Common themes emerge at Melcrum's London Summit

By Mandy Thatcher, Head of Content, Melcrum

I was delighted to identify a few common themes at Melcrum's SCM Summit in London last week – as chair person you're always looking for themes to emerge, thus enabling a vaguely articulate "summary" at the end of the event! But there was so much great content covered over the two days and it was all quite diverse: internal branding, change, leadership, managers, professional development, etc.

Last year was slightly different as the social media frenzy was truly upon us. The strong theme was clear: What does this new world of social media mean for internal communicators?

Social media and its significance for organisational communication hasn't gone away. But as Melcrum's CEO Victoria Mellor pointed out in her welcome speech on day one of the Summit "Let's get the basics right before we introduce new tools to the mix."

For me personally, I felt there were two important themes that many of the presentations seemed to link to:

Involvement
How do you encourage your employees to feel involved in the business? Perhaps this is the same thing as "engagement" but the general consensus was that this term is in grave danger of being over-used to the point of becoming meaningless.

In his presentation on "Having conversations that matter" Jonathan Scott, group head of internal comms at Royal & Sun Alliance said the company never talks about launching an "engagement" campaign as this is likely to cause instant scepticism. But with the use of World Cafes they've still succeeded in making employees feel part of the company, encouraging them to put their ideas forward for changing and improving the business. And they're seeing results.

Nokia has also used the appreciative inquiry technique behind the World Cafe approach, which they shared in their presentation about communicating a new business strategy at Nokia. They're successfully using this to involve their 45,000-strong workforce in helping the company shift from a mobile technology company to an internet-based organisation.

Other presentations linking to this theme of involvement included B&Q (together with The Edge Picture Company) who did a great presentation on a comms campaign called "Stock Idol" built to help implement a new stock-management system. The subject matter (stock control) may have been dry, but their approach – an internal version of the popular reality TV program Pop Idol – was anything but.

Partnerships
Another strong theme in my opinion was the importance of developing good internal partnerships. Whether it's getting to understand the CEO better, working with managers to improve their leadership capabilities, or setting up a strategic partnership with organisational development, it was clear from many of the presentations that relationships such as these help communicators to gain influence and get things done.

In fact, some very pragmatic advice came from one speaker who urged internal communicators to work more closely with the marketing team when looking to develop the internal brand. Not only do marketers have great creative ideas, pointed out the speaker, they also tend to have loads of budget!

Smart practice indeed...

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