My second session at Social Media Week London was organised by Unilever and took a look at their work in using a social to employee engagement. There were 4 separate sections to this; a look at employee feedback mechanisms, recruitment, graduate recruitment and flexible working. Each was presented by a different set.
A social approach to employee surveys – Michael Silverman
- Usually, providing feedback is boring. there’s too many numbers, not enough open questions. It’s a corporate black hole – where does the information go?
- To activate the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – which is sort of what employee feedback is – then 4 conditions need to be met. Diversity. Independence. Decentralisation. Aggregation. Surveys are by their nature anti-social. This Unilever project looked at making feedback social. they used a consultancy called Silverman (run by an ex-Unilever employee)
- When it comes to social media, with reviews etc, linear lists have problems. There is information overload, there’s high diversity, and ratings are primitive. There are linguistic techniques to extract meaning but this information is more powerful when you add structured data.
- The projects worked to build models to allow visualisation of opinions and attitudes, mapping users by opinions about how close they were. They allowed users to rate others answers, to allow a consensus to appear. Some of the studies were anonymous, others had identified people.
- In another project, they looked at organisational network analysis, based on social network analysis. What were the clusters of relationships. Did this inform opinions and attitudes. (they used Socilyzer). This brought together attitudinal and relationship data
- Finally, the Social Media Garden (pdf) project to crowd-source research into barriers that prevent the organisational adoption of social media
- The slides from the event
Looking at adoption of social media Natalie Nahai, Web Psycholgist
- Social media satisfies the human need to connection and communications. Measuring usage can provide a measure of intimacy and influencer of relationships. More many, social media can be a key to self-esteem. In organisations, it can engender a sense of belonging; it can reflect the org culture
- 56% of youth would refuse to work if access to social media was banned. 24% make access to social media a condition of accepting a job
- The risks are known – controllability, the need for transparency and accountability, how it can result in power shifts.
- To get adoption in a organisation, there needs to be a motivation, it needs to be interesting. You need to think about cultural cahnge, about reward and engagement and how it can be intrinsic to the job.
- The Slides
In general, the quick interlude was all about social tools and happiness/games (eg see this presentation by Jane McGonigal)
Talent Acquisition. Paul Maxin. Global Resourcing Director
- the recruiting landscape is changing. With social media, everyone is is a recruiter.. There are changes in experience, in services offered.
- Recruitment in Unilever links back to their business objectives. Double the revenue. Halve the carbon footprint (sustainability). They don’t have a separate digital and strategy to help drive this, it’s all connected.
- The recruitment process impacts the business. 53% of those with a bad recruitment experience are less inclined to buy good from the organisation. For a company like Unilever, that’s a lot of products that could be impacted. 75% will share their bad experience with friends (and influence them)
- The recruitment world has moved. from Broadcast to Conversation. From Attract to Nurturing. From Corporate to Human. From Formal to Frictionless. From Careers Site to an Ecosystem.
- You need to leverage the right channels. They have evolved to an engagement-based approach. They have 260k followers on LinkedIn, 90k on Facebook.
- Facebook (Unilever Careers)is one page – used for all countries. They use country specific apps (Buddy Media) and have consistent content.
- Linked In. They are building in specific calls to action, getting employees to activate as well.
- They use lots and lots of data analysis to improve engagement.
- The slides
A look at Graduate recruitment Klazien van Vliet
- There is a lot of competition for Graduates amongst FMCG companies . How do Unilever differentiate?
- They have big brands, sustainability, global reach. So do their competitors. So Unilever think their differentiator is the people and the work environment. But this is difficult to bring to life in advertising; this is where social media helps.
- They use glassdoor.com to help this. Glassdoor approached them, with information about all the searches that are being done around Unilever., how it followed patterns looking at them and competitors. They decided to work with glassdoor around branded content, about working in the company. Added testimonials, videos etc. Most important was the reviews around the company.
- In return, they get lots of data about what people are looking at, how they behave on the site. It’s not a volume driver, but it is a self-assessment tool. It helps people see if they really do want to work with Unilever and acts as a initial screener.
- The slides
How social media can help with Agile Working – Jacobina Plummer
- You used to need to be at work in order to do work. Now there is maximum flexibility, minimal constraints. You can work anytime, anywhere.
- Agile working is critical for Unilever as it enables their global operating framework; supports the sustainability agenda; provides cost savings; helps them a #1 workplace
- They looked at practices, workplaces and technology, They made sure their focus was on growth rather than cutting costs.
- To support agile working, they use external Twitter – eg for snow days etc. They use internal Yammer and they have a collaboration space. It allows better collation, faster decision making; work arbitrage and a greater cultural understanding and diversity.
- The slides
There is a video of the whole event made available from Unilver
