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Three golden rules of employee engagement

Three golden rules of employee engagement

One of my great interests is how western capitalism (as focused through broad based consumerism) impacts those cultures and economies which don’t necessarily share such values.

This inevitably ends up as being a discussion about human and indigenous rights.  How the Bushmen are pushed off their mineral rich land, for instance, or how Apple’s i- revolution appears to have been underpinned by regular suicides.

I firmly believe that if western consumers knew of such tragedies they would think again about buying the goods they take for granted.  Who wants to know that their mobile phone has perpetuated civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or that the cheap fashion they just bought may have just condemned another child to starvation?

There are many NGOs out there who seek to remedy this deplorable situation, and one of those who have my profound respect is Impactt.

Impactt are currently celebrating 15 years since their foundation.  As part of this they’ve released a report, entitled “Finding the Sweet Spot: Smarter Ethical Trade That Delivers More For All”, and will be hosting their first ever conference on the same subject in May. [Read more…] about Three golden rules of employee engagement

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 4: Share Price Charts

Last week we focused on immediate share price information and today we will be looking at stock charts. At its very basic, a stock chart should clearly convey the price history of a stock over a defined period of time. So at a minimum, a line chart over the past year with a clearly defined axis showing the price is what investors can expect. Most companies also include a volume chart below the share price. Scottish and Southern Energy has a nice example of this simple approach and I’ve reproduced it below.

Scottish & Southern stock chart
Click image to enlarge

You will note that the charting page for Scottish and Southern Energy also includes a selection tool that allows investors to select the time period that they wish to view, ranging from intraday to five years in length.

This is the next iteration of choice for price charts and very helpful for someone thinking about purchasing the stock.

Taking it one step further, some companies also allow user selected dates to define the beginning and end of the chart. This makes sense for people who already own the stock as chances are most investors did not buy the stock on the one, two or five year anniversary of their looking at the chart.

A good example of this capability is the chart of Friends Provident Group, reproduced below, where I’ve arbitrarily chosen to look at the share price performance since the beginning of the year 2000.

Friends Provident stock chartA close inspection of the chart will also show that investors have the capability to chart against other companies (in this case, up to eight pre-selected companies), indexes and sectors.

As an investor, this is useful, because you always want to know “Compared to what?” however, it probably comes under the “Nice to have“ category as opposed to essential information.

Finally, a feature I really like, but which I don’t see that often, is illustrated on the chart from ENI. (If you really want to see a well-executed investor site, visit ENI’s site www.eni.it.)

eni stock price chart
Click image to enlarge

They have overlain their interactive chart with indicators of the release of corporate information. For example, by scrolling over April 24, 2009, you are able to see that the rise in their stock price coincided with the release of ENI’s first quarter 2009 results.

I find this particularly helpful when I look at a large rise or fall on a stock price chart as it often helps me understand what may have been causing the movement.

In this series:
Previous post: Share price information
Next post: Historical share price data

Talent Acquisition 2009: No Surprises


Big 2

Looking over Talent Acquisition Strategies 2009: Cutting through the Clutter and Proactively Managing Quality Candidates, a new report from the Aberdeen Group, there’s a definite sense of familiarity.  Almost every finding and every recommendation is related to strategies and tactics that have been covered here on Corporate Eye and widely discussed among recruiting professionals.  So the value of the report is not so much in big news as in validation of the conventional wisdom–and some ideas for strategic fine-tuning.

As mentioned in the introductory post for this series, the report covers a lot of territory.  So I will focus on highlighting the information that pertains to corporate websites, social media, and employer branding.  By way of introduction:

  • The report defines three “maturity classes”—Best in Class (20% of respondents), Industry Average (50%), and Laggards (30%)
  • Class placement is assessed on four measures—percentage of new hires that were top choice; year-over-year increase in candidate quality; year-over-year increase in retention; percentage of new hires meeting or exceeding requirements on first review
  • Differences between Best in Class and Laggards were fairly dramatic in some cases—with BiCs getting 90% of their first choice hires, Laggards only 27%, but . . .
  • Laggards were not as far off in employee success measured by first reviews, with the BiCs showing 90%, the Laggards 71%

So what do we learn about Best in Class practices?  Among other things:

