What the Olympic opening ceremony teaches us about employee engagement

I woke up this morning as high as a kite after watching the epic, awesome Olympic opening ceremony last night. It was an extraordinary display; a great love letter to our country. For me the thing that really elevated it from spectacular to oh-my-god-so-bloody-uber-amazingly-spectacular was the rich storytelling.
Danny Boyle crafted a story that is familiar to us (about our modern history) but told it in such a beautiful way that you couldn't help but be captivated. From the first scene change, the rolling green hills disappearing under the satanic mills of the industrial revolution, the audience could anticipate the story arc; but that only added to the sense of drama.
The tiny details - the poppies swaying in the breeze, the torch under the bed covers - contrasted with the big bang moments, enhancing the story further. One of my favourite authors Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said: "If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you." That stuck with me as a journalist and I think about it often in my current role; the beauty (and the devil) is in the detail.
Storytelling is a skill as old as speech itself and yet its power remains. That power is why successful storytelling is fundamental to employee engagement. In fact David MacLeod identified creating a strong, strategic narrative as one of the enablers of engagement in his seminal study, Engage For Success.
Using stories, repeating them and embedding them as a narrative within organisations helps connect people with purpose. Usually great organisational stories tell themselves and they follow a familiar plot: we were like this, then we did this and now we're like this.
One of my favourite stories about Wolverhampton Homes is that before we were created, when the Audit Commission inspected the housing service, they said if there was a rating below zero stars they would have given it. That's how bad we were. That story - and the relentless hard work and drive in between - was why it was all the sweeter to be rated excellent with excellent prospects for improvement when we were inspected in 2010.
We've told our story in numerous ways internally and externally. It makes staff feel proud of their contribution and the journey we've come on. The fact we could achieve that inspires us to think what more we can achieve in the future and how much further we can improve things for tenants.
As Danny Boyle now knows more than ever, storytelling has the power to inspire a generation.

When Nings work and when they don't...

Last year I wrote this post about working with a group of tenants to set up a website for Low Hill, an area of Wolverhampton. Sadly, it didn't take off as much as we all wanted it to and I've been mulling over the reasons for that.
I think part of it might be that we used Ning as our platform. Ning is a build your own social media network platform. Visitors to the Low Hill site could view the content without logging in but if they wanted to comment or add their own content, they had to log in. I think this could have been part of the problem.
The site was quite widely publicised in the area it served through a variety of channels but I wonder if people were going to the site, having a nose around and then not really understanding what they had to do to get into it.
The idea of using Ning went against the oft-quoted social media principle of 'go where the people are', but we went with it because we felt it might create a safer, more welcoming environment than, say, facebook where some people might make bitchy or inappropriate comments to other tenants. Now I think we should have gone with a facebook page (because everyone is already there) and just managed the page firmly to avoid allowing those kind of comments.

I've also set up a Ning for staff at Wolverhampton Homes; I wrote about it here. Conversely to the Low Hill experience, this network has taken off massively. I think the reason for this is partly the reason why Low Hill didn't succeed; the act of logging in gives people a sense of security and privacy so they feel happy to share their ideas, stories and photos of the great engagement work going on in their teams.
I started off with the aim of recruiting 100 members to the network, called Great Placers, who would act as champions of employee engagement throughout the business. As of today we have 141.
The two other things that I think has helped it succeed is that we don't have an intranet or any other network that we could use in this way; it filled a vacuum, and I send an email one a week to all members. The email covers what's happened on the network that week and what progress we've made on engagement. This whets people's appetites if they haven't been on the site that week and it prompts them to visit it.
Also, considering we're based in one city, our 720 staff are very spread out. We have 13 offices and many colleagues work out and about on estates and in tenants' homes so rarely see their workmates or hear about what work they've been doing. This network helps address that challenge.
Unsurprisingly the photos are the most popular element of the network; staff like to see their colleagues, put names to faces and understand more about their roles. The idea of all this, of course, is to deliver excellent services to customers. If staff have positive relationships and work well together, they will be more effective and better able to serve tenants.
Staff have told me it helps them feel closer to their workmates and more like one organisation. Building those relationships and social capital is what social media, and employee engagement, is all about.

Digital Inclusion at Wolverhampton Homes

For the past two years, encouraging digital inclusion in tenants has been a delivery plan level priority for Wolverhampton Homes. This means it's in one of the top ten most important things the business is working on.
We recognise that digital inclusion makes sense for our tenants (they're better able to access employment, training, manage their finances, be connected with their family, friends and community). We also recognise it's makes sense for us.
Interacting with us online, rather than in person or over the phone, is cheaper and, when done right, more convenient for both parties. We've long held the view that online channels will not replace face-to-face or phone contact but that online gives our customers greater choice.
At our last STAR survey, we found out that 49% of our customers have some access to the internet. We know that figure will be growing every day, particularly as the non-contract smart phone market matures.
Our approach to digital inclusion has been about creating 'pulls' and 'pushes' that will (hopefully) nudge up the number of tenants who use the internet and help develop their skills.

Pushes:

• We've held five Homes on the Net sessions - these are opportunities for tenants who have never used the internet to come along and have a go. These are group sessions where tenants sit with a staff member and chat about what they'd like to use the internet for and together they give it a go. What's good about these sessions is they are informal and friendly, and genuine relationships are formed, what's bad is we can only host 12 tenants at a time - not exactly scalable.
• We put a tablet and PC into a former sheltered housing scheme and hooked them up with broadband. Our ICT team trained the tenants on how to use them. This has had some success with a handful of tenants really taking to it but again it's not scalable.

Pulls:

• We're setting up an online self-service where tenants can directly access their accounts, update their details, report repairs and book appointments. A lot of housing organisations have similar services but most don't link into their housing management system. If they don't, it (usually) means an email is generated and someone at the landlord end of the transaction has to do something with it. This means it's not a genuine 24 hour service. What we wanted was a system where people could instantly book their own repairs appointments depending on what suited them without having to have a person at the other end. This is way more difficult to set up but we believe it will be worth it for the better quality of service it will offer customers. We have just trialled the first phase with tenants and it went well.
• We worked with a group of tenants in Low Hill to set up a website for their area. The idea was that a resident-led website would stimulate people to want to get online to find out the latest news and information. It hasn't been a total fail but it hasn't succeeded in the way we wanted it to. Part of the problem, I think, is that we used Ning and the barrier of having to log in to a platform they weren't used to, put people off. I keep meaning to blog about it and I will soon.
• We've set up presences on social media and encourage tenants to interact with us about whatever they like there. Facebook is the most popular for customer interaction; we get occasional customer engagement on Twitter. We use youtube for videos of anything and everything.
• We've gone to where the people are: our Council runs the immensely successful Wolverhampton Today facebook page; we share our stuff with them and vice versa, and we are hugely lucky to be working in a city with exemplary citizen digital engagement in the shape of WV11. We interact with those guys whenever we can.

There's a few other initiatives we're trying too. We are also soon to be starting a project with the Council, Police and a couple of other organisations to try and stimulate digital inclusion in neighbourhoods through social media surgeries. I've been a 'surgeon' at various surgeries around the midlands and I've seen how powerful they can be at connecting people and ideas. I have high hopes for this project, but I'm still not convinced we've found the key to unlocking digital inclusion en masse. I think more likely it will take lots of little things over time to get to the tipping point; what I hope is that our efforts can hurry that tipping point along.

If you're ever trying to make the case for digital inclusion, I like this video. This Ning for digital inclusion is also useful to check out.