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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

Website Squatters and Ghost Sites

derelict-house
In a previous existence, I used to enjoy debugging code. I also like to proof-read and sub-edit content… But it doesn’t take an expert to spot some problems.

As I’ve said before I spend a lot of my time these days exploring corporate websites. Sometimes I’ve been invited to sub the site to look for problems; sometimes I’m out hunting interesting new ways of doing things.

And sometimes I end up, uninvited, down a deserted back alley of the internet, where sites have been forgotten about, and are being left to rot gently.

Today I came across an old corporate website. The company has been taken over, and this particular URL, while owned by the company until about six months ago, is now being squatted by someone else.

The content is all still the same corporate content—right down to the copyright statement—but the site has been infiltrated by inappropriate adverts and links.

The result is a sad dissonance… and though I know that the company is not responsible for this version of their content, it does, nevertheless, taint my impression of the company.

Given that some people will still look for a company under an old URL for some time after the company has moved on, I suggest that:

  • ownership of old URLs should be retained for some years
  • there should be a page explaining what has happened to the company (with a link to the new company) hosted there for a while (again, for some years)
  • and then the domain name should be forwarded to the new one.

In this particular case, I suspect it wasn’t the main domain name for the site, but was a variant used to catch and redirect visitors to the correct (former) site. So maybe the squatter has simply copied and pasted code from there in an attempt to make it look official.

At least the worst they’re doing is adding adverts; someone with a grudge could do something much more unpleasant.

4 Strategies for Effective Onboarding

I invited Steve O’Brian to write a post about onboarding. We know that keeping employees beyond that first year can be difficult—and losing them is expensive—so getting them up to speed, enthusiastic and embedded in your corporate culture is vital. But how to do it?

4 Strategies for Effective Onboarding

onboarding
Everyone has the same vision of perfect employee onboarding. Your new hires get up to speed quickly. They embrace (and yes, evangelize!) your corporate culture. Above all, these new employees are motivated and contributing to the bottom line.

Sound perfect? It could be. Simple to achieve? That’s something else. The reality is that often, successfully onboarding new hires for long term happiness and productivity can be challenging. Consider:

  • A full third of external hires are no longer with the organization after two years
  • Almost a third of employees employed in their current job for less than six months are already job searching1

A few days of orientation is not sufficient to adequately engage new hires and get them off to a fast start. But how do you get there? The solution: “continual, reinforced learning environments.” (Bersin2) By helping employees learn over time and apply what they learn on the job, your onboarding program will drive the golden benefits of new employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

Here are 4 strategies with examples to get your onboarding program productive now.

  • Extend the learning window

    After the initial orientation, true corporate learning happens in small chunks, over time. This type of learning is “relational,” and includes concepts like on-the-job training, role relevance to the organization, in-house networking, and performance expectations.

    Studies suggest you extend onboarding programs for at least six months to achieve effective learning saturation. Also keep in mind that beyond speed to competency, employees are still in the process of “buying in.” In fact, 90% of employees are still deciding whether they’ll stay at an organization throughout their first six months.3

    By extending your onboarding program past six months to a year or more, your learners will:

    1. Understand and retain learning better with data learned in small bites over time.
    2. Improve performance. Employees better understand the job and the organization while achieving productivity faster.
    3. Have higher retention rates from continual learning, which keeps employees engaged and interested.

  • Incorporate Learning Through Others

    Adding a personalized, 1:1 approach to your extended onboarding program greatly improves learning retention, since this is how we, as people, naturally want to learn. Some of the benefits you can expect to see through collaborative, in-person learning are:

    • Better data retention with the “show me” vs. “tell me” approach.
    • Increased employee engagement. Being face-to-face with someone demands attentive listening and feedback, resulting in a more productive learning experience.
    • Ability to understand the “soft” learnings of a job, such as the company culture or weight of departmental priorities.
    • An understanding of the “insider tips” everyone needs to do their job. Who’s your go-to person in accounting to get something approved? What managers should be kept in – or maybe out – of the loop?

    A good example is Medline.4 Medline is a medical device manufacturer with a large worldwide sales force. Medical equipment can be a complex, technical sale, and so Medline ensures all new sales reps are well trained over the course of an entire year. Their onboarding program blends periodic classroom learning with 1:1 field training experience to ensure deep, technical learning is achieved.

