Who buys 11% of their alcohol online during lockdown, and what would a Likert scale say about it?

I was on an ActionCOACH call with a group of business owners, and the question was turning to getting the staff back to work, and also how to start greeting customers. People have been coaxing their staff out of their homes and starting to get them ready to go back into the office, factory, or shop.

The next task of companies is to start communicating with existing and potential customers. The stories that were shared included one about a dentist who had done nothing during the coronavirus lockdown. Whilst one of the participants in the call had a dental appointment, there'd be no call to actually physically cancel the appointment, nor any follow-up to reschedule. Another person on the call had the opposite experience, where their dentist had rung them to explain when the practice would be open again and what could be done to catch up with their dental care.

It raised, in a very simple way, how different companies have reached out to their existing customers and are reaching out to potentially new customers. The question turned to whether you should ring all of your customers and find out how they're doing. The issue with that is it’s just not practical for many people, especially people in retail that have a large number of customers or walk-in customers for which they may or may not have had any engagement or ongoing relationship. This is very, very difficult. 

I suggested that one way that people could start to get a barometer on the well-being and the attitude of their customers is to start to use polling. How does polling impact PR? Without knowing how people are feeling and what they're thinking, the message that we're about to give may, more likely, fall on deaf or not hearing ears. As I've talked about before with the Wiio’s Law from the famous Finnish professor, whatever can be misunderstood will be misunderstood. The way of reducing the chance of being misunderstood is really to take a temperature check and find out what people are thinking before they come into contact with you. 

Polls can be placed either in-store or point-of-sale. In Singapore, where I travel and live a lot, they actually have a touch screen where you can give a rating for the cleanliness of the restrooms at the airport. For example, at the airport in Beijing, the counter with the passports has a Like/Dislike button on it as well so you can rate the customs officer (you always have to be careful not to rate them Not Like until you've got your stamp). Polls like these can take place in-store or you can have them online using platforms like Survey Monkey or PollDaddy. There is a new one that's come to my attention called Mentimeter, which enables you to embed a polling system and a word cloud into your presentation, so that if you are having a presentation on Zoom, for example, or Microsoft Teams, you can actually upload the PowerPoint to Mentimeter and plug in some polls to that. As you're displaying that, you can ask everybody with you to give their feedback. Polls can also be used in LinkedIn as a new feature, as we've covered on one of our blog posts recently. It can also be inserted into Facebook, where you can create polls as well. So there are many tools, both structured and unstructured, for doing polling. 

These come back to the science created by a chap called Likert. This is an American social scientist called Rensis Likert who invented this bipolar scale all the way back in 1932. This was some 90 years ago, so we're still living on the technology invented by someone a great deal pre-digital times. With the Likert scale, it seems that there's a strength of intensity or an attitude that is linear, from liking to disliking, and somewhere along the line in between. It allows for quantitative data to be collected about an emotional issue. That could be very powerful, because we can start to take temperature tests about how people feel about any number of issues that we're facing. 

Now, we've been talking about the reluctance of people to go back to work. There was a survey done just recently by a company in America called Vitovio, and they found that 25% of all workers would leave their job if the workplace didn't make stronger investments in cleanliness. As business owners, we're thinking about how we can get people to work and how to service our customers. We're possibly thinking about relatively superficial amounts of information that we're giving to our staff. Implementing a social distancing policy, investing in smarter cleaning methods, and communicating and educating workers on healthy habits will be three key parts of getting back to work both for our team and for our consumers.

A UK-based video meetings company called StarLeaf did a survey as well, as people are now figuring out surveys are the best way to also create media coverage. This StarLeaf survey reveals that 57% of people working from home due to the corona outbreak are quite happy to wait at least a month after the lockdown before returning to their office. This was in May 7. Now, we have people going back to work and school. There's a time lag then between when we're open for work, for education, and so on, and when people actually feel comfortable going back to work. 

We have listeners of the SPEAK|pr podcast all the way over in Singapore and Malaysia, so I’m very happy to hear that. For those listeners in Singapore, a survey done by JobsCentral of nearly three and a half thousand employees has found that 20% of the employees surveyed admitted to faking an illness so they could get an MC (medical certificate). A medical certificate in Singapore gives you the entitlement to take a day off and, if I recall, a company can't really quiz that up to a certain number. A member of staff can get an MC, and the company has to give them a paid day without more than the medical note. If we take this 20%, how many of them are thinking at the moment, “I'm being asked to go back to work before I'm really ready”? Last year, the number of people who took MCs in Singapore under admission was only about two and a half days per year. It's not egregious; it may just be tacked on an extra day for a long weekend. That still represents possibly an area where Singaporean employees and those that can use this ploy in other countries might start to turn to the MC as a policy, instead of just saying no to their employees and employers.

