Inspiring Your Employees to Embrace Analytics

About me: I'm the DPD for the Berkley Group at Penguin Random House. I do digital strategy for our imprints, work on websites and pricing, and help my colleagues understand data.

Like many of you, I've been doing digital stuff for a long time, working in start-ups, magazine and book publishing companies, and, before I joined Penguin Random House, I spent five years working at the Tribune in Chicago, on digital content strategy for their network of newspapers and broadcast stations.

I've been thinking about data a lot.

I saw some trends in journalism that I'm seeing again in book publishing.

Our consumers are changing. And so are our employees.

Those high school and college graduations you attended last month...

The interns that are populating your cubicles this summer...

The tech enthusiasts who are into wearables...

All are observing data, tracking data, and using data in their daily lives in highly sophisticated ways.

Let me give you an example.

Andrew Watts is a student at UT Austin and he wrote a great piece on Medium called "A Teenager's View on Social Media." In it, he described where teenagers hang out online and why.

I think what's fascinating to me about his quote is what he's watching. Not only does he know the number of his friend's Instagram followers and Facebook friends, he knows the engagement she gets on both platforms.

This is the norm.

A high schooler will delete a photo she's placed on Instagram if it doesn't get X number of likes in the first hour.

Teens are coaching each other on through a ton of YouTube videos on how to tweak your Tumblr posts to gain more followers. #followforfollow is a popular hashtag used across networks as essentially early affiliate marketing.

This is what happens when you have a generation who has grown up as content creators.






(https://medium.com/backchannel/a-teenagers-view-on-social-media-1df945c09ac...)

And it filters through the rest of the culture, too.

How many of you use a fitness tracker like FitBit, Jawbone, Leaf, or Apple Health?

How many of you have changed your behavior because of it?

Me too. I bike to work instead of taking the bus because I wanted my app to show that I've been active.

We're used to using analytics in our everyday life. It's getting to the point where it would be weird if we're not driven by data
at work, too.

So how do you get your organization to embrace the change?

You're not a Bill Lumbergh from Office Space.

You don't need to give a top-down mandate of "Now we're a team who does stuff with data. We analyze things. We're analytical."

Those mandates never stick. And they suck the life out of an office culture.

Instead, choose joy.

Going back to our Fitbit data, I'd rather bike than take the bus because it's fun. I started doing it because I wanted to check the box for fitness. It was a fun little game.

Then I kept doing it because I enjoyed the feeling of the wind in my hair and the new way to experience the city. The act itself was fun.

Inspire your team. Don't just tell them you need to use analytics because that's the wave of the future and you can't be left behind and your users and interns are doing things smarter than you.

Really inspire them. Show them how you're making changes. How you are inspired.

Make it fun. Empower your team. And, invest in the tools to make it easy.

I want to talk about fun.

Too often we relegate fun to something that isn't work. I disagree.

If you're tracking your time like I am, you know you're spending more of your waking hours with your work than your spouse. For that reason alone, it better be fun.

I'm not saying we should abandon our assignments and run through the sprinklers, but I am saying that as the leader, you set the tone. If you are engaged in a way that brings you joy, in a way that is visibly fun, if you're talking about joy as one of your drivers, your employees will see that they have permission to seek joy and fun within their roles. That leads to more creativity, productivity, and a happier workplace with higher retention rates because people want to be there.

Here's an example of how a little bit of fun can go a long way.

This is a tool called Asana. It's a great project management tool that I use with my team and my colleagues.

It's similar to Basecamp, in that you create projects and tasks, and can assign them to people. I work on a lot of different books and projects with many different deadlines, sometimes as close as an hour from now, and sometimes as long as a year or more so I thought this would be a good way to manage everything.

I've tried every technology and task organizer out there and my pattern is generally to use a tool like there's no tomorrow for the first week and then gradually drop off and revert to my old way of doing things.

I haven't seen that here because of some smart details that make the tool fun. There's a switch in settings labeled "Celebrate." I turned it on, and to my surprise, got a unicorn every time I complete a task. The unicorn changes -- this one's pink, sometimes it says "Hooray," but it's a nice little piece of whimsy that makes something boring like task management fun. And it keeps me coming back multiple times each day.

Book publishing folks don't have the reputation as being the fastest to embrace technological solutions.
I was nervous when I shared the idea of tracking projects and tasks in a web app instead of the thousands of emails my colleagues because I wasn't sure how it would go over, especially with people in different departments.

So I described my experience: I'm more organized, I can manage the deadlines that are far away, I can track every request, it's searchable, think of how organized we'll be because we won't be sending each other the reminder "hey, did you do this" email, blah blah blah. I could see my colleagues start to file it away in "Ugh, here's something else I'm supposed to do." So I closed with, "And you get a rainbow unicorn whenever you complete something." The immediate reaction is "what?" They're paying attention again. "Yup," I say. "A unicorn. Crazy developer, right? Want to try it?"

Always an enthusiastic yes, their eyes lighting up. Why?
Because it's whimsical and it's fun.