  • Guide the Learning

    Extending the onboarding training process and including individualized on-the-job learning is great. But how can you keep this phase of less formal training focused and productive? In a word: structure.

    Just like classroom learning, it’s important to provide a structure for any extended informal or hands-on learning. Creating a guided workflow for the entire length of your onboarding program ensures that learning is continuous and productive, speeding your new hire time-to-productivity.

    Providing structure for informal learning can be easy – even a simple checklist will do. Guided onboarding plans should provide:

    • Specific milestones and tasks.
    • On-demand training articles or videos at key junctures.
    • Check-ins and assessments to gauge progress.
    • A definitive end point to the program to help employees focus on reaching their goals.

    Guided onboarding plans should be specific to job functions such as marketing or operations. Over time, you can build a small library of onboarding plans for easy deployment for the next crop of new hires. In Medline’s case, they’ve built out 11 different learning plans for their technical field sales force, which are used in North America, South America, and Europe.

  • Measure Impact, Iterate, and Scale

    Results are fairly easy to calculate once you focus on tracking these metrics at two levels: the program level and the employee level.

    At the program level, build metrics around defined business objectives, such as before and after new employee attrition rates or program completion rates. For individuals, to understand the impact your extended new employee onboarding program, surveys are handy. Onboarding software can often help you measure program performance and gather participant feedback.

    With results in hand, assess your program and make improvements. Then, standardize your program for repeatability across departments. Research from Aberdeen shows that organizations with a standardized onboarding process saw:

    • 13% higher rates of new hire performance goals met
    • 19% higher new hire engagement
    • 19% higher new hire retention5

Conclusion

Everyone has an onboarding program. Make yours more effective by extending the time window, adding 1:1 experiential learning, providing guided learning plans for the entire extended process, and measuring/analyzing your entire program. Following this guide, it should be fairly easy now to scale your strategic onboarding program across your organization to achieve a uniform, effective new hire experience.

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References
1 Stein & Christian, 2010.
2 Bersin, “The Corporate Learning Factbook,” 2012
3 Partnership for Public Service, Getting On Board: A Model for Integrating and Engaging New Employees,” 2008
4 Medline Onboarding Program Case Study, Chronus Corporation, 2014.
5 Aberdeen Group, “Onboarding 2011, the Path to Productivity,” March 2011.

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Thank you Steve!

Steve O’Brian, Vice President of Chronus Corp, is an accomplished author and speaker on the subject of corporate mentoring, coaching, and onboarding. His thought leadership has been instrumental in changing the way companies approach talent development programs. Deeply involved in the creation of client solutions, O’Brian shares his best-practice program expertise throughout the corporate learning and development world.

Chronus Corporation is a global provider of software to run talent development programs including employee onboarding, mentoring, and coaching.

Employees are our greatest asset

human capital

“Our employees are our greatest asset.”

How often have you heard (or even said) something along those lines?

It’s become a cliché, but only because of the truth it conveys. Without the people who work in it, an organisation is worth very little. Both businesses and brands are shaped and defined by people.

Communicate’s Corporate Reporting and Human Capital conference on Friday will demonstrate how to measure and communicate the value of the people in a company through corporate reporting.

Incidentally, I know there’s ongoing debate about use of the term ‘human capital’: human capital isn’t the most people-friendly phrase, conflating the idea of financial capital with people, as if people were not more important… On the other hand, thinking of people as human resources is no better, implying the commodification of people. We’ll stick with ‘human capital’, at least for now, as it does include an implication of value. (Juliet Bourke discusses just this on one of the Deloitte’s blogs.)

Increasingly, companies are trying to become more ‘human’ in their approach, in the recognition that the people in the company matter, and do indeed have value, both intrinsically, and for the company. And then the very human need for storytelling and narrative is a key feature when engaging investors and other stakeholders with your business—because of course these external stakeholders are people too.

But how do you communicate the particular skills and expertise of your people to investors?
And just how do you measure employee experience and communicate your employer brand?

