How to Manage the Human Element of Enterprise Activation

People are not cogs

In an earlier post, we offered five ways to activate the enterprise. It covered approaches on what you need to do, but it didn’t address the key factor in whether those activities would ultimately succeed: people. Initiating change in any organization is never purely academic. Organizations are a collection of people. And people are beholden to self-interest and influenced by emotion. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Done with care, you can harness the power of that self-interest and emotion, and transform uncertainty surrounding any major change into commitment and passion, your chance of a successful activation increase exponentially. And, you’ll have created an accelerated path to success.

Start at the top

Enterprise activation is, at its heart, a change management issue. And in most companies, unless you build consensus among senior management prior to asking for commitment from employees, managing change across multiple departments or business units can be akin to herding cats. If employees sense that their managers and leaders aren’t fully committed, or if they sense the change ultimately, “won’t take,” they may never actually undertake the behaviors asked of them.

Think of the early stages of consensus building among senior leadership as the beta test for activation across the enterprise as a whole. If there is resistance or hesitation at the top, it will only accelerate or amplify when the activation is rolled out to the rest of the organization.

Communicate the context

Activation is rarely embraced quickly or positively when delivered as an edict. Employees need and deserve context. Far too often, companies send out new-sheriff-in-town style memos outlining what is changing with little background on why, what the implications are and how those changes fit into the long-term vision for success. One approach might be to follow a simple narrative outline that covers:

1. What factors (external or internal) prompted the need or desire for change
2. How leadership arrived at the approach to address that need
3. What the impending change looks like and the time frame within which they will be implemented
4. What the expected positive outcomes of those changes are
5. What mechanisms for providing feedback or asking questions are available and how inquiries or suggestions will be considered by management

Enhance communications with metaphors, analogies, examples and stories

Stories are one of the most powerful tools for engaging any audience. And the more complicated the plan being presented, the more powerful a strategically wielded anecdote, metaphor or analogy can be. Metaphors and analogies can help people begin to understand and evaluate the implications any proposed change in a framework abstracted from its direct impact on their position in the firm. In other words, stories are a highly relatable way to express what the changes mean, not simply what the changes are.

Address any elephants in the room directly

An “elephant,” in most enterprise settings, would be any aspect of the impending activation plan that will affect what employees earn or the amount of time it takes them to earn it. Even if that means something as seemingly ”fun” as a kickoff party planned for what would normally be a non-work Saturday. Or, if it means something more dramatic, like people would have revised job descriptions. In any case, it pays to anticipate those impacts and address them upfront.

Repeat, repeat, repeat (and vary the medium of communication)

It’s one thing for an idea to be heard. It’s quite another for an idea to be understood. That’s certainly not a new concept for anyone charged with marketing or communications, but all too often companies expect that once a program has been communicated, everyone should consider themselves “informed.” But garnering change from any population, corporate or otherwise, requires repetition. A rule of thumb long held in media and advertising is that the minimum level of impressions needed to become top of mind, let alone trusted, is five. The dynamic holds for internal campaigns as well. Further, since we are all getting much better at tuning out intrusive messaging, it helps to provide those impressions over a variety of media.

Simply think of your own experience. Imagine you’ve seen the same email header twice. The third time it arrives atop an incoming message, you’ll likely not even notice it’s there. But if the third impression arrives on a mug, emblazoned with the theme line for your internal activation campaign—third hit noticed. Follow that with a mention of support for the program in the CEO’s monthly town hall address. Noticed. What about creating a rap song performed by upper management? No. Never do that. But you get the idea. The more and different ways you can reinforce the program with employees, the smoother and faster the adoption.

Ultimately, speak to the enterprise like you would want to be spoken to individually

Regardless of what industry you’re in, or the size of the company, human nature remains constant. Every employee or stakeholder wants first to know what’s in it for them and what about their day-to-day work life will change and what it all means. So, for any enterprise activation program to be successful, you have to address those issues.

