Creating Dialogue at Best Buy

How Best Buy provides a voice for its remote workforce using social media
Andrew Hokenson (@Andreux), Senior Specialist—Employee Communications, Best Buy

The culture of Best Buy – 167,000 employees worldwide, the largest electronics retailer in the world, average age of employees is 27 years old, and the average corporate age is 38.  Everyone says that employees are the center of their business, but at Best Buy they truly feel this way.

Creating a culture of dialogue

They’ve defined their department with the mission: Communications function for delivering information, gathering feedback and making decisions.

They knew they needed to get away from the top-down, cascading structure in order to create a dialogue where employees can connect.  Now, more than ever, their employees are connected – mobile, social networks, etc. – and they expect to have tools that can connect them and let them participate in conversations.

Traditionally, Best Buy relied on newsletters, email, direct mail, meeting cascades, etc. to connect with employees.  A few years ago, they created a message board to connect with employees.  The message board failed because they didn’t know how to facilitate communication (by very conservative moderation and editing).  It evolved to another message board, eliminating the moderation, giving them the ability to connect with leadership and other employees – simply asking them to “be as trusted online as they are in the stores.”  Employees started to adopt this, and the internal communication team started including news and information about the company.  They wanted things to fit the medium, and started creating content there that was more personal, encouraging more dialogue.

Communication isn’t just about pushing messages to your audience, it’s also about listening.  You let people know you are listening by responding to comments, answering questions, and engaging in real time.  It’s been critical to do this in real time, but was easy since it was the people who had posted the message who responded.

Communications is more than a department

The principles that now guide Best Buy’s internal communications:

• Connect with your audience
• Create an experience
• Become human
• Stop telling, start sharing

For example, when the new CEO started, he posted directly to the company’s message board – in his own words.  Employees then engaged with him as a person through comments.  Not only did he connect with them on the message board, but he went and worked in stores and shared his stories on the message board (sometimes asking people in the store to interview him and write stories).

As communicators – our competition are viral videos, weird photos, and all the bizarre things that get posted on Facebook pages and get a lot of traffic on the web.  How are we going to try to engage them on an equal level?  Here are the do’s and don’ts for doing so:

Don’t over-moderate – Lay down the rules (no cursing) and ask them to police themselves (let employees flag content). However, they have fun with their language filter, so profanity might show up as “What the {Pancake Bunny}!!!”

Don’t micromanage – Trust them online the same way you trust them with customers.

Use the data for good, not evil – It’s easy to look at what you want employees to stop doing, but you should focus on using the data to giving employees what they want.

Know the risks – Give them a protected venue to have conversations, and often employees will vent there, rather than taking it public.  However, there’s always risk in these conversations… BUT the conversations are happening anyway, and there’s also risk in not providing a venue for this dialogue (i.e. they take the conversation elsewhere, you’re missing out on feedback, etc.)

Finally, your social media policy should reflect the language most of your employees use… and most of your employees are not lawyers.

Question from audience: How do you manage getting hourly employees to participate?  Answer: Every employee is allotted training and development time, and they can log hours they spend on these tools to that.

Create a Great Place to Work

7 ways internal communications can help create a great place to work
Kim Darnofall (@KimDarnofall), Internal Communications Project Manager, SAS

SAS has been the Number 1 best company to work for, as rated by Forbes magazine several times in the last few years. They are a technology company, so their audience is very techno-centric, and they have great IT support. Their company has 12,000 people and their internal communication team is made up of 11 people (Senior Director, Social Media & Technology Manager (3), Managing Editor (6), International Liaison, Admin Asst.).

They deliver news from the SAS Wide Web, the company’s intranet portal, as well as to other country’s mirror portal sites. Some countries adopt this, others don’t, it’s not forced to pull corporate content.

They focus on engaging employees through:

Customization – They utilize RSS feeds to deliver customized content to the portal page.

Inclusion – They handle the SAS Family Site, which provides information externally to spouses/families of the employees.

Participation – They allow comments on every story they post, as well as lots of blogs (from individuals and groups/departments).  They also engage employees through photos and videos – asking employees to submit them.

Contests – Conducted a photo contest among employees, and got over 25,000 submissions (that’s more than 2 per employee). They had employees vote on the best.

Polls & Quizzes – Give people a chance to give you their thoughts, and quizzes to see if communication or training has been effective.

Report it! – Borrowed idea from CNN and other news outlets, it lets employees can submit stories and articles to the internal communication team.

Connect employees to Leadership – Conversations over coffee (like a town hall format), executive update webcasts (deliver message and answer questions in town hall format, and in addition, have live interactions via chat stream on their social hub during webcast), executive blogs, Leadership Live (one-on-one conversation with a leader), Meals (managers met with employees over breakfast, and the CEO might just show up and participate like any other employee).  Also got execs to participate in employee programs  – like “Leanest Loser,” a corporate flash mob, and “Camp Chill” (an event where they brought in snow and road down the hill with their kids).

Connect employees to each other – This includes different kinds of profiles of employees on their news site, post responses to questions with names attached.

Stay on the cutting edge – They have invested in equipment to shoot their own video, and have found better success with engagement and viewership than they have with print articles (see photo to right).

Keep the Corporate Culture – Internal communications is the voice of the company to show everything the company does, who the people are, and the values they hold.

Have fun – Highlighted things like “Talk Like a Pirate Day” and “Pi” Day with executive involvement.

Results – Regularly ranked in top 3 of best places to work, and employee surveys rate communications and satisfaction highly.