the @Work stAte of mind projectimages.forbes.com/forbesinsights/StudyPDFs/gyroAtWorkStateofMind.pdf · A collAborAtive mArketing reseArch And development project led by gyro, the

A collAborAtive mArketing reseArch And development project

led by gyro, the globAl ideAs shop

the @Work stAte of mind project

engAging the most engAged

contents

Methodology............................................................................................................. 2

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................. 2

Foreword .................................................................................................................... 3

Introduction ...............................................................................................................4

Prologue ..................................................................................................................... 6

Key Findings.............................................................................................................. 7

Executive Summary ............................................................................................... 8

Work Is No Longer a Place: It’s a State of Mind .......................................... 9

Returning to a New World of Ever-Present Work ......................................11

Readiness With a Human Face .........................................................................13

A Thoughtful and Disciplined Social Media Approach ............................14

The @Work Reality................................................................................................15

Always Prioritize .....................................................................................................19

A Blurring of Work-Life Boundaries ..............................................................20

Conclusion: How to Put the @Work State of Mind to Work for Your Brand ..........23

2 | THE @WoRK STATE oF MIND PRojECT

AcknoWledgments

Gyro and Forbes Insights would like to thank the following for their assistance, counsel and contributions to this report:

Honorable Elaine Chao, U.S. Secretary of Labor (2001-2009); Dalton Conley, Ph.D., Dean of Social Sciences, New York University; Maggie Jackson, journalist and author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age; Ralph Oliva, Ph.D., Institute for the Study of Business Markets, Smeal College of Business, Penn State Univer-sity; Fred W. Roedl, Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing, Director-Business Marketing Academy, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University; the Business Marketing Association; Kenneth Hein, Marketing Director NA, gyro, and Patrick Danaher, Marketing Director EMEA, gyro.

methodology This report is based on a survey of 543 executives and dozens of one-on-one interviews

conducted by Forbes Insights. The survey respondents described themselves as decision

makers, with most focused on business operations (62%) and strategy (60%).

Ten percent were business owners, 24% held C-level positions, and 41% were EVP/SVP/VP/director. The remaining 23% were unit or department heads or managers. (Three percent were board members.)

Roughly one in three respondents (31%) worked for companies with revenues under $100 million, 22% worked for companies with revenues of between $100 million and $1 billion, and the remaining 47% worked for companies with revenues of more than $1 billion, including the single largest grouping (19%), who worked for firms with revenues of more than $10 billion.

The largest concentration of respondents came from banking/financial services/insurance (19%). The groups working in manufacturing (12%) and professional services (10%) were the two next largest.

The geographic breakdown included 316 respondents in the U.S., 105 in the U.K. and 122 in Continental Europe. Some charts may not add to 100% due to rounding.

CoPYRIGHT © 2012 Forbes InsIghts | 3

Work is no longer a place, but a state of mind.There are no boundaries between work and leisure.

It’s now just life.The customers who matter most to your success—the

decision makers—now have an @Work State of Mind. This means that communications must evolve to reach them. It means that messages must be more inspirational, more humanly relevant.

Gyro partnered with Forbes Insights to create a clear picture of how executives consume information and in what way it influences their business decisions. We also asked, most importantly, how they feel about the @Work State of Mind.

We surveyed more than 500 marketers and inter-viewed CMOs at Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and many of the world’s other top companies.

Our pursuit is to understand this @Work State of Mind better than anyone else in the world so that we can best ignite emotions.

What you are about to read presents a clear picture of how today’s independently minded and highly connected executive looks, thinks and feels.

We hope this deeper understanding of the @Work State of Mind will inspire you.

What a time to be alive!

“Nine-to-five thinking is a thing of the past, and this must be reflected in how brands advertise with their customers and clients.”

foreWord

bY ChrIstoPh beCKer Ceo and Chief Creative officer, gyro

CHRISToPH BECKER CEo and chief creative officer of gyro, the global ideas shop. Contact him at [email protected].

our mission is to create ideas that are humanly relevant. gyro is an Advertising Age Top 50 global ideas shop with 600 creative minds in 17 offices in nine coun-tries. Globally gyro works with Abbott, Audi, FedEx, HP, john Deere, L’oreal, USG and Virgin Atlantic. www.gyro.com


introduction In the summer of 2010, gyro assembled a group at Hyper Island, the world-famous digital

training center in Karlskrone, Sweden, for what we call the gyro Academy, an intense profes-

sional development program for our up-and-comer colleagues. We exposed these students

to our techniques and tools for ideation and collaboration. The group was asked to select a

challenge against which they could practice these tools. They chose “work-life balance.”

Alas, I am not among our youngest colleagues. So, when I came to the session as a mentor, I was gruff and dismis-sive. “Quit whining! People have been complaining to me for 30 years about the long and daunting hours of the ad agency business. Do you want a job, or do you want a career? This is no business for clock-watchers. It’s a fact of life in the agency busi-ness. There’s nothing new about this work-life balance issue,” I said.

Then one of them said, “Oh, yes, there is,” and she reached in her jeans pocket and set her iPhone on the table. “This has changed. It’s attached to me. I cannot dis-connect from it.”

It was for us a moment of epiphany; of sudden reve-lation and insight. It was not as if we had been oblivious to the spread of networked communications and hand-held devices, or even how important it was to deliver new forms of communica-tion to reach people with these media. But as people engaged in perfecting mar-keting communications, it struck us like a lightning bolt.

Work has changed—and people at work have changed profoundly.

Oh, we had understood for many years that it was technically easier than ever to identify targets, locate them, reach them, engage them and transact with them; even to spur them to exchange messages among themselves. We understood clearly how technology had changed, but we confess we neglected just how much it had changed them: the people to whom we were marketing.

Being at work is a state of mind; no longer a place or even a fixed period of the day.

The Internet, mobile telecom, social network-ing and a 24/7 global economy have eliminated the boundaries of time and space that once def ined the

workplace. Technology has caused work to expand to longer hours of the day and has attached work to people wherever they are.

Product iv it y-enhancing technology has not served to increase the amount of leisure time we enjoy—quite the con-trary. It’s caused work to spill over its banks, flooding more hours of the day and more days of the week—curiously, as a matter of people’s own behav-ior and choices.

