If a client chooses another option over the one you’re selling, there are two things you can do.

The first is to attack the client directly – accuse them of being unprofessional, complain that you didn’t do your best and deserve another chance, bad-mouth the competitor, complain and use all your sales skills and existing knowledge of the client to try and guilt them into reversing the decision.

The second is to take it on the chin, to wish them well and tell them that the door is always open if there’s anything you can ever do for them. Keep it professional and objective, get feedback on what you could have done better, and stay in touch.

Guess which one means you might get the business back eventually? That’s right – the one most of us don’t do.

Criticism.

There’s a poster on my wall at work that says “If you’re tired of people exposing your mistakes, don’t attack the people. Attack the mistakes.” I’ve seen a few people in the industry respond to criticism by publicly attacking the critic. How does this make you look more credible? If you have issue with the review, address the review, not the reviewer. Attacking people, instead of issues, just weakens your argument. Or, just for something different, be confident enough in what you’re doing to ignore the criticism. If you don’t credit the reviewer, don’ respond publicly – just ignore it. Drawing attention to nasty things someone said about you on the internet doesn’t create anything but antipathy. And I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough of that already.

If it works, do it again. if it doesn’t, do it again. And don’t feed the trolls.

(I’ll preface this by pointing out that I am a gamer, albeit casually. So my insights into gaming as a subculture are driven largely by my own participation in gaming. )

Where gaming becomes essentially a tribe (by which I mean a subculture with a communal interest, language and standard of value) is when shared exposure to a particular experience becomes a unifying factor. Gamers become members of factions within their tribe that revolve around genres, platforms, styles, social connections and more. There’s occasionally some tribal warfare among these smaller groups (PC vs console, X360 vs PS3, etc) but they are still all gamers. Their membership to a self-selected class of people becomes part of their identity. They actively seek out discussion on their areas of interest. They recognise each other through a shared cultural language and, occasionally, uniform.

How do gamers get wins? Achievement. Achievement over universal expectation, set by the industry. Beating a game universally acknowledged as difficult creates prestige and personal value. Winning a gaming competition against skilled players builds reputation. The community defines its own champions against the standard set by programmers and the average experience curve. In short, the continued standard of value grows organically, as more games, more gamers and a constantly shifting standard of ‘average’ skill contribute to an overall perception.

Tribal values are community driven. They are set by adherence to a shared evaluation of what constitutes average. So creating wins is about having a communal set expectation of ‘ordinary’ so that ‘extraordinary’ is easily recognisable. You can’t overstep the mark without knowing where the mark is, and you can’t add value without knowing the difference between what is extra and what’s just service. So setting the average expectation is key.

Encouraging wins from a community perspective is the other side of the coin. Enhancing a culture which celebrates individual achievement against an accepted norm creates competition, not against each other, but against the standard. In golf, this is referred to as ‘playing against the course’. Set a ‘par’ performance on a particular task (which is essentially average expectation) and people will try to beat it for a self-perceived pay-off. If you have a culture which celebrates wins, and confers an objective, external benefit which supplements the individual’s sense of achievement, you create two connections. You connect achievement with external recognition, and you connect individual standard of value with recognised norms.

Stimulating tribal values allows us to create a framework to evaluate success. Connecting individual perception of above-average performance with recognisable reward builds community. The epic win pays off; in higher engagement with the community, in improved performance against the average, and in emotional reinvestment from the employee.

How can you change your culture to encourage epic wins?

I think there are five things that smart, tech-savvy corporates (and recruiters, but I tend to write from a corporate perspective) can do to help candidates and managers with the issue of ‘public’ information about people’s private lives.

Set boundaries.

Where do you as a company/recruiter draw the line? Is LinkedIn the limit, or will you use Google, Twitter, Facebook, (the list is endless) to build a cultural profile. Determine what constitutes relevant information and make it public that these are the streams you’ll combine to build your information flow. This lets candidates know where you’ll be looking.

Publish your practice.

Make it part of your Terms and Conditions. Put special content in your “Thanks For Applying” auto-replies so there’s NO DOUBT that this is your practice. Better yet, give candidates an opportunity to opt-out of this process if they’re concerned. Outline what your boundaries are (and preferably your methodology) so candidates can perform the same audits and be prepared to address any discrepancies that come up.

Educate your candidates.

