company and a small daycare could do the same thing.  By using both exact and abstract examples, the audience can more easily grasp the core concept that runs through all examples.

2 – This is what it looks like when you do it right, and this is what it looks like when you mess up. When I’m working at home, I will often turn on the tv just to have background noise so I can better focus on my work.  Sounds weird, but it works for me.  And I will typically have the PBS Create TV channel on, which has a mixture of cooking, travel and hobby-related programming.  One show they have is called Cook’s Country, it’s a cooking show that teaches you how to cook.  But one thing the staff does that I love is before they start showing you how to cook a particular dish, they will show you how it will look if you mess up.  And they will explain how you messed up.  If you cook it on too high of a temperature, it looks like this, if you use warm butter instead of chilled, it looks like this.  They address common errors that are made in cooking a dish at the start, and explain what you did wrong and how to avoid it.  Then as they cook the dish, they explain how they aren’t replicating that error, then the end result is a gorgeous dish and you have a complete understanding of how the dish should look if you do it correctly.  More importantly, you understand what you did wrong before, so you can correct your error in the future.

3 – You learn by doing. Building on both of the previous examples, you can also use scenarios to apply what you’ve learned.  Giving your audience examples of ‘this is what it looks like when it’s messed up’, and let them apply what they have learned to fix it. For example, in my content strategy and creation workshops, one of the exercises I have attendees do is I give them a ‘bad’ post headline, and ask them to re-write it, using the concepts I’ve taught them for writing a better headline.  This is especially true in an in-person setting, but if you just explain a concept without having the audience put that learning into action, they won’t grasp it as fully.  This is honestly where a lot of workshops fail attendees, they forget that a workshop isn’t a presentation with Q&A, it’s for learning via participation.  The attendees are supposed to be involved because you want them to apply what they have learned before they leave, so it helps cement the learning process for them.

 

When you are creating content, whether its writing a blog post or creating a white paper, give thought to how you are teaching and more importantly what you are teaching.  Don’t just write that case study because you think it will make your business or your agency look good, also teach your audience how they can get similar results for their business.  If you teach your audience a new skill that improves their own business efforts, you have created value for them, and that’s how you win their attention and create word of mouth (word of mouse?) for your business online.

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An honest look at being a Social Media consultant

Typically, I am loathe to write personal posts here, because I think I am boring y’all to tears, but I wanted to do so today.  Over the past few months, I’ve had several discussions with people that are working in this space as the umbrella term of a ‘social media consultant’.  What prompted me to write this post was because several times I have heard from friends that are struggling, and they assume that since they are struggling, that it’s a direct reflection on their abilities as a consultant.  They also assume that most consultants are doing extremely well, so if they aren’t, that further cements the idea that they just aren’t ‘cut out’ for this type of work.

I think there are a LOT of misconceptions about being a social media consultant.  The first is that many people think that ‘big name’ consultants are out there getting $20K every day to swoop into companies and spend a few hours with them.  So the logic becomes ‘if I can make a big name for myself, I will get big bucks too.’

From my experience and talking to others, this is fantasyland.  Not saying 1 or 2 consultants don’t do/get this, but for the consultants I know and talk to, nothing could be further from the truth.  A lot of times they are working on monthly projects, with a monthly fee.  That’s probably a lot closer to $1K than $20K.

The second misconception seems to be that social media consulting is a much more stable and profitable way to go than simply doing similar work for a company.  The downturn in the economy that’s been going on for years now has affected social media consultants as much as anyone.  Probably more, since companies tend to only allocate marketing dollars to the ‘tried and true’ when funds run low.  So if you can’t find a job and are thinking that becoming a ‘social media consultant’ will save you, good luck.

Now that I’ve set the stage with all this doom and gloom, I wanted to circle back to why I wanted to write this post.  It was mainly to talk about the misconception my friends seemed to be having that if they were struggling in consulting, it was more a reflection on them and their skills, versus the reality of the space.  I think it’s more of the latter.  I’m not saying that you can’t make good money and be successful as a social media consultant.  But it is a LOT of work.  Personally, I’ve been doing this for about 5 years now, and 2011 is the 1st year where I’ve really felt like I was getting my feet under me.  There are a TON of ups and downs, so if you are a social media consultant or considering becoming one, please keep these things in mind:

1 – Figure out what you are offering, and who you are offering it to.  And be aware that this likely will change over time, but you need to start out trying to decide who you are wanting to work with, and what you can offer them.  Do you want to work with small businesses, or large companies?  Do you want to work with local clients, or virtually with national clients?  What services do you want to offer?  Campaign/project creation and execution?  Training?  Speaking?  Actual consulting?  Again, this will likely change a bit over time, but a big reason why I think a lot of people struggle with social media consulting is that they don’t clearly have their preferred clients decided upon, and their value proposition for those clients.  Remember, you can’t get work until others know what you do, and a ton of your work will come from referrals.  So the sooner you can clearly define your role and niche, the better.

2 – Realize that there WILL be downtime in work, and how to capitalize on that.  One of the things I have always hated about being a social media consultant is that it seemed like I would have 3 months with little to no work, then 3 months with more work than I could handle.  It was such a relief to talk to other consultants, and find that most of them go through the same feast or famine work cycle.  Their best advice was that when you know a lull is coming, to shift your focus to working on YOUR business, and make yourself your client.  Freshen up your blog/website, re-evaluate your marketing strategy, etc.  For example, I was crazy busy from May-September, but I knew looking ahead that October-December would probably be slower.  So I took some of the personal business projects that I wanted to work on, and moved them to the end of the year.  Now that work is slower, I still have some things to keep me busy.

3 – Be creative in finding sources of income.  The great thing about social media consulting is that this space is so new.  And as such, there’s a ton of new possibilities, and things that have never been tried yet.  For example, my biggest source of income this year has been from doing Live #Blogchats, something that I’d never even considered offering this time last year.  But I decided to try doing one this year at SXSW to see what the reaction would be, and the rest is history.  Other consultants have had much success with thinking ‘outside the box’, for example, look at what Tom Martin has done with getting Emma to sponsor his TalkingWithTom.com, or look at how Jim Kukral is crowd-sourcing the funding of his next book.

 

These are a few ideas, but I know from my own experience that my first few years of being a social media consultant would have been easier if I had known the above.  But if you are struggling as a consultant, don’t assume it means that simply aren’t ‘smart enough’ to do the work, it could simply mean that you need to better organize your marketing and business efforts.  It’s often true that we can offer far better marketing advice for our clients than ourselves.  Look at your business situation as if you were hiring yourself, and see what advice you would give yourself on how to improve your situation.

Those of you that are consulting now, what are some of the potholes you’ve encountered, and how did you move past them?  Or if you are having troubles now, maybe we could give you some advice on moving past them?

 

PS: I meant to add this in the post under #3 but got sidetracked, but Lee Odden last night was telling us about Live-Blogging an event during #Blogchat.  He said that because of his Live-Blogging, he’s gotten passes to over 50 events in the last 5 years.  And of course, being at all those events has opened a ton of doors and opportunities for him.  Check out his post today where he walks you through the process, and talks about some of the benefits he’s enjoyed as a result.

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