Work goes home. Home goes to work. People are con-stantly toggling between working and “home-ing,” making decisions, personal and professional, at all hours of the day. They master time, rather than the other way around.

People in an @Work State of Mind today are exposed to a constant, multi-point flow of communications from not just customers, suppliers and co-workers, but also from family, friends, would-be friends and network members. They are not only engaged in considering brand messages while at work, but also championing them to their social networks.

People in the @Work State of Mind represent a pow-erful theater for brand communications; perhaps the most powerful. They exert double purchasing power on both their own needs and those of their companies.

“Technology has caused work to expand to longer hours of the day and has attached work to people

wherever they are.”

–rICK segAL President Worldwide and

Chief Practice officer, gyro


Their eyes are on screens: small, medium and large.

They are already in engagement mode.

They are considering solutions carefully.

They are making decisions.

And this @Work State of Mind is a shared state of mind. People today are connected to and commu-nicating with others in the same state of mind. This makes them a switching station of enthusiasm and endorsement channeled toward decision-makers and inf luencers, immediately.

Mining opportunity from the rich vein of the @Work State of Mind requires new methods and models. The model must be much more real-time, agile and even uncontrolled.

It is an approach that must be anchored in anthropol-ogy and behavioral science, relying more heavily than ever on understanding human-scale motives and at striking responsive chords of emotion—particularly if people are

to be compelled to act and advocate spontaneously on a brand’s behalf.

Mastering the @Work State of Mind promises break-through success for marketers, exchanging the mediocre performance of conventional methods for the high perfor-mance of programs radically reset to the way people really live, work, dream and prosper.

Gyro is delighted to have at its disposal the amazing resources of Forbes Insights in the ongoing investigation of this profoundly important area of inquiry. This report is but the first of several products to emanate from “The @Work State of Mind Project,” a collaborative market-ing R&D project led by gyro that includes participants from business, government, the arts, healthcare, NGOs, academia and entertainment. If you have an interest in sharing in this discovery, we hope you will join us.

RICK SEGAL President worldwide and chief practice officer of gyro, the global ideas shop. Contact him at [email protected].


Three years ago I took up bicycling to stay in shape. I try to get in four rides a week—Saturday, Sunday and two more rides in the middle of the week.

The thing you try to avoid as a bike rider is a bad encounter with a car or truck. Simple physics tells you who will win that battle. Thus, for weekday bike rid-ers, the safest hours to share the road with cars and trucks are those between late morning and early afternoon—10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The commuters are all at work. The high school drivers are still in school. The roads are as free as they’ll get.

At this point you may ask, what kind of serious work-ing professional can take time to ride a bike—or chase fun of any kind—in the middle of the workday, in the middle of the week? Answer: Tens of millions of us. Smartphones and Wi-Fi have set us free.

The flipside of the freedom to play hooky in the middle of the week is obvious. You can’t get away from work. Not really. Not for more than a few hours at a time. Flying from San Francisco to New York, even in coach class, used to be a mini vacation. It meant six hours alone with the latest John Grisham. “Nobody can screw

with me while I’m 35,000 feet over Nebraska,” I would happily think as I boarded the plane. Kiss those days goodbye. Try telling your boss that, sorry, I was out of email reach during my long flight. Doesn’t fly anymore, that excuse.

The @Work State of Mind is both a deeply researched and very personal look at how the always-on workstyle has changed our lives, for better and worse (but mostly for better). I couldn’t stop reading this report. Each page gave me a fresh insight into the biggest trend affecting the workplace and the minds of the new 24/7 profes-sionals, who are figuring out their own seamless blend of work and non-work.

If nothing else, after reading “The @Work State of Mind,” you will lose the guilt over declaring your own independence. You will happily steal an hour to ride a bicycle or visit a friend in the middle of the weekday. Enjoy that freedom, and bestow it generously on your colleagues. The best and brightest will demand these new choices.

Just stay in touch, and remember to keep your smart-phone battery charged.

“If nothing else, after reading ‘The @Work State of Mind,’ you will lose the guilt over declaring your own independence. Enjoy that freedom, and bestow it generously on your colleagues.”

prologue

bY rICh KArLgAArd Publisher, Forbes


the @Work state of Mind has taken hold. The barriers between personal and work time have crumbled. Executives have to be prepared to make decisions anywhere and at any time. just 3% of the survey respondents said that they didn’t send or receive emails while on vacation. only 2% said that they never worked weekends or nights. More than half the respondents (52%) said they receive information related to business decisions round-the-clock, including weekends.

the @Work state of Mind reflects a new blending of work and personal time. Downtime no longer means total disengagement from work for an extended period. Those most at ease with the @Work State of Mind are those who feel most in control. They are good at separating work from personal time: only 15% of them said they are rarely or never able to do so, versus 24% of those who feel a lack of control. Since both groups spend similar amounts of time working on weekends, evenings, etc., this seems to be a matter of successful mental compartmentalization. “just as the boundaries of the physical world and digital worlds are blurring with the rapidly increasing penetration of smartphones, tablets, Facebook and location-based apps like Shopkick and Foursquare, so are the boundaries blurring between work and home,” says Nathan Estruth, VP, Procter & Gamble FutureWorks NDB. “Increasingly, work is no longer constrained by space or even by time of day, but rather by an individual’s personal prefer-ences and state of mind at any given moment.”

Work—or personal space—is where you make it. Almost three in five respondents (59%) said that they made business decisions at home, while almost two in three (64%) said that they made decisions while traveling on business and an additional one in three (30%) said that they made business decisions while traveling with family. At the same time, 98% of respondents said that they dealt with personal matters in the office, with 41% saying that they spend more than 10% of their time doing so. “With the growth of the Web and the introduction of high-speed data connections at home, it’s now possible to do most jobs from any location, including home,” says Rick Saletta, VP of marketing for Vitria Technology. “Problem is, that means we are always on and usually multi-tasking.”

technological innovation has largely enabled the @Work state of Mind, but this new era has expanded rapidly because it is linked to professional advancement. More than two in five respondents (43%) said that technology had fueled the dismantling of barriers between work and personal time. About three in 10 respondents (28%) said that personal ambition was the reason, 15% said it was about creating efficiency, and 9% cited a desire to move ahead.