Publish tips about how to protect private information for your candidates. We used to put up tips about how to write resumes. Now put up tips about protecting yourself from personal brand fall-out. We are learned in this field, so our expectation is different. My engineers wouldn’t appreciate the challenges in personal vs professional, so passing on our expertise is key. And a value-add to candidates, who tend to feel like renters in a buyer’s market anyway.

Create an internal content filter.

Be prepared to have your policy of making cultural decisions tested by candidates. Have written guidelines about what content can and cannot be used to make these decisions. Have guidelines about how you clarify identity (email addresses are a good indicator for an ATS) in a shared-name situation, how far you go back monitoring, how you amplify and evaluate digital foot-prints. If you’re going to evaluate on data, have a visible measuring system so you know what to keep, and what to discard when profiling.

Make a statement with your employer brand.

I know it’s my area of personal focus, but I think that being transparent, authentic and honest in your conversations with people who are interested in joining you is key. And that extends to telling them how that you’re using this media to evaluate them, how you’re evaluating them and give them the opportunity to be actively involved in the discussion. It’s about maintaining trust between the organisation and your candidates, and demonstrating that you value discussion, not hearsay.

These may not save you, but I think they’re still good tips when it comes to protecting your company, your brand and your candidates. At the end of the day, we need to be able to show that we respect our candidates, and while we can use this information to make better hiring decisions, we won’t do that at the expense of our employees’ trust.

The Swastika Test (a)

You search a candidate’s name – let’s call him Rolf Gerhard. In the image results section, there’s a picture of them holding a swastika armband. It’s on the first page of results, and is linked to a reputable news service, as well as being repeated a few times from other sources. How do you approach this?

The Amazon Test (a)

We saw yesterday software that parses your Amazon.com purchases into your ATS social media profile, as well as other information from various additional social media sites. Your candidate is 38 and male, listed as single, buys a lot of large women’s underwear. Once reviewed Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert online. Bought a book on how to do make up. They’re one of two candidates. The other candidate has no online identity. What’s your conclusion, based on this information?

The Religious Test (a)

You search a candidate’s name and find reviews of Richard Dawkins’ books. The client you’re recruiting for is looking for a senior manager for a not-for-profit that receives church funding. How does this affect your position on the candidate’s culture fit?

Now imagine the following:

The Swastika Test (b)

Information that doesn’t appear in the search format for images includes the caption, which says “Rolf Gerhard displays the swastika he found in his letterbox. Thousands of Jewish families appear to have been targeted.”

The Amazon Test (b)

Your candidate lives with two females, who regularly use his Amazon account to buy goods online and have them delivered.  There is no record of this in the transactional data you have in the system.

The Religious Test (b)

Your candidate once reviewed Richard Dawkins online as part of a book club studying a variety of religious texts, and due to SEO on the pages surrounding Dawkins and his recent visits to Australia, pages concerning atheist texts have been pushed up the rankings to appear before the other reviews.

Recruitment agencies and companies will have to define an ethical position on this information and how it applies to their recruitment process. I think due diligence is a great idea when checking candidates. However, there’s a legitimacy of information question involved. If everything (self-published or not) needs to be viewed in context to be understood, will recruiters build the whole picture and maintain objectivity?

Try again….

The Swastika Test (c)

The recruiter is young, new to the industry and to profiling candidates, and comes from a background which was significantly impacted by the Holocaust. Are they affected by seeing a candidate who is coming in for an interview tomorrow with them, holding a swastika?

The Amazon Test (c)

In order to resolve this, in the second interview, the recruiter lets slip that there’s been a social media search and shows the candidate the results. The candidate (who is flustered by having a dossier on them exposed) sees the Amazon results and explains the situation. Does your recruiter see defensive cover-up or explanation?

The Religious Test (c)

In the search results, given the candidate has been painted as an atheism advocate by earlier results, the recruiter finds a reference to the candidate’s name in the summary of a protected position paper on late-term abortions, which can’t be read fully. Your recruiter can’t access the facts, but presents the reference as being an ‘unresolved’ question about the candidate to the client’s hiring manager.

So what do we need to consider?

Ethical questions about whether the existence of this information means you should use it aside, it’s obvious that without all the facts, this data is online hearsay. It’s inconsistent, and distracts from your purpose – can this candidate do the job? Does this social media dossier distract recruiters from their traditional observations of character in person and in communication? If I were new to social media (and there are still millions of people who are) being told “If you didn’t want us to find this you should have protected yourself better” is a cop-out of the highest order. If you haven’t told the candidate this is happening, it’s snooping. It isn’t reference checking – references are supplied. It isn’t ‘doing a background check’ because you aren’t checking facts. You’re building a picture from individual behaviours, served without context. Without an objective standard (like LinkedIn) how does this data serve as a quantifiable resource for evaluating fit for role/culture?