Andrew Thomas, publishing editor at Cravenhill Publishing, says,

“This conference is about how companies can put people at the heart of their annual report. Organisations often fail to recognise or communicate the value of their employees as assets. This conference will look at effective methods for measuring talent and will explore how that value can be shared with investors and stakeholders.”

Discussion at this half-day conference will explore whether a standardised framework of metrics is feasible – including the science and psychology of accounting for human capital. Speakers will look at how organisations communicate and report on their human capital in their annual reports, and will highlight the key areas in which people at all levels of an organisation are critical to financial performance.

It should be very interesting indeed, bringing together academics, HR and IR experts, the FRC, IIRC and CIPD, and consultants.

For more information please visit the conference website.

Presenting Compliance Requirements in Plain Language

Mike Miranda from the Clear Law Institute offered to write a post for us about communicating compliance requirements in plain language. I spend a lot of time reviewing corporate websites, and sometimes the compliance sections are the hardest (and slowest), because of the complexity of the language, and the density of the information. Plain language matters!

Over to you, Mike…

plain-language
When we talk to each other we generally speak in plain language. Have you ever met someone who purposely uses terminology that unnecessarily complicates the point? If you have, you’ll quickly understand the importance of using plain language in conversation.

The same can be said for those in the legal field. Legal jargon is usually meticulously written and confusing to follow, and for good reason: when drafting a contract this practice has purpose, especially for the contractor.

But when dealing with compliance requirements the goal is to make these requirements known and simple to follow. In order for that to happen the point should be expressed clearly and plainly as to avoid any confusion and/or misconception of the intentions stated.

As a matter of fact, studies show that attorneys took twice as long to translate “legalese” as it took brain surgeons to comprehend medical jargon.

So it’s safe to say simplifying the text will save time, which saves money and improves compliance, which will translate to fewer complaints and less to resolve.

How do we define “plain language”?

It is communication that your audience will understand as soon as they read it or hear it. It will enable them to find what they need, understand what they find, and use what they found to meet their needs.

This streamlines the process of conveying information to your audience.

In a corporate setting, this would allow your company to reach its goals more quickly by eliminating any slack caused by the uninformed. The more someone understands what’s required of them the more efficient they will be.

When you’re dealing with a large company, this difference can be worth millions. For example: every few years the VBA (Veteran Benefit Administration) reaches out to all veterans and asks them to update their beneficiaries. If a veteran dies without doing so the VBA has to identify an eligible beneficiary through extensive research. Each time they do this it costs them thousands of dollars in staff time. So they decided to rewrite the letter they send to veterans in plain language.

The original outreach yielded a 43% response rate. But the response of the plain language outreach went up to 65% and the VBA saved $5 million in staff time over the course of each mailing period.

These are some things to keep in mind when preparing a compliance presentation in plain language:

  • Identify and write exclusively for your audience
  • If you are speaking publicly, make sure to speak clearly and audibly
  • If you’re writing, keep paragraphs and sentences short and to the point. There is no need for fluff. Also, there is no need for complication of the subject via huge words
  • Limit jargon, legalese, and acronyms to a minimum. If there is a way to explain yourself in simple terms, do so
  • Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Who is my audience? What do they already know about the subject? What kinds of questions will they likely have? Be prepared and you’ll have a much easier time
  • You should use common words. For example, instead of “prior to” say “before” and opposed to “commence” say “begin” or “start”. Keep it simple and your audience will soak up your message. This will create a common understanding, which will greatly increase the adherence to your compliance requirements.

Thomas Jefferson once said “The most valuable of all talents is never using two words where one will do.” Remember this saying, it will serve you well!

Thanks Mike!

Mike Miranda is a writer and PR person for Clear Law Institute.

Informative Eye Candy

For this post, I wanted to write about the absolutely critical importance of clear and engaging web copy. After all, we’ve all come across badly written web pages that prompt a rapid visit to the good old “go-back” icon.

Then I found myself reading a Linkedin post about why human beings like visual content. And this reminded me of something we often discuss with clients at Corporate Eye. So, despite having a vested interest in writing about good web copy (I am a blog writer after all!), for this post I’m going to talk about…

infographic-arrow

Okay, I’ll admit it – we have touched on the value and effectiveness of infographics in previous blog posts. But I think it’s worth revisiting this subject, and also adding some science to explain why visual images can be an incredibly effective way to communicate core messages and key data.

