Somehow or other, says Paul Gordon, people have got it into their heads that business communications should appeal to reason first and emotion a distant second. Some recent research we commissioned in the group healthcare market suggests just the opposite.
I feel worried about last month’s management accounts. I feel hopeful about next month’s. I feel pleased with myself. I feel such a failure. I feel everyone likes me. I feel everyone hates me. God, I’ve only been in the office for just over an hour, and I’ve already been through such a raging torrent of emotions.
The thing is – in fact, the point of this article is – that business is a much more emotional area than we sometimes think. We all know that everything everyone ever does involves some sort of combination of the left and right sides of the brain. But sometimes, we think that when we’re engaging with people in a b2c context it’s mostly about the right brain (which, oddly, is the creative and emotional side) whereas when we’re talking to people in a b2b context it’s mostly about the left brain (the rational, analytical side).
When we think this way we’re half right. We’re right that most b2c communications will be better if they make an emotional connection first. But we’re also half wrong. Because, as a little piece of new research we’ve done recently clearly confirms, an awful lot of b2b communications will work better if they make an emotional connection first too.
What about this research, I hear you ask. Well, we set aside a fair chunk of money each year to pay for research studies of our own design – sometimes to help us win new business, sometimes to help us take part in a conference or debate, sometimes just because we want to understand an area or issue better.
Recently, we commissioned a piece of qualitative work among owner/managers and senior directors of SMEs, looking at the broad area of employee benefits in general, and the provision of kinds of health insurance in particular.
We got back the findings you would expect. Everyone said that the ability to recruit and retain top-quality staff was one of their most important success factors. And everyone said that providing an attractive and competitive benefits package was one of the key ways to do so. Big surprise. Not.
Fortunately Sarah O’Brien at Firefly, who did the research for us, is a bit better than that, and was able to get behind these platitudes.
And what lies behind them, interestingly, is a world of more or less pure emotion. A world in which, actually, what the company does reflects infinitely much more on how the owners and bosses feel about themselves, and about their staff, and the kinds of relationships they want to have with them, and, above all, the kinds of employers they want to be seen to be.
There are both micro and macro examples of this. Employers tend to provide benefits that fit with their own priorities. Older employers care more about pensions. Female employers help more with child care arrangements. Employers who drive to work provide more parking spaces.
But it’s not quite as simple as that, either. Ever since David Brent, every boss is interested in how he or she is seen. If you help people arrange flexible working, then you want to be seen as someone who cares about work/life balance. If you arrange thorough recycling and carbon offset schemes, then obviously your green credentials matter to you. For some employers, this kind of commitment goes hand in hand with strong support for charities, involving staff through pound-for-pound matching schemes and so on: others couldn’t care less about global warming but get a huge kick out of supporting local causes.
Then of course there’s the whole subject of health. Some employers just don’t think this is any of their business – even to the point of feeling that it would be embarrassing and inappropriate to intervene in any way. Some others feel a lot of responsibility for the wellbeing of their employees, and provide all sorts of benefits – from visiting masseurs and therapists, to gym memberships, to sponsoring marathons and fun runs, to health screening programmes, to full-on health insurance.
The funny thing is, very little of this has anything much to do with what employees actually want. In fact, very few of the employers we spoke to really knew what their employees wanted. And in a few cases, they did know but deliberately chose not to give it to them – either because it would be “too expensive and disruptive” (one employer whose young, fitness-oriented staff were longing for a shower at the office) or because they were convinced it was “not really in people’s best interests,” (another employer who felt strongly that pensions were a rip-off).
What all of these findings have in common is that they show how employers’ behaviour in the whole broad area of employee benefits is driven first by the way they feel about themselves as employers, second and closely related by the way they want to be seen as employers by their staff, and only a distant third by what will actually be most appreciated by their employees and will therefore help most in recruiting and retaining people.
As an employer, I grudgingly recognise the truth of this. I can hardly do otherwise, in the light of my own passionate loyalty to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club – and the fact that for the last few years one of our higher-profile staff benefits has been, well, um, actually, to be honest, four season tickets at White Hart Lane.
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