Remaking a Company for the Digital Natives

The Gallup Great Workplace Award was created to recognize companies that have figured out the best ways to create an engaged workplace culture. In 2014, USAA was one of just 36 companies worldwide to receive the award.

That’s a feather in the cap of Renee Horne, the vice president of social business at USAA, who joined the company in 2012. She is part of the team of people who recognized that social business tools could be used for talent recruitment and new employee engagement at USAA, the Texas-based Fortune 500 company that offers a variety of financial services to military members and their families, from auto insurance and credit cards to life insurance and more.

“Social media gives us an opportunity to provide a showcase into what it’s like to work at USAA,” with videos, photos and live feeds on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Social tools also are fueling internal communities where USAA’s 26,000 employees can share ideas and find answers from colleagues they’ve never met.

In a conversation with Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane, an associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and guest editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s Social Business Big Idea Initiative, Horne details the increase of digital natives in the USAA workforce, the use of metrics to measure social’s impact, and the coming rise in demand for social strategists.

So how did USAA get started with social business?

What’s interesting for us is [that] we have always been a word-of-mouth company, for more than 90 years. We started where military officers were self-insuring, and basically through word-of-mouth, with one telling the next about USAA. That was largely how we grew — until more recent years, of course.

Like most major brands in the mid-2000s, we established a presence with social media communities, third-party platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We were largely focusing on increasing brand affinity and monitoring to better service our members and maintain our reputation.

What’s going on now with social at USAA today?

We have continued to mature our social media usage and experience. We quickly realized that there’s a larger opportunity to make it more holistic — and really, an integral part of the fabric of USAA.

We’re getting thousands of Twitter interactions monthly from our membership. That’s the entry ticket. There are a whole set of ways we’re having to rethink how we look at social media as more than just a channel and more of an integrated part of the way we have to do business going forward.

A lot of it has to do with our evolving membership in terms of the increasing composition of digital natives and individuals that are just more comfortable with interacting digitally, or in some cases through social media. Inside of our company, our workforce demographic has evolved with that as well.

Tell us more about that — the increase of what you called “digital natives” in your workforce, and what that means for the company.

Let me give you a specific use case within our IT developer function here at USAA.
We have an internally based [online] community. It sits on an interactive platform much like you would see in your personal life: a LinkedIn or a Facebook or a Twitter, where there’s micro-blogging and interaction back and forth. And it’s 6,000 or 7,000 IT developers that come together and explore source code solutions and fixes and co-create. They have a very real-time, active dialog around questions and answers to solve business problems.

And so it has been an extremely valuable resource for the following reasons: one, it has inspired crowdsourcing and solution gathering from peers; two, it defies the notion that all communications have to be led from the top down to get things done; and three, it has been a very, very organic and almost tribe-like experience for those that are a part of this community. We’re reducing the time it takes to resolve issues. We’re getting things done in terms of the cycle time in a much shorter period of time, while experts rise to the occasion.

And that’s just one example. We’ve got dozens of these. And so my point here is, if you think about the way things historically have gotten done — not just at USAA, but many companies — it was very, very different. This is a natural, free-forming, opt-in, no-pressure way of problem solving and getting work done faster.

I read a case study where you said one of the goals you had for social was to engage current employees and recruiting the best prospective employees. Can you give some examples of how you do recruiting using social at USAA?

I was just with our HR partners recently, talking about use of social for recruitment purposes. It’s almost common practice for us right now, whether it’s on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, to promote active job openings or even job fairs. We’re utilizing all of them where appropriate.

And we’re getting a lot of engagement. Social media gives us an opportunity to provide a showcase into what it’s like to work at USAA — whether it’s video content, whether it’s photos, whether it’s things from a live fair. It’s a great way to provide some insight into the very rich tapestry of the experiences of working at USAA.

Personally speaking, I had a situation about a year ago where we had a position to fill on my immediate team, and I thought, “Well, let me give it a shot.” I put it into my LinkedIn network, and within two hours, up pops an individual in my network who I happen to know. With hundreds of folks in your network, you’re never really sure who’s going to come up. You just can’t remember them all. We put them through the proper screening process, of course, and interviews and whatnot. And in less than 60 days, the individual was on staff.

When we did our 2014 social business report, our survey respondents have told us that talent recruitment and new employee engagement is a major use.

Yes. I think we’re a little unique at USAA because we have such a military-centric focus. We’ve got a variety of communities, including recently separated veterans, who’ve taken jobs with USAA. We have quite a few communities including mentoring. It helps the transition from the military world to the civilian world.

We’re also seeing an emergence of a new community called Impact. Anyone can join it, but it’s predominately made up of millennials just trying to pick the greatest brains and minds at USAA to figure out how to advance their careers and how to get the most out of them. We’re seeing an emergence of a lot of — I don’t want to call them support groups, but they’re really growth and development and career reentry-type groups for our military folks.

What impact do you think these communities are having on your employees?

It’s driving large amounts of engagement and participation. For instance, we have another community for employee innovation where we post problems we’re trying to solve. Maybe it’s time-bound, almost equivalent to those IBM jams. We get tons of participation — ideas off the charts, some of which we implement. It’s an impressive way to engage and tap into the talent of more than 26,000 employees. And it also gives employees an opportunity to know — and not just feel like, but know — that their ideas matter. I think for that reason, that’s why we have been privileged to enjoy some of the highest engagement rates among all businesses, particularly in the Fortune 500.

When you say you have one of the highest levels of engagement in the Fortune 500, where do you get that? Do you have data on that?

