Profile: Glenn Manoff, O2
Leadership styles / 01 May 2010
With an ambitious vision to build a pan-European ‘fandom’ for telecoms giant O2, Glenn Manoff has no intention of holding back now he has a network of followers. Jane Lewis finds out what drives the company's communications director
Glenn Manoff is a man on a mission. He wants to spread love and isn’t embarrassed who knows. In fact, the prospect of creating a world where everyone connected with O2 contributes personal views, shares ideas, and even detractors are encouraged to play their part is a welcome force driving his new-found passion.
“It’s not just lip gloss,” says Manoff. “We’re thinking about these things really seriously.” The aim is to convert a transactional relationship with customers and employees into something much deeper. “It’s about playing a far broader role in people’s lives.”
The word ‘fan’, as Manoff recently told a Department for Business, Innovations and Skills (BIS) conference on employee engagement, is “a very small word” but “a very big thought”. Indeed, O2 bases its entire strategy around establishing the concept of fandom: everything the company measures – from customer ratings to how management bonuses are assessed – starts from this deceptively simple idea.
Getting a thank you, recognition and a pat on the back is wonderful – and you can start to see how that resonates with being and feeling like a fan
Glenn Manoff, communications director, O2
Standing outside O2’s new HQ on the outskirts of Slough, the eminently approachable O2 communications director sets the tone for the informal feel of the place. The building, Manoff points out, is only half finished. When complete, it will feature a huge O2 retail store where customers can come and play with the technology and generally hang out. It’s a tangible expression of the O2 concept writ large: the mingling of work with home life; of the private and corporate worlds. The mobile operator wants to make ‘fans’ of both its customers and its employees.
With a 27% share of the market, one in three people in the UK – some 20 million – are O2 customers. But the mobile operator needs to be on its toes – competition is heating up as the Orange and T-Mobile merger is given the go-ahead creating a potential behemoth with a 37% share of mobile users. At the heart of O2’s philosophy and the key to its strategy is a customer promise phrased in deliberately emotive language. “We love helping customers. We love connecting them to the people and to the things that matter. We love making changes for the better.”
But, in some ways, the bigger problem was how to get O2’s vast and decentralised workforce hooked on the theme, an audience of 12,000 people, comprising everyone from retail outlets and call centre employees, through the sales and tech support teams, to the company’s corporate staff.
Culture club
Manoff’s solution was to establish a company-wide Fan Club, the most visible manifestation being the in-house social network FanBook. The central purpose of both the club and the network is to resonate with O2’s customer strategy. “The social network is specifically designed so people repeat, reinforce and value the behaviours that lead to the delivery of our customer promise.”
The network allows employees to build a profile of themselves – and “give applause” to colleagues doing an outstanding job. “Getting a thank you, recognition and a pat on the back is wonderful – and you can start to see how that resonates with being and feeling like a fan,” says Manoff.
To those who question the strategy, Manoff points to Apple whose workforce are serious fans of the company. “Fans behave with their hearts and their heads – they go the extra mile.” Being a fan is not always very rational, and he concedes that many companies might find this type of upfront employee engagement “anathema”: even O2’s parent, Telefonica – 100 years’ old and Spain’s biggest company – “can’t quite imagine getting there”.
But there is evidence that the approach is paying dividends. Just four months into the programme, over half of O2’s UK staff had created an online profile, and when the company linked 2,500 employees nationwide into a live-link awards ceremony (the invitees were those deemed most active in the O2 fan clubs) “the energy and sense of passion” was palpable.
“Social media is predominantly a very personal tool, yet a powerful one, but it’s not necessarily well matched to business,” a lesson that O2 learnt from experience. FanBook is actually its second attempt at kick-starting conversations among employees via a social network.
The first attempt, Mingle, didn’t meet expectations. “We just kind of chucked it out there, it didn’t take off because we didn’t align the tool and the strategy – we were using the medium for the medium’s sake.” The big lesson learned, he says, was the vital importance of aligning the social network with the company’s underlying philosophy – its customer promise.
Another obvious risk of empowering employees to communicate via social media is how they interact with customers. Manoff cites the example of one employee, who was so galvanised by a critique of the company he found online that he delivered a punchy riposte to the original poster. It was a rather problematic situation to deal with, says Manoff.
On the one hand, “the last thing you want to do is to make an example of people in the company [who behave like] fans”. But if all-out anarchy is to be avoided, “you need very clear policies on how people can talk about the company – and they’re evolving constantly”.
Perhaps the most effective is the establishment of a new social media team, dedicated to interacting with the company’s fans and critics online. Social media has changed everything about the way companies communicate with customers. “All these millions of conversations are happening and it’s a tremendous opportunity. A few years ago, you would never have had the [market] intelligence to know what people were thinking and saying. But now it’s absolutely real-time. We know the reaction of customers to something almost immediately. We are now regularly aware if a problem arises on our network before our colleagues in tech support are – because someone in Scunthorpe has just tweeted: ‘Hey, network down. What gives?’”
Given a 20 million customer-base, Manoff recognises that at least some of these conversations will be negative. But, with a team trained to put the company’s view across skillfully, “employees never have to read these things and feel lousy because someone out there is dissing the company – and no-one’s doing anything about it”. It’s important for your employee base, and their morale, to see that “you care enough to participate – and do it skillfully”.