Many decision makers feel empowered by the @Work state of Mind. Asked how they feel when making a business decision, considering the stream and volume of information, 40% of respondents said they feel empowered and 44% feel well-prepared.

but attitudes differ between U.s. and european executives toward the @Work state. European decision makers viewed the @Work condition more negatively than their American counterparts. Three in 10 European respondents (30%) said that they felt irritated by the blending of work and personal time, compared with 19% of Americans. U.K. respondents trended closer to U.S. than to other European decision makers.

social networks are important for conducting business. About two in three respondents (67%) said that such work-related networks play a significant role in business, and 56% said that personal social networks influence their determinations. But business-related networks are clearly more important than ones more focused on personal life. “Highly focused tablet/smartphone apps with closed social media built in will replace email,” says Warren N. Bimblick, senior vice president of strategy and business development for Penton Media.

key findings


Gyro, the global ideas shop, in association with Forbes Insights, the thought leader-ship practice of Forbes Media, surveyed more than 500 global executives about the @Work State of Mind, and conducted in-depth interviews with marketing lead-ers and experts.

The survey found that in the @Work State of Mind world, executives resemble 24/7 news networks—constantly receiving, processing and sending information. The aim of this report is to start a discussion about what might characterize the most effective messaging—the type that cuts through the static of other messages to reach…emotion.

2%Never work weekends

or nights

14%Rarely work weekends

or nights

52%Receive business

information round the clock, including

weekends

27%Work most weekends

or nights

17%Work weekends and nights every week

executive summAry The @Work State of Mind means that most global business

decision makers are on, irrespective of time or location.

Reaching them successfully requires an understanding of more

than how they blur the lines between work and personal time

in terms of their usage of technological devices, time slots or

locations. To communicate with @Work State of Mind decision

makers, it’s imperative to understand their motivations, emo-

tional attitudes and levels of satisfaction with round-the-clock,

all-device messaging.


Work is no longer A plAce: it’s A stAte of mindIn today’s working world, most executives are always on. Not necessarily actively engaged in work or think-ing of work, but available, reachable, aware that they may have to respond in a heartbeat. No place is sacrosanct. Not lunchtime, family dinners, weekends or vacations. Even the once relative calm of an air voyage—the busi-ness trip where fierce road warriors could unwind—was shattered years ago. Now desperate travelers hang on with their fingernails to connectivity as their planes taxi down the runway. A few minutes into flight, they’re on Wi-Fi, exchanging emails and moni-toring events in real time.

Executives are 365-day, 24-hour networks, ready to parachute into any pressing issue. Technology has enabled the rapid response and made it the norm. Executives who do not engage with the informa-tion flow risk falling behind, or worse, worry about what they might have missed. “There’s no more off switch,” says Tom Nightingale, pres-ident, sales and marketing, for Waltham, Mass.-based ModusLink Global Solutions, a multifaceted technology services provider. “There are very few people who are not checking emails or receiving social media while at work, school, commuting, or at the sidelines of their kids’ sport-ing events.”

Indeed, for Lauren Flaherty, executive vice presi-dent and CMO for San Diego-based technology provider Juniper Networks, “connections” are “ubiquitous.” “We are all much more real-time in our work habits,” she says.

The @Work world is the result of a historic period of technological advancement. In less than 25 years, man has overhauled communication systems several times over. The past decade alone has seen the rise of increasingly powerful, more-multifaceted mobile devices that allow people to touch base and be touched any time and from

nearly any location. Social media sites have simultaneously sprouted and mushroomed to encompass huge swatches of the world’s population. Facebook now reports more than 850 million users, roughly one-tenth of the world’s 7 billion people. Twitter and LinkedIn subscribers both number over 100 million and are growing rapidly. There are an estimated 5 billion subscriptions to cell phones.

“Technology has created devices that present us with an ever-increasing number of choices,” says Laura Gross,

marketing SVP for Muriel Siebert, “compressing an ever-decreasing amount of what used to be known as free time.” Gross thinks all these choices have made the task of the marketer more difficult. “What should we do on our commute, for example?” she asks. “Read and respond to work email? Decompress from the day with Angry Birds or Sudoku? Catch up on The Wall Street Journal or the Economist? Listen to our iPods? Turn on the radio? Will we choose busi-ness news, jazz, rock, or play a CD or an audio book? Surf the Internet for hotels for next year’s vacation? Can we even hear old-fashioned ads

anymore or have we become numb to them, regardless of venue?”

Adam Swann, head of strategy, gyro New York, says this state of perpetual contact has sprouted from a growing sense of community—people responding simultaneously to the same trend and adding to its momentum. “It’s human instinct to want to be involved, to know what’s going on, to feel part of a community, a tribe, to feel like you have significance,” he says.

But Swann adds that the @Work State has grown because it has already proven a more effective way of doing business by lessening stress later on. “Sometimes when you jump on an issue, it might be in the evening

“It’s human instinct to want to be involved,

to know what’s going on, to feel part of a

community, a tribe...”

–AdAM sWAnn head of strategy, gyro new York


and you might be at home, you can deal with something quickly, and the issue is resolved. It doesn’t explode into something more.”

An often cited IDC study sponsored by EMC Corporation found that the amount of information on the Internet will dou-ble every 18 months. Many executives consider the con-stant access to increasing

quantities of information a business advantage. They no longer have to spend as much time searching for what they need, and that has made their jobs easier. “The information is right there as soon as you ask a question,” says Jennifer Nealson, the CMO for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Such easy accessibility has decreased the need for con-ventional marketing and pointed toward approaches that

are more nuanced and profound. The days of passive con-sumption of messaging are gone. Relationships in the @Work era are more interactive and changeable. The new marketer has become a listener who is adaptable to an audience’s hot spots more than simply the disseminator of information. “The boundaries between our public (work) and private (home) are collapsing,” says Joan D. Khoury, managing director and CMO at LPL Financial. “But almost from the moment of birth, people want to learn. We must change our marketing approach to less reflect old boundaries and to more reflect the desire to know.”

