Like Seth Godin’s ‘Tribes’ and ‘Poke The Box’, ‘Evil Plans’ is a guidbook to adventure by shedding an almost surgical light on what’s possible. I can’t recommend it enough, and as a short blast of good sense and inspiring stories, it’s definitely worth a read. However, tied to the theme of this blog, I found amidst the messages a very simple idea that we often ignore. And almost always, ignore at our peril.

Talking to a co-worker after reading this book about employee evaluation and performance management, this book came up. I was talking about the way performance management seems tied to salary review, and can be seen by employees as a justification of denied reward- i.e, a system which identifies reasons to deny pay rises, not reward them. And by different paths, my colleague and I hit upon the same phrase. Employee reviews need to be about helping people achieve their own ‘evil plans’ – about helping them get paid to do something they love doing anyway.

We’ve made a horrible error, somewhere. We’ve made ‘performance review’ into a gauntlet that employees need to run, with the idea that, if they get through relatively unscathed, there’s a slightly larger pot of gold at the end. We’ve let money become the benchmark – it’s universally applicable, so I guess that made sense, once upon a time. Money means a better life, right? More cash, nicer things, bigger holidays. The universal standard for increased happiness – the mild increase in personal freedom that having more money implies. And yet, this isn’t really true at all. And it’s sucking the will to work out of people’s hearts.

Why aren’t we using an employee review differently? Why isn’t it a process of levelling up, RPG style, to the next professional plane? Why isn’t it a chance, not to withhold money, but to map out the next stage of a career? Why are we trading on satisfying  KPIs with minimum numerical value, without giving those numbers meaning by showing where the brackets end? Why is it about your performance instead of your skills? Why is it about what you didn’t do on paper, rather than what you did do in real life? And why is it something that so many employees dread, or loathe, or deride?

The answer to the last one is simple. We haven’t made it fun. We’ve made it mandatory. We’ve made it a ticked-box, a satisfied process, a checklist item on the ‘be a good manager’ sheet that’s overtaken common sense and good education. We’ve made this whole thing about ‘do this and you might not be disciplined/get more cash’ instead of saying ‘Let’s see what we can do to make you better/get you a better job/build your skills.’ We’ve made performance the benchmark, not people. We’ve reviewed outcomes and not progress.

Read ‘Evil Plans’ – I guarantee there’s something in there for you. And when you’re done, ask yourself if your organisation is helping people live their own evil plans. Ask yourself whether you’re building careers and crafting passionate, engaged people. And ask yourself whether your organisation is driven by satisfied targets, or by the ideas, dreams and joie de vivre  of your people. Because if it’s people, then reducing them to a measurable, subjective, minimum-standard performance review is the easiest way to ge them to look for new challenges elsewhere.

One of the things that struck me regularly was the utter lack of emotion in these calls. I rarely felt like I was talking to a person, let alone a brand ambassador for the employment experience. Often these calls were very one sided. “Tell us about you, and if you make it to interview, you can ask us some questions then.” In some cases (two recruiters in particular, both from the same company) the calls were very authoritarian. There was a clear sense of reading questions off an interview guide, of a rigid adherence to process that forbade any humanity sneaking in. I was literally told by one recruiter that he didn’t meed more information about my job history – a yes or no answer would do.

In a couple of cases, I was ‘set up’ as a passive target, a possible headhunt. One of these was even for a company that I’d already ‘applied’ for, and a different recruiter contacted me to sound me out. They used the same script they use for applicant-based recruitment, right down to “Where did you hear about this opportunity?” It will suffice to say this didn’t resonate well with me, the talent who was contacted because they had been identified as a good fit, particularly as the caller didn’t get my name right, and hadn’t read the ‘souring report’ they’d been supplied.

Whether systems of thought or technology, most recruitment systems encourage adherence to process. They encourage control – of the candidate, of the data, of the experience. Systems are all about universal experience, and a functional return on time spent. However, that control can come at a cost – the sense of automation rather than process. For the recruiter, ‘adhering to the process’ can be a synonym for ‘doing a good job’, particularly if the metrics which measure performance are built around the system itself. For the talent, it’s a massive turn off to feel like you’re talking to a machine, not a person.

This is an experience that can be designed for user delight, just like any other. A great phone interview should make the interviewee feel valuable, engaged and connected to the interviewer. If your brand is designed to communicate easy interaction and conversation, your processes need to be built with this in mind. Application, interview, onboarding – all these parts of the new employee experience should reflect the attributes of your employment experience. They should be reflective of your values and principles, and, ideally, your strategy regarding people.

Recruiters shouldn’t just be filling in forms and word-matching CVs to job specs. They are the ambassadors for the experience of being employed by your company. They’re the salespeople trying to make someone change their life, their routine and their job. Their role isn’t to adhere to process, but to satisfy process. And they can do it in such a way that they encourage emotional connection, a pleasant experience and begin to create the sense of mutual respect that forms the backbone of a good employment relationship.

