WHY WORD OF MOUTH (WOM)
STILL WORKS BEST
There are probably at least a dozen good reasons for
folks to look forward to the prospect of getting out of their houses, off the
Zoom calls, and back to the office, but none will be more important than the
long-awaited return to those time-honored and ritualistic “watercooler”
conversations. These critical daily pipelines for the most current, direct and
valuable dissemination of the gospel, the gossip, and the goings-on of any
business are, without question, the most effective purveyors of connection, engagement
and company culture ever invented. And, just to be clear, in most companies,
more substantive and actionable information generally flows back and forth
during such sessions than in any formally organized meetings where no one wants
to be too outspoken, too woke or not woke enough, or too far ahead of the pack.
Meetings these days make mainly for consensus, wasted time and mediocrity. (See
https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/make-your-meetings-crisp-or-forget-them.html .)
And, while you’re at it, forget about Teams and Slack
as well. They may be handy for real-time messaging and short alerts, but
they’re sterile, noisy and cluttered environments largely drained of real
interpersonal connection and/or emotional engagement where it’s virtually
impossible to get any actual flow going or hold substantive conversations.
Unmoderated and largely uncontrolled, these channels quickly turn into sewers
of specious sentiment, woke wars, and podiums for the loudest, most voluminous,
and most pedantic voices in the conversation - and not much else. Yelling
through a digital megaphone – especially to an asynchronous, disconnected, and
often remote crowd - isn’t any more effective at convincing anyone of anything
than running through the streets shouting at the top of your lungs. For sure,
you’ve been heard, but have you been listened to?
There’s simply no good alternative and nothing more
efficient than getting the juicy tidbits directly and personally right from the
horse’s mouth. At the very best, online conversations offer a tiny fraction of
the many cues which we consciously and subconsciously collect and collate in
every single face-to-face conversation. And frankly, that’s why word of mouth
(WOM) is still the most credible, authentic, and valuable endorsement and
recommendation vehicle which businesses can employ to get their messages to and
through their employees and out to the marketplace. And, in a word, WOM
works best at work.
It turns out that, while millions of Americans have
largely given up on the mainstream media as a source of objective information
(you can thank Trump, his minions, and his misfits for that) and millions of
others have abandoned traditional forms of advertising as well as any belief in
our political leaders or in what we see and read online, we still basically
want to trust the folks we work with every day to give us the straight scoop.
Pre-pandemic, peer-to-peer, face-to-face, the workplace was the best place to
be - and to be seen and heard - because we trust the people that we know and
with whom we spend most of our daily waking hours. Even more importantly, the
work environment serves a curatorial and collective function for us – we know
where our friends, peers and others will regularly be (at least in the old
days) and we knew when they’d be there and how to readily access them. And of
this reliable regularity, of course, is now entirely up for grabs.
It’s already clear that what the environment’s going
to look like as we return to the office will be considerably different than our
fond and nostalgic memories of the places we left. For one thing, for sure,
discussing politics in the office is a no-win proposition, a waste of breath,
and bad for the business as well. (See https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/dont-mention-the-election.html.)
Given the substantial time that we’ve all been
homebound and imprisoned in carefully filtered online information bubbles where
getting the news depended on how and what whichever source we were tuned into
saw fit to share, I think we’re going to find it challenging, upsetting and
highly revelatory when we leave our own little echo chambers and Covid-19
circles, clans and clusters and get back to the work world; reacquaint
ourselves with seriously changed old friends and virtually unknown new ones;
and immediately get a strong dose of the new realities of the world outside of
our windows. As much as we all think we’ve just been cooped up in suspended
animation for two years, the fact is that we’ve had very different experiences
– mostly bad – and they’ve left scars, sour spots and a lot of tender
sensibilities.
The common ground, the shared views, and even the
conversations around the water cooler simply aren’t going to provide the safe
spaces which they once did. Word of mouth is going to have to work even harder
and in dramatically circumscribed circumstances. And management is going to have to quickly
and clearly set out some new keys, rules of the road, and frankly some
limitations (freedom of speech notwithstanding) on what are going to be genial
conversations in the “new” world of work. (See https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/the-old-office-rules-no-longer-apply-got-any-new-ones.html .)
And I’m not simply talking about pronouns although -
even there - it’s clear that most of the world doesn’t understand or appreciate
at any given point in time what the constantly shifting appropriate protocols
are and why, apparently, it’s no longer proper to even ask. (See https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/spare-me-from-the-pronoun-police.html.) In a world
of pronoun-denominated name tags, the next step may have to be warning signs
which we all wear (like convention badges) outlining all the matters and topics
we’d be pleased to never discuss at the office. This turn of events may
be good for sports fans (arguably still a safe topic), but it’s gonna be hard
on most other day-to-day social chatter.
We’re going to have to carefully rebuild and
restructure the water cooler conversations because they’re the heart of the
information sharing systems we employ at work and those informal sharing
systems are how we develop, build, and sustain our trust in and comfort with
our peers and others. Ultimately, it’s that basic trust that’s the fundamental
foundation of all the commercial interactions we have with - and all the
business we do with - each other. As simple trust and social sharing
disappears, there’s very little left upon which to form the common bonds and
connections we need to make our commerce systems and our society work.
So, the question really is what should the new rules
of the road be and how should they be implemented in a way that doesn’t simply
cause new and different problems? If you’re a business aggressively trying to
(a) get your people back to business and (b) trying to keep them from spending
inordinate amounts of time every day lecturin’, learnin’, and arguing with each
other about things that don’t mean a hills of beans to the business, here are a
few thoughts and suggestions.
First and foremost, focus on the few. It turns out
that only about 10% of your team members are the most active sharers – they’re
well-intentioned, think they’re being additive and helpful, and frankly they
can’t really help themselves. These are the folks who make it their business to
mind other people’s business and they’re the ones that need to be reminded that
the office is no longer the place for too much chatter about sensitive
subjects.
Second, create a better, structured and finite outlet
for the discussions. In the hybrid world we’re looking at, it’s not enough to
say that we need your body at the office three days a week rain or shine (or
something like that) because that doesn’t really make much sense to anyone.
It’s much better to offer a concrete reason to return and to say something like
we’re having a regularly scheduled “educational” event – every week or every
other week - and we want you there to listen and learn. You don’t have to agree
with the speaker, you don’t have to participate in the discussion, and you
don’t have to be convinced of anything.
But this is the exclusive forum, time and place in which we are now
addressing many of these kinds of complicated and contested concerns. Take it or leave it.
Finally, and this is the hardest question, decide
whether, why and how your company is going to express a position on some or any
of these hot button issues given that you can be absolutely certain that there
is ZERO unanimity across your entire workforce on any of these matters. If
Disney still can’t figure out how to do these kinds of things, maybe discretion
is the better part of valor for you and your business – at least for the
moment.