This new age has also necessitated an ability to pin-point the right audience segments—influencers—and take advantage of their increased power in ongoing debates about products, services and organizations. “The advent of the web and real-time communications has upended engagement paradigms,” says Andres Jordan, Deutsche Telekom North America’s VP, innovation and business development, international business. “That, paired with people’s innate desire to belong, requires that the new engagement models be dynamic, genuine, and

How often do you step away from dinner and other family gatherings to deal with business calls and other work issues?

“The information is right there as soon as

you ask a question.”

—JennIFer neALson CMO,Denver Center for

the Performing Arts

n 3% Multiple times at each event

n 9% Do so at least once per event

n 41% Do so occasionally

n 31% Rarely

n 17% Almost never


In 1926, Henry Ford instituted a controversial shift change at his growing automotive empire: the weekend. To the ire of many other manufacturers, Ford closed shop on Satur-days, giving his workers the new-fangled ritual of two days off a week. His move was the high point of a short-lived historic experiment. Remember the weekend, when men and women valiantly tried to keep work and home separate, equal and unadulterated?

Now, of course, we work anywhere, and most of the time. Work is in our pocket, spilling into homes, weekends, vaca-tions and bedrooms. Nearly 40 percent of mobile workers with PDAs now wake up at night at times to check them, at least occasionally, according to a quarterly survey of mobile enterprise workers by iPass.

Does this blurring of boundaries signify an easy return to a pre-industrial past, when we lived over the store or on the farm? Are we sliding seamlessly back into integrated lives? No. For most of human history, work and home were blended due to the restriction of experience. Geographic distance and the rhythms of sun and season limited the circumference of our work and home lives. Trade, like war, ceased at sunset. Entire lives centered on the same corner of earth.

Today we multitask in nanoseconds on a global scale, mov-ing restlessly in thought and body across the planet. Forty percent of offices lie vacant on any given day, according to Deloitte. Bankers shift their hours to the midnight darkness of each monetary mess. We rarely speak of anything being “too far away” anymore. “Long weeks within a single com-munity are unusual; a full day within a single neighborhood is becoming rare,” writes sociologist Kenneth Gergen in The Saturated Self. The @Work State of Mind arises from an ex-pansion of experience.

What is the impact of these extraordinary changes? Surely, we are light-footed and nimble-minded. And yet always-on work forces us to constantly negotiate what we are doing, individually and collectively. Who changes the diaper when both spouses return from work exhausted? How do you sync a team spread across six time zones and three alternative work arrangements? Throughout the day, the average worker switches tasks on average every three minutes; half the time,

they are interrupting themselves, according to studies by Glo-ria Mark, a professor of Informatics at the University of Califor-nia Irvine. Perhaps this is why the @Work study reveals that among today’s decision-makers, a sense of accomplishment correlates with an ability to separate work and personal life. Without at least a few borderlines, we cannot find terra firma in an unshackled world.

A constant negotiation of attention is our foremost challenge. At heart, paying attention well is a matter of judicious bound-ary-making. Focus, or “orienting” in science parlance, is akin to a spotlight of the mind, allowing us to filter what’s second-ary and go deep into thought. Awareness opens our sensory floodgates, making us sensitive to our wider surroundings. Finally, executive attention fuels our abilities to plan, prioritize and weigh conflicting data. Attention isn’t singular, scientists are now discovering. It’s a multifaceted skill set that is a secret to thriving in an always-on era. How we attend shapes how we rest, play, create, manage, communicate and love.

Hopping from task to task, juggling interruptions, layering time is our default workstyle, although research conclusive-ly shows that we cannot multitask very well. Beyond simple tasks such as folding laundry and watching television, we are often slow, prone to error and intellectually half-asleep when we multitask. And those who do it the most tend to do it most poorly, according to a 2009 study by Stanford University sci-entist Clifford Nass. The habit trains them to be “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Nass. Skimming, surfing, task-switching are crucial “literacies” of this new age. But they must be balanced by time for deep focus, analysis, reflection and—dare I say it?—calm. @Work needn’t be a monotone state of mind.

Remember the weekend? It varied the pace of life, placing a boundary around something worthwhile. Put in place to pro-tect people from the burden of never-ending work, over time the weekend, nevertheless, came to exemplify the rigidity of the boundary-centric Industrial Age. Now liberated from the confines of space and time, will we be remembered by future generations as the people who forgot the art of the limit?

returning to A neW World of ever-present WorkbY MAggIe JACKson Award-winning columnist and author of Distracted


dare I say, soulful. It presents a glorious opportunity for brands to build genuine two-way communications/feed-back loops with advocate communities that can be part of the brand’s evolution.”

Jordan says that “the new instant feedback economy has empowered everyone to be a recommendation engine and critic. Therefore, customer touch points are now becoming critical shapers of customer experience driven

by a new awareness and dig-ital behaviors that feed into our propensity to buy,” he says. “Feeling empowered to provide instant feedback on that bad experience you had returning that car in the air-port is literally 30 seconds away with your mobile app.”

The importance of this development has only been heightened by the economic downturn and the resulting intense competition for cus-tomers. Customer reviews, whether positive or negative, can be a life-or-death issue for many companies.

Many marketers and observers of this industry believe that the stakes have never been higher because companies’ competitive advantage will rest increas-ingly on barrages of information that appear from an increasing range of sources. These channels will be increasingly unplanned and unsolicited, part of a con-stant and constantly shape-changing conversation. The relevance of information received one day may dimin-ish starkly within months or weeks. This speed of change stems from the lightning rapidity of product change and increased transparency, since it is more dif-f icult than ever for companies to keep secrets about what they are doing.

“Customers don’t need marketing so much to actually tell them what’s out there,” says Kevin Allen, gyro’s inter-national planning director. “The sensible marketer will be looking to change [customers’] behavior, not necessarily overnight, but they should have a plan for it.”

Yet some marketers understandably see a danger in the amount of information available. They believe that people may be so overloaded that they freeze or cannot make the right decision. Manny Kostas, SVP marketing and strategy, Imaging and Printing Group at Hewlett-Packard, sees his role akin to a guide: “If we understand how the overload diverts us, we can better figure out how to help the customer sort amongst all that data, and

turn that overload into helping us make a real meaning-ful impact.”