  • BICs are much more likely than Laggards to have a well-defined candidate relationship management process in place
  • As a preferred response to economic stress, expanding the candidate pipeline proactively was the top choice for BiCs (39%) and scaling back on recruiting efforts was the bottom choice (14%)
  • BiCs are significantly more likely than Averages and Laggards to use a variety of pre-hire assessments

In terms of how to build/expand the pipeline of quality candidates, the top two BiC choices were:

  • Cultivating employee referrals (which entails the need to increase employee engagement)
  • Maintaining “an engaging and informative company career portal”

As for other aspect of technology–large percentages (70% to 90%) of all three maturity classes have adopted:

  • Applicant tracking systems
  • Hiring management systems
  • Background screening solutions, and
  • Online career portals (both external- and internal-facing)

The gap between BiCs and all others is also relatively small when it comes to the use of “Web 2.0 and social networking,” but in this case the percentages are all low rather than high.  Less than 30% of companies in each maturity class utilize these capabilities now, with another 30% “planning to use.”

Note that (a) this assessment leaves about 40% with neither implementation nor plan, and (b) BiCs are no further along than Laggards.  (Though of the BiCs that do use social networking tools, three-quarters say their recruiters are trained on use of the tools, while just under half of Laggard users have training in place.)

In a related Aberdeen report (HR Executive’s Guide to Web 2.0: Cracking the Code for Talent Management), a survey of more than 500 companies found that less than half were using Web 2.0 and social networking tools for talent acquisition, but noted a 105% rate of growth in use over the the previous year’s figures.  Respondents in that study identified the greatest value of Web 2.0 tools in recruitment as “[giving] the candidate a sense of the company’s culture.”

I hope anyone who gleans further insights from the Aberdeen report will share—and in the meantime, I’ll offer an additional line of thought in the next post.


(Thanks to gthomasbower for the visual mash-up of Number 2.)

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 3: Share Price Information

Having established last time that a roadmap to the relevant investor information is essential on the main investor relations page, this piece will discuss one of investor relations more popular destinations – the share price page. You might think that this would be a simple enough thing to do – throw a graph of the share price up on the screen and let it go at that. But there is a lot more to it than that and companies that pay attention to this area can save their shareholders (particularly individual investors) quite a bit of frustration by thinking the site through.

The first thing to realize is that there are several distinct sets of information that investors are looking for when they visit your site for share price information. First, there is immediate information: what is the stock price doing now? Next, there is graphical information: what does the price chart look like? Third, there is historical information: what was the stock price on a certain date? I will be breaking down all of these parts in due course, but today I will be concentrating on immediate share price information.

There is a standard set of information that investors expect to see when looking at current price: last trade, open, high, low, change, volume and whether the information is real time or delayed. Below is a screen shot from the web site of ENI, the Italian energy company that does a good job setting out intraday information. Because ENI is traded on multiple markets, they also provide tabs to view the information for the particular market you may be interested in.

ENI-stock-price

Another good example comes from BT, the telecom company, and below is a screen shot of a portion of their page on share price information. Note that BT adds in the P/E ratio and the dividend yield as additional pieces of information on the stock. Further, BT also shows what the relevant index, the FTSE 100 did on the day in question, so you have a reference point, although if they are going to do that, they should include the percentage change for both their stock and the index rather that the pure price change in order to facilitate understanding of the stock price change relative to the index.

BT-share-price-information

Having established what the current trading in the stock is, companies should then move on to placing the stock price in historical context by the use of price chart graphs. In addition to the basics, there are many interesting things companies can do to help investors and I’ll be covering some of them next time.

In this series:
Previous post: Provide a Roadmap
Next post: Share price charts

Naming standards and the FTSE100

So what do you think is the best term to describe businesses behaving responsibly within their various networks and communities? (See, its difficult even to describe without prejudging or loading the scales, and almost impossible without using the word ‘stakeholder‘).

Fabian Pattberg recently ran a poll, asking which of the following would be the best term to describe this:

  • Corporate Responsibility
  • Corporate Social Responsibility
  • Sustainability
  • Accountability
  • Corporate Citizenship
  • Corporate Sustainability
  • Responsible Governance
  • Sustainable Responsible Business
  • Corporate Social Performance
  • Others – Ethical Business / Business Ethics, Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, Sustainable Business Culture, ESG (Environment, Social and Government), Business Ethics, Responsible Business.