And finally

Yesterday we had a TinyChat discussion about this. About six of us were talking, when I flagged the Swastika question above. The exchange went like this:

Me: What would you think if you googled me and found a pic of me holding a swastika armband?

NotMe: I’d like it if I were recruiting for the Nazi Party

NotMe: (continues on thread here)

Out of context, can I then publish that NotMe said in an online discussion “I’d like it if I were recruiting for the Nazi party ”? The quote is accurate. And I’m not required to explain the context on my blog. If that little gem turned up when researching a candidate, how would you respond?

Other authors and comments on this topic from

Riges Younan

Aaron Dodd

Justin Hillier

Andy Headworth

When we first began using the internet as a forum for classified advertising, with sites like SEEK, we found that we could significantly reduce the time and cost of going to market for jobs, provided our audience knew how to deal with internet recruitment tactics. Companies had a basic site (some more complex, obviously, usually aligned with interest in the internet’s tools, like computers) but content published online was still paid. It was a niche media stream, like running one’s own private magazine. The global economy which exists online makes it easier for people to find work, and the searchable nature of the information made it easier for us to find data on nearly any subject. The problem became quality control. Ease of publishing led to a loss of focus on quality, and a perceived dip in value (after all, publishing online was easier than newspapers, etc, so didn’t receive the same respect from the business community)

Now, as we enter a web which allows people, not brands or identities, to create content which drastically affects our world view, we are caught in a difficult equation. There’s plenty to learn, but there’s no objectivity anymore. We are compelled to find our truths by aligning socially (using technology) with subsets of online communities who share our position, issue by issue, until we feel we have found our tribes.  So as a result, the voice of the common man has started to have more relevance than the voice of a company (which is almost universally perceived as evil, or at the least, self-validating online). We are becoming a community driven by opinion, seeking out validation in shared opinion. So how do we apply this to work, to love, to life?

The internet made us able to connect, to be ourselves online. However, in exposing us to the brilliance of unpublished minds, it also exposes the ignorance, bigotry, fear and subjectivity of our collective dark-side. The internet amplifies humanity, and we are now, more than ever, in a position to choose which side of our humanity we wish to feed with content. And in doing so, we inadvertently create an online profile which telegraphs our personality to the world at large. What we choose to interact with demonstrates our interests, our passions, the things we’ll stand up for. (Quick example – I read a blog post earlier and the factual, grammar and spelling errors were more distracting than the actual theme of the post. I found myself wanting to comment on the inaccuracies at the expense of adding value. Now, I can do nothing, or I can educate the author privately about how this kind of thing impacts personal reputation, or I can publicly point out flaws, or I can write a post of my own, or I can email the link to friends who will find actual value in the post and not pick out the errors. If this were ten years ago, I’d have read this in a newspaper, and probably just turned the page. The ability to interact breeds interaction, almost ad infinitum!)

As a community which facilitates an emotional connection (and regular reinvestment) between people and companies/communities, our challenge in the technologically-adept social landscape is to elevate the conversation from “skill-set  = job” to “person = community member, commercial asset and private citizen” in a way which adds value to our clients/employers, and lets us embrace our human capacity to socialise and grow with technology as a tool, not as a motivator. If we accept the premise that people prefer to do work they love for a company they like, with a salary that affords them comfort and ataraxia outside their professional life, then we take it upon ourselves to apply the internet’s capacity for connection to achieve these aims. People love to connect with people – the skill in our business, which previously was about facilitating the delivery of a skill-set to a company, is now about delivering a person, with all their public faults, social connections, opinions and history. Employment ceases to be about the simple equations of demand and supply for skills. It is now about personality and personal choice.

For me, it’s simple. The internet lets you talk about anything, with almost anyone. However, you must first free yourself from the idea that published content has legitimacy. When you get to the core, the internet is a tool for connecting people, and yet it hasn’t made them smarter, wiser, less judgemental or less prone to ridiculous mistakes. In fact, it’s probably done the reverse.

