The Importance Of Internal Marketing To The Employee Experience

Good morning. Happy Monday. It’s John Garrett, coming to you with another episode of Green Apple Slices where every Monday I always call up the — it’s not “the.”

Rachel: No, it’s not the drop of the…

John: I always call Accountants & Alliances for Sage Canada, Rachel Fisch.

Rachel: Hello, John. How are you?

John: The Rachel Fisch. Exactly. I’m good. How are you?

Rachel: Good. I just got back from Vegas and —

John: Oh, wow! So you’re broke.

Rachel: Oh, no, no, hanging out with the guys from Millennia Global there and then heading to Ottawa this Sunday. So I’ll be there for our chat next Monday.

John: Excellent. Very cool. Well, we always get together as you know. But for listeners that might be new, talking through an article about employee engagement or corporate culture, things along these lines, just trying to make the workplace a better place to be. I found this article on Forbes called “The Importance of Internal Marketing to the Employee Experience” which is, yeah, pretty huge, pretty huge, internal marketing, talking about basically just for a lot of companies, they’re always worried about the customer experience. A lot of times, they forget about the employee experience.

Rachel: Yes, like a lot. So the interesting thing is that I think all companies market to their employees, whether they think they are or not, but we’ve talked in several episodes recently about your intention behind it. So I think that if you can intentionally market to your employees, the message that you want them to hear, similar to the way that you have marketing staff, marketing externally, just to take one person from that team to be internally focused. In many cases, you’re communicating the same kind of thing, but you’re going to do so in a different way, or you want the buy-in from your employees first before you launch a program externally facing, but there’s still a connection between the two. So I think that there’s definitely some really great choices here.

John: Yeah, or you let the employees know what’s going on and where we’re headed and what products are launching or what have you before they find out about it in the general public, because then friends and family are asking and you’re like, “We don’t do that. Oh, I guess we do now.”

Rachel: Well, that’s just good corporate communications. But you’re right; there may be some companies out there that don’t do that particularly well either. I think there’s definitely, as I said, an intention, not just communicating what has been going on, but really kind of selling them on a vision going forward. I know that’s something that I’ve done since I’ve been here at Sage. Doing presentations to different staff things is kind of getting different teams buy in for where we’re going as a company or some of the initiatives that we’re working on, and really letting them know that where we’re going is actually possible and that we actually do have all the tools to do it.

John: Yeah, and by doing that, I’m sure that sometimes people can contribute ideas or look at from a different angle that might be able to accelerate that process even and make things better as a whole.

Rachel: Looking through the different, like it breaks it down into subtopics. So this is in a list, that’s numbered. Gosh, darn it! But it does kind of break it down. I’m happy when I see things in bold where it’s talking about bidirectional buy-in. It’s interesting, I mentioned I had been to the AICPA Women’s Global Leadership Summit. I was in a group of women. We’re talking about kind of what our superpower is. One of the ladies said, “My superpower is getting buy-in,” which basically just means that you are able to create influence. You have influence; you can get people to buy in.

It’s interesting that this is actually one of the things that they mentioned, bidirectional buy-ins, right, that it’s coming from the leadership to the staff as well as vice versa but that you can’t really get that without some level of enthusiasm. So it does then talk about how to earn that enthusiasm either. So I think it does definitely come down to influence, but it talks about it in a really intelligent way and very specifically for marketing purposes.

John: And I love how it says, you know, just sharing news and personal stories which I think dovetails nicely with the whole Green Apple message, just that the people that make up your company are people. They have lives, and they have things going on outside of work. Celebrating those and shining a light on those is a cool thing and definitely makes engagement go up. I mean, that’s just it. It’s really that simple on top of strategic initiatives and things like that. But that’s one way to also get enthusiasm because people want to work with people that they know, like, and trust. And that’s what happens.

Rachel: Absolutely. Even in your keynote, when you get people to talk to each other, like a room of 800 people, get them to talk about what they do and there’s kind of these low rumblings. Get them to talk about what their habits are or what they really love, and you can just hear and feel the energy and the volume in the room go up. So there’s definitely an enthusiasm and a shared passion that comes when you connect in that way for sure.

John: So that’s it. That’s what we got. If you want to read the article, you can go to greenapplepodcast.com. There’s a link there. Don’t forget to hit Subscribe so you can listen to all the episodes that we have each and every week. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @GreenApplePod or @FischBooks and I’m @RecoveringCPA. I think we should let everyone go be engaged in stuff with everybody.

So have a good week, Rachel. We’ll talk to you next Monday.

Rachel: You too, John. Talk to you later.