A great book came out a couple of years ago called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. For those who might be less familiar with ?The Dead? phenomenon: over 2,300 live performances from 1965 to 1995 established them as the most popular touring act in rock history?all without a single top 10 hit (until 1987?s ?Touch of Grey? reached number nine, driven by what had grown into an enormous concert-going fan base). The book is written by two dedicated (or rather ?Dead-icated?) dead-heads who happen to be in the center of some of the biggest changes in marketing in the past 40 years. Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, has attended over 100 Grateful Dead shows, and David Meerman Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, has seen?he thinks?45 (or so) shows.
Why would HR practitioners benefit from reading a marketing book??Two reasons: First, many of the lessons are ?business? lessons as much as they are marketing lessons.?And the more conversant you are with business strategy and ideas, the more credibility you bring to the table with your company leadership.?Second, we?ve found that our HR clients who partner with their marketing counterparts experience greatly increased influence on their organization.?How??By bringing their brand to life inside the company.?To do that well, HR leaders need to have a feel for marketing key marketing principles.
Another reason: inside of these marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead are some potent HR lessons, especially with respect to employee recognition programs.?
For example, the music industry has tanked in recent years due to its stubborn need to control content. As Halligan and Scott write in their book, The Grateful Dead figured this out a long time ago;?they focused on concerts as their main source of revenue, and allowed fans to record live shows:
??they actually established ?taper sections? where fans? equipment could be set up for the best sound quality.?When nearly every other band said ?No,? the Grateful Dead created a huge network of people who traded tapes in pre-Internet days.?The broad exposure led to millions of new fans and sold tickets to the live shows.?
Consider the ever-present urge in the HR world to control, to regulate, to create rules. Aside from things like health care benefits or sexual harassment?where rules are critical?in what areas of HR might you be able to turn away from rigid controls to get better results?
Imagine overburdening an employee recognition program with a thicket of rules.?That?s the LAST thing you want with an employee recognition program because each of those rules creates a barrier to adoption and pretty soon, nobody is using the program.?Wise HR professionals ?get? this and go the other direction by minimizing rules for recognition programs ? and in doing so, foster programs that really get used.?We?re not talking about people in tie-dyed clothing? passing joints around?your drug testing policies will manage that. We?re talking about people at work passing around kudos and high fives about great work.?Surely, we don?t need a lot of restrictions around that.
Beyond trusting your people, why not reward your recognition program?s greatest ?fans???Recognize the top recognizers. The Grateful Dead created a way to always put die-hard fans in the front row:
??Unlike nearly every other band, the Grateful Dead controlled the ticket sales for their concerts.?The unique ticketing system?led to word-of-mouth marketing like this: ?Want some great tickets to the Grateful Dead concert? You can buy tickets directly from the band. I know their phone number!??For most gigs, blocks of tickets were also sold at the venue box office and through electronic ticketing systems.?But the best seats always went to the band?s biggest fans.?
And how do you keep fans coming back?
?The Grateful Dead played over 2,300 concerts, and each one was completely unique due to their improvisational style.??Unlike traditional improvisation, the band ?improvised individually and as a group ? at the same time.?Musically, this simultaneous improvisation was profound as it required band members to listen carefully to what each of the band members were doing musically and build on it ? while simultaneously carrying on their own improvisational riffs.??
This was a big reason fans felt compelled to see the band again and again, and to create (and trade) as many tape recordings of shows as possible.?Variety kept everything they did interesting.
Our research with managers confirms employee recognition programs need variety to keep your people using them.?One-size-fits-all programs get old fast, and over time start to feel stale and less genuine.?Make sure you have strategies in place to 1) notice day-to-day effort, 2) reward above-and-beyond results, and 3) celebrate career milestones.?And then make sure you have a wide variety of tactics and tools available to deliver those strategies.
Jerry Garcia and friends might sum this up by saying ?have a little faith in people, reward your fans, give them variety, and let the goodness fly.??The Grateful Dead taught us that beautiful things happen when you trust people and let them help define the experience.?Maybe that?s why they were so grateful.
There are lessons to learn from FIS, a Fortune 500 financial services company. This global organization has used recognition to unify its culture and thousands of employees around the world following a number of mergers and acquisitions. The company?s recognition program has paid off. Eighteen months after the launch, FIS experienced a 61 percent increase in recognition, 16 percent increase in overall engagement, and eight percent increase in trust. Find out why the FIS story is one of team-building, communication, and unification.
Source: http://www.octanner.com/blog/2012/10/free-up-your-employee-recognition-program/
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