The process shouldn’t get in the way of the people.  The system shouldn’t overtake the core role of a recruiter/sourcer – which is  to find and engage talent that’s ready to join the tribe, willing to endure the change required to change roles, and able to satisfy the duties of the role. Your talent are more than walking skill-sets, they’re people whose emotions are a strong part of the decision making process. And the process should never overtake the purpose.

We sat down and read the ads that had been used in the past, looking for clues. They were pretty standard ads – list of skills, what you’ll be doing here, the usual jazz. There wasn’t much to inspire there, not a lot of cultural discussion. So we started writing new copy for all the ads to talk about the team from a human perspective.

And we hit a snag.

We were looking at recruiting into a team with an obvious problem around staff performance and culture. We were looking at recruiting into a team that suffered such quick turnover that only the staff who didn’t leave became the culture.  We were recruiting fast moving fish into a stagnant pond, and watching them jump out straight away.

We had to choose how to tell this truth to the market. We had to find a way to still hit the targets and attract people, even though we were selling them a culture that would require a massive shift. The old ads had used the company EVP – be inspired, become part of a fast moving team, we’re doing great things, etc. However, the greater business EVP didn’t apply to a functional support area like IT.  The first draft, which I call the dead draft (a cacophemism, the absolute hard truth version) read something like this:

“Join a team where your ideas will be crushed by the indifference of colleagues. You’ll work as part of an undervalued function, delivering services that the larger business will take for granted and making adjustments that no one will probably notice. You’ll sit beside some of the most boring and difficult to work with people we can find, who’ll inspire you to either abandon hope, or quit your job and work somewhere else. Apply now!”

We took this to the manager. We explained that we weren’t going to solve this by recruiting more people who either hated the culture and left, or hated the culture and stayed. We needed to fix this by being honest, and by fixing the team culture while we recruited people who could act as change agents.

By doing this, we replaced a lot of people in that group. We did it using our own brand, which cut down on recruitment fees. We did it using an honest TVP that explained that the function was changing, and we needed people to a part of the new evolution. We made this new direction obvious to staff and gave them the chance to opt out. We dropped attrition 20% in a year once the new culture was in place. And we influenced change to the point where that group started wanting to tell people outside the business how things were now, and how being an employee was making their lives better.

Building a brand (in employment or otherwise) involves three things – a good story, the right channel and quality execution. Are you spending as much time on creating a good story as you are on telling it?

(I’ll preface this by pointing out that I am a gamer, albeit casually. So my insights into gaming as a subculture are driven largely by my own participation in gaming. )

Where gaming becomes essentially a tribe (by which I mean a subculture with a communal interest, language and standard of value) is when shared exposure to a particular experience becomes a unifying factor. Gamers become members of factions within their tribe that revolve around genres, platforms, styles, social connections and more. There’s occasionally some tribal warfare among these smaller groups (PC vs console, X360 vs PS3, etc) but they are still all gamers. Their membership to a self-selected class of people becomes part of their identity. They actively seek out discussion on their areas of interest. They recognise each other through a shared cultural language and, occasionally, uniform.

How do gamers get wins? Achievement. Achievement over universal expectation, set by the industry. Beating a game universally acknowledged as difficult creates prestige and personal value. Winning a gaming competition against skilled players builds reputation. The community defines its own champions against the standard set by programmers and the average experience curve. In short, the continued standard of value grows organically, as more games, more gamers and a constantly shifting standard of ‘average’ skill contribute to an overall perception.

Tribal values are community driven. They are set by adherence to a shared evaluation of what constitutes average. So creating wins is about having a communal set expectation of ‘ordinary’ so that ‘extraordinary’ is easily recognisable. You can’t overstep the mark without knowing where the mark is, and you can’t add value without knowing the difference between what is extra and what’s just service. So setting the average expectation is key.

Encouraging wins from a community perspective is the other side of the coin. Enhancing a culture which celebrates individual achievement against an accepted norm creates competition, not against each other, but against the standard. In golf, this is referred to as ‘playing against the course’. Set a ‘par’ performance on a particular task (which is essentially average expectation) and people will try to beat it for a self-perceived pay-off. If you have a culture which celebrates wins, and confers an objective, external benefit which supplements the individual’s sense of achievement, you create two connections. You connect achievement with external recognition, and you connect individual standard of value with recognised norms.

Stimulating tribal values allows us to create a framework to evaluate success. Connecting individual perception of above-average performance with recognisable reward builds community. The epic win pays off; in higher engagement with the community, in improved performance against the average, and in emotional reinvestment from the employee.

How can you change your culture to encourage epic wins?

