The 400% Increase In Workplace Skills

Destination marketing a community is more complicated than marketing a specific business or organization.

Community destination marketing organizations (DMOs) such as those I managed are intermediaries.  They have no control over the communities they market requiring that a lot of time be spent cajoling stakeholder businesses, strategic partners and officials to align.

Few, if any, of these stakeholders have any clue about marketing let alone sense of place, but usually they think they do, making alignment far more complicated than it may sound and a never-ending process.

And you thought herding cats was difficult.

Residents are the ultimate internal stakeholders for a DMO, especially those who are passionate about their community, but if they only knew that the greatest obstacles to marketing a community comes from those they assume would be the first to get on board.

Workplace skills needed for community marketing range far beyond what people think of as marketing including analytics, project management, technology, strategy-making, critical thinking and organizational behavior, to name a handful.

Also required is a working knowledge of areas such as archeology, history, physiography, consumer psychology, geology, financing, culture, ecosystems and authenticity.

Just in the first 18 months after I retired more than five years ago in late 2009, skills needed in the workplace increased more than 400% from 178 to 924.

This is also why experts see the future of higher education including periods of intensive competency-based education and re-education while in the workforce, something my last organization began to provide to staff with an online program in 2005.

Each employee was able to take up to 20 courses annually selecting from over 3,000 titles, each followed by an online test to demonstrate competency.  But supervisors and direct reports selected some courses in support of specific roles that could be taken during the workday.

The inability to adapt to this need for competency-based workplace education is what led disruptive innovation guru Dr. Clayton Christensen a few years ago to predict that within 15 years, half of the universities and colleges in America could be in bankruptcy.

He didn’t mean that the need for traditional higher education will decline but that the way it will be accessed is rapidly shifting in a way that may leave thousands of smaller colleges as well as many state institution behind.

A leader in this movement to competency-based education for students already in the workforce is Westminster College, a few blocks from where my daughter and grandsons live.

Another is Southern New Hampshire University which redesigned its entire business administration program into modules that provide an innovative, competency-based, three year bachelor’s degree  but  this is all a topic for another essay.

A litmus test I often used to quickly detect how much someone really knew about marketing a community is if they still lobbied for mass marketing such as traditional print, radio and television, dating them by at least three decades.

That’s when, as research shows, marketing shifted away from how many eyeballs you reached to reaching the right eyeballs, not by “shouting” to get attention with traditional ads but earning attention through astute “content marketing.”

Long ago, reaching just the right consumers right at the time when they wanted the information through tools such as search engine optimization and Google adwords transcended traditional advertising.

Savvy marketers today understand that 20% of their efforts produce 80% of their results and similarly 20% of their customers or prospects represent 80% of their success.

The fact that I came early to this awareness in my forty year career is due to listening to astute elders in destination marketing who understood how fast things were changing.

The challenge in marketing is to cast more and more narrowly in order to zero in on the most likely and highly engaged prospects - without interrupting them - until they are seeking information to make a decision and it is clear your destination or product is what they want.

Now, according to studies, marketers are investing in “retargeting” or re-engaging users who have already accessed content about a destination or product via an app or mobile website.  Research shows that for every $1 invested in retargeting there is an incremental increase of $4 in sales.

It works best when focused on prospects who are already engaged.  A mistake many marketers make is viewing it as “missionary” work when at its very essence; it is more like gardening than hunting, more cultivating engagement than casting nets.

For retargeting to work, you need engagement and that begins with great content that zeroes in on what marketing intelligence (research) has identified as traits of greatest appeal to a specific audience.  Even more importantly, you must be willing to accept that your product isn’t for everyone and stop “yelling” to get attention such as with billboards.

The key objective to content marketing, which began its transcendence three decades ago, is to provide something of value focused around differentiation.

A form of retargeting can be seen in action when you leave a website to search another related to the same objective and an ad pops up with the opportunity to return to a deeper link on the earlier site.

The percentage of marketers overall that spend up to 50% on retargeting has doubled in the last year.  Nearly three-quarters (71%) of marketers spend between 10 to 50% of their digital marketing budgets on retargeting.

As marketing has been for more than three decades now, segmentation of those who access marketing content is at the core of retargeting.

Retargeting will be more of a challenge for community marketing organizations (DMOs) because they are intermediaries.  The actual transactions take place with stakeholder businesses and organizations but it can be done.

As one chief marketing officer, Adam Berke, noted recently, marketing placement has evolved from “guess and check” to real-time programmatic campaigns that leverage engagement to ROI.

So the next time you pass by a community still using traditional media such as outdoor billboards, wave hello to a real live “dinosaur.”

Also certain is that as much as I appear to keep up with destination marketing since retirement, I became a “dinosaur” the day I walked out the door.

The same can be said for today’s college graduates.  A degree is just the beginning of a lifetime of learning.

The Hardest Workplace Challenge

Hiring the right people is the hardest part of management.

Many people who are disengaged or actively disengaged at work are great at crafting a resume and interviewing.  Many are even able to get past case studies and batteries of tests.