Five Ways to Activate the Enterprise in 2018

It’s not surprising that for many marketers, enterprise activation can be a nebulous term. And frankly, the idea potentially encompasses so many functions across a company—from operations to customers service to fulfillment, that even deciding which activation points to focus on can be a daunting task. Regardless of the specifics, what does the general term mean anyway? Enterprise activation is about creating a shared vision for success then aligning and coordinating the internal departments, resources and processes needed to deliver exceptional brand, user or customer experiences.

Whew. Encompassing, indeed. And to complicate things further, choosing and prioritizing the messages and tactics needed to pull that off can differ wildly, company to company. But no matter what the size or type of enterprise you’re seeking to activate, here’s a list of five basic activation areas every company should undertake.

1. Craft a vision statement

A vision statement is an essential tool for promoting understanding throughout any organization. The most successful of those should define an aspirational state of what the enterprise would like to achieve or accomplish and provide a clear guide for evaluating business choices today, as well as evaluating and prioritizing future plans of action.

An example: Amazon’s vision statement: “Our vision is to be earth's most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” Its bold language leaves them focused on their purpose, yet open to innovative arrangements like affiliate marketing and contract fulfillment, and unique lines of business like Amazon Web Services (AWS). And, undoubtedly, it seems to be working for them.

2. Prioritize an enterprise-wide goal

If you have a viable vision statement, now you need to define a measurable goal that stakeholders throughout the business can focus on to guide their individual efforts. Whether it’s a customer related goal (increased awareness levels, positive net promoter score, improved conversions, etc.), a specific business goal (revenue targets, improved operating margin, broad market share, etc.), or operational (zero waste to landfill, 100% renewable energy usage, etc.), the act of choosing “the big one” for the enterprise to rally around can be instrumental in activating the enterprise. There is always opportunity to be found in getting everyone in the company to pull on the same rope. But you’ll improve greatly your chances of making it happen when you define what the rope looks like.

3. Define and measure your KPIs

To extend our rope metaphor, your key performance indicators (KPIs) tell everyone just how far they’ve moved whatever goal is on the business end of that rope. It’s not always possible to choose a KPI that is a direct measure of progress against the goal. But there is always some viable proxy. For example, if you don’t have a budget to conduct formal pre/post campaign awareness studies, you could examine your web analytics for any changes in the frequency of unique visitors. The main point is that you choose a KPI that is sufficiently available and transparent to be communicated throughout the company in as close to real time as possible, so that stakeholders throughout the enterprise feel their actions are directly influential to its movement and can use the measure of it to evaluate their effective progress against the enterprise-wide goal.

4. Cross-departmental process evaluation

Potentially the most resource-intensive and complex points in this post, cross-departmental process evaluation is about cataloging and auditing those company processes that have the greatest impact on your chosen goals and KPIs. The purpose is to uncover where there may be processes that are bottlenecks to reduce, or accelerative behaviors that should be promoted throughout the enterprise. An example would be if your main goal is to increase revenues, and the KPI for measuring progress is converted web leads. Upon examining the cross-departmental processes, you find the web site is delivering an adequate level of form fills and warm leads, but processes or systems for distribution of and follow up on those leads within the sales department is inordinately delayed. That makes it very clear you should focus remedial efforts on shortening the time between lead acquisition and first follow-up to improve efficiencies and maximize conversions.

5. Employee communications & campaigns

At the foundation of activation is understanding. You’ve crafted a vision statement and defined all the variables that go into achieving and measuring the impact of them. But enterprise activation is never as simple as a “build it and they will come” kind of program. Activating any enterprise requires communications. In practice, that may manifest as something as simple as a t-shirt or mug with the vision statement silkscreened on it, or as complex as creating digital signage in the company elevators, or coding a bespoke social network for use inside the company. There’s no simple, best-practices solution for employee communications and campaigns. How much of an effort this is correlates directly with the scale and global footprint of the enterprise.

Go forth and activate

If branding and marketing is about talking the talk, enterprise activation is about making sure the business is truly walking the walk.