I’m a Customer Experience Designer – someone who uses a multifunctional, holistic blend of customer service, marketing, communications, and anthropology. Earlier in my career, I honed my craft as a nonprofit membership development manager where I created several successful relationship-building programs and strategies that connected members to associations. This background, along with my later experiences within companies and startup businesses, guides my unique approach to connecting customers with brands.

If you’re currently seeking a savvy, innovative professional to help your business with:

• Customer Engagement and Retention
• Voice of the Customer Programs
• Consumer/Market Research
• Online Community Development

We should really talk.

Five Reasons Why I’m a Great Hire

When great candidates are set side-by-side and evaluated, it’s often the intangibles that make the difference. Here are five intangible qualities that I bring to my work.

1. Eclectic Problem Solver: I love browsing through architectural design books, reading Popular Science, watching nature shows, and sharing beers and conversation with philosophers. I do it not only because I’m curious but also because it helps me come up with innovative ideas for how to solve problems in my work.

2. Intuitive Leader: I believe that leading is about building great relationships, setting the right expectations, gaining commitments, and modeling the behavior you want to see. And even great leaders must know when to follow when it serves the best interest of the team (and the customer). I’m experienced at leading from both management and team player positions.

3. Change Cartographer: Success in business is knowing when to make changes and how to make them so employees and customers don’t become shell-shocked. While it can be an emotional and logistical rollercoaster, change can be mapped to ensure it works. With a background in helping organizations make improvements to their work processes, I know how to successfully design and guide change initiatives.

4. Bridge Builder: Getting things done is rarely accomplished in isolation. It’s often a process involving collaboration among different people, workgroups, and divisions. I’m highly experienced at connecting people, facilitating dialogue, getting committed buy-in from critical stakeholders, and communicating results.

5. Passionate Learner: Voracious is how I would describe my approach to learning. If you read my blog, you know that I’m dedicated to not only increasing my knowledge of new things, but sharing this knowledge with others. I’m also committed to reviewing and improving on what I’ve already done. I believe the true test of a professional is how they learn from their experiments and develop better ways of thinking and doing.

Do these qualities sound like what you’re looking for in your employees? If so, let’s talk. Email me at chris@chrisbaileyworks.com or give me a call at 512.394.3598. Look forward to finding out how we can work together.

Portfolio

Select Blogposts:
Great Customer Engagement Starts On The Inside
Is Your Website All Pretty and No Purpose?
Beyond Engaged Community Members…Think Stewardship
Five Steps To Make Employees Your Best Brand Ambassadors

Resume and Profile

For a deeper dive into my qualifications, experience and results, check out my LinkedIn Profile or my VisualCV.

Most businesses that know they need to create a customer engagement program start with good questions:

• How do we establish our brand promise and get it in the forefront of our customers’ minds?
• How do we become an essential partner with our customers?
• How can we best understand their everyday needs and challenges?

What’s missing here, though? Most questions and objectives that drive customer engagement programs focus on the external but give little thought and planning to the internal…you know, those people you might know as “employees.” I’m probably preaching to the choir if you’re a community manager or in a similar role where your success is tied to gaining internal buy-in (if this is you, feel free to share this post with your manager, CMO, or CEO who needs a good prodding).

Okay, so if you or your company is intent on implementing a customer engagement program think about how it will integrate into your organizational cultures and dynamics. The question that needs to be asked is:

• How can we generate acceptance and adoption of this program throughout the organization?

Success in your program begins with making sure your entire organization and workforce is aligned to your program’s goals. Here are a few ideas to make that happen:

Get internal buy-in. Yeah, I know…easier said than done. But consider this: your customers are savvy enough to know when they’re being conned and even a whiff of insincerity will trigger a nasty visceral response that will only get amplified through the web and social media. Avoid that insincerity by making sure that each one of your employees – not just the ones who are customer-facing – know the objectives and expectations of your customer engagement program. Each employee needs to embody the soul of your program. If they don’t, they might as well just answer the phone with “Hello, how can I lie to you today?”