If we turn our attention to France, which is also where we have some listeners of my podcast, the Gallup survey conducted just in April this year very recently found that over one-third of French workers (36%) agree that their employer has communicated a clear plan of action, and that they're informed about the state of the company. In other words, two-thirds of French workers feel uninformed about the state of the company and the clear plan of action post-COVID. Only one-third feel confident that their company's health policies will keep them safe. That's massive. If two thirds of the employees in France feel as though they are unsafe, then why would they go back to work? The French and the Dutch employees were the ones surveyed that felt that they had the greatest sense of employee stability, i.e. that they could say whether they did or did not want to go to work without threat of retaliation by the company. 

Interestingly, in France, only 39% of the French managers felt that their immediate superior kept them informed about what's going on. In other words, over half of all French management believe that their senior management didn't tell them what was going on. The Gallup poll is showing that in France, as one example, nearly only a third of people believe that they're going to be safe when they go back to work. They also feel that they don't have to, because they have enough rights not to go back to work.

Let's look at the other side of the equation. A survey just recently in America showed that 60% of all shoppers are fearful of shopping inside grocery stores. This survey found that shoppers in America have reduced their visiting of stores from 2.5 times a week to just once a week, which is less than half. If I think about my own habits, we used to go two or three times on the way back from school. Now, we really only make one necessary journey. 

Consumers are apparently feeling, according to a survey in Forbes, that they're caught between a double axis crisis between health and finances. There were some 13 countries surveyed by Deloitte, and it showed that 42% of all the respondents across these 13 different countries, which included places like China, India, France, the Netherlands, the UK, America, and South Korea, worry about job loss, led by the people in Spain, where my good friend Keith is holed up at the moment and has been for what must be months now. In India, 54% of people were afraid of job loss; in South Korea, 51%. 

We've got a lot of people who are both nervous about going back to work, but are also worried about their finances. The French and the Dutch felt that they were the most secure, and they're also the least worried about making their upcoming payments. The Japanese, who are notorious for saving, were the least worried about meeting their requirements. The average consumer responses across the survey showed that only 35% said they felt safe going back to stores, 25% felt safe staying in a hotel, and only 22% felt safe getting back on an aeroplane. That's a massive number. If you run a hotel, or any kind of accommodation business, there's 75% of people across these 13 countries that do not trust going back into your accommodation. If you're running an airline, nearly 80% of people feel that it's unsafe to get in a tin can in the sky, let alone the holding area that you have to wait in before you get on an aeroplane.

We're going to see some amazing shifts then that what we're going to have to be looking at in PR is more than just a short-term need to reassure our customers that it's safe to go back in our stores, but that it's also okay for our staff. We're also going to have to work from a PR point of view on the communication, not just one-to-one, but through the different layers of management, because if you run a big company, or even a mid-sized one, and you have different layers of management, inculcating and sharing the messaging across the different tiers is going to be essential. This is why we have on our website under the SPEAK|pr module, the message home which has got the key message that you want to communicate, and then the three supporting messages. 

I suggested that all PR now should be what I call through a COVID mindset: Compassionate, Optimistic, Values-based, Informative, and Digital. I was heartened to see that in the Forbes and digital report from Deloitte, they also talk about the need to be digital, about the importance of being optimistic, and also the importance of being informative. We have now a situation where, from a PR point of view, you're running companies where your staff feel, by and large statistically, that they're not ready to go back to work and quite happily spend almost another month waiting to go back to work, and you have consumers that are saying that they don't want to go back into the store, airport, or hotel. 

A big part of our job is to bridge the divide; draw those people back out into the workforce and to reassure and coax those consumers and customers back into the marketplace. Where people are shopping is online. This Deloitte report also shows that it's really millennials leading the online shift to mostly in-store categories. My 12-year-old daughter is having a field day right now with deliveries from Amazon, because she has her own account and she has her own bank account, and she's loving it. 

All age groups are doing more shopping online. But interestingly, the young are buying more products online across all categories included in the survey: groceries, alcohol, everyday household goods, and medicine. The middle-aged are now buying 25% of their medicines online, and the over 55 are buying 30% of all their medicines online. For the older people above 55 (I'm not quite there yet), whilst they're buying 30% of their medicines online, they've said that they're only going to buy 11% of their alcohol online. They're seeing that they're either finishing off their wine cellars or that going to the wine shop is still part of an essential purchase, a necessary part of their daily lives. So, some things are changing, but some things are going to stay the same. 

As you get ready to coax your staff out of their furlough position and to encourage customers to come back, to feel safe in your workplace, factory, restaurant, or wherever it is, think about how you can be compassionate, optimistic, values-based, informative, and digital. I also hope you can use a survey to find out where they’re at and how you're doing.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Thanh Serious on Unsplash