Tribe, Inc.

Let’s say you’re an internal communications staffer charged with launching a new intranet for your company. In discussions with your agency (hopefully Tribe) the recommendation is made to provide mobile access.

Is it worth the hassle of talking your IT department into that idea?  With most intranet projects, the relationship between communications and IT is a delicate balance. Each party provides subject matter expertise. And each has its own concerns and priorities.

Your new intranet will likely become the hub of all employee communications. Here are three reasons providing mobile access is important:

1. Our responsibility as communicators is to deliver information in the ways employees prefer to receive it. We want to make it as easy as possible for them to hear what the company is trying to say. In 2012, 49 percent of people in the US had smartphones. In 2017, that figure is projected to be 68 percent.

2. The only time most Gen Y employees aren’t checking their smartphones is when they’re asleep. Nine out of 10 say they check them before even getting out of bed, according to a Cisco study referenced on Baseline. If you have to fight an internal battle to take your intranet mobile, find yourself a young champion in the IT department. Over 40 percent of Gen Y IT professionals check their smartphones every 10 minutes, according to the same study.

3. Not every employee is sitting at a computer all day. If your company has employees working in the field, frontline employees on a retail floor or back-of-house workers behind the scenes, then it’s not realistic to think they’ll go to the trouble to find a computer to check in on the latest intranet content.

One of the great things about the internal communications field today is the many tools technology gives us to reach employees. The onus is on us to take advantage of that technology.

Before we get into this, let me say hi. My name is Nicholas LaManna and I am Tribe’s 2013 summer intern. I like to call myself the lead (aka only) research intern but that is another story for another day. I am a UNC Chapel Hill student and a sports fanatic and after watching game one of the NBA Finals last night I have a couple thoughts.

People say that Father Time will always catch up with you but after watching the Spurs last night I know that they were lying. The fact that a team filled guys in their 30s were able to beat up on a team of superstars in their 20s makes no sense to me. I am still trying to figure out how LeBron James can have a triple-double and lose.

The only thing I can think of that is close to what I watched last night happened to me at the YMCA when I was in high school. I walked in into the gym with four of my friends, all of whom were on our varsity basketball team. We walked onto the court and saw a bunch of older guys shooting on the hoop opposite us.

When I say old I am talking about, dirty Nikes from the 80s, high socks, headbands, and goggles. After about like 10 minutes they asked us to play. I thought to myself “This will be easy,” but then the game happened.

We did not score a single point. We tried to take them one-on-one, thinking that they would never be able to stay in front of us. Boy, were we dead wrong. They knew what we were going to do before we did. They made every shot and got every rebound. They played together and seemed to be everywhere at once. A brief dramatization of the game can be seen here.

The Spurs did the same thing to the Heat last night. Playing as a team beats individuals 10 out of 10 times and the quicker Miami realizes that the quicker they can prevent me from yelling at TV until midnight.

Companies usually measure their strategies using quantitative measures, but measuring employee engagement requires strategies off the beaten path.  While these measurement procedures require much more effort than looking at a spreadsheet, they are critical in evaluating the overall health of a company, which can influence the bottom line.

To find out more about measuring employee engagement, check out this blog on 5 tips to measure employee engagement.

Want a better understanding of your Gen Y employees? Just spend an hour or so looking over the shoulder of any young person playing Minecraft.

At first glance, this multiplayer game looks like electronic legos. Players manipulate colored blocks to build rooms, buildings, farms and cities, gathering resources like iron and wood to craft tools and raising crops and animals for food. Random zombies and spiders crop up occasionally and gender-free animals inexplicably reproduce when they get together. (The way you know they’re making babies is a bunch of cartoon hearts appear over their heads.)

A recent Fast Company article outlined five Minecraft lessons for entrepreneurs. Writer Amber Cox described watching her young son play the game and said, “The more I watch him explore this new universe, the more I realize that there are secret lessons within Minecraft that can help everyone–especially us entrepreneurs.”

Minecraft also offers lessons on Gen Y in the workplace. Our two boys, born at either end of the Gen Y age cohort, spend a lot of time on Minecraft. The younger one started his own Minecraft server and is the administrator, which seems to mean he’s in charge of making sure people play by the rules. It’s been an interesting window into his style of leadership, which is quite typical for his generation.

In Tribe’s research with employee populations, we found some marked differences in Gen Y’s definition of leadership. To Boomers, a leader is the person at the top of the hierarchy telling everyone else what to do. For Gen Y, a leader is more about team building.

In Minecraft, the players often work together as a team. Sometimes I see my boys building some giant building or city with five or six people at once, communicating by Skype as they work. No one person seems to be in charge. Yet it’s remarkable to see what they create collectively. They get a lot done.