Human beings like colourful eye-catching content, and perhaps that’s no surprise when we consider that:

infographic-steps

Bold and vibrant infographics on a web page can convey important stories about your company fast. And that could take the form of showing resources and markets, achievement against target, or aims and ambitions.

Providing engaging and clear infographics can also be good news for web writers. How many times have you skim-read copy within a website? Well, don’t worry too much if you might have done this on the odd occasion, as research suggests that web users often only read 28% of the copy within a website. And maybe that isn’t surprising. There is of course a lot to take in on even basic corporate sites. But good infographics can help us stop skimming and increase our willingness to read by a massive 80%! Engaging visuals that tell a story can also help to embed key messages. As a broad rule, we only remember 20% of what we read, but we remember 80% of what we see.

Infographics can be used in a variety of different ways, on webpages and downloads. And they don’t have to be static. Animated infographics can be imbedded into webpages or incorporated into video links, and both options can help to deliver memorable and attractive content.

But isn’t this just a lot of fuss being made about pretty pictures? If someone is seriously interested in a company, surely they’ll take the time to read the carefully crafted web text on your site, even if the visual content on your pages is a little on the thin side.

As a writer of carefully well-crafted web text (Note to Editor: Please feel free to disagree!), I would like to say: Yes – all you need is well-written text! But I’m afraid I can’t. The truth is we live in an incredibly information-rich age, and even the best text has a heck of a lot to compete with. And science tells us that engaging infographics can help good copy stand out, be remembered, and perhaps more important of all, be understood.

If you would like to find out more on how to use infographics and other visual tools effectively, why not drop us a line and we’ll be happy to share our knowledge.

Note: With thanks to Hubspot for inspiring me to write this post

Coca-Cola Contour Bottle Turns 100 This Year

coca-cola bottleThis year, Coca-Cola’s iconic contour bottle celebrates its 100th anniversary. Back in 1915, the Root Glass Company developed the bottle design after the Coca-Cola Company asked a number of manufacturers to develop a design that would make it more distinctive. Specifically, the company asked manufacturers to create a design that wasn’t just distinctive—it had to be so distinctive that it could be recognized only by touch and still recognized visually even after it shattered.

The bottle design that the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana created was based on a picture of a cocoa pod that the primary designer, Earl R. Dean, found in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He used that image to create a prototype, which the Coca-Cola Company selected as its new bottle design. By 1916, the new bottle was available to consumers.

In 1923, the design was patented with the company obtaining a second patent on the design in 1937, which enabled the company to protect its bottle design for another 14 years. It took nearly 50 more years for the Coca-Cola contour bottle with the Coca-Cola name on it to be trademarked in 1960, which gave the Coca-Cola Company protection indefinitely. It took another three more years for the bottle shape alone to be trademarked (1977).

While the bottle has evolved over the years, it still retains that instantly recognizable contour shape. Today, all of that intellectual property is worth billions of dollars to the Coca-Cola Company, and the company enforces its patent and trademark protections vigorously.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the contour bottle, Coca-Cola launched a special website and a year-long campaign that will include seven key initiatives:

  • The Coca-Cola Bottle: An American Icon at 100 – an exhibit with the High Museum of Art which will feature a variety of artists’ work including paintings by Andy Warhol
  • The Coca-Cola Bottle Art Tour: Inspiring Pop Culture for 100 Years – a traveling art exhibition
  • Television and digital films – 14 in total
  • New music anthem – called “Nobody Like You”
  • Global out-of-home campaign – called “Kissed By” featuring Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles
  • Book – French publishing house Assouline will publish the book called “Kiss the Past Hello”
  • App – called the Story of Coca-Cola Bottle App

Coca-Cola’s bottle design is undoubtedly one of the most iconic examples of successful package design in the world. It gives Coca-Cola a great deal of brand recognition, which is a significant competitive advantage since it is so well protected as valuable intellectual property. Even if the label is printed in different languages, people still recognize the brand by the bottle’s contour shape.

Suffice it to say, the company succeeded in building a truly distinctive bottle design in 1915, and that design continues to stand the test of time.

Image: Nick Amoscato license CC BY 2.0