Pretending to be a nice guy will only get you so far. (Frank Fontaine, BioShock)

In BioShock, the historical story tells you of Frank Fontaine, a man who came to the fictional city of Rapture, Rapture, built on Ayn Rand’s principles of objective realist capitalism, was a city with no religion or socialist agenda. Fontaine established himself as God-fearing and concerned with the workers, which earned him points with the general population. Fontaine eventually revealed himself as a conman and sadist, so eager for control that he led his followers in a war against the status quo, sacrificing them for his personal glory. Even as the city lay empty, dying and filled with the insane, domination was more important than the thing he was dominating. His lust for control overcame the reason the thing he wanted to control existed, and quickly changed a vibrant metropolis into a dormant, dysfunctional dystopia.

If (like Frank Fontaine) your goal is personal glory, have the courage to admit it outright. Pretending your goals are corporate altruism or team play when they aren’t doesn’t just make you a liar. Eventually, it makes you unemployed.

Teams of Different Skills Can Be Hugely Effective Against Contingencies (X-Men, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, Overlord, etc)

Games that employ more than one potential protagonist are built around the premise of ‘specific skill for specific challenge’. Archers are good against footsoldiers, cavalry good against archers, etc. These games, while teaching us that each sub-set of your overall force has a specialty, also teach us how best to combine those specialities into a dynamic effort. Particularly when the problem you thought you were attacking turns out to be something else entirely. Teams with different skill sets offer different perspectives and advantages, but also give us quick resources when the game changes. They teach us that analysing your challenges and strategies isn’t as much about finding the right tool for the job as it is about finding the right tools for solving the problems around the job as well. It’s one thing to plan for when things go right, but another to have the right people on the team if something unforeseen happens.

It’s Not Your Competition You’re Up Against. It’s Expectation. (Every racing game with a time trial mode. Ever)

In a lot of racing games from the early to mid nineties, the goal was just to win. Complete a course in the fastest time and avoid crashing, and you’re in line for champagne and enormous crockery. As console gaming started getting smarter, the idea that it was your opponent you were racing started to change. It isn’t. It’s the best possible outcome that you’re trying to beat, or at least match. Other competitors crash in the same way you do – they miss turns, take bad corners, hit rails and (occasionally) pile into fences too. It’s the ghost time you’re trying to beat –the best possible application of skill on a particular challenge. Beating someone else who is as fallible as you are might have been enough when being better than the others was a good marketing strategy. These days, it’s about beating expectation, about beating the perceived ideal. And that’s a lot harder.

Move or die. (Frogger, and the million variations thereon)

Frogger is one of the all time greatest games for simple entertainment. The goal is simple – move, or die. There are a million threats waiting to take you down as you navigate from the bottom to the top, again and again. And in fact, the game isn’t about making it to the end, because you have to do it over again and again. Frogger is about making small moves in the right direction, sometimes lateral, sometimes forward, to get where you’re going. And the only sure way to die is to stand still when you need to make a move.

If It’s Easy, It’s Not Going To Be Satisfying (Ninja Gaiden, G-Police, Battletoads, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Contra)

Videogames can induce swearing on an unprecedented scale. Also controller throwing, TV breakages and serious psychological meltdowns. Why? Because they’re TOUGH! Games like those listed above were games that required every ounce of skill, focus and determination to get through. You fought the same challenges over and over again because, if you got through one level (ONE LEVEL!!!) of these games, you were proud. The first gamer reputations began when people would crowd around arcade machines to watch the best players finish a game previously thought unfinishable. They were gods.

If it’s not challenging to beat, it’s almost certainly not going to be satisfying for you. If you’re not having trouble completing a challenge, it’s time to step it up a notch. Good management involves (at least to some extent) pushing the envelope of your skills. If you are doing something that’s unsatisfying, you need to up the difficulty level. Sure, you’re out of your comfort zone. The reward for flourishing there is so much stronger than fighting a battle you know you can win with one hand.

Reward is important (Mario Bros)

Every time you finish a mammoth trial in the original Mario Bros franchise, you heard the same old thing. “Sorry – our princess is in another castle.” Effectively – ‘Thanks for all the effort you put in. You’ll get a reward next time, I promise. Now, back to work!”

I don’t think this needs to be spelled out, do you? (Also, for Portal fans – the cake is a lie. Don’t promise me something I’m not going to get.)

