All Jobs are Local: Divisions, Departments, Groups, and–
February 12, 2010
Every year, when Fortune publishes its list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For (2010 should be along soon, by the way), a healthy percentage of the reader comments are some version of “that may be true about Company X in general, but where I work . . . “
For the most part, people employed by large corporations identify with the local office or agency where they work, the division or department they work in, the group that they work with. And that has several implications for the corporate Careers site.
1. Very large companies may have many separate divisions or subsidiaries, multiple global entities, and/or numerous entry paths (new graduate, experienced professional, hourly worker, and so on).
Q: How can the site effectively communicate across all these possibilities?
2. Mid-sized to large companies may have dozens of locations and/or many different departments and groups.
Q. What if there are differences in culture and policies among these various entities?
3. Employee profiles and testimonials from selected segments of the organization may not reflect other segments accurately at all.
Q: Are there issues of misrepresentation (intentionally or otherwise)?
4. Combining a variety of entities into one site may be confusing for visitors—but splitting them up into a lot of semi-related sites may be confusing in a different way.
Q: What’s the best approach for a specific company?
5. Different entities within the organization may have different (even radically different) visions of the Careers site–objectives, approach, style, functionality, et cetera.
Q: How can competing needs be reconciled?
6. Unfortunate events, management problems, and other negative circumstances may afflict just one component of the company but spread bad publicity to other components.
Q: Can the employer brand be protected from the effects of localized difficulties?
Those are just some of the issues—and there are no easy answers. However, each question is worth serious strategic consideration
Two observations:
- Microsites can be used to present smaller employment segments more effectively and accurately.
- It takes attentive oversight to successfully communicate one employer brand across many employment segments.
Two good examples:
Far-flung KPMG does a nice job of integrating multiple locations and career pthats.
Global Website: http://www.kpmg.com/Global/JoinUs/
U.S. Website: http://www.kpmgcareers.com/index.shtml
Multi-functional Sodexo makes great use of microsites for diversified messaging and social media for unified messaging.
http://www.sodexousa.com/usen/careers/careers.asp
One more point worth noting:
Six of the top ten qualities that contribute to job satisfaction (according to SHRM’s 2009 Employee Job Satisfaction Survey) are more concernd with the local workplace than with the company at large:
- opportunities to use skills and abilities
- feeling safe in the work environment
- relationship with immediate supervisor
- management recognition of employee job performance
- communication between employees and senior management
- the work itself
- autonomy and independence
(Merci to nicholasnova for the great graphic.)
Pushdown Ads Bring Brand Stories Above the Fold
February 12, 2010
The Pushdown ad unit is becoming more popular now that some major Web properties have adopted it. In case you’re not familiar with the Pushdown ad unit, it’s those annoying ads that appear at the top of a Web page and actually ‘push’ the content of that Web page down further on your screen (sometimes a long way down your screen). Sometimes it can be hard to make them go away. However, advertisers are learning to love them, and it’s not surprising really. The surprise is actually that Pushdown ads didn’t gain momentum faster.
Pushdown ads are intrusive, and that’s exactly what the Online Publishers Association wanted when the ad unit was created a year or so ago. You may have seen them on sites owned by the New York Times, Discovery, ESPN or Conde Nast — some of the first well-known publishers to test the Pushdown ad format.
According to an article from BrandWeek, more and more companies are actively seeking Pushdown ad placement, including AT&T, Anheuser-Busch, Universal Pictures, and Nokia. In fact, Yahoo! has started testing Pushdown ad units in response to advertiser demand (and a desire to increase advertising revenue, of course).
The Online Publishers Association claims that Pushdown ad units allow advertisers to tell more complete brand stories and helps to provide a more creative advertising opportunity that should stand out from crowded online display advertising industry.
There is no doubt that Pushdown ads fall into the realm of ‘interruption marketing’. The question is whether or not people will feel the ads are too much of an interruption. Does the extra scrolling to get to a Web page’s real content bother consumers? Would it bother you?
We’ll have to wait for the inevitable research and statistics about click-through rates, abandon rates, and so on before we’ll know exactly how effective Pushdown ads are. I know I’m curious to hear how this one shakes out. What are your predictions? Will Pushdown ads be embraced by consumers or will Pushdown ads make consumers click away and search for another Web page that provides similar content without the extra scrolling requirements? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
SKF Little Glitz, Lots of Content
February 11, 2010
SKF is one of the leading global suppliers of products, solutions and services within rolling bearings, seals, mechatronics, services and lubrication systems.
Industrial products – so I expected a more serious corporate website without the “bells and whistles” you see on consumer products and services companies.
Right? Well, not entirely… The company has a video and some interactive items on the homepage, and there are plenty more “bells and whistles” elsewhere. Plus, they do a good job of integrating product information with corporate material here (not always easy).