This more social approach to work is an attitude we also saw in the Tribe study with Gen Y. When asked what it means to be a leader, 76 percent of the respondents agreed with, “Inspiring others to do their best.” Over 63 percent agreed with “Helping to develop other members of the team.” And 59 percent said leadership was the “ability to build strong relationships with those above and below in the company.”

The global assortment of players is also typical of Gen Y. In contrast to Boomers and even Gen X, they’ve grown up in a world made small by technology. Some of the regular players on my son’s Minecraft server are kids he knows from school; others are sitting in front of computers in Canada and Wales.

There’s also an attitude of inclusion that seems unique to this generation. On Minecraft, anyone seems to be welcome as long as they abide by the rules. On my son’s server the rules are: Be respectful; Use common sense; No harsh profanity; No spamming or griefing. (In case you didn’t know, griefing means breaking or destroying others’ things.)

Gen Y expects to work with people who may be different from them. Our oldest is 24, and he plays alongside not only our 13-year-old and his friends, but also their friends’ little brothers. The population seems to skew heavily male, but females like the game too. When a female player was getting unwanted attention from a guy on the server, our son talked to the offending party privately to let him know that was not okay. He said something like, “Don’t think about her as a girl. She’s just like any other player and you need to treat her that way.”

That’s the kind of attitude Gen Y brings to the workplace. It will be interesting to see what they collectively create.

So the countdown is on until the birth of my second child. It’s funny how different the mood is between baby one and baby two. There are fewer people shoving books in my hands on how to be a good parent, and less slaps on the back followed by a jovial, “You ready, man?”

I guess because when you already have one kid, people assume you’re ready. Which is not a bad assumption to make, except that people living a standard nine to five lifestyle are never really ready to wake up two or three times each night to “hang out.” Not since Christmas Eve, when I was well on my way to transforming a potentially delicious piece of poultry into turkey jerky have I woken up in the middle of the night. The occasion for that disturbance was to make sure my smoker had enough wood to keep the fire burning until morning. Slightly different than a newborn sounding the dinner bell and never asking the question, “What time would be good for you?”

The other thing that’s different this time is how our house is changing. When our son was born, the office was combined with our guest bedroom. Now that baby number two is on the way, the office has been reassigned a nice, new situation in our storage room. The guest room component of our house has now been combo-ed with the new baby room. Which means any friends or family members sleeping over will be treated to a nice double-sized bed surrounded by baby toys.

As far as the office goes, I like to think we’re giving the desk, chair and file cabinets their freedom. Gone are their days of being held captive in a rarely visited room that only sees action when it’s time to do our taxes or other life management events. Now they’re free to visit with the other neglected items in our storage room like the characters do in Pixar’s Toy Story movies. I have this vision of closing the door and walking away as all of these “D-list” pieces of our life instantly spring to life and have amazing adventure together. If I had to guess their personalities, I would say the desk is the responsible one, the file cabinet is grumpy and the chair is the young hipster on the go (you know, because it’s on wheels). Either way, my wife and I like to smile and think they’re all happier there together.

Oh yeah, back to the kid. The second child will officially fill our three-bedroom/two bath house full. And being a person who has hobbies that require space in which to fully enjoy them, we hope to eventually move on from what one of our official housing documents calls our “bungalow ranch.” This move will not be any time soon, but when it happens, I’ll have to admit a certain nostalgia for my orange brick house (don’t look at me, I’m only guilty of buying the house, not picking the color of its construction materials.)

This was the house I moved into after moving every May for six or seven years in a row. It was where I proposed to my wife (I even turned the TV off for that one) and where I spent the majority of the early years with my two children. It’s also where I tried unsuccessfully to kill a rat that was waiting for me in my kitchen one night, and where a former roommate and I almost burned the place down during a grilling episode gone wrong.

But homes are places made for creating memories, not for holding onto them. If you want to hold on to a memory, you do what everyone else does and record it on your smartphone. (Please don’t try to experience something and just “remember” it. That is extremely dangerous.)

Does your company leave most employee communication up to direct managers? That’s a common default mechanism for keeping employees in the loop, particularly when those employees don’t have their own computers at work.

It’s not a bad system, but employees do cite two issues with communication flowing only through their direct managers. One is consistency of message, since each direct manager will interpret news in their own way, creating employee concern that important points might be lost in translation. The other is timeliness of the message, particularly in times of major company change. Each direct manager will generally communicate on his or her own timetable. Employees don’t like knowing that other employees heard some piece of news before they did.

How can internal communications departments help direct managers communicate more effectively? One is by developing communications toolkits, giving managers prepared materials they can easily pass on to employees. For instance, Tribe recently built a toolkit to help managers of a large company with many brands communicate the company’s  sustainability efforts to employees.