Innovations are gateways to new opportunity. (Half Life 2, Portal)

In both the games above, plus hundreds more, devices change the way you interact with the world. Technology changes your focus, from seeing things as background, unnecessary items to potential weapons, different ways of navigating obstacles, and even an extra dimension to a story. In these two games particularly, the new technology adds an extra dimension to the game, and changes the way the player sees opportunity. As we interact more through technology, publish more and connect more with each other, embracing technology isn’t just keeping up with the pack – it’s about leading them, and finding new ways to challenge traditional thinking. I’m not done – just done for now.

Your EVP (and your employer brand) should be an echo. It should be an echo of how people feel every day about working for you, about how you treat them as an employer, about how working with you adds to their lives. It should not be propaganda, which sets out to convince. It should not be a campaign for change or revolution. It should be the quiet affirmation of something people may not already realise – this is how it feels to be a part of your business. (I can’t over-emphasise the word feels enough either- the EVP isn’t about what reason, but emotion).

When you’re applying the brand, it should be with a light touch. It should feel like an accent. Whether you’re taking it as far as some (designing forms and technological interactions to connect more meaningfully with people) or simply implementing an EVP at the basic level, the rule always applies. You don’t need the town crier. You need a quiet ‘yes’ whispered in the ear of your staff. That’s why it works – because you’re not selling them, you’re reminding them.

Externally, a heavier touch is needed, but still nothing excessive. People are convinced by emotional connections – you’re not offering them a bargain-basement deal, so don’t advertise like you are. Go out for talent by using different means of creating an emotional impression. Draw them into conversation, so that their interaction with you becomes a human exchange. After all, this is the brand that’s made up of people, so it’s much easier to be conversational and honest. Talented people looking at your organisation should see no difference between the story you’re giving them and the way you conduct yourselves (both on and offline) with other talent. They should see that this is who you are, and, once they’ve joined you, see that this is STILL who you are.

Most people won’t notice that you’ve made your intranet more user-friendly, or that you’ve made it easier to change their details themselves, or that you’ve restructured your career development framework. The won’t notice the specifics – they’ll notice that when they interact with the business as employees, it feels like they expect it to feel.

There’s another post coming up about how this applies to your employer brand in social media, but for now I’ll say this – your EVP is supposedly the aggregate of every thought your employees have ever had about what it’s like to work for you. Social media lets them publish those thoughts. Now, if you could read every conversation every single employee of yours had online about working for you, would they match?

The behaviour of employees, unchecked and unmonitored, can be tremendously damaging to a brand. An employee whose identity, online or off, is linked to a brand, can through their behaviour bring the brand into disrepute, lose clients for the business, land clients in actual legal trouble and have a significant impact on the ability of the business to attract talent and clients.

I’m not suggesting every employee will. Nearly every employee will behave in a manner consistent with your corporate values. Hopefully, you hired them because they believe in the same things your company does anyway. However, if ‘common sense’ was as common as the title suggests, we wouldn’t need anything like these policies. And because it isn’t, we need to be prepared.

There are two distinct groups of people – those who believe that adults, unchecked and self-monitoring, will always act like mature, responsible people who avoid public outbursts and irrational arguments, and those that have spent a bit of time on the internet. Let’s face it – employees are just people, and people are capable of behaving in ways we can never predict, both online and off.

So our solution is this. On one hand, you build a policy. A legal framework that identifies which behaviours are outside the company’s tolerance for appropriate behaviour as linked with the brand. This is no different to a professional conduct policy, which most businesses have in one form or another. It spells out what is acceptable behaviour, and what is not. Hopefully, you never have to use that. And it doesn’t have to be extreme – Nick Hodge tells us that Microsoft’s is a list of bullet points. It needs to be the company’s back-stop against behaviour which is detrimental.

On the flip side of that, you educate staff. You explain to staff that there is a policy, which they should read, about what’s good behaviour online. As a business, you offer to train them in creating successful and lucrative social presences. You invite them to become advocates and spokespeople for the brand on company-sponsored forums. You give staff the benefit of the doubt, and some tools to help them steer clear of potential mess.

This is not control. This is risk management. You don’t assume that people driving your company cars have current licences – you check that they know what they’re doing before they take a fleet car out for a spin. Control is an active interest and ongoing program of involvement. Management is a system which involves monitoring, and adjustment where necessary of existing processes. Particularly with an audience to whom this technology is new, difficult to get used to, and requires the use of skills that haven’t been developed previously. (In our case, additional care has to be taken, because our employee base is highly technical. They like tolerances and technical limits. You can’t speak in generalities to engineers – the laws must be rigid.)

