Historic crises have shown marketers that those brands advertising through the crisis, come out stronger. Being present is critical. This means monitoring metrics like Share of Voice (the percentage of advertising investment for your market) or Share of Experience (the percentage of experiences people pick up across your paid, owned and earned channels versus your competitors).
Will this be the legacy from COVID-19?
The pandemic has challenged many companies in their handling of different stakeholder groups. Is investing more in advertising the right decision if the company needs to furlough its staff? Unhappy employees can lead to unhappy customers. Lockdown impacted on us all. And when people saw bank branch staff, as they did for Barclays, Halifax, NatWest and TSB, on hastily made TV ads, they had empathy for these banking staff that previously sat in branches and call centres, and were now having to conduct their business from their own homes, like many of their customers. News stories about people losing their jobs evoked sadness and there was anger with larger companies, like Shake Shack in the US, taking government relief designed for small businesses.
This made me wonder, has measuring employee experience become more important than ever?
Direct Line is one company that did not furlough its staff and I spoke to Mark Evans, Managing Director Marketing and Digital for his perspective.
“Mark, companies have had many priorities to manage over COVID, from investors, employees to customers and other stakeholders, do you think there will be a link between employee NPS/satisfaction and customer NPS?”
We have only fairly recently started measuring eNPS so haven’t been able to prove causal linkage to cNPS yet. However, it makes a lot of sense that there would be a strong and causal link. We said that two of our key priorities for COVID were “to look after our people” and “to look after our customers” and I think we underestimated that one of the best ways to look after our customers was in the very act of looking after our people.
It appears that, for pandemics at least, employees treat customers in line with how they are treated themselves. In practice this means that looking after the health and safety and mental wellbeing of our staff, and being as flexible as possible, translated into our employees showing up really well and acting with empathy and advocacy for our customers.
How about company culture?
“COVID-19, and especially remote working, has placed a huge focus on company culture; maintaining it and using it to support employees throughout difficult working conditions. What are positive learning experiences Direct Line has had in this period and how are you evaluating the strength of your culture?”
I believe that we have done a number of smart things to support our people whilst working from home including regular all-colleague calls, employee sentiment surveying, and internal communications. None of these are rocket science but it was doing them on a weekly basis (and then moderating the frequency slightly over time, based on feedback) that made the difference.
These activities required considerable and sustained effort to deliver them in a consistent and compelling way. The tone was also critical and came from the top via our CEO who led the charge, bringing a human touch to everything.
In addition, we had fairly recently launched our new strategy and vision and stated our intent to be a “force for good”. Through our community activities in the seven major cities that we have offices we have been able to demonstrate that intent vividly. This has helped us culturally in terms of giving everyone something to be really proud of. To be realistic, culture is best nourished face to face but isn’t necessarily degraded with virtual working if there is still a sense of belonging to something with purpose.
For years we have been talking about the importance of purpose and the pandemic has been a time that has tested the depth of this purpose, I feel. I wondered which other companies Mark felt had been doing well with their treatment of their employees.
We work quite closely with Google and their response is also impressive. Again, they have looked to set their employees up well through lockdown and in particular allocating each employee a budget to invest in their personal working space at home. They have done much more than that, in line with others, but this stood out to me in terms of creating a strong sense of trust and empowerment.
Nothing stands still and Mark had spoken in a WARC article about accelerating agile ways of working and postponing a restructure.
“What employee engagement metrics will become most important when agile working is rolled out?”
We did choicefully decelerate the transition to our new operating model to ensure that we respectfully preserved a full and proper employee consultation process. But now that transition moment has arrived. With a bold move to autonomous, self-managed, cross-functional squads across our head office we are hoping to unlock the potential of our people and talent beyond anything that we have achieved before. Building upon the success that we’ve had with agile ways of working in delivering digital change, we hope that this will give us a competitive edge with increased innovation and customer-centricity.
There are some really obvious employee engagement metrics through such a transition phase including eNPS scores, and in general the retention of talent, but there are also some really important softer metrics. A key one is increasing the t-shaped nature of our people so that each squad has the best cocktail of capability to manage their sprints and missions an end-to-end basis, minimising handovers and maximising speed to market.
“I am wondering whether Employee NPS might become the new Customer NPS because it is a leading indicator? What do you think? Will we see more CEOs reporting on this metric (or others similar) in their finance calls?”
There are many engagement measurement methodologies available but in much the same way that cNPS is a very purifying and comparable approach I can see the same happening for eNPS. As with cNPS it would need to be complemented with other diagnostics to understand the “why? underneath the scores in order to drive actionability.
More broadly I see inclusivity surveying as the more immediate trend for employee measurement per se, but ultimately eNPS is a really simple way for Boards and investors to hold Exec teams to account on their people agenda.
Inclusivity is, of course, a passion of mine, having founded a women-owned business! There is ample evidence to demonstrate that diverse teams deliver better business results. But with diverse teams, each member needs to feel that they belong and that their unique contribution is valued.
Direct Line’s commitment throughout COVID-19 to look after both employees and customers makes sense from a human, a brand and a business perspective. With the 2020 pandemic, will history tell us that those companies, like Direct Line, that have invested in their employees and handled them with empathy, come out stronger? I hope so.
Drawing a causal relationship between employee engagement and customer engagement has never been more important. For the market research industry, now is the time to put a spotlight onto truly understanding the employee experience.
Source: https://www.marketingweek.com/direct-line-promotes-mark-evans-digital-transformation/