Identify prospective employee evangelists. Just as you’re going to want to locate your customer evangelists, you need to figure out who among your employees are going to be crucial to successfully launching your program. Not sure? Conduct a social network analysis inside your organization. That will help you determine who your prime influencers and connectors are. These folks are not always managers and execs…they could be your receptionist or mailroom guy or junior salesperson. But whoever they are, you need to encourage them on-board, get knowledgeable about the program, and give them all the tools and resources they need to evangelize your program from the inside.

Understand and build competencies. Don’t assume all your employees are techno-wizards and social media smarty-pants. Many are not so it’s your mission to figure out which individuals need training and then deliver it. If you’re developing an online community, give your folks a chance to get their mitts on it. If you’re using video to connect with customers, make sure your employees know what’s happening so they don’t sound like ignorant buffoons. Nothing is worse than developing a slick new program but not having all your employees reading and working from the same playbook.

And for heaven’s sake, BE REAL. I’m going to level with you about something you probably already know: trust in corporations is at a pretty dismal place right now. Customers are on hyper-alert for any phoniness so if you’re thinking you can glide your way through an engagement program, you might want to let your PR folks know up front. Your program will only be successful if your business and brand are real, honest, transparent, and caring about your customers. Get that right and your customers will be open and willing to build a great relationship with your company.

photo credit: pdxdiver (via Flickr)

Here’s the challenge that is weighing rather heavily on me as we enter the new year. As a blogger, I just don’t feel I can keep up with two primary professional blogs and a business blog for BaileyHill Media (let alone trying to continually grow BaileyHill Media’s business). I now realize that what I once loved to do has become an arduous chore and I don’t like it. So while there’s no perfect solution I’m trying to figure out what will allow me to sustain my passion for blogging ideas, my desire for further building a community here, and my commitment to helping our growing stable of clients at BaileyHill Media.

My chief challenge is that my interests don’t fall into one particular niche. I might talk about employee engagement issues one day, online community development another day, and finish the week with thoughts on creativity. I see these somewhat eclectic interests as a personal strength but understand they can also be a detriment to generating salient content that folks want to read. If you subscribe to read more about improving organizational leadership, you may not care at all about how to build a better Facebook community. And I really don’t want to be hamstrung into only writing about one thing…that wouldn’t be authentic to who I am.

I need your help and would love to get your feedback on what I’m considering as my next step.

The option I’m heavily considering right now is to consolidate Alchemy of Soulful Work and Gravit8 Interactivity into a single online presence (likely to be located at chrisbaileyworks.com) that would serve all niches. It would be focused on me and the somewhat disparate interests I have: future of work, organizational development, management and leadership, social business, business anthropology, online communities, social media and web communication, etc., etc. In many ways, I can see the overlap…but here’s what I really want to know: would you still subscribe and read my writing? As much as I sometimes try to pretend it doesn’t matter, I do need you as a reader and commenter. Your thoughtful feedback to my posts are part of the dialogue that I value.

So, there’s the question that I want to pose to you. If you’re a reader of Alchemy, would you mind reading more of the things I write about at Gravit8; and it’s the same question if you’re a reader of Gravit8. Or would you prefer and advise that I continue to keep the niches separate and find ways to maintain a writing regimen that emphasizes both of these blogs?

For this post – perhaps more than almost any other that I’ve written in a while – I do need your comments and advice. Thanks so much.

Earlier this week, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch managed to get his mitts on some rather juicy inside information from Google. Turns out that the tech darling isn’t the career paradise that it’s been made out to be. For all the gushing that us outsiders did over their innovative benefits and employment practices, perhaps it was all just hyperbole. From the post:

One message stands out though in most of the posts – employees thought they were entering the promised land when they joined Google, and most of them were disappointed. Some of them wondered if it meant they were somehow lacking. One person sums it all up nicely:

“Those of us who failed to thrive at Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves. Just seeing that other people ran into the same issues is a huge relief. Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can’t be happy there how will you ever be happy? It’s supposed to be the ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can’t be productive there how will you ever be productive?”