So at this point, here’s the situation. Any employee is free to exist on any social network they choose. They are free to network with anyone they like. They are free to post pictures, upload videos, chat with people and undertake any social networking activities which fall within our Use of IT Equipment policy. The only codicil is that if they are going to wilfully engage in (or have been found to engage in) behaviours which contravene the conduct policy, they remove their association with the business from their active profile.  This is a choice to honour a behavioural code which aligns with our values, or to ignore that code.

Essentially, the company is saying “If you’re going to act this way, we don’t want to be associated with you.” The same as the company would if an employee ran around the city in corporate livery attacking foreigners or molesting girls in nightclubs. Engaging in that behaviour is the responsibility of the individual. The brand needs to stand up for the values which support it, and behaviours which fall outside this should be separated from the brand. (There is an argument that an employee who plans to engage in these behaviours is probably not someone you want to employ anyway, but we’ll save that one.)

This is not control. We are not dictating your behaviour. We are saying that you, as a professional who understands the consequences, needs to act in a manner which supports the public values of our brand. If you choose not to, your association with the brand must cease – you are damaging an asset. We are saying that you have a choice. And if you choose to behave that way while representing the brand, there will be consequences. As I said earlier, most of the time, this isn’t even an issue. Depending on your brand values, most employees already adhere to an unofficial code of conduct – it’s a community-set standard of behaviour.

And yes – people will always argue that you aren’t an employee 24/7. No, you aren’t. However, the global web makes no distinction. It doesn’t care when you logged off and went from being an employee to a private citizen. It sees your employer name in your profile, and you represent that employer – in spirit, at the very least.

I’d love to hear more about what other organisations are doing in this space. If you know of any great case studies, please comment, or get in touch!

Your EVP and your employer brand are ideally connected to the employee experience. Not just as the result of it (which you gained through research and focus groups and surveys and such) but a continual cause-and-effect. Your brand is at its most effective when it is used to influence how employees feel about working for you, and how they connect with you. For many companies, this is about internal reinforcement – you told us you work here for X, so we’re going to provide more of X. X is great! Hooray for X, which we provide!

However, I think there’s a more active way to do this. Every interaction your employees have with your business (and particularly your HR department) is an interaction with the experience they’ve chosen to invest in as employees. When you’re doing performance reviews, when you’re communicating changes to the corporate structure, when you’re getting employees to fill out timesheets – all of these are aspects of the product that is the employment experience. It’s the product that you as a company deliver to your employees. It’s what they get because they’ve choosing to work for you.

So why not make these interactions more meaningful? Why not apply the principles of better user experience to employment? Look at whether processes add value. Look at whether interactions (via technology or otherwise) sit alongside the brand principles you have. Talk to staff and ask “How could we make doing this task a better experience for you?” Build processes and product experiences that are meaningful – that empower employees, and that tie in with their emotional connection to the business.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a company that does an internal survey every two years, asking employees a range of questions about the business; where it’s heading, what they need to do more of, manager behaviour – it’s a comprehensive survey. And moreover, it can precipitate real change in the business as a result of the feedback. In preparation for the next survey, it’s previously been their tradition to put out a simple list of the things which have changed as a result of the last survey, in an all-staff email, to be read (or ignored) by staff, before the next survey comes along.

This year, said company chose to do something different. They built a game, a game of Spot The Difference, between two images. Image one was the office two years ago. Image two was the same image, with all the improvements made as a result of the last survey. More desks. More training. Environmental awareness measures. When you clicked on the difference in the second shot, a little blurb came up detailing the change, and the effect it had on the company as a whole. As an incentive, they held a competition for three iPhones. All you had to do to enter was find the ten differences they’d included in the game, and register your email address on the internal server, and you‘re were in the draw.

The response was brilliant. Not just from a numbers perspective, but also from qualitative feedback. Everyone who entered the competition said that they enjoyed this – because it made the changes recognisable, and because it gave them a challenge: to see what had changed in their time as an employee. The team who built the game designed the experience so that, when it came time to do the survey, those who had played the game had thought about what changes would come from their answers. And the percentage of completed surveys jumped about 15% as a result.

When you’re looking at communicating to employees, or implementing a new process, or engaging new hires on induction – think beyond what the company wants to say, and focus on how it makes your audience interact with the company and feel about the brand. Every positive experience, every meaningful experience, contributes to a stronger emotional investment. And that leads to better retention of the right people, and more discretionary effort. And those are never bad things.