On closing the poll, the most preferred term was Corporate Responsibility, with 21% of the votes, though as you can see it was a very close-run thing, with four main contenders and Sustainability coming a strong fifth.

fabian-pattberg-poll

(image snagged from FabianPattberg.com)

Now, when we started the Corporate Eye blog, we were unsure what to call this category of posts. We went for Corporate Social Responsibility – CSR for short – because that seemed to be what most companies were calling it, but at the time some on the team were arguing for Sustainability as a title.

But over the summer Chris MacDonald ran a series of posts on Business Ethics arguing against each of the elements of ‘CSR’ in turn. In summary:

CSR “isn’t (just) about corporations, isn’t just about social questions, and it isn’t just about responsibilities”.

So: what to call it?

This is where I confess that my vote in the Pattberg poll went to Responsible Governance, because I think it’s important that Responsibility – or whatever you care to call it – is embedded within the management and strategy of the company. (More on this another day). Clearly nobody else agreed with me, and it isn’t a term I’ve ever seen used in the wild.

So I reviewed the current FTSE 100 corporate websites, to see what was actually going on out there, and found that most companies – by a long way – are calling this section ‘Corporate Responsibility’ (no ‘social’). There are a few unusual cases, as you’d expect: companies that try to find a uniquely tailored title, or companies that don’t have a dedicated section to cover all ‘CSR’ topics, but choose to have separate sections such as Environment and Society.

But overall, the picture is clear:

ftse100-names

Perhaps this isn’t surprising; standardising the names of sections on corporate websites makes it easy for the visitor to find what they’re looking for. What is interesting, though, is the difference between what the FTSE100 companies are actually using, and what the people taking the Pattberg poll thought. The poll results were much more evenly spread among the four front-runners, which aren’t the same as the four front-runners of the FTSE100 usage.

Possibly this comes down to a difference in what terminology people use in speaking or writing about a topic day to day, and what terms people expect to see on a corporate website.

But it is difficult to choose a term that doesn’t carry unintended baggage, because all those phrases mean something slightly different. I think this is why we see FTSE100 companies tending to adopt the same term, so it is easily recognisable by visitors, but people working within that sector will use the term that means the most to them. The corporate term will tend to become bland and inoffensive, and may lose its specificity because of being stretched in many different directions; individuals will use – and will argue vehemently for – the terms that mean exactly what those people want to convey, because the terminology matters.

So, given that we aim to parallel the corporate site, should we change to ‘Corporate Responsibility’ to follow the majority? Or – being pragmatic – to ‘Responsibility’ because it is short, and will fit well on one line in our navigation? I’ll accept that Responsible Governance doesn’t mean enough to enough people to be a sensible choice.

What do you call this on your website?

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 2: Provide a Roadmap

Having started with the premise that an effective investor web site should give a clear and concise description of what your company does, the next logical thing to do is to provide an easy-to-use roadmap of where the relevant information lies. Most companies choose a format that places a column of links or tabs in either the upper left or right hand side of the main investor relations page. Set forth below is an example of this type of layout as used by Standard Life.

Standard Life investor relations

In looking at a number of websites, I could discern no standard list of what linked sections appear or in what order they are listed. Given that the objective is to enable investors to get the information they need quickly with a minimum of hunting, I would suggest that effective websites think in terms of priorities.

First, certain things are essential to investor relations and an understanding of the company and therefore access to your share price, financial statements annual and interim reports and press releases should be considered a first priority and go to the top of the list.

Of next importance are more discretionary disclosures such as investor presentations, Webcasts, upcoming investor events and the company’s financial calendar. Links that help answer questions for specific groups of investors, such as debt holders or information for individual shareholders administrative items are the next priority that should be included.

Finally, depending on the inclination of the company, the composition of its investor base, and a myriad of other factors, there are links to more specialized information that may prove helpful, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (often seen as a section on its own), corporate governance (also often seen as a separate section), links to the Annual General Meeting materials, and, in the United States, links to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Because the subject headings are not uniform and information is often buried two or three links deep, I am a proponent of the use of popup menus as you scroll over the list of links. This enables a visitor to quickly see where information has been placed. It also helps avoid the back and forth hunting for information and waiting for web pages to load that often happens when you click on a promising heading only to find that it doesn’t lead to the information you want. It turns out, that on the web, as in life, you can’t tell a link by its cover.

In this series:
Previous post: What does the company do?
Next post: Share price information