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Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

MARKETING

The rise of the C-suite influencer

It’s not just you. CEOs on LinkedIn are having a moment

LOOK, IT’LL BE no surprise to learn that in the world of CEOs, the social media platform of choice is LinkedIn. You pretty much don’t, or can’t, get to the top of the corporate ladder anymore without flexing your LinkedIn muscles here and there, be it networking or job-hunting.

 

So, when you get to the top of the heap, what do you do? Well, you keep posting of course. And posting, and posting and posting some more, apparently.

 

CEOs have been going hog wild on LinkedIn this year: the platform estimates there has been a 23 per cent increase in posts by CEOs on the site in 2024, while the number of people following these posters has risen by a sharp 31 per cent just this year alone. When 5,000 CEOs were surveyed by Inc. earlier this year, 58.5 per cent said it was the most important social platform to them. They love it. It loves them.

 

Why now, though? Increasingly, CEOs are seeing it as a direct marketing platform. “Many CEOs are moonlighting as LinkedIn creators, publishing content and interacting with others on the platform as company ambassadors,” reported Fast Company, eschewing traditional advice that might guide them to be less visible on the app.

 

CEOs are increasingly comfortable letting the human side of their brand show, added Morgan DeBaun, CEO of Blavity. “They want to tell their story, they want to be heard,” chimed in VP of product at LinkedIn Dan Roth. Others put down the rise in LinkedIn posting to the declining number of journalism outlets to cover their story.

 

But there’s loving something, and then loving it a bit too much, as the owner of the Instagram account @BestofLinkedIn could attest. For instance, there’s the CEO who posted about his challenges with peeing in public restrooms, or the CEO who went to LinkedIn to ask his followers how to get his kid more football playing time, or one who announced that “if you never engage with my posts, I’m not engaging with yours.”

 

Good, bad? Who knows, and who cares? We can at least delight that it’s more human than it ever has been over on LinkedIn. “It’s my way of creating a little more personal connection between the company, myself and our customers,” said Bolle Drinks CEO Gary Read. “My posts are random. Not timed. Not reviewed by anyone and honestly may be completely boring. But they are me.”

REMOTE WORK

Hybrid hygiene

More productive, less stressed ... and a little more stinky

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ARE YOU A hybrid worker? If so ― how do you smell right now?

 

With a lot of employees settling into some kind of hybrid schedule, we’re seeing a divergence in the kinds of personal grooming and hygiene habits practised on in-office days and at-home days. Statistics Canada’s recent Time Use Survey, which is the first to really look in granular detail at how teleworkers are using their time differently, was able to put a number on it.

 

“Working from home was associated with less time in personal care activities, such as personal hygiene, grooming or getting dressed,” the survey found. Remote workers are spending on average 24 minutes less on personal care. Working from home may give workers a lot more time, but fewer of them choose to spend that time on freshening up.

 

This probably makes sense (scents?) to you. Without coworkers sniffing around your desk, why shower?

 

“The amount of time we spend making ourselves fit for public consumption, it’s not worth the amount of time we’re given,” observed Andrew Penner, sociology professor at the University of California. But maybe the better question to ask isn’t why remote workers aren’t taking so much time in the bathroom in the mornings; it’s why are the in-office workers spending so much time in there?

 

There are plenty who would argue that this trend is a negative one ― that grooming and hygiene is psychologically a boundary between work and home that is ever more important when those two things both take place at home. “Grooming for your day sends a signal to yourself that it’s time to get to work,” wrote William Arruda. “If you know you’re disheveled, your state of mind can lead to disheveled performance, too.”

 

Perhaps, but something else the stats revealed is that just about everyone benefits from the time savings associated with shorter, less strict grooming regimes. When given the 25 or so extra minutes, 40 per cent of employees put that time back into their work; 30 per cent put it into time with their kids or their home; and 30 per cent put it into exercise. And those that have broken free of society’s hygienic shackles say it can be liberating to stop caring what your coworkers ― or your housemates ― think.

 

“We’re still in a Mad Men type era of thinking about the office, that people should look beautiful and put on their best aesthetic to go to work,” said Toronto Metropolitan University professor Cheryl Thompson. “For a lot of people, when they realized they didn’t have to do it, it was this break from appearing in public as your public self.” 