The behaviour of employees, unchecked and unmonitored, can be tremendously damaging to a brand. An employee whose identity, online or off, is linked to a brand, can through their behaviour bring the brand into disrepute, lose clients for the business, land clients in actual legal trouble and have a significant impact on the ability of the business to attract talent and clients.

I’m not suggesting every employee will. Nearly every employee will behave in a manner consistent with your corporate values. Hopefully, you hired them because they believe in the same things your company does anyway. However, if ‘common sense’ was as common as the title suggests, we wouldn’t need anything like these policies. And because it isn’t, we need to be prepared.

There are two distinct groups of people – those who believe that adults, unchecked and self-monitoring, will always act like mature, responsible people who avoid public outbursts and irrational arguments, and those that have spent a bit of time on the internet. Let’s face it – employees are just people, and people are capable of behaving in ways we can never predict, both online and off.

So our solution is this. On one hand, you build a policy. A legal framework that identifies which behaviours are outside the company’s tolerance for appropriate behaviour as linked with the brand. This is no different to a professional conduct policy, which most businesses have in one form or another. It spells out what is acceptable behaviour, and what is not. Hopefully, you never have to use that. And it doesn’t have to be extreme – Nick Hodge tells us that Microsoft’s is a list of bullet points. It needs to be the company’s back-stop against behaviour which is detrimental.

On the flip side of that, you educate staff. You explain to staff that there is a policy, which they should read, about what’s good behaviour online. As a business, you offer to train them in creating successful and lucrative social presences. You invite them to become advocates and spokespeople for the brand on company-sponsored forums. You give staff the benefit of the doubt, and some tools to help them steer clear of potential mess.

This is not control. This is risk management. You don’t assume that people driving your company cars have current licences – you check that they know what they’re doing before they take a fleet car out for a spin. Control is an active interest and ongoing program of involvement. Management is a system which involves monitoring, and adjustment where necessary of existing processes. Particularly with an audience to whom this technology is new, difficult to get used to, and requires the use of skills that haven’t been developed previously. (In our case, additional care has to be taken, because our employee base is highly technical. They like tolerances and technical limits. You can’t speak in generalities to engineers – the laws must be rigid.)

So at this point, here’s the situation. Any employee is free to exist on any social network they choose. They are free to network with anyone they like. They are free to post pictures, upload videos, chat with people and undertake any social networking activities which fall within our Use of IT Equipment policy. The only codicil is that if they are going to wilfully engage in (or have been found to engage in) behaviours which contravene the conduct policy, they remove their association with the business from their active profile.  This is a choice to honour a behavioural code which aligns with our values, or to ignore that code.

Essentially, the company is saying “If you’re going to act this way, we don’t want to be associated with you.” The same as the company would if an employee ran around the city in corporate livery attacking foreigners or molesting girls in nightclubs. Engaging in that behaviour is the responsibility of the individual. The brand needs to stand up for the values which support it, and behaviours which fall outside this should be separated from the brand. (There is an argument that an employee who plans to engage in these behaviours is probably not someone you want to employ anyway, but we’ll save that one.)

This is not control. We are not dictating your behaviour. We are saying that you, as a professional who understands the consequences, needs to act in a manner which supports the public values of our brand. If you choose not to, your association with the brand must cease – you are damaging an asset. We are saying that you have a choice. And if you choose to behave that way while representing the brand, there will be consequences. As I said earlier, most of the time, this isn’t even an issue. Depending on your brand values, most employees already adhere to an unofficial code of conduct – it’s a community-set standard of behaviour.

And yes – people will always argue that you aren’t an employee 24/7. No, you aren’t. However, the global web makes no distinction. It doesn’t care when you logged off and went from being an employee to a private citizen. It sees your employer name in your profile, and you represent that employer – in spirit, at the very least.

I’d love to hear more about what other organisations are doing in this space. If you know of any great case studies, please comment, or get in touch!

However, this raises another question. We know (from sites such as Lamebook) that people are becoming more likely to share content which reflects badly on either themselves or the company on social networking sites. We’ve all seen the stories of people fired for criticising employers online. Does our duty of care as an employer extend to educating staff on how to protect their online reputations, and by extension, our own?

Honestly, I think progressive organisations should be doing this. Some organisations already are. Preparing employees for their inevitable forays into social networking and online social media interaction is a pre-emptive strike in the reputation wars. Running learning and development programs for employees on how to self-sanitize public content, manage and maintain networks and act as the face of the organisation (where online interaction is part of the business strategy) has no down-side.

Additionally (as highlighted in this article) your organisation is increasingly judged by the sum total of your employees’ reputations and behaviours. If you’re not showing them where the dangers are and how to avoid them, you’re less prepared when trouble comes knocking.

