Blog Roundup: The Irresistible Workplace

Welcome to our monthly round-up of articles and resources on internal communications, employee experience, and employee engagement. We tweet the articles and share on our social channels but in case you missed them here are a few of our favorites.

With the current rise of greatercorporate transparency, workforce mobility, and skills shortages; culture, engagement, and retention have emerged as top organizational priorities for business leaders. This month’s round-up touches on these topics including why an ‘irresistible’ workplace is good for business.

• Employees Love Working at These Companies
  —By Jeanne Sahadi, @jjsahadi“No employer is perfect. But some companies come much closer than others, at least in the eyes of the staff. Using anonymous feedback provided by those who completed reviews of their employers, jobs site Glassdoor compiled a list of the top 50 best places to work. Companies that made the list typically valued their employees, had a unique culture that aligned with the company’s mission, offered clear direction, provided great perks and benefits and hired smart people.”

• Are You Missing The Most Important Audience For Your Content Marketing?—By Carla Johnson, via @cmicontent
  “Similar to a customer’s journey with a brand, companies need to drive awareness, engagement, and conversion of the company’s strategy with employees to ensure that they viscerally understand it and how it benefits customers,” Wilson says. “Just as it’s critical to deliver on each step of the customer journey, it’s similarly critical to deliver on each step of the employee journey. Once this is in place, teams can focus on delivering outcomes that support the strategy rather than performing a set of disconnected activities. You have to keep pounding the awareness and engagement of the message and bake it into the culture.”

• 5 Reasons Great Employee Experience Leads to Great Customer Experience—By Niraj Ranjan Rout @nirajr
  “Increasing employee engagement is the goal that employers should be striving for. Foresee, a Customer Experience analytics firm, examined the results of two studies that used their analytics technology. The first was about employee experience for American workers at all levels of employment. The second observed the retail experience of 40,000 Customers. What they discovered was Customer Satisfaction was highest in retailers with high employee engagement. This led to increased revenues for those stores by referrals; return visits and purchases from other channels.”

• 4 Google work secrets for boosting creativity in your company— Dr. Tamara Friedrich, @DrFriedrichWBS
  “While it may be more difficult than less complex forms of performance, there is research that shows there are methods for identifying creative performers, and a clear pattern of characteristics that can be assessed when hiring, including knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics such as personality.”

• Can Content Marketing Create Corporate Culture?—By Carla Johnson, @CarlaJohnson
  “…when you want to create rich, meaningful relationships with customers. In our book Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, Robert Rose and I talk about why internal audiences are always the first place to start with any experience you hope to createfor an external audience. Just as we strategically plan and manage the stories we tell external audiences, we need to plan and structure how we manage content creation for internal audiences. It’s a key part of how to develop a dialogue with employees andcreate remarkable experiences for them.”The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer showed that people trust companies and the media less than in previous years. Who do they trust? Employees. But Gallup’s 2013 State of the Workplace poll reports that a jaw-dropping 41% of employees don’t even know what their brand stands for. How can you trust an employee who has a pretty high chance of not knowing what they’re talking about?”

• Why being an ‘irresistible’ workplace is good for business—David Bator, @tembosocial
  “Reflecting on the company’s new Global Human Capital Research, Deloitte’s Josh Bersin coined a term for enterprises that have a strategic handle on corporate culture. “Simply Irresistible” workplaces, he explained, are those that create a working environment that attracts top talent and helps employees thrive. For your business, this means creating a better workplace atmosphere that inspires excellent workers to flock to you.”