There are some cautionary lessons to be extracted from this if you’re not only on the hook for your organization’s employer branding but employee engagement.

The reality doesn’t match the expectation. This is a failure of the brand to deliver the expected experience. Consumers rail against companies that deliver poor brand experiences, particularly when the brand has been hyped to the nth degree (e.g., Chevrolet, Sprint, Microsoft Vista). So, why does employer branding get a relatively free pass?

Individuals wanted to work for Google because it was supposed to be different than the norm, had innovative benefits, promoted a fun workplace, etc., etc. Turns out that maybe these were a clever facade masking a workplace and company that were just humdrum. If you want to sell the sizzle, that steak better not come out limp and soggy.

Professional failing is personal failure. It pisses me off when I hear stuff like this. Why? Because there’s a hellacious management problem here that no one is apparently trying to resolve. If a manager is going to wear the big hat and call him- or herself a leader, they better start with making sure that their people are getting what they need to be – and feel – successful. If an employee is struggling with their work, you better believe that’s likely going to get internalized as a “personal” problem. It’s a one-way ticket to not only poor engagement but a morale freefall.

When the going gets tough, uniqueness gets crushed. Yeah, I know…it’s tough out there for business. I get it. Now get over it. Everybody’s impacted so don’t think for a second that you’re special (hell, even Microsoft is laying folks off). So rather than curl up in a ball do something that none of your competition is likely thinking about right now: become even more unique and remarkable. Trust me, your competitor is hoping you’ll lay low like them. Instead, do something that will make their management wet themselves. Actually engage in employer branding. Build a workplace model where the people you have are doing their best not because they’re scared to death they’ll lose their job tomorrow if they don’t, but because they genuinely care about their work and their organization. Go out and look for the talent that’s looking for a place to make a difference (there’s plenty of good folks out there now).

Don’t waste this perfectly good opportunity. Be a leader, show some guts, and build something special when no one else appears to be doing it.

The modern concept of branding and word-of-mouth-marketing focuses primarily on getting customers to become raving fans and talk positively about a company to their friends and colleagues. In the past few years, this focus has come to also include the value of getting employees to be raving fans of their own company, to speak openly and honestly about their company’s virtues, and to share their pride for their own and the company’s work. The thinking goes that if a company employs happy and satisfied employees, then that adds to an overall positive reflection of the company brand.

Yeah, but what does this have to do with non-profits…or maybe more importantly, how does this help you achieve your organizational mission? I’d like to argue that your own staff is the critical, yet underdeveloped, edge you need to meeting your fundraising, advocacy, and other goals. You have powerful resources that extend far outside of your own marketing department. Here are five steps in figuring out how to use them.

1. Know your internal broadcasters.
Your staff can be roughly divided into two groups: consumers and broadcasters. Consumers take in content through various channels like newspapers, blogs, and websites. Broadcasters do all of this and also create the content. They’re your bloggers, Twitterers, Facebookers, Plurkers, etc. They’re the ones who are connecting with others far outside your particular marketing focus. They’re the ones you want to build your employee brand ambassador program around.

2. Reward your broadcasters.
Broadcasters live for information. They want to know all the cool and worthy initiatives that are going on in your organization and be able to share that information with others. Don’t be shy about opening access and sharing this valuable information. And ask for their input and insight into how to penetrate your organization’s messages deeper into your target communities and wider into new areas.

3. Allow for creativity.
The social media space and branding world evolve at a rapid pace, which means that your dedicated and passionate broadcasters tend to live at the cutting edge. Don’t make the mistake of binding them or restricting their platforms. Innovative social media broadcasters are always finding new ways to use current tools. And for every one of today’s Twitters and Facebooks, there are several undeveloped tools waiting to be created and used.

4. Show them how to recruit other staff.
Broadcasters shouldn’t be an exclusive clique within your organization. Help them create more broadcasters and new brand ambassadors. Ask them to do “lunch and learns” about social media. Create knowledge sharing orientations to help them discuss their brand ambassador work when asked by others in your organization. The objective isn’t necessarily to get 100% of your staff involved in social media and branding…instead, show that every individual has an opportunity to contribute.

