2. Treat Your Employees Like Customers

If you do just one thing differently as a result of reading this book, let it be this: Treat your employees just like your customers. Take this small step, and big, positive results will follow.

Here’s why. Your company has many important constituents—from government regulators to unions, shareholders, customers, neighbors, and the press. Your employees occupy a unique place in this group.

When your employees do a great job, create new products, build your brand, and sell your wares, they also forge a positive link with one or more of the other groups important to your company’s success.

Think about it, and you’ll realize how appropriate it is to treat your employees like customers. They are, after all, customers of the HR benefits, services, and programs your company offers.

How to Sell Employees on the Value of Working for Your Company

When Jane was hired to head up the HR communications unit at Citibank, her boss said, “We want you to use your background in advertising and marketing to sell employees on the value of working here.” This was innovative in the late 1970s, and it would still be considered an innovative approach in many businesses today.

Yet it works. Whether you communicate electronically, in writing, or in person, treating employees like you treat your valued customers changes everything. It changes how you communicate, what you say, how you say it, and the results you get. In this chapter, we show you how to treat employees like customers of HR products and services, because that’s precisely who they are.

Take a look at the marketing materials your company sends to customers or the financial communications you send to shareholders, and compare them to the HR communication materials your employees receive. Are they compatible in terms of quality? Tone? Clarity? If they aren’t, how do you suppose employees interpret the difference?

How Marketers Begin: By Knowing Their Customers

In Chapter 1, “Know Your Employees,” we emphasized the importance of analyzing the demographics of your employees and using focus groups to determine their experiences, preferences, and needs. Now we show you how to use this new knowledge to design communication that meets employees’ needs while accomplishing your objectives.

Four Ways to Treat Your Employees Like Customers

If you want to treat your employees like customers, here are four steps you can take that will help you create effective HR communications:

1. Create a profile of your target “customers.”

2. Assess the current state of employee understanding.

3. Build communication around employee preferences.

4. Make it easy for employees to do the right thing.

Create a Profile of Your Target “Customers”

We’re kind of geeky, so we love statistics. But it’s not surprising that most HR professionals are less interested in math and more focused on people. That’s why we often start communication planning by creating employee profiles.

What’s a Profile?

In marketing, “customer profile” can be briefly defined as “A precise description of the characteristics of buyers for a specific product or service.” For a longer explanation, we like how Answers.com describes a customer profile:

Description of a customer group or type of customer based on various demographic, psychographic and/or geographic characteristics; also called shopper profile. For example, magazine advertising salespeople provide advertisers with customer profiles describing the type of person who will be exposed to advertisements in that magazine. The description may include income, occupation, level of education, age, gender, hobbies, or area of residence. Customer profiles provide the knowledge needed to select the best prospect lists and to enable advertisers to select the best media.¹

Why are profiles valuable? Product developers and marketers find them useful because they go beyond dry data to bring customers to life. When you can imagine the people you’re trying to reach—with all their desires and preferences and quirks—you can do a better job of giving them what they need.

We find the same is true for HR. Profiles help us move from thinking abstractly about employees to seeing them as living, breathing people.

Although profiles are insightful, creating them doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out process. Our simple method goes like this: We ask our clients to pull all the demographic data available on their employees and bring it to a planning meeting. The most relevant facts are projected on a PowerPoint slide or posted on a flipchart.

By reviewing this data, we could see many similarities among the groups—such as length of service—but also some important differences. For example, employees tended to be located in different areas depending on their level, and functions were also clustered by level.

To complement our client’s demographic information, we bring our own contribution: a stack of stock photographs, each portraying a head-and-shoulders view of an individual. There’s a photo of a 45-year-old man wearing a suit, for example, another of a 30-something woman who looks like she’s driving a truck, and still another of a guy in his late 20s who works in IT support.

Based on the data, the entire group works together to decide on three or four key demographic segments we need to target with our upcoming communication.

We then break participants into small groups and ask each breakout team to take one demographic group and create a portrait of a typical employee in that segment, using one of the photos provided and a blank flipchart page.

What do you do with profiles after you’ve developed them? Some people we know actually hang profile posters in their offices to keep the employee customer in view. Others include profiles in PowerPoint presentations that describe employees—along with demographic data, engagement survey scores, and other information—that they use when presenting to peers or senior management about employees. Still others build profiles into communication plans—right after the section on objectives and before the part about strategies—to make sure their program is on target. Whatever you decide to do with the profiles you create, the idea is to make your employees as vivid as possible, and then make decisions about communication based on your new knowledge.