We do. We take an annual employee engagement survey and it’s run by Gallup. I know that we’ve had in the past, and as of late, some of the highest engagement numbers —

The interesting piece to see would be as USAA has become more social, has that gotten even a higher score for you. Is there a correlation there?

Good question. That’s not something we’ve necessarily looked at. I don’t know if there’s a correlation or not. I don’t want to sound like we’re beating our own drum, but our numbers have traditionally been high and I’m not sure how much higher they could actually go.

So, for us it may be difficult to measure the impact of social in this regard. But I would say sustainment would play into that. If the numbers stay at that level, social certainly would have a role as technology and our reliance of social for internal collaboration and engagement increase.

One of the things we’ve seen in mature businesses is financial or operational measures associated with social. Are there bottom-line metrics that you can cite or report to your leadership that highlight the impact and value of social?

Yes. Part of what I’ve spent the last year and a half socializing and building with the team here is an overarching business case and business plan. By that I mean really articulating that business value, across our members, employees and the association

It is a maturing practice. I will tell you it has not reached its full potential yet, because, again, we are still early in our journey from evolving from the more traditional social media for brand presence use to the full-scale, more holistic social business as a practice whereby its embedded and used in support of business specific objectives.

Can you give me an example of how you have been able to tie social initiatives to business outcome?

Well, something as simple as being able to reduce time to service a member. If you think about being able to simply respond and having a minimum turnaround time in social, that’s an example. Or a certain level of problem resolution, things of that nature. We’ve also used social listening to inform our marketing and communications to members, especially for increasing financial literacy and mitigating fraud.

And you have quantified that and been able to quantify the reduction because of social?

That’s correct. Our scorecard is not for public consumption, if you will, but I want to make sure you know there isn’t a single KPI [Key Performance Indicator]. We have multiple [KPIs]. It goes back to what are our objectives. We measure our success against the objectives.

Who do you report up to? Marketing? Operations?

I’m often asked that question. First of all, you need to know it’s a cross-functional enterprise effort when anyone says they’re engaging in social enterprise activities or fully embracing the concept of being a social business. My background is skewed towards finance and marketing and a little bit of communications. I report up through an organization called Enterprise Strategy and Marketing.

My role and the function that we are leading — we, as in our team — is enterprise-wide. If you think about it in terms of a hub-and-spoke type model, we’re the hub. So, I’ve got a small team of a mix of some community managers, marketers, some strategists and internal consultants to various lines of business units and staff agents. We work with a large cross-functional working group, which is basically an extended core team that includes representatives from IT and marketing and the various lines of businesses and product developers.

One thing we don’t spend a lot of time talking about or haggling over is ownership. Accountability is shared, and we all have respective functional domains of expertise. And as long as we embrace how to best to deploy whatever the social capability is in the proper area, I think it eliminates a lot of confusion and nonproductive energy around debating who owns it.

My own view is that it’s the members, the consumers, who own social. And really that’s how we do everything here at USAA. Our mission starts with the member. If our members weren’t giving us feedback, then we probably have a little bit of a different business model and we may not even be having this conversation. But we will organize and service and surround ourselves with fulfilling our member mission.

Are you guys using social data, either internally or externally? And if yes, how are you using that?

Oh, that’s a loaded question! Let’s just talk about just social listening. I think most companies that are serious about this have some form of a monitoring tool or listening tool. And we’re no different in that regard. We’re certainly not trying to stalk [members] or anything. What we’re trying to do is learn and understand what concerns are or, in some cases, opportunities to address member needs. And our members are very forthcoming, and they’ve helped us work through issues we’ve had.

Sometimes social’s a leading indicator for us for something that may be happening in the marketplace, whether it’s USAA-centric or not, that we probably need to pay attention to. It’s a great resource for making sure we’re in touch with what’s impacting our members and their needs.

Any other ways you’re using social data other than monitoring?

Yes. There are multiple use cases, some of which I can’t get into because it gets into areas around fraud and whatnot. Just rest assured that we utilized this data to the best benefit of our membership, and that’s for sure. It’s amazing how sophisticated the technology is and what it allows us to be able to do in terms of speed and the velocity at which it helps us and informs decisions. Things as simple as, if there is some kind of outage, if there is an issue with an application or deposits.

In some cases, we’ll get signals that will give us alerts and we’ll research things — it’s ahead of the call center. Often times, members will speak out and come to us via social before picking up the phone. And so we take it very, very seriously, and we see it as a very, very valuable mechanism for insights and business intelligence. I know that might sound a little vague.

I know. I so want to press you on this, but I want to be respectful of proprietary information. I’ll move to my final question, which is: where do you think social will be in two to three years from now?

Oh, very good question. I think what you’re starting to see is a more proactive set of uses and ideation around how to get on the office, if you will, with social instead of social being the, oh, this passive thing. Social is becoming a naturally integrated part of the very fabric of the business, whether you’re talking about an advertising campaign, whether you’re talking about how you go to market around a new product or service, whether you’re talking about how you build a new product or services with a consumer or customer, or members in our case.

Social is now, I think, a more widely accepted and increasingly will become a more readily utilized lever and construct for deriving and helping meet business objectives. It’s no longer an exception, but I think it’s becoming the norm.

I think what we’re going to ultimately see over the next two years is a ramp-up in demand for social strategists. The community manager role, I think, has been around for a minute. And for anyone who’s been in this a while, that was sort of the first thing that people put in place. But now you’re going to see strategists, advisors, more business skill-sets in terms of taking a harder stance and playing a larger role in how to utilize social for business purposes. I think you’re going to see the talent evolve immensely.