5. Keep an eye on the relationship.
I can imagine one objection or question that may be sitting at the tip of your tongue: how do we make sure that our broadcasters don’t put the organization or our formal branding work in jeopardy? The simple answer is that you can’t and the brutal truth is that you no longer have total control over the message. Sorry…those days are long gone, which is why #5 is so important.

It may seem obvious, but in order for your staff to speak openly, authentically, and enthusiastically about your organization, they need to be in a positive relationship with your organization. That means being focused on your staff’s level of engagement with their work and tapping into the pride your staff has working for your organization and it’s mission.

If your organization has had great results from cultivating organization-wide brand ambassadors, what’s your story? Share the wealth in the comments below.

From Bailey WorkPlay, first published July 28, 2008

In the Fall 2008 edition of the OD Practitioner [membership required], Peter Block writes a provocative article entitled Nothing is Next where he explores emerging trends in organizations. Block is one of the chief influences (along with Meg Wheatley and Bob Sutton) in my own work and he doesn’t disappoint here. One of the trends he highlights is Fearful Employees.

In a world of increasing consolidation and lessened customer choice, employees have been commoditized. Workers are treated as costs, not assets. The faster we can automate processes, outsource functions and send questions to a website, the happier we are. It is cost effective, but has created widespread insecurity so that people are as afraid of their bosses now as they were forty years ago when I began this work.

I had thought that when team building, larger group methods, decades of employee involvement and the results gained by the quality movement had become mainstream and part of the common knowledge, we would care more for our employees. I would have expected we might have reduced the social distance between levels. We would act as partners in our relationship with the boss. We would feel the place we work is where we belong. I don’t see it, maybe I am missing it, but the alienation and caution people feel about the workplace seems too painfully common.

He surfaces a disappointment that I think is shared by many who care about improving workplace dynamics and employee engagement. And it’s exacerbated now with the economy the way it is. Companies are in full survival mode with their focus squarely on managing through the short-term. Nothing wrong with that in principle; it would be irresponsible to not act on current business conditions. However, when does action merely become reaction? Was all this talk about employee empowerment and engagement just a bunch of crap, conditional on sunny economic conditions? Time to go back to the comfortable business basics of last century?

The real question that organizations of all types need to ask right now is…what is the opportunity in front of you right now to (re)create a business that changes the relationships with employees and customers?

Leave it to Pamela Slim to help me fine-tune something that I’ve been playing around with for a while. As I aim to keep all the various parts of my professional life in some sort of harmonious symmetry, I find myself struggling to define what I am doing. On a near daily basis I ask myself questions like:

How does my career path relate to my current job?
How does my current job relate to my graduate work in business anthropology?
How does my graduate work relate to Bailey WorkPlay?
How does Bailey WorkPlay relate to my career path?
…and so the cycle continues.

Much of the confusion lies in that word ‘job’. I often wonder how the work I do daily relates to where I’m going in my professional life. Don’t get me wrong…I enjoy what I do. Yet, there’s little of the business anthropology that I’m being trained to do and the employee engagement that embodies the focus of Bailey WorkPlay. How does all of this integrate? Or is that just the technicolor dream of a guy who is often accused of being a crazy idealist?

Let’s start with the whole notion of a job. It’s a word that carries some fairly crappy baggage…and more often than not we help pack its bags. By taking the small view of a job, we easily lose sight of our greater professional purpose. Pamela smartly points out:

When you focus first on the perfect job, you automatically narrow your opportunities to jobs you are familiar with. Jobs are temporary things, often enticing on paper until you realize that as soon as you get comfortable in your position, it will change, your boss will change, your team will change or your organization will change. That is just the nature of business. Therefore if you go into a job excited by the position or the person you will be working for and not the work itself, you often set yourself up to be disappointed.

Instead, she encourages us to think about our ‘life’s work’ instead. I’ve been mulling over my own life’s work (or what I tend to think of as a calling) ever since I left college. There are days when I think I have it all figured out only to have something happen that puts my idea of a calling in doubt. Thanks to Pamela I think I now know what happened: I focused a bit too much on the job details of the calling. I know…strangely paradoxical.

