Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
Measuring Morale
I’ve always been very interested in internal branding. The ‘War for Talent’ as McKinsey called it, seems to be one of the greatest of CEO concerns.
Brands help morale. This makes intuitive sense. People feel proud working for a great brand, so it helps recruit, retain and motivate people.
You can argue that most brands, to some extent, these days are service brands. Even General Motors, the quintessential manufacturing company, earns over two thirds of its profits from servicing and financing.
However, there’s surprisingly little data on internal morale. Even large sophisticated companies measure very little. Even if they do, they do it sporadically, often when something goes wrong. It’s also very hard to put the data in context – either by comparing the scores to similar companies or tracking them over time.
I recently discovered Glassdoor.com, which is an excellent source of (admittedly pretty rough) data on the subject. It’s a job review site, where employees go to rank their companies, disclose their salaries and bitch about their employers. Its putative purpose is give information to job applicants . But the real motivation for most, I imagine, is simply for people to let off steam. No matter! Information wants to be free and this is a great example of the internet opening up metrics to the world.
This is a snapshot I quickly built on the pharmaceutical category:
Sample sizes are small. (Maybe they’ll grow over time.) But they’re usually robust enough to be able to do something with. This picture is pretty clear, for example and I believe it. (Pfizer and Wyeth are about to merge.)
At least we’re measuring something that was previously not thought to be measurable.
This is even more powerful if you correlate it to brand strength. There’s nearly always a correspondence. And it’s more powerful yet if you track it over time.
Welcome to the age of transparency!
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