What should messages look like, and how often should they be sent? These are age-old questions that have assumed an even larger significance in the @Work world. Some marketers worry that they will irritate their audience by sending too many communications or tim-ing them poorly. “With work taking over, that creates an environment where there is less tolerance for other interruptions—and like it or not, marketing and com-munications typically fall into the other interruptions category,” says Andrew Bosman, CMO of consultancy Navigant. “As marketing and communication profes-sionals, we must be cognizant of this resentment, and not only pay attention to the timing of our messages but also ensure that our targets feel they are better off for receiving our information.”

There’s a fine balance that marketers have to strike of frequent but not too frequent messages framed in just the right tone. This has underscored the importance of more personalized methods in engaging audiences—at times, customizing methods by individuals or small groups. “Many still approach marketing communica-tions as trumpeting one message across all channels, typically from a business perspective,” says Jim Davis, senior vice president and CMO for SAS. “Those that continue to broadcast will lose in the social envi-ronment. Brands, even B2Bs, have to celebrate the uniqueness of each channel and relate to the customer as an individual.”

“Brands, even B2Bs, have to celebrate the

uniqueness of each channel and relate

to the customer as an individual.”

— JIM dAVIs Senior Vice President and

CMO, SAS


The transition to a world where individuals increasingly conduct business outside the office has been so seamless that it’s difficult for many managers to pinpoint where em-ployees are making most of their decisions. They see the ad-vantages for their organizations when workers can engage at all hours. As long as they are making good decisions, it doesn’t generally concern them how and where they are rendered. “More of your waking hours are devoted to think-ing through some office elements,” says Randy Brandoff, SVP and CMo of Netjets, a Columbus, ohio-based provider of shared aircraft ownership. “There’s so much activity from conversations, meetings, conference calls, travel in the day-to-day job that, at this point, fewer decisions are being made in the office.”

Brandoff says that he rarely if ever disconnects for more than a day from his professional life. “That’s a lot, including vaca-tions,” he deadpans. Rather, Brandoff escapes in small snip-pets, a half-hour in the morning to spend time with his baby, an hour or two in the evenings to spend time with his wife and child. on weekends, he usually responds to emails in half-hour to two-hour blocks.

This high level of readiness is perhaps more important at Net-jets, which has jets in the air at any time, than at some other companies. Last year the company faced the added burden of assimilating Marquis jet, which the company had acquired the previous year. Brandoff and his team had to work par-ticularly hard creating new marketing materials to address the firms’ combined resources. “Starting in the first quarter, we wanted to hit the ground running on integrating the brands and the companies and the team, and not skip a beat from a marketing and business sales standpoint,” he says. “There was a great deal of work to do and time pressure.”

Brandoff says that even skipping a day of email can lead to lengthy backlogs requiring hours of catch-up. “If I were to take a week and not look or respond to emails, I could literally have 2,000 to 3,000 emails that I would come back to, 15 to

20 hours’ worth of catching up where, by the way, I’d be get-ting 200 to 300 more emails.”

Yet Brandoff does not expect his charges to respond right away. He says that part of effective management in an al-ways-on business climate is enabling employees to maintain a sound balance between career and home life. For example, he requires only that his subordinates respond to emails in “an appropriate amount of time,” unless marked urgent. And he tries not to impose on individuals’ free time. “If you get an email at a moment when you’re able to respond, people respond, but they’re not in any way, shape or form required to,” Brandoff says. “I’ll sometimes be cleaning up emails while someone I know is on vacation, and I’ll say before they go away: ‘Following up on a handful of things. Please wait until your return to deal with this.’”

“There’s so much activity from conversations, meetings, conference calls, travel in the day-to-day job that, at this point, fewer decisions are being made in the office.”

reAdiness With A humAn fAce

rAndY brAndoFF sVP and CMo, netJets


While two in three respondents (67%) said that input from work-related social networks plays an important role in busi-ness, social networks still remain a less compelling resource than other online and traditional outlets, including industry and business websites.

Some marketers expect that to change as social media sites now separately targeting business or personal life blend. “We have started to think about Facebook and LinkedIn as reality TV channels with everyone curating their own shows,” says Kirk Chartier, a vice president at financial services firm Charles Schwab & Co.

A number of companies in the @Work world have recognized that social media’s effectiveness as a marketing tool depends on a thoughtful, disciplined strategy that focuses on reaching the right individuals at the right time.

Consider Hewlett-Packard’s Imaging & Printing division. It re-cently introduced a new commercial digital printer that it sells largely to small and midsize printing firms for about $1 million. Some of these companies may not generate revenues much over $10 million, so the expense of replacing a printer is care-fully considered.

Manny Kostas, the HP Imaging & Printing Group’s VP of strategy and marketing, says that his unit decided to launch the newest product at a customer’s plant before a select audience of journalists and other individuals whom the company identified as influencers. In the past, HP might have staged the event at its own site, but the company felt that a neutral environment gave it more credibility. HP pro-vided video and other materials that could be used swiftly online to help spread interest. “The information went out via tweets and re-tweets from about 1,300 people who were attending,” Kostas says. “They were helping other print-service providers qualify this big capital investment they were about to make, or they were print-service provid-ers themselves who actively have a community discussing among themselves what the best new digital printing tech-nology is. That just fostered an official HP communications path. What’s most critical is we’re choosing a medium that the customer has chosen.”

Kostas says that once the event took place, his group entrust-ed the content and distribution of messaging to the circles of influencers and other interested parties. But he believes that the benefits of relinquishing some control—open discussion and a more engaged audience—outweighed the main down-side of potential criticism in a public forum. “The customers know better what’s most important to them, not necessarily the manufacturer or even the salesperson,” Kostas says. “So when you rely upon the industry analysts and members of the press that focus on this very small, distinct market as well as the customers themselves, they trust each other more than they trust the manufacturer to help sort the most relevant and compelling data out of this information overload that’s com-ing to them. As long as you get the content in the form, in the vehicle that’s relevant to them, but then they self-select and talk amongst themselves, then you deliver the message far more effectively.”

Kostas says that the same principles apply in marketing to indi-viduals and businesses. “We don’t separate the pure B2B from the individual because the owner-manager or the professional is inundated on the personal as well as the professional front. The explosion of content, whether it’s email coming to them, tweets, searching queries or blog posts, all that information is coming at them whether they’re on their way home, on a cell phone, on a tablet or in the workplace. We have to manage that in its entirety.”