It is crucial to remember that 30% or less of the entire workforce is engaged.  So a hiring process must determine if a candidate is:

• Among the 50-60% of the workforce overall that is not engaged.
• Among the 18-20% of the workforce that is actively disengaged, or
• A high performer that is “grow and go” or trying to escape an organization that has become a haven for disengaged workers.

Studies over more than 15 years now have shown that breakdowns of engagement in the workforce have varied very little, even among management.

Cities face this challenge as well when they seek to develop or attract “talent,” now well proven to be the best way to grow economically.

It is interesting that 150 years after the Civil War effectively ended here in Durham, and more than 60 years since officials from Durham began to lay the groundwork for its evolution as a center for the creative class, the state of North Carolina has only now closed the workforce gap created by that conflict.

But the talent that drives organizations of any size as well as entire local economies is entrepreneurial and studies by Gallup show that about 5 in every 1000 working age adults possess the talents that underlie entrepreneurship.

Of those Americans who do not already own a business, only 2.5% have very high-level entrepreneurial talent.

Gallup researchers estimate that among the 30 million U.S. students now in middle and high schools, there are 150,000 future “blue-chip” entrepreneurs.

Training, support such as hubs and venture capital funding, as well as educational development are important, but experts find that they won’t create talents such as these where it doesn’t exist, merely foster them where they exist.

Talents and skillsets shouldn’t be confused.

Key to attracting and retaining talent at any level or size of organization is also about understanding and managing turnover.

I finally learned during the last part of my career to break turnover down into preventable and unpreventable, voluntary and involuntary and by tenure and performance level.

Turnover alone is far too broad a metric.  Having a low turnover rate can be indicative of even greater problems than a high turnover rate.  It is important to zero in on positive turnover, e.g.

• “Grow and go” policies for talented high performers when there aren’t positions to move up
• “Firing Fast” when new hires turn out not to be as self-advertised
• Making quick changes when any employee disengages or is found to be “actively disengaged” such as working to undermine others

That’s why it is important to hire slow and then fire fast.  Rarely is an employee going to become truly engaged if this hasn’t occurred in the first six months.

One of the hardest lessons to learn is that failing to discharge low performers in a very timely manner is a sure fire way to dishearten, burn out and lose high performers, who on average are 400% more productive.

There are studies that show what high performers want from a workplace, but at the very nitty-gritty, they want to be rewarded, which includes with a workplace free of those who would undermine or hold them back.

This is the element most workplace consultants never plumb but something anyone who reads between the lines of in-depth exit interviews is bound to uncover.  Remediation attempts are fine but nothing works as well as hiring the right people.

This is also true of CEOs and governing board members.  I worked under some incredible boards of directors but it was always clear when individual members were engaged or just putting in the time.  And there was always one it seemed who was actively disengaged or trying to undermine the organization and me.

But one weakness of governing boards as it is for elected bodies is the reluctance to “fire,” discharge or call out unproductive and actively disengaged members.  Most governing boards are reluctant to internally self-govern.

This is also at the heart of why it is so hard to get good candidates to run and when they are elected to keep them.

Look at any elected body and I guarantee you will find the same breakdown of engaged, disengaged and actively disengaged - or worse -that is found in the American workforce.

Of course, just as smaller organizations have a higher level of engagement, so do elected bodies as they come down to the local level.

Unfortunately, the way we finance and conduct elections in America makes it almost impossible for voters to make decisions based on the performance and levels of engagement among candidates for office.

But when it comes to society at large, we have yet to come to grips with engagement in the population.  Officials and the news media seem eager to assign responsibility to school systems and workplaces but engagement begins at the personal level and with parenting.

Dating to records when settlers first immigrated to this continent, including legends and stories passed down by Native Americans; there has always been a concern over the part of society that seems disengaged, or worse, actively disengaged.

Our nature as human beings is to try to “breathe fire” into these individuals.  You can see a denial about this reality today among those who fear that safety nets are an excuse to land rather than bounce back leading some to try to to restore work requirements and volunteerism as a qualification.

A lot of what we call gridlock is a refusal to deal with the same realities in society that are found in the workplace and have inhabited our population from our first settlements.

There is simply a portion of society that is or chooses to be disengaged or worse, actively disengaged.

And believe me; they are certainly far from all being poor.

A business approach would be to carefully distinguish those who just need a hand up from those who refuse lifelines and those who are mentally or physically disabled.

Like businesses do with leakage of goods to theft, maybe for the sake of those who are engaged, we need as a society to come to grips with the fact that a portion of society never will be and simply incorporate it as the cost of doing business, as the cost of society.

If this sounds un-empathetic, those of us who believe they are empathetic need to be aware of research finding that the more empathetic managers are, the more egocentric they tend to become.

The problem with this is that instead of paying attention to scientific, generalizable data, they begin projecting their own values on those they are trying to help.  I stand guilty as charged.

As much as cities and states talk about attracting talent, they focus too much on granting incentives or “big game hunting” that would be better invested in fostering talent at home and becoming places talented people want to live and put down roots.

This begins with placing a premium on:

• tree canopy, technology and other infrastructure,
• scenic preservation and elimination of blight,
• clean air and water,
• distinctive communities with ample natural space,
• well-resourced secondary schools,
• continuous workforce training collaborations including competency-based learning as well as
• universal day care.