Who is Our Speaker? 

J.D. Norton, former global manager of eBay and current head of internal communications at Thumbtack, is a purpose-driven and highly influential employee engagement and internal communications professional. He is an adept at driving strategy throughout multiple business-units across a global organization. With around 20 years of experience in HR space, he is passionate about creating innovative solutions for communicating and engaging, not just minds, but also hearts and hands, with the goal of building camaraderie, strengthening culture, and creating an amazing employee experience. He has managed global teams and executed unique, results-oriented engagement programs, which closely align with business objectives and company values. 

Podcast

A Peek into The Podcast 

00:49 – 02:34 – How did you create a strategy that aligns with the company goals and values and execute the same to engage employees in the business and mission of the company?

02:36 – 04:22 – What’s your opinion on employee engagement and building a culture of listening and learning? 

04:24 – 05:46 – How companies and managers have to adapt to the post COVID world? 

05:47 – 08:06 – What kind of innovative ways you think companies can do to keep employee engagement?

08:07 – 10:25 – How companies can help the managers to better prepare to handle the post COVID world? 

10:26 – 11:07 – Employee engagement is going to have a probably better impact on employee retention

Insightful Talk on Employee Engagement 

With this pandemic, what’s happening right now? I know, we are in an amazing space in terms of how the HR space is kind of getting transformed. So, let me go into the first question here. In your past experiences, you have led internal communications and employee experience for Symantec, how did you create a strategy that aligns with the company goals and values and execute the same to engage employees in the business and mission of the company?  

J.D.Norton: It’s interesting because I supported the Norton business unit at Symantec as well as the workspace security business unit. So, Symantec was split into three business units that were the main one and then the two that I supported and it’s interesting because you want to have a cohesive engagement strategy that aligns with the global companies strategy but at the same time sort of keeping the uniqueness of each of those business units and so it’s almost like creating two strategies in a way because you want to each one has different office locations, a different set of employees and you really want to create something that is really targeted to those specific people.

In very large organizations, you have sort of global or arching umbrella strategy, your vision, your mission, and then it’s kind of up to those business units to sort of determining how they align with those but keeping all of those in mind so I think that was you know specific to Symantec was how we did that; The Norton security unit was a lot younger, it was a little hipper, it was kind of the cool business unit as part of Symantec and so, we could do a lot of different things, a lot of the leadership was more apt to be casual and have conversations and have some fun with it and get into video.

Employee engagement now has got a lot of heavy focus. We all believe that employee engagement benefits both employees and organizations; but however, building a culture of listening learning, and doing in kind of remote teams, helping employees to take ownership of their own engagement, I think that’s a pretty challenging thing to do. What’s your opinion? What’s your experience been?  

J.D.Norton: Yeah, yeah, it really is. And I think that the listening and learning part is something that does get sort of overlooked a lot of times. My job is 70% just listening to what is happening within an organization. It’s like people and leadership looks to me to know what is happening within the organization, to have all of those voices, I always say, that internal communication is a sort of like the conduit between leadership and the employees and I’m that filter. I filtered information going both directions and so listening is huge because if you don’t have a pulse on what’s happening with all these employees throughout the company, then you can’t adequately give information to leadership to make decisions, and also if you can’t sort of disseminating information from leadership in a way that engages the employees knowing what they kind of want to hear, what they need to hear, then everything is kind of at a loss and that’s where you know engagement communication breakdown and so listening and learning I think is one of the most important things that a communicator can do.

In the post COVID world, how’s your experience is going to change, and how companies and managers have to adapt to this?  

J.D.Norton: I think right now, COVID itself like made all companies take a step back, and it forced them to get creative. It forced them to sort of, if anybody was ever lazy about employee engagement or communications you couldn’t be anymore because I think a lot of places may be relied on sort of that word of mouth and the water cooler talk that happened in the office and that is non-existent now. And so, it’s been interesting to see all of the creative ways people have been communicating and engaging their employees during COVID and I think what needs to happen post COVID, we need to take a lot of the learnings that we have and Institute those into what we were doing before because I think there’s been a lot of really cool things that have come up because COVID sort of forced our hands.

In a post COVID world, when you are looking at companies investing in employees, do you think this will be how much efforts should they put in terms of, for example, they can work from anywhere but there’s acceptance, the comfort factor, those come in and again with that comes in, what kind of innovative and creative ways you think you have seen or you think companies can do to keep the employee engagement?  

J.D.Norton: I think one of the things that’s first is, you need to get in front of employees more often especially the leadership team. You can’t just rely on once-a-month all hands to let employees see leadership because they don’t see them in the halls anymore, they don’t see them in the lunchroom. They have no visibility like if they’re not in a meeting with the leadership they don’t see them now and so it’s important to make sure that leadership within your company has a voice that the employees are constantly hearing, not overbearing such but like weekly meetings or bi-weekly meetings and change those up. 

Your leadership team maybe should be starting like a weekly, end of week, check-in like, “Hey, this is what was on my mind this week, this is what I’m doing, this is what I’m looking forward to…”  and doing shoutouts and celebrating people. I think there’s a lot that is going to need to be maintained in post COVID as well because I think that’s been one of those best practices that a lot of people have instituted and that have been great. I think leadership is being more visible now than they have been, and I think employees are really appreciating it, especially now that a lot of companies are going to be higher in remotely moving like a hybrid in office remote strategy for when they return to work, it’s going to be interesting.  

Leadership always needs to be transparent but especially now, you need to be seen and be heard by all of your employees. 

What kind of things you think companies can do to make sure that the managers are better prepared to handle the post COVID world?  

J.D.Norton: It’s a matter of actually having like a cascading strategy within your business. Everybody has always heard about cascading communications; it comes down but I think a lot of people rely too much on thinking that all managers know how to do this well. And when you’re cascading information, that’s where it always starts to sort of fall apart. You’re coming down, you have your leader, your C-level and then you’ve got your seniors, your VPs, your senior directors, your directors, and your managers. By the time you get to the managers, it’s like that game of phone, where the message has been lost.  

So, I think one thing that people really need to do especially now because you can’t always have these meetings with people and you can have these conversations is making sure that you’re equipping your managers with the tools that they need and how do you hold a meeting that is successful, what types of meetings are most successful for what types of messaging, giving them key messages. I think the key messaging thing, that’s something that carries across the internal comms as a whole, is so important because you want everyone saying the same thing. If one manager goes out and gives a different message, then the other managers are lost and the credibility is lost. And so, giving them all of those tools, it can be as simple as a document. Every time we have a big project or a big product or a program launching, we have a doc that we send to our extended leadership team that says here is how to communicate this.  

Employee engagement is going to have probably better impact on employee retention, right? 

J.D.Norton: Employee engagement is so important. If you don’t have an engaged employee base, they leave. If you aren’t making them feel like they’re developing and that they’re part of the journey, then you’re not going to have them for every long because the competition right now especially in places like Silicon Valley is insane, especially for engineers.  

Thank you for reading and listening to the podcast. The insights in this podcast will be super helpful to keep your employees engaged and motivated. Stay safe and productive!