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BENEFITS

Go on now, git!

The newest work perk? Companies are paying to make sure workers take vacation

REGULAR READERS OF this newsletter will probably know that experts in the HR and management world are practically begging employers and employees to get on board with positive PTO and vacation cultures at their workplaces. The benefits are well-substantiated: less burnout, higher productivity and greater staff satisfaction.

 

Readers of this newsletter will also know that this remains a challenge. Workers voluntarily leave PTO on the table, and employers push schemes like “unlimited PTO” that ultimately result in less time off being taken. One solution, though, is a somewhat radical one: pay your staff to go on vacation.

 

We’re not just talking about the paid in paid time off here. What if your workplace actually footed the bill for your trip? It’s a solution that some workplaces are finding success with. Software company Bamboo HR provides a $2,000 annual stipend for vacations, and the benefit is one of the company’s most popular perks ― it has “nearly 100 per cent” uptake, the company said.

 

Other companies have their own ways of doing it, often paying a matching percentage into a vacation fund. Proponents say it’s a fair, universal benefit that staff love, and one of the few benefits that ― regardless of your age, or gender, income bracket, marital status ― appeals to just about everyone because everyone is expected to take some time off during the year.

 

You’re starting to see this kind of benefit pop up increasingly these days, especially among companies with any connection to the tourism business. Airbnb, Evernote, Expedia and United Airlines are among the companies that offer some kind of travel stipend program. “The steep increase in the cost of living and rising inflation rates worldwide make holidays a true luxury,” noted Michael Konig of Vienna University. “Companies that offer paid holiday expenses are addressing this directly, and employers can use this intelligently in their employer branding strategy.”

 

“In this competitive market offering a paid vacation stipend sticks out to recruits,” said Bamboo HR’s Kimberley Stout. “It’s a quick and easy way to prove that companies are not just giving lip service about the value and the culture with their benefits, they’re standing behind them.”

WORKFORCE

Transforming from within

In an era when business success depends on having caring, creative employees, enthusiasm for employee ownership programs is gaining momentum

SO, MAYBE YOU’RE an employer who read the previous story and thought, ‘No way I’m paying for vacations!’ But maybe you still want a team of satisfied, motivated employees, who genuinely want to see a company prosper.

 

One solution? Expanding employee stock ownership programs. It’s an idea that is getting some renewed momentum, and it’s being pushed not (only) by unions and socialists, but by private equity executive Pete Stavros.

 

“How much better would our economy be if workers owned a piece of every company in America?” Stavros, head of KKR’s global private-equity business, asked recently in a Wall Street Journal article. Stavros recently founded the group Expanding ESOPs (employee stock ownership plan) with more than 50 foundations, including law firms, banks and academics, with the hope of encouraging businesses to address long-standing productivity and inequality crises with programs that buy workers into the economy.

 

It’s an idea that also has a lot of traction in the labour research world. A recent paper by researchers at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota found that companies with ESOPs correlate positively with employee satisfaction, without requiring higher compensation. “By increasing their financial participation, this would directly increase their motivation, which would translate to higher productivity and well-being,” said the paper’s co-author Adrianto Adrianto.

 

And it’s an idea that has some backing here in Canada, with tax incentives for successions to employee ownership (i.e., ceding the business to its workers after the owner retires) included in the recent federal budget. (Notably, selling a business to an employee trust is one way to partially get around the new capital gains tax inclusion rate.)

 

Noting that 76 per cent of Canadian business owners plan to retire in the next decade, proponents here would like to see employee ownership plans ― which can include ESOPs ― be included in the conversation.

 

“With every sale to an employee ownership trust, we’re increasing the likelihood that companies stay Canadian-owned, remain resilient in the face of economic turbulence and provide meaningful wealth for working Canadians,” said Tiara Letourneau, steering committee member of the Canadian Employee Ownership Coalition. “The creation of an employee ownership trust and accompanying tax incentive will, for the first time, provide business owners with a viable alternative to selling their businesses to international private equity firms or competitors.”

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