Now I have the beginnings of a new perspective on the question of my own life’s work. Where the core of Pamela’s life’s work is transformational, I believe mine is relational. You can see this in the questions I pose to myself above. It’s one of the reasons I chose anthropology since so much of it involves intensive study of human relations. I love taking ideas and seeing how they relate to each other. I love bringing people and ideas together and then helping them see the relationships. I love working in organizations and helping leaders better relate to their employees and customers. This is the core purpose behind my work in business anthropology and Bailey WorkPlay.

And knowing this, I too can be in occasionally rough situations in my job and still remain focused on my core passion of relationships. Even when I’m not actually doing business anthropology or employee engagement, I am helping to generate relationships between people, ideas, and actions every day.

So…here’s a gentle challenge for this week. If you’re struggling to figure out how your job, career path, and life’s work relate to each other, take some time and reflect on the exercise at the end of Pamela’s post. Then come back and share what you believe is your life’s work. I’d love to hear about it and know what I can do to support you.

Here’s my latest blogpost over at the Connection Cafe…

Yesterday, Lacey wrote about how to engage folks who are interested in volunteering for organizations. It’s a great segue into another area that I find lacking in most nonprofit websites: staff and organizational employees. What do they both have in common? Your volunteers and paid staff are part of a diverse community within your organization. However, it’s this diversity in community that is often neglected.

Frequently, staff can get left aside in the community. Why? Is it because they are paid members of the community? Are their roles separate from the community that includes folks like donors, volunteers, Board members? If you’re thinking ‘yes’ to either of these questions, I would argue that these ideas can’t work in today’s world where employee engagement is a true key to strong organizational health. It’s time to bring your staff more fully into your organization’s community.

Here are some ideas that can help you better integrate your own staff into your organization’s community:

Head on over to the cafe to Cafe to read the rest of the blogpost…

The modern concept of branding and word-of-mouth-marketing focuses primarily on getting customers to become raving fans and talk positively about a company to their friends and colleagues. In the past few years, this focus has come to also include the value of getting employees to be raving fans of their own company, to speak openly and honestly about their company’s virtues, and to share their pride for their own and the company’s work. The thinking goes that if a company employs happy and satisfied employees, then that adds to an overall positive reflection of the company brand.

Yeah, but what does this have to do with non-profits…or maybe more importantly, how does this help you achieve your organizational mission? I’d like to argue that your own staff is the critical, yet underdeveloped, edge you need to meeting your fundraising, advocacy, and other goals. You have powerful resources that extend far outside of your own marketing department. Here are five steps in figuring out how to use them.

1. Know your internal broadcasters.
Your staff can be roughly divided into two groups: consumers and broadcasters. Consumers take in content through various channels like newspapers, blogs, and websites. Broadcasters do all of this and also create the content. They’re your bloggers, Twitterers, Facebookers, Plurkers, etc. They’re the ones who are connecting with others far outside your particular marketing focus. They’re the ones you want to build your employee brand ambassador program around.

2. Reward your broadcasters.
Broadcasters live for information. They want to know all the cool and worthy initiatives that are going on in your organization and be able to share that information with others. Don’t be shy about opening access and sharing this valuable information. And ask for their input and insight into how to penetrate your organization’s messages deeper into your target communities and wider into new areas.

3. Allow for creativity.
The social media space and branding world evolve at a rapid pace, which means that your dedicated and passionate broadcasters tend to live at the cutting edge. Don’t make the mistake of binding them or restricting their platforms. Innovative social media broadcasters are always finding new ways to use current tools. And for every one of today’s Twitters and Facebooks, there are several undeveloped tools waiting to be created and used.

4. Show them how to recruit other staff.
Broadcasters shouldn’t be an exclusive clique within your organization. Help them create more broadcasters and new brand ambassadors. Ask them to do “lunch and learns” about social media. Create knowledge sharing orientations to help them discuss their brand ambassador work when asked by others in your organization. The objective isn’t necessarily to get 100% of your staff involved in social media and branding…instead, show that every individual has an opportunity to contribute.