Kostas adds: “The key is to embrace it and to understand the right time, the right form, and glean amongst all that informa-tion what’s most compelling.”

A thoughtful And disciplined sociAl mediA ApproAchMAnnY KostAs VP of strategy and marketing, hewlett-Packard Imaging & Printing group


the @Work reAlity Email, seemingly less intrusive than a phone call, has turned into an always open channel of

communication. just 3% of executives said that they never send work-related emails while on

vacation. Another 12% said they rarely send or receive such emails. Contrast these numbers

with the nearly two in three respondents (63%) who send or receive such emails on every, or on

most, vacations.

To be sure, this doesn’t necessarily mean a significant commitment for decision makers. Michael Fertman, CMO at Guidepoint, checks his email about once per day during vacations. “I’m just looking for [emails] where I know somebody really needs something, and there’s no one else who’s going to be able to help them,” he says. “It’s around literally how to find something or helping craft a tiny little message, but not things that will be a half-day kind of thing.”

Still, the perceived need to monitor the flow often leads to compulsive behavior. Twelve percent of respon-dents said they check email on a smartphone during non-work hours at least five times per hour. And 63% said they check at least every one to two hours.

Even Europe, with its traditionally greater emphasis on vacations than North America, now accepts downtime interruptions as common practice. Indeed, almost seven in 10 respondents (69%) from Continental Europe said that they sent or received emails during all or most vacations (this may bear some relationship to the length of many European vacations). That’s eight percentage points higher than among U.S. professionals.

Gyro’s Allen says this may reflect the continued influx and influence of international companies in Europe, which have imported their work schedules rather than adopting national practices. “In European companies that are part of international networks, you often don’t have a choice. If you were working for a German engineering company that did most of its business in Germany, I’d be interested to see if it was different.”

It might be. Car manufacturer Volkswagen recently prevented some 1,100 non-management employees from sending or receiving emails between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. on their company-issued BlackBerrys and other smartphones. The move responded to employee com-plaints about workdays extended by having to respond to messages at any time.

How often do you send and receive work-related emails and have business discussions during vacations?

Som

etim

es

Mos

t vac

atio

nsEver

y va

catio

n

Occ

asio

nally

Rar

ely

Nev

er

3

121011

25

38

Percentage %


But Volkswagen limited this ruling—effectively rein-stituting evenings off—to non-management employees only, and only to its German workers. Management types don’t fall under this rule, as it was negotiated by a trade union. That non-management employees were upset about having to monitor email after work hours should not come as a surprise, as attitudes about email depend on a given employee’s rank.

The Forbes Insights survey confirms this thesis. Analyzing the responses of two groups—those who feel in control, who are driven to participate in the @Work State of Mind by their own ambition; and the Not-In-Control group, who are driven by company expectations, such as the Volkswagen employees who won email free time—differences in attitudes become clear. For example, even though 35% of respondents reported feeling productive, only 22% of the not-in-control set felt productive.

The composition of the groups varies by title, respon-sibilities and company size. The higher up the ladder they

are, the happier the @Work State of Mind makes execu-tives. While 37% of the executives surveyed were C-level, just 24% felt a lack of control. This ratio is reversed for executives with titles below C-level. While 64% of exec-utives surveyed had titles below C-level, 77% of below C-level executives felt a lack of control.

In fact, while those who feel in control are distributed pretty evenly across the range of company sizes, the per-centage of those who feel a lack of control over their work flow increases fairly steadily with company size.

John Cripps, founding partner and president of Marketing Decision Science Inc., adds that attitudes toward the glut of information depend on whether people are more often on the receiving or sending end of com-munications. The receivers are more likely to feel negative about it because they are more frequently responding to commands. “If you’re a net receiver of communications, you’re angry because you’re not in control,” Cripps says. “A good day for me is if I send 50 emails but receive 10 and have no calls.”

n The U.S. n The U.K. n other Europe

Every vacation SometimesMost vacations Occasionally Rarely Never

How often do you send and receive work-related emails and have business discussions during vacations?

39

22

12 12 1214

9

3 37

107

118

23

34

39

35

Percentage %


TOTAL

35%

TOTAL

21%

TOTAL

10%

iN CONTROL

44%

iN CONTROL

26%

iN CONTROL

13%

NOT iN CONTROL

22%

NOT iN CONTROL

11%

NOT iN CONTROL

3%

TOTAL

33%

TOTAL

22%

TOTAL

11%

iN CONTROL

32%

iN CONTROL

15%

iN CONTROL

7%

NOT iN CONTROL

44%

NOT iN CONTROL

36%

NOT iN CONTROL

21%

PRO

Du

CTiV

ERE

Sig

NED

ENA

BLED

iRRi

TATE

DEN

ERg

izED

SHA

CKLE

D

Positive Feelings

+

- Negative Feelings

Note: Executives could select multiple responses.


Email often works in favor of C-level executives and owners, notes gyro’s Swann, because it gives them more control. They’re copied on many emails, which means they don’t feel obliged to respond but still get a constant flow of information, which helps with decision-making. It also helps with monitoring activity and conversation, and now keeps very senior people, who once upon a time would have been very detached, quite involved in what’s going on.

Apart from control, email also affords them comfort. “I check email during vacations, every morning and some late afternoons,” says Juniper Networks’ Flaherty, “That doesn’t mean I speak to anybody, but it means that I monitor the flow. It makes me more relaxed that everything is well at the home office.”

But even C-level executives can sometimes feel deluged by email requests. For marketers, this means that they can-not know the current state of mind of any receiver. The challenge is knowing when to contact someone, and how to shape a message. Cripps differentiates between text mes-sages and emails. He would send a text to a customer he knows well, but would resort to the more official format of an email when bidding on a contract. “You have to play carefully,” he says.

In view of this nuanced reality, Michael Goldberg, senior partner and CMO at public relations firm Porter Novelli, says that although ever-improving software can help pin-point how and when to communicate, a marketer’s success rests on intuition, personal judgment—what he refers to as the “human touch.”