And, after using it for awhile, I find that my colleagues in other departments who don't report to me, prioritize the tasks I assign them. Why? They tell me like getting the unicorn, It's more fun than an emailed "Thx."

To inspire your employees to embrace analytics, or anything, for that matter, you need to empower your team.

You don't have to institute Google's 20% rule across the board to make that happen.

But you do need to find key people who are self-directed and can take a project and run with it.

Maybe it's the guy who's taking classes at General Assembly at night, learning SQL and Python for fun. What would happen if you gave that person access to your API?

Think about what you want to know.

Is it how your users access your content? Is it where they come from? Is it how they compare to a different demographic? Is it what your competition is doing? What the industry is doing? What different industries are doing?

What are the questions your team wants to know about? Ask them. What are they thinking about it? How do they think they can make your business, your content, your process better? What would be more joyful for them?

For each question, there is someone on your team who is excited by answering that question. Find them. Give them the power to find the answer their own way. Maybe it means collaborating with someone else or trying something you wouldn't. Give them the freedom to do that and the permission to fail. And do it again and again. Keep exploring.

Your questions will lead you to search for tools.

Maybe it's in-house, maybe it's off-the-shelf.

Maybe it's a social listening tool like Radian6

Or real-time monitoring with HitWise.

Maybe it's a combination. Are the keywords you're using working? Do people still care about your products?

Maybe you've gone to a subscription model; what does your traffic look compared to what it was before? How did that change your revenue

You've empowered people on your team. If you're really serious about your commitment, maybe you've hired data analysts or statisticians. Someone who can crunch the data. Who will look at the lines of numbers pulled in Excel or Business Objects or Access or from a .json file or from wherever and will get completely excited.

Ideally, someone who can create a model from it.

And then build it into tools everyone else in your organization can understand.

Spreadsheets aren't going to do it.

It has to be visual.

How detailed you get depends on what you and your team need.

If you're stitching data together from your CRM, your CMS, social listening, maybe you need a page that looks like this.

This is Nick Felton's work. He's an app designer and data geek who tracked every communication he had over the course of a year to see his larger patterns and trends.

http://feltron.com/FAR13_14.html

Or maybe all that data stitching is very simple. We were doing this and now we're doing that and here's why it's better.

This is Google Trends. And they do a beautiful job of telling a story through the popularity of a search term in a very clean way.

Whatever tools you wind up using, they need to be visual. And bonus points if the design is clean because beauty leads to joy.

Let me give you an example of everything coming together.

I was working on a syndication desk for newspapers and tv news sites.

Ad-supported model, based on page views.

The end of every month was always a scramble -- what could we do to meet our page view goals?

The management team had a little wager on who could create the most shared content. I liked creating good content, and I really liked the idea of winning. We did this a few times ourselves and it was fun so we spread it to the full staff.

We piled everyone into a room a little too small and brought in pizza, explained what we were trying to do, and then had a brainstorming session. We tweaked it from our initial run from "create the most shared content." to "what content would be the most fun to read and to create?"

We wrote our ideas on the walls. We gave people stickers to vote on what they'd like to build, what they thought would be the most fun to read.

We awarded little prizes in the meeting to encourage people to open up. Most ideas, most people who wanted to work on a project, funniest headline.

We empowered people -- if someone really wanted to work on an idea, that person could. If other people wanted to work with her, she became that content's leader and was responsible for managing that process. Everyone had the same deadline, second Thursday of the month. Then, the team members sent their gallery or video or article -- whatever the content wound up being -- to another content team for editing. We put them up the following Monday and tracked their progress using real-time monitoring. The team, which had been told they had to watch the analytics in the past but never was able to tell us how their content was doing, really paid attention to the analytics. Many teams went back to tweak, changing out the thumbnail because that slide had performed the best so far, dropping elements that didn't work, experimenting and measuring with new methods.

We'd gather again the next month to celebrate the winner (we already knew who because everyone was tracking the analytics) and start the process again. In addition to opening our creativity, our meetings were filled with laughter, running jokes, a closer team.

And the process yielded real results. We doubled, tripled, quadrupled our page views. We never had the end-of-the-month crunch again of "are we going to meet our goals?" And, creating content was really, really fun.

You are the inspiration to your team, both for embracing analytics and for creating a work culture that is a place where you want to be.

You do this with your words and your deeds: leading with joy, empowering your team, and investing in the tools that will take you to the next level.

Organizational change starts with you.

I want you to examine your process. Is there something you're doing that you don't like? Why don't you like it? Is there a way to do that one thing with more joy?

I challenge you to do one joyful act next week. Talk about what you're changing and why with your team.

Because being inspired is the first step to inspiring others.

You can do it.

Thanks! Any questions?

About me: I'm the DPD for the Berkley Group at Penguin Random House. I do digital strategy for our imprints, work on websites and pricing, and help my colleagues understand data.

Like many of you, I've been doing digital stuff for a long time, working in start-ups, magazine and book publishing companies, and, before I joined Penguin Random House, I spent five years working at the Tribune in Chicago, on digital content strategy for their network of newspapers and broadcast stations.

I've been thinking about data a lot.

I saw some trends in journalism that I'm seeing again in book publishing.