5. Keep an eye on the relationship.
I can imagine one objection or question that may be sitting at the tip of your tongue: how do we make sure that our broadcasters don’t put the organization or our formal branding work in jeopardy? The simple answer is that you can’t and the brutal truth is that you no longer have total control over the message. Sorry…those days are long gone, which is why #5 is so important.

It may seem obvious, but in order for your staff to speak openly, authentically, and enthusiastically about your organization, they need to be in a positive relationship with your organization. That means being focused on your staff’s level of engagement with their work and tapping into the pride your staff has working for your organization and it’s mission.

If your organization has had great results from cultivating organization-wide brand ambassadors, what’s your story? Share the wealth in the comments below.

Before diving into the idea of hidden talent, we should take a step back and examine the current understanding of talent. Before 1997, the concept of talent was pretty much exclusive to the entertainment industry. That changed when McKinsey published their seminal study called The War for Talent. Whether or not you buy into whether there’s continues to be a war or not (particularly with our current sensitivities toward actual war), I think we can agree with the central thesis: that a post-industrial era company’s most vital asset is not bricks, widgets, or equipment; it lies in the intangible qualities of the company’s people.

Yet, if that’s true then why do so many organizations typically do a lackluster job at attracting, managing, and engaging talent? The answer lies in the persistent use of old school human resource practices and industrial age thinking about employees.

The Struggle to Attract and Keep Talent
The interesting trend is that recruitment continues to outpace retention when it comes to attention and innovation. But then, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Getting something (or someone) new has always been sexier than trying to keep them. I learned that in a past-life working in nonprofit association membership management. When I compiled my monthly member data reports, my Boards and Executive Directors always asked first about the growth statistics. “How many new members did we get? Which recruitment effort worked the best? Etc, etc, etc.”

However, for all of this attention and innovation, employee recruitment often continues to be disconnected from the issues of retention. Think of the typical sales cycle within most companies: marketing creates a branding image and sales continues to build on this image to close the deal. What happens if this carefully crafted image turns out to be more myth than reality? You have some very pissed off customers on your hands (think: JetBlue, Microsoft Vista, General Motors for some recent examples of unrealistic branding). The very same thing happens in organizations. New talented employees are lured in by slick employer branding only to find that the reality of working there is quite different. Again, pissed off employees who are feeling disenchanted and devalued.

And this feeling isn’t exclusive to newer hires. If organizational changes are made that negatively disrupt that initial branding or a more recent employment experience (think job description changes or management shake ups), then you can expect a similar type of disengagement. The fact is that if left unengaged, your people will be shopping their themselves and their talents even in not so good economic times. Michael Gregoire, President and CEO of Taleo Corporation recently wrote:

Today’s workforce is in control. Employees want to understand how they are connected to the company. They want to know how they can progress. They want to work at a place that fits their lifestyle choices. As employers, we have been placed in the unenviable position of needing to market our companies to our employees each and every day. If we neglect to engage our own employees, those who are frustrated can surf hundreds of job boards to see what other opportunities await.

A Refreshed Look at Talent
While talent is often defined as a natural aptitude or skill, I take a wider view of it. It’s not just about raw intellect or strictly defined as having an Ivy League education. I see a talent as something unique to an individual. I also see it as a gift; a gift given to each of us that we can use in service to others. Some of these talents are immediately evident, particularly those that match up with our job descriptions. But we know that job descriptions, while necessary, can be limiting unless employees are given the room to explore outside of their boundaries. Each of us have been endowed with talents that not only energize us when we use them, they are an organization’s prime source of innovation, passionate enthusiasm, and competitive remarkability. In short, these hidden talents are one of the critical elements in creating a culture of high employee engagement that leads to long-term organizational success.

This week, I’ll be exploring hidden talents, why they are important, how to surface and use them in work, and ways to embed them in organizational culture. I’m looking forward to the rich dialogue we’ll cocreate together.