An email one day after a meeting may appear pushy if it seems robotic, without substance. But contact that addresses a particular issue, framed gracefully, can show sincere interest and weigh positively on a potential customer. “I don’t think it’s the time; it’s the relevance and the intent of the message,” Goldberg says. “Whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s still a human dealing with a human.”

What was your company’s approximate revenue during the most recent fiscal year?

n Lack of control n Control

$500 million - $999 million

$1 billion - $4.9 billion

$5 billion - $9.9 billion

Greater than $10 billion

13

18

14

21

11

16

10

16

Less than $5 million

$5 million - $24.9 million

$25 million - $99.9 million

5

6

9

14

13

13

10

11$100 million -$499 million

Percentage %


Lauren Flaherty sees the ready access to information and dismantling of the borders between personal and profes-sional life as beneficial to her job. “It was harder when you were doing this with workstations and faxes,” says Flaherty, EVP and CMo for juniper Networks. “You had to do it from your house, so you had to be tethered to a wire. With the new devices, you are able to be more pro-ductive. You are able to be more responsible.” She adds: “With all these devices that liberate us, the freedom and mobility are exceptional.”

Flaherty says that it’s important to develop time man-agement skills, and that these may be best learned partly by observing “high performance” colleagues. “It’s a com-bination of experience and picking up best practices,” she says.

As the flow of information and communications has in-creased, she has also improved her ability to prioritize. “Pick a period of time when there hasn’t been a requirement for people in business to filter through a lot of information, dis-till what’s important, get to the core issues, focus on what matters,” Flaherty says. “Maybe the tools and technology have changed the volume, but the fundamentals are the same. You’ve got to hone those prioritization skills.”

Business owner

Board member

Chief executive officer/president/

managing director

Chief financial officer

Chief operating officer

Chief information officer/chief

technology officer

Other C-level executive

EVP/SVP

VP/Director

Manager

Head of business unit/development

Which of the following best describes your title?

n Total n Lack of control n Control

10

3

10

4

3

3

4

6

35

15

8

4

4

4

3

3

4

6

42

21

8

13

3

10

4

3

3

6

34

12

9

2

2

AlWAys prioritize

LAUren FLAhertY eVP and CMo, Juniper networks

“With all these devices that liberate us, the freedom and mobility are exceptional.”

Percentage %


A Blurring of Work-Life Boundaries The place of doing business—once, the traditional office—is no longer a physical or stationary location, but a state of mind. People address work issues whenever and wherever they arise. “The collapse or collision of work and home life is a new world phenomenon that must be understood by today’s marketers in order to shape their communica-tions, messaging and delivery methods,” says Michael A. Disser, president of MAD Marketing.

Asked if she was making more business decisions outside the office than in the office, Juniper Networks’ Flaherty said: “I don’t even know if I make that dis-tinction. You make them where and when you need to make them.”

The survey detected some regional variation here: Those in the U.K. spend less time on work decisions at home, as well as less time on personal matters in the office, and so are more likely to keep the two realms separate.

Executives interviewed for this report point to the advantages of the blurring of the lines between work and personal time. Gyro’s Allen notes that where and when someone decides is fluid, and that the locations where business decisions are made are not always correlated with when or where they are conceived or evaluated. Executives may be pondering business-related informa-tion during personal time, or they may test a potential solution they’ve reached outside the office at work. “Outside of work is often one of the few places where I have a chance to actually think about something, gather up the evidence, weigh the facts and come to a conclu-sion,” says Allen.

Porter Novelli’s Goldberg says that it’s an advantage to be able to respond to the flash of inspiration anytime. “The light of it to me is that I have a right to participate in anything that my head and heart are interested in at the moment,” he says. “There is no ‘open’ or ‘closed’ sign.”

95%Making business

decisions at the office

52%Making business

decisions en route to work

59%Making business

decisions at home

55%Making at least 20% of

their work decisions at home

9%Making at least 50% of

their work decisions at home

21%Making less than 10%

of work decisions at home

Where are we when making business decisions?


Goldberg expounds on the freedom afforded by the @Work State of Mind: “I can accomplish all the matters of heart and mind, and get them all done—ultimately with much more control than I ever had before. It wasn’t that long ago, but at the same time it was a world ago, I had to focus on things that were professional during the day, and I couldn’t get to [other things]. So, I had chores when I got to work and I had chores when I got home, a to-do list in two places. Now I can be in a coffee line and reserving tickets to a vacation, and at the same time, studying some-thing in social media that I think is relevant to a client. It’s this mass blending.”

The blurring of work and personal life has influenced not only where and when, but also—perhaps most impor-tant—how people are making decisions. More than three in four respondents said that personal values were important or critically important in making business decisions, more than said that return on investment or other financial benchmarks were important or critically important.

What percentage of time do you spend on work decisions at home?

>40 >30 >20 >10 <10 Don’t know

Meanwhile, at the office...

4%Spend more than 50% of their office time on

personal matters

98%Spend time at the office

on personal matters

>50

11

6 5 68

16

12

18

2724

20 1921

27

2219

29

2 1 26

n The U.S. n The U.K. n other Europe


Since decision makers often involve their personal values in their business decision-making, a marketing message has to reverberate with or inform the value sys-tem. “Effective leaders have a strong set of values, and as the @Work State of Mind evolves to more decisions being taken from home or holiday, then personal values will become more important factors in making decisions,” says Chris Combemale, executive director of the Direct Marketing Association, a U.K.-based trade group. “Sales and marketing messages need to move beyond trans-actional, rational decision making and focus more on brand values, tone of voice and subjective benefits.” Combemale adds: “In the technology space, brands that are sexy or cool will win out versus brands that are purely functional, and psychographic factors will become more important.”

While reaching out to their audience, market-ers need to take into consideration all the layers of the @Work State of Mind, starting with the setting where this message is received. “The majority of marketers might think, ‘We’re going to talk to someone in an office setting, they’ll be at work and they’ll be in their office,’” says gyro’s Swann. “We’ll send them something, and it’s all pretty traditional.”

But that can be a mistake. The executive that you may be trying to reach could be in a taxi on his way to the air-port, he could be at home, or on vacation.

The reception of the marketing message will vary depending on the place and time, so “you’re going to get a little bit of tension,” says Swann, “and whatever you do with that tension, you have to make an impact.”

