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.

Moving Employees to Action

Employee communications tactics for an ADD world: How to engage, collaborate and motivate employees
Caitlin Duffy (@duffycait), Managing Editor of MSW, Microsoft

MSW is Microsoft’s internal portal site, includes news and information, as well as links to company resources.  They have a five person editorial team, and a vendor who built the site and manages placing the content.  They handle enterprise-level topics, and localized information is handled separately.  Their sections include – Articles (1 daily editorial story and external story responses), employee submission of stories, snapshot (employee submitted photos), and a few others.  They let people choose their own homepage/portal and don’t force this site on them.  They still have a very high awareness and readership rate.

5 lessons for employee engagment:

1. Skate to where the puck is going
   
   

   Microsoft’s MSW is their internal portal – a source for news and links to company intranet resources.

   People want information wherever/whenever, want shorter bursts of information, and they expect to be able to interact.  They created “The Pulse” as an extension for their MSW internal brand.  It’s a place for microblogging and interaction in order to engage in conversations.  They can use this to monitor employee sentiment and change internal perceptions around certain issues.

   Similarly, mobile is critical – there’s often more participation due to accessibility of content whenever/wherever – so they’ve developed all these tools on a mobile app.  Mobile is so critical, they’ve eliminated their mass email program to free up resources to implement the mobile aspect of the site.

   What didn’t work – “Submit a Question” – surveys revealed people wanted to ask executives questions.  So they developed a tool to let people post questions and vote them up based on popularity.  Failed because questions that came in often related to secret information that wasn’t ready to be discussed.  They failed to work together with departmental communications managers to be prepared for the questions coming in.

2. Make it Easy for People to Act
   Infographics make it easy to explain content in a simple way, and can be utilized both internally and externally.  What doesn’t work: A complicated call to action.
3. Make your Events Social
   Utilized their social platform to socialize events.  There were some minor issues with employee submissions, they were prepared and acted on it.
4. Make it Real
   Don’t force participation, highlight events, meetings, employee retail deals, etc. to give them what they want and may not be aware of them.
5. Involve them in Big Moments
   This includes product launches, acquisitions, company meetings, and other big changes impacting the company.  This can be used as a focus group to determine employee sentiment and engagement.