Learning the ropes
Despite his youthful appearance, Manoff is actually rather a grand old man of the communications industry. American-born (he was raised in Philadelphia and attended George Washington University in DC), he arrived at Manchester University as an exchange student in the mid-1980s – and has stayed in the UK, on and off, ever since. After spending his twenties travelling and dabbling in work, teaching English and coaching basketball, before studying for a masters, he ended up in London. By the mid-1990s he was business editor at publishers EMAP.
“It was a very serendipitous thing. I was covering a young, dynamic industry just when dotcom was booming, telecoms in Europe were being deregulated and markets were going crazy. You didn’t realise at the time that it was a bubble – but the bubble kept growing bigger. Everyone on the title was getting job offers left, right and centre – because there weren’t that many people who knew about the industry, and it was expanding exponentially. And at some point I thought, well doing it and building it could be more fun. And I never looked back.”
Manoff started out at Esprit Telecom, then a start-up, and went on to work at Global Telesystems and B2B telecoms outfit Ebone, before joining newly-formed O2 in 2002. He arrived at a crucial juncture. The company, formerly BT Cellnet, had just been spun out of BT and rebranded. “BT Cellnet wasn’t failing, but it wasn’t exactly performing” and it wasn’t effectively positioned in a rapidly-changing market that was heading in a more lifestyle-based direction – exemplified by rival Orange’s ‘The future’s bright’ campaign.
“It’s not that often you get the chance to have a completely fresh start and clean sheet. That was the opportunity O2 had when it cast aside Cellnet and launched a new company and brand. There was a big job to do. But there’s been phenomenal growth and I think we’ve built a very strong brand here.” Certainly, when O2 was acquired by Spain’s Telefonica in 2006 for £17.7bn, the deal was reported as a triumph for the company’s CEO Peter Erskine.
“It was a big deal – a lot of money. But it was based on a lot of trust between the two CEOs. Peter conveyed to Cesar [Telefonica boss Cesar Alierta] that we’d built something very special: the brand is special, the culture is special and it’s really working. And Telefonica understood that.
“That’s not to say that we have a hands-off relationship. But there was a recognition that we didn’t want to do what so many M&As (mergers and acquisitions) do, which is kill the goose. Since then, we’ve built growing momentum. I’ve been in quite a few M&As and I’ve never seen it go quite so well as here.”
Manoff professes to be “a very impatient” person. “I don’t have a very big attention span, so I like to keep going to the next idea – the next big thing.” Even so, when he finds something good, he tends to stick with it. He met his partner Maggie in Manchester in the 1980s and they’ve been together ever since; and he’s certainly been a permanent fixture at O2. But, then again, his role has evolved constantly over the years, in line with changing technology. Meanwhile, his team has grown from four to more than 50 and his remit for building 02 “communities” now extends well into mainland Europe.
“O2 is the most dynamic, fast-changing company ever to work for. It gives you incredible licence to go for big ideas.” A case in point was planting the O2 name on the former Dome – a considerable PR risk that has paid off in spades. Another is the company’s move into mobile banking, O2 Money. The company’s game plan is to make the mobile phone “the remote control” for every facet of life: from gaming and socialising, to managing money.
Ideas bank
“We’re expanding into new areas where we think the customer could be served much better.” Given the UK’s “unbanked” millions, the idea of introducing a prepaid money card, which works like a pre-paid phone, was inspirational. “It was the fastest-growing card launch ever – a great example of combining the right insight with strong execution.”
And there are plenty more plans. Some of these ventures are more successful than others: “Some go straight to the moon, some will be slow-burners”. But the point is that O2 is a hotbed of new ideas and possibilities. How does it sustain that dynamic culture? There’s a clue in the office set-up: a rather more elegant version of the 1990s hot desking idea. No-one at O2 has their own office – even the CEO; and no-one has their own desk either. Why would you need one, asks Manoff. “Thanks to comms technology, you can be anywhere – and people increasingly are anywhere. You don’t need to be in the office to do your job. In fact, often times the worst place you can be is in that office. You’ve got to be out where the action is – where the people are. I can talk to any of my team wherever I am over webcams.”
Consequently, he believes, the old distinction between office-based workers and teleworkers is defunct. We’re all mobile workers now. It’s a more fluid way of working and living that keeps monotony at bay and sparks new ideas. To Manoff, the idea of enforcing “silly rules” like banning staff from going on Facebook is outdated. “If you can’t trust people to do their jobs just because they’re going on Facebook, clearly you’ve hired the wrong person. If you want to engage your people, the first thing you’ve got to do is hire the right people.”
Even with all the tools available out there, measuring engagement can be tricky, says Manoff. “We use 360 degree surveys and bring in external benchmarkers, and so on. But you’re never quite there with those things. Measuring the heart is always harder than measuring the head. Our strategy – both external and internal – is about getting to this level of emotional engagement that creates love. It sounds like a funny word in the corporate world, but that relationship is central to what we do. That’s how you get people to put in that discretionary effort, that personal commitment and desire to own the company strategy themselves.”