You may have great leaders in your organisation, but are they great digital leaders?

As hybrid work becomes the new norm, it is imperative leaders are able to connect and communicate in digital spaces, not just face-to-face or in an office environment.

Becoming a great digital leader doesn’t happen by accident. It takes work and planning. Luckily for us, global food and beverage giant Nestle has shared how it coaches its great digital leaders.

So important is it to be a great digital leader at Nestle, the company has established a Connected Leaders program. Key to becoming a great digital leader, especially in a large organisation like Nestle, is a platform to communicate, like an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) such as Workplace from Facebook or Yammer, or a digital team space such as Microsoft Teams, along with a tool to measure engagement, such as SWOOP Analytics. In Nestle’s case, it uses Workplace with SWOOP.  

Ryan Wade, ​ Adoption & Change specialist at Nestle, explains the two-step Connected Leaders program.

1. Enabling leaders with tech skills

2. Building coaches for leaders

Step 1

The first step is to enable leaders with the technical skills to amplify their message. This starts with ensuring the leader is on the platform and knows how to use it. It sounds basic, but check if your leaders are connected to your ESN.

In this first step, it’s also important to ensure leaders know the value of being digitally connected.

Leaders need to know what they can achieve by being a great digital leader. The benefits include faster decision making, innovation, employee engagement, boosting morale which leads to employee retention, and the ability to broadcast company values.

“By creating great communication and great posts, we can have insights directly from the frontline all the way back to the head office,” Ryan said.

“We can foster innovation. So anyone at Nestle can reply to a Workplace post and provide an idea.

“You might want to create a challenge – what do you think about the branding of this product, or do you have ideas for the naming of this product? People can then get back to you via the comment section.

“You can engage employees and boost morale, which in turn, also boosts retention.”

Step 2

The second step towards creating a great digital leader is to work with leaders’ corporate communication coaches to ensure they echo your messages. In smaller organisations, ensure you can access leaders to coach them.

The majority of leaders at Nestle work with a corporate communications specialist – a communications coach. Ryan said it’s important for the Adoption and Change team and Internal Communications team to build a strong relationship with these coaches so they can echo messages through leaders.

For example, there might be a campaign to boost the adoption of Microsoft Teams.

“It’s up to the coaches to really transmit your message to the leaders in their language,” Ryan said.

“What that allows you to do is really have a two-pronged approach in terms of you’re giving your leaders the technical ability to be a great digital leader but also you’ve got coaches there to support them along the way.

“They’re going to be creating better content, and engaging in the workplace, which ultimately helps you to achieve your goals.”

How to write a great post

Ryan shared the example of a great post on Nestle’s Workplace network from Chris Johnson, Executive Vice President and CEO for Asia, Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa (AOA).

This was a post to frontline workers during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Chris picked up his phone and recorded a video to thank frontline workers for their hard work and encouraged colleagues to share his message and add their own words of thanks. 

“Chris just picked up the phone, recorded a video using his phone camera and it had a very informal feel to it,” Ryan said.

“Even the messaging itself in the post, when you read through the text, it has quite an authentic tone. The authenticity of this post is something I found very pleasing.”

The post was made on April 6, 2020 – about a month into the initial pandemic lockdown across the region when Nestle’s essential frontline workers were still going to work every day to ensure supermarket shelves had food and drinks.

“It was a very topical and opportune moment to start talking about this,” Ryan said.

“This message from Chris was really around thanking our frontline superheroes. As a food and beverage company, Nestle is considered to be an essential business so the factories stayed open throughout the whole COVID pandemic so it’s important to keep morale up.

“We were able to give a platform to people to directly reach out to frontline workers. This post gave people the opportunity to go in and actually tag people who they know work on the frontline.

“That’s the type of connection and community feel we want to create around the company.”

Connecting with the frontline

Ryan said connecting frontline workers on Workplace is one of the biggest challenges faced at Nestle but campaigns like Chris Johnson’s post give users the platform to directly thank frontline workers – boosting staff morale, strengthening the community and increasing frontline engagement in Workplace.

Part of the difficulty connecting with frontline workers is a lack of hardware, as some workers don’t have smart phones. When there is an opportunity to set up a new Workplace group to target specific groups, do so, Ryan advises.

For example, there was a Nestle factory in Italy where workers would meet each day around a notice board for company updates and information. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and social distancing restrictions came into force, that was no longer possible.

“That was an opportunity for Workplace to step in and say; ‘We’re going to create this group and we’re going to create this space for all those updates to happen’,” Ryan said.

“Look at opportunities to digitalise your processes. If there is something that always takes place on paper, Workplace or Yammer can take over in that space.”

Measuring a great leader with SWOOP Analytics

No matter how good your leaders may appear to be online, the only true way of knowing their impact and engagement with staff is by measuring it with data. Nestle relies on SWOOP Analytics to deliver the data for KPIs and to help shape future campaigns.

Prior to launching an internal communications campaign, Ryan suggests setting up objectives in advance, including looking at similar campaigns across the organisation and benchmarking success based on engagement levels, all of which can be easily achieved with SWOOP.

The next step, Ryan suggests, is to identify champions who can amplify messages. This may mean tapping into influencers for each group you want to target your message towards.

“We were able to go into SWOOP, look at who are the top influential people in that group,” Ryan said.

“This is a short list of people who could be great to launch the campaign. Further to that, we were able to say, this is the best person, this is the best time.”

Ryan recommends checking SWOOP’s Activity by Time widget to find the best time of day to post on Workplace, along with the Response Rate. He also suggests checking SWOOP’s Cross team Collaboration map to immediately see any gaps in collaboration or engagement.

“Great campaigns don’t happen by accident,” Ryan said.

“You can create the perfect post but if you haven’t done the ground work in advance, you might find that you struggle.”

Hear more from Ryan on How to write a great post and check out our SWOOP Hacks to learn how to compare campaign engagement and how to benchmark your leaders’ digital impact.