Assess the Current State of Employee Understanding

A wise client once said to us, “Never underestimate employees’ intelligence or overestimate their knowledge.” We’ve kept that advice in mind ever since, especially when it comes to HR communication. You are probably a subject-matter expert on (or at least well-versed in) health benefits and/or performance objectives and/or variable compensation and/or short-term disability. But chances are that even your smartest employees have only superficial knowledge about any of these topics.

For example, we conducted focus groups for a consumer products company to find out what leaders understood (and thought about) a valuable but complicated executive pay program. The results? Leaders who participated admitted that they didn’t really get it:

• “I’ve been here five years, and I’m still learning every day how this is structured and how it’s weighted and the impact on me. I think it’s too complicated.”

• “I have difficulty understanding exactly how all of this adds up for me personally every year. This is very confusing.”

• “I have the most complicated spreadsheet to manage my compensation. It has macros in it; it has all sorts of stuff just to manage how much money comes into my household. It’s unbelievable.”

This story illustrates that even when employees are highly intelligent (these executives are the best and the brightest in a very smart company) and the subject is something that matters to them (pay certainly ranks high in importance), there can still be significant gaps in what employees understand about an HR policy or program.

That’s why we encourage you to use focus groups to assess your employees’ knowledge thoroughly. Only by doing so can you design communication that effectively explains what employees need to know and do.

Build Communication Around Employee Preferences

Your company’s marketing department spends a great deal of time and money to figure out which communication channels your customers read, watch, and listen to. And it also exhaustively tests potential messages to see which words, phrases, and images resonate with customers. Only when that analysis is complete does your marketing group create a communication program designed to reach and engage your customers.

Okay. You know where we’re going here. Just do the same with your employees as you prepare HR communications.

You’ll want to do the following:

• Conduct focus groups or other qualitative research before you begin your communications.

• Get feedback from employees on your HR communications after you have distributed them (see Chapter 9, “Measure Effectiveness”).

By getting employee feedback before you create your communications plan and strategy, you’ll learn the following:

• What employees like and don’t like about a specific benefit.

• Questions employees typically have—or questions that vary based on demographics.

• Knowledge levels—what employees know, don’t know, or the “facts versus fiction” of a particular benefit or program.

• Communication preferences—how employees prefer to hear about changes in their benefits or HR programs.

• Usage—who’s using the benefit program, when, and why—and answers to the question, “Does usage vary by demographics?”

Make It Easy for Employees to Do the Right Thing

Most companies make it as easy as they can for customers to use their products. They package products in convenient forms, ensure that instructions are easy to understand, and provide support (via a website or call center) if the customer has questions. In HR, we need to put that same thought, logic, and presentation into helping employees make smart choices—or, do the right thing—to take action such as enrolling in benefits by a certain deadline.

For situations where you need employees to take action, make it unbelievably easy for them to do so. Think through where and when they need to act and what prompts will they need. Give them “just in time” prompts to call, log on, or write to get the coverage they should have.

When you start applying “Make it easy for people to do the right thing” to your HR and communication challenges, really think outside the cubicle. Sometimes the best solution might start with changing plan design first and following that up with good communication.

For example, say your goal is to increase enrollment in the company savings plan (or even reach 100% enrollment). One way to achieve that goal is to enroll all employees in the savings plan automatically on Day One, with the provision that they can opt out after six months. Then, if you communicate with employees throughout those six months—pointing out how easy it is to save and sharing projections of how much they can save in both short- and long-term scenarios—perhaps they’ll stay in the plan after six months. In this case, you’ve made inertia (after all, doing nothing really is the easiest thing to do), the right course of “action.”

Checklist for Treating Your Employees as Customers

Create an employee profile that describes a typical employee in key demographic groups.

Include a (fictional) photo in the profiles you create so that you can visualize your employee customer.

Remember this sage advice: “Never underestimate employees’ intelligence or overestimate their knowledge.”

Use focus groups to assess what employees understand about key policies, programs, and issues.

When surveying or conducting focus groups, include this question: “What is the one thing you would change about how we communicate?”

Give employees the information and tools they need to “do the right thing” when they take action on important programs or policies.