The business case for Engaging, Growing and Optimising your business through Social Leadership
At Yapster, we use the acronym E.G.O. (Engage, Grow, Optimise) when explaining Social Leadership to give a tongue-in-cheek nod to the fact that many leaders feel a little embarrassed about putting themselves into the company spotlight. They ask “can video updates from a CEO really transform a business, or are they just evidence of the boss’s ego?”
86% OF EMPLOYEES BLAME INEFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION FOR COMPANY FAILURES
Whilst it may sound obvious and easy, few companies hold on to efficiency advantages as they grow. Growth creates organisational complexity and growing complexity tends to lead to collaboration and communication breakdowns. According to polling done by Salesforce, 86% of employees and executives blame a lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures.
At Yapster, we work hard for working people - assistants, baristas and carers. And we make money by selling per user licences to their employers - some of the largest companies in the real-world economy.
‘SOCIAL LEADERSHIP’ IS YOUR COMPANY’S TICKET INTO THE TOP 14%
Social Leadership is the practice of influencing people at work, using digital tools such as the smartphone and whole-company communication software like Yapster.
Social Leadership isn’t a buzzword - it’s an economic megatrend. According to Statistica, around 95% of working age adults now own a smartphone (80% in the 55-64 year old bracket). This means, for the first time in business history, it is now possible for a leader (or group of leaders across an organisation) to communicate directly with an entire workforce in real time - irrespective of company scale or geographic spread.
In the wake of this technology revolution, leaders no longer have a legitimate structural excuse for presiding over broken workflows and miscommunication.
Engage the frontline - for a 30% increase in employee satisfaction
Take Wendy Bartlett, founder and Exec Chair of Bartlett Mitchell, a 1,000 employee catering business (now a division of WSH BaxterStorey). After rolling out Yapster, Bartlett Mitchell - propelled by Wendy’s extraordinary examples of Social Leadership - achieved a 30% increase in employee engagement, 98% customer retention and a 16.8% increase in turnover.
Click here to access a recording of Wendy telling her own story.
“Last week at 2pm we [used Yapster to ask our] teams to come on a Zoom [video call] and by end of day over half the workforce turned up”
Grow the top line - by 7% like-for-like through social sales campaigns
Revere pubs (a division of Marston’s plc) approached Yapster after identifying that a number of their locations were regularly selling more desserts than others and that existing methods of communicating those figures across teams were failing to impact monthly sales figures.
After launching Yapster and successfully making the transition to becoming Social Leaders (regularly broadcasting, reacting and direct messaging frontline bar staff across their estate), Revere’s leadership team integrated their Electronic Point of Sale system data into Yapster and began running automated ‘sales games’ to drive further fun and financials.
The results of this initiative were remarkable. Competing pubs achieved an 87% increase in the percentage of desserts to mains sold compared to the previous month. Compared to 2018 sales figures, competing pubs achieved an 8% increase in the percentage of desserts-to-mains sold.
Non-competing ‘control’ sites achieved a 1% increase. Allowing for the control group, like-for-like dessert sales increased by 7%.
“It was a win-win for us - we boosted like-for-likes and revenue and the participating teams really enjoyed getting stuck in too.”
Optimise workflows, cut costs and boost the bottom line
Social Leadership allows companies to run with ‘fewer, better’ managers, each able to digitally cover more ground than their pre-Yapster travel allowance ever allowed. Operating in this way with flatter organisational hierarchies, and improving productivity through greater business alignment at all levels, in turn leads to hard cost savings.
This was seen at Tossed, where successful Social Leadership helped the business to turnaround during challenging times.
“We’ve always been a forward-thinking operator, quick to introduce technology front and back of house to boost productivity, but coronavirus forced us to take this mindset to a whole new level. We’re now running with a head office team which is 200% more productive than pre-covid.
Supported by Yapster, bureaucracy has been removed and replaced with easy comms as everybody is on the platform and is engaged. I now do weekly videos to keep the whole business aligned and my colleagues in Central Operations use the platform for local team alignment and
inspiration too. We’ve saved 20% in operating costs this year and I expect that to rise to 40% as we rescale our business with this new, hyper-efficient operating model.”