But the real story is how they present the company.
First, the About Us section is called This Is SKF. This is only a portion of the page — the company offers too much information to display in one image.
So let’s see the menu on this page:
- The Power of Knowledge Engineering
- Fast facts
- The SKF Culture
- Living the Vision
- Six Sigma
- Board and management
- Division overview
- Awards
- In focus
- SKF History
- SKF Supplier Centre
- SKF Nova
- Corporate sponsorships
- This website
Pretty comprehensive, and there are bells and whistles all over the place: see Living the Vision and the Power of Knowledge Engineering, and do go to look at the history timeline. The In Focus section has loads of information about the various components of the company (very interesting). And “This website” is something I have never seen on a corporate website: it describes the organization of the website. Much better than a site map.
Next a visit to Corporate Governance.
The theme of rich content continues here but, unlike other sections, there is too much use of PDFs rather than online sources for my taste.
Suggestion for SKF–apply your overall content strategy in the Corporate Governance section as well as elsewhere.
Despite this minor quibble, SKF’s website is content rich for stakeholders.
Something for everyone…
MTV – New Logo for a Changing Brand Promise
February 10, 2010
Remember when MTV promised to deliver music via television? The MTV of the 1980s was completely different than the MTV that teens watch today, and the logo has been changed to better reflect that new brand promise. While it’s true that the brand name should actually change in order for the name to match the promise, the company is only changing the logo at this time.
However, MTV’s content has changed since its 1981 debut in an effort to keep up with the changing world around it and shifting consumer demands. You can’t fault the company for making that change, even if the brand name is now an oxymoron. In a time when teens (and even adults) can go to YouTube anytime of the day or night and find just about any music video or live performance to watch at their leisure, it would seem obvious that the original MTV format wouldn’t bring in enough viewers anymore to keep the channel afloat.
There is no doubt that MTV has put a lot of effort into remaining relevant, but that relevancy has moved from music to something else entirely. Remember when “I want my MTV” was practically the mantra of a generation? Now, that was a powerful brand!
Three Views on Employment Happiness
February 10, 2010
In a recent Harvard Business Review post, The Problem of Forced Fun, guest contributor Grant McCracken makes an unexpected and fascinating observation:
When we commandeer the emotional lives of our employees we waste a valuable resource. Left to their own devices, employees represent a wonderful variety of attitudes, interests and activities. They are in fact a very good opportunity for the corporation to survey what is happening “out there” in the world. When we ask them to be outward facing ambassadors for the corporation, we flatten their naturally occurring variety, making it much more difficult for them to serve as inward facing ambassadors for the world.
McCracken, a research affiliate at Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT, is the author of Chief Culture Officer—in which he makes a convincing case that corporations need someone who’s focused on understanding popular culture and anticipating trends. In the HBR post he suggests that using employees to put a happy face on the company has unexpected consequences.
Worth considering: Employee testimonials on the Careers site may seem more authentic if they reflect diverse attitudes and orientations.
Careening to an entirely different viewpoint, we can look at the Scott Adams theory of job satisfaction, as expounded on Dilbert.com:
My theory is that your degree of job satisfaction is largely a function of who you blame for the necessarily unpleasant job you have. If you blame yourself, that’s when cognitive dissonance sets in and your brain redefines your situation as “satisfied.” To do otherwise would mean you deliberately keep yourself in a bad situation for no good reason, assuming you believe you have options. Your brain likes to rationalize your actions to seem consistent with the person you believe you are.
The post goes on to expound a circuitous method for improving employee satisfaction by convincing workers there are better jobs elsewhere. Worth a read—and don’t skip the comments, which include some surprisingly long, serious responses.
Finally, a few facts about happy/unhappy job-holders. According to the most recent Conference Board report on job satisfaction in the United States, only 45% of those surveyed were satisfied with their jobs . . .
“While one in 10 Americans is now unemployed, their working compatriots of all ages and incomes continue to grow increasingly unhappy,” says Lynn Franco, director of the Consumer Research Center of The Conference Board. “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.”
Job satisfaction is also at an all-time low in the United Kingdom, according to a recent report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) report.
None of which is surprising, in light of findings from the 2009 Employee Job Satisfaction Survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The top five determiners of employee satisfaction:
- job security
- benefits
- compensation
- opportunities to use skills and abilities
- feeling safe in the work environment
All those factors are in increasingly short supply, so there may not be much room for employers to improve the situation at that level. However—the next five determiners offer a lot more room for positive action:
- relationship with immediate supervisor
- management recognition of employee job performance
- communication between employees and senior management
- the work itself
- autonomy and independence
So . . . maybe Careers sites should focus more on communicating positive messages about the second set of desirables?
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