As the market switches from recruiting to redeployment, many experts are saying that your brand still needs to be a fundamental part of your argument. This is absolutely true – you don’t stop having a brand just because you aren’t actively promoting it. Your brand is who you are, your fundamental personality. There is a scramble within market to turn brands inward, to focus on key staff retention and keeping talent, rather than attracting it.

If your brand is built on an honest reflection of the actual employee experience, this shouldn’t be too hard. Brands which attracted by overselling the company and building an idealistic view will struggle.Companies guilty of ‘oversell’ will start to see real problems when the false retention that the current crisis has induced begins to wear off.

When the recruitment requirements of companies begin to thaw, the employment brand of a copany will be a strong determinant in attracting key staff. More importantly, it will play a huge part in your ability as a business to hold onto the key performers you need, when the downturn ends. Your brand needs to be robust enough to attract and retain with equal measure – getting them in the door is only a small aprt of finding and engaging the staff you need to succeed.

Imagine you’re at a coffee shop on your own on Saturday morning. You’re in a relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. You don’t feel that you’re ready to break up and leave the relationship yet, but you’re keeping a weather eye out, just in case. You’re enjoying some alone time.

While reading the paper, you see an ad that describes you as the person who is perfect for the author. The ad makes them sound attractive, rewarding and fun. Like your partner used to be. You’re intrigued. You want to know more.

You recognize the name from somewhere. Maybe someone you know has had a relationship with them before. Maybe one of your friends knows them. You know there’s a connection somewhere.

Do you:

1. Call the number on the ad and talk to them, knowing that they’re on the market and possibly desperate?
2. Look them up on Facebook, Twitter, wikipedia, or the web, to try and find out about them quietly?
3. Ask your friends if anyone knows them and whether it’s a good opportunity?
4. Wait and hope that one of your friends will introduce the two of you out of the blue?
5. Call a dating agency to see if they can introduce you?

The way you address this is no different to the ways you can look at engaging a company to find a job. There’s no right way – there are only different levels of directness. When you identify an opportunity, you have the control over how you approach the company. And in fact, a company that is closely aligned with you spiritually will have made itself contactable in your preferred method deliberately. They’ll have done this for two reasons – to put you at ease, and prove they can speak your language.

If you’re an employer, part of your employer brand includes where you choose to be seen, and how to be contacted. Your brand isn’t just about broadcasting a message. It’s also about designing mechanisms for conversation that make your target market feel comfortable to engage in. Understanding how your employees want to get in contact with you, and preparing a response or strategy for enhancing this first contact is crucial to beginning engagement.

Five questions worth asking of your brand conversation strategy are;

1. How do the bulk of candidates respond to an advertised opportunity?
2. Can your current contact plan ensure a consistent, brand-rich experience across all your contact mediums?
3. Where could your brand currently be that candidates would be looking for you? Note – this isn’t an excuse to leap onto Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social platforms. Research first, action second.
4. What isn’t working? Where are the holes in the process? What could you re-engineer to make more representative of your brand?
5. What is in place to ensure consistency? What guidelines are there about brand-rich communication for new staff, external recruitment agencies and your successors?

Just like the phone call after a first date, the immediate contact you have with someone who is interested in you as an employer is key. Make it brand-rich, honest and meaningful, and you drastically improve your chances of getting the right people on board.

I compare the process to love letters. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve received love letters, you know there’s a tremendous personality that’s part of them. Hand-written, full of protestations of affection, written to make you feel valuable and loved. You can put fifty of them from the same author side by side, and see a pattern.

Now imagine your true lover started typing them on a computer, printing them on plain white paper and started writing from the head, not the heart. You’d be worried. You’d feel it was a formality, something carried on simply because it had been done before. You’d be put off by the change of pattern, and I suspect part of you would start questioning the relationship. You’d almost be waiting for the Dear John letter, wouldn’t you?

That psychological change comes because the original love letters made you feel special. They felt and sounded like the person you were in love with. They were a reaffirmation of your emotional contract, and they made you reinvest in the relationship.When the communication style changes, becomes more impersonal, and more functional, your emotional contract begins to weaken. You’re seeing no evidence of the person you’re in love with. You’re just being given messages with no emotion, no transference of care.

This is exactly the same for internal communications. Communication has become about the delivery of data, which lacks emotional input, and denies us the ability to connect author and reader. The word we use for the delivery of emotion is story-telling, and even that’s evasive. Every message, no matter how small or dry, can be imbued with some personality, some sense of single-voice authorship. It can be imbued, for want of a better term, with love.

A good employer brand lives on the continual transfer of emotion, the ongoing renewal of that psychological contract. If your communications with employees feel more like impersonal manuals and less like messages from one person to another, you’re alienating employees from the brand they identify with. And there’s no faster way to make people fall out of love with an idea than assuming that you only have to fall in love with it once. The best employer brand does something to make people renew their emotional commitment at every encounter, no matter how small.