The kit, delivered on a jump drive, included materials that were ready to use as-is as well as templates to be adapted by the individual brands. Direct managers will be able to communicate the sustainability messages as simply as copying and pasting prepared emails. They also can adapt newsletters, posters, FAQs, and more to their own brand standards.

A tried-and-true method of supporting direct manager communications is to institutionalize some sort of pre-shift meeting. One of Tribe’s clients uses weekly meetings to share prepared messages focused on the brand’s internal culture and values. Another begins every shift with a brief message from corporate.

Of course, employees still want to hear from the top. Although direct managers might be able to handle the bulk of company communications, it’s still important to provide at least one channel of communication directly from top management to employees. Even better, make that channel a means for two-way communication, so employees can share their insights, concerns and ideas with their corporate leadership.

Anna, our wonderful Account Coordinator, recently had to make a relatively expensive purchase that we all begrudge but have to deal with at some point: new tires. Which got me to thinking that a new set of tires might be the single most unfulfilling purchase that one could ever make in their lives.  I, for one, have never heard of anyone making an impulse buy on a set of Goodyears.  Let’s review…

For the most part, tires are tires.  Sure there are good tires and there are bad tires but when was the last time you were rolling down the street, glancing at a fellow commuter’s ride and thinking to yourself “damn, look at those tires.”  Even the whitest of whitewalls or most pristine tread is not going to have anyone doing a double take.

If you’re anything like me, when you make a big purchase you want to enjoy it for all it’s worth, especially when you first get it.  Unfortunately this yearning subsides rather quickly when dealing with something designed solely to connect your car to the road. Unless you’re driving the Autobahn, the feeling you get driving your car for the first time with a new set is pretty much going to be the same as before.  Our Writer Alan Dixon disagrees citing that he “really enjoys the feeling of driving around on a new set of tires” but Alan doesn’t get out much (I kid, I kid).

But alas, purchasing new tires is always a good thing, even if it’s not exactly the most exciting acquisition around.  The fun in the purchase is the piece of mind that you’re riding around in a safe vehicle and more importantly, that you don’t have to do that again for a very long time.

How can internal communications make a real and lasting impact on employee engagement? Find the answer to this question by checking out Tribe’s latest one-pager describing four ways internal communications can connect your employees with your company.

Innovation is often considered the domain of engineers. And of course it’s true: a new technological innovation can be the catalyst that allows one company to gain dominance over the competition.

Yet innovation can come from anywhere in the company, particularly the frontline. The frontline workers —  those people who are making the beds in your hotels or running the drive-thru at your quick service restaurants or standing on the sales floor in your retail operations — can be a gold mine of innovative ideas.

Because that’s who has a finger on the pulse of the consumer. While the engineers are sitting in front of the computer or messing around in the lab, the frontline employees are interacting with your customers. They see what works about your product or service — and even more importantly, what doesn’t.

Unfortunately, many companies operate with very little input from frontline employees. That’s not necessarily because management discounts the value of their ideas. More often, it’s merely because it can be so difficult to communicate with non-desk employees.

But it’s not impossible. When companies do find ways to reach non-desk workers, not just through their direct managers but through direct channels to corporate, they’re able to harness the ideas of those with a unique understanding of the customer.

Those companies also enjoy higher employee engagement. In Tribe’s research with frontline and field employees, our respondents consistently noted that they felt out of the loop — and often that made them feel they weren’t respected or valued by the company.

Want to promote innovation on your frontline? Tribe can help.

Pinterest did not properly prepare me for the hazards of wearing a pencil skirt. After months of seeing Pinterest posts of cute outfits involving pencil skirts, when it came time to step up my work wardrobe it was my first purchase. Trying it on in the fitting room didn’t make it seem abnormal from a regular skirt except for the higher waist. Excited about my new skirt, I decided to wear it the next day.

I did my hair and makeup and put on my new pencil skirt and some heels and proceeded to attempt to leave the bathroom. But that seemed like more of a challenge than I had anticipated. It isn’t necessary to be overly cognizant about your stride to realize it has just been drastically reduced. Determined not to be discouraged, I’d just plan for it to take me twice as long to get anywhere.

I baby-stepped it to my car, only to have a new dilemma. For fear of ripping my skirt, I had to get in backside first like an 18th century sidesaddle rider. My pencil skirt will never be able to ride in my boyfriend’s jacked-up truck unless he lifts me up to put me in my seat. Being the ever-practical Midwest boy, he’d probably make me go change.

After spending the day moving forward ten inches at a time, I realized what an actual hazard this is. I would have zero chance of outrunning an attacker. Forget the studies about the dangers of walking alone at night or wearing provocative clothing, I want to see the data on pencil skirts.

Google failed me in my search for statistics. The only dangerous result I could find were the “dangerous curves” pencil skirts highlight. How ironic, all these perils of wearing a pencil skirt and according to my Google search, I only needed to worry about the danger of looking too good.