Every day in America, 3.5 billion brand-related con-versations take place, according to a report by Keller Fay Group. Getting a message noticed and having it rever-berate in that environment is a sophisticated process, requiring understanding of the @Work State of Mind.

“The perception for marketers is that brands aren’t being spoken about,” says Swann, “so what we have to do is shout our message at this audience. The reality is that people are speaking about brands over time. They’re talk-ing about them particularly in the course of work but also in the course of their private life. Therefore, it’s less about yelling and shouting and it’s much more about offering something new to say about that brand. Give people some clear value, and they will talk about you.”

Factors affecting business decision making

77%Personal values important

or critically important


conclusionhoW to put the @Work stAte of mind to Work for your brAnd

From the thought leaders at gyroThe emergence of the @Work State of Mind necessitates some wholesale reconsideration of how marketing com-munications programs are planned and executed. New best practices must emerge to accommodate such radical reconfiguration of the business decision maker’s time and space. These new practices seem obvious, based on the findings of this research.

A new practice for driving actionable results At gyro we are working to develop new processes and tools to define and visualize the decision makers’ @Work State of Mind. Through this visualization we seek to understand where our client’s marketing efforts intersect with decision makers and their influencers, but more importantly we hope to identify new opportunities for the client to engage and support the individual’s decision-making process. The outcome is an action plan for adjusting current marketing efforts, altering existing message platforms and creating altogether new marketing strategies and programs.

@Work State of Mind Action Planning 1. MAPPiNg THE @WORK STATE OF MiND A. Modeling the Purchase Consideration Perspective The gyro process starts by building a model of the purchase consideration process based on input from the client’s

sales and marketing team. This consideration model is used as a guide for conducting qualitative research with targeted decision makers and influencers.

B. Building a Project List Persona Our qualitative research asks participants to describe their mental “to do” list comprised of work and personal tasks.

From this study we discover how decision makers accomplish the task of decision making throughout their daily routine. We identify critical interactions, defining where those interactions will likely take place (work, home, other), how interactions are accomplished and what are the likely outcomes from those interactions. Far more than just a replay of the day, this investigation unlocks the pace and emotion that is at play during these often rapid-fire exchanges. The results can be surprising when compared to the client’s rational and linear view of the process. This new view is captured in a “Project List Persona” that paints a rich picture of the individual, their emotions, depen-dence on others, use of technology and their frame of mind throughout the consideration process.

C. Diagramming the Active Decision Flow Accompanying the Project List Persona is the Active Decision Flow, which maps the activities of an individual based on

goals such as seeking solutions, validating sources and building consensus. This Active Decision Flow is often circular and includes many interactions typically not captured in the linear purchase consideration model.


2. VALiDATiNg AND ENRiCHiNg THE DATA A. Capturing and validating Consumer-initiated Connections Drawing from the persona research, we are able to identify keywords and topics that can be used to feed social media

monitoring and search tools that validate the qualitative research and determine the scale and depth of the conver-sation in the marketplace. These tools also identify the overall tone of the conversation and relevant authorities. Additional online tools are used to identify destinations most visited by decision makers, thereby giving us a more complete picture of their activities.

B. Sizing up the opportunity with a Relevance Register Combining results from the qualitative tools with quantitative data allows us to identify and prioritize destinations

and conversations where the decision maker is most engaged and will find the client’s information most relevant to his or her goals. This prioritized list of opportunities is referred to as a Relevance Register and serves to guide our final recommendations.

3. SHAPiNg ACTiONABLE RECOMMENDATiONS iN THE @WORK STATE OF MiND REPORT The combined output from the process is summarized in a report that offers recommendations in three areas.

A. Adapting current marketing efforts Recommendations on how to adjust current marketing programs to better support the decision maker’s tasks, motiva-

tions and destinations.

B. Altering content strategies Recommendations on how to create consumable content and shape relevant message platforms.

C. identifying new opportunities Recommendations on new engagement strategies based on a better understanding of the @Work State of Mind.

A fresh perspective for a new consciousness The @Work State of Mind Project remains a collaborative effort: it is only facilitated by gyro. The practice is new and rapidly evolving and we are looking for clients who are interested in learning with us. We invite you to contact us to participate in the global ideation process underway to shape a new strategic and tactical approach.


ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

BUSINESS POINT OF VIEW

DIGITAL DRIVERS

AREA OF CONCERN: INTERCONNECTEDNESS

AREA OF CONCERN: REPUTATION

AREA OF CONCERN: TRANSPARENCY

AREA OF CONCERN: PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES

The @Work State of Mind

INTEGRATED EFFECTIVENESSBEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

EMOTIONAL

DRIVERS

EMPOWERMENT

RESPONSIBILITY

AFFINITY

PERFORMANCEMETRICS

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

LEADERSHIPMANAGEMENT

TEAMWORK

CAPABILITY

MISSIONVISION

VALUES

EXPERTISE

WEB/CONNECTIVITYMOTIVATION

PERSONAL NETWORKKCABDEEFSLAOG

DECISION MAKING

COLLABORATION

CAUSE

ALIGNMENT

DASHBOARD ANALYTICS

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

ECON

OMIC

DR

IVER

S

SOCIAL DRIVERS

SOCIAL MEDIA

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Addressing the whole @Work State of Mind?This framework depicts the individual in the middle of the whole @Work State of Mind. The highlighted area in lower left is where most business marketing activities have been focused historically.

About forbes insights

Forbes insights is the strategic research practice of Forbes Media, publisher of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com. Taking advantage of a proprietary database of senior-level executives in the Forbes community, Forbes insights’ research covers a wide range of vital business issues, including: talent management; marketing; financial benchmarking; risk and regulation; small/midsize

business; and more.

Bruce Rogers chief insights officer

Brenna Sniderman senior director

Christiaan Rizy director

Kasia Moreno editoriAl director

James P. Rubin report Author

Taryn Sefecka designer

60 fifth Avenue, new york, ny 10011 | 212.367.2662 | www.forbes.com/forbesinsights

Documents

the @Work stAte of mind projectimages.forbes.com/forbesinsights/StudyPDFs/gyroAtWorkStateofMind.pdf · A collAborAtive mArketing reseArch And development project led by gyro, the