Ever considered infecting your employees?

By Sona Hathi, Assistant Editor, Melcrum

After much anticipation, Melcrum hosted its third members-only event in London last week. Members from all over Europe joined their peers for breakfast at London's New Connaught Rooms, to network and learn more about Melcrum's latest research into peer-to-peer communication.

The audience heard case studies from the new report Viral Communication in the Workplace, how organizations including easyJet, Pfizer, Sun Microsystems and Deloitte have "virally infected" employees with enthusiasm and interest in change programs and new initiatives.

There were presentations from 3 experts in this area of research, (who you may have heard us raving about for sometime now):

* Kieron Shaw, internal communication specialist and former head of research at Melcrum;
* Dr. Leandro Herrero, CEO of The Chalfont Project consultancy and pioneer of Viral Change™; and
* Nigel Edwards, UK communication manager, Pfizer.

The topic is one that has definitely created a buzz among internal communicators. It throws up a number of questions and concerns, as some of the ideas around viral communication and viral change are quite radical. But these companies have proved that it does work. For example, Kieron highlighted a case study from the Dutch healthcare company Novo Nordisk . The company kept secrets and withdrew information from employees, bar three small secret societies - sounds unthinkable right? "Surely that's bad for morale?" I hear you cry.

But no, it created an unimaginable amount of curiousity and interest among the workforce, in what the organization was doing. Interest that a standard corporate email, or cascade process would be hard pushed to create. It did cause irritation among some employees, but isn't negative interest better than no interest at all?

Leandro Herrero, is perhaps the most passionate guy on the topic of viral change - after all, he literally wrote the book on it. So it was fascinating to watch this Spaniard present in his signature, energetic way, on how organizational structures are changing from hierarchical to those of clusters. He says that viral change programmes cannot be led. Leaders need to remain in the background and let the message spread among the clusters in the workforce - like a virus that infects every employee.

Perhaps the quote from him that stuck out to me the most was:

"Organizations need to talk less and do more. The best culture change management program is where the words 'culture', 'change', 'management' and 'program' are silent."

Nigel Edwards, UK communication manager at Pfizer talked about how the company gave a selected number of employees video cameras to take home and make candid diary clips of their journey in the first 3 months of a major change programme. The clips were distributed to the entire workforce, resulting in the company gaining more trust from employees. I won't go in to any more detail but it's an excellent case study and you can read more on the Hub, or in the report Viral communication in the workplace.

There was a challenging Q&A session at the end of each presentation. Here's a sample:

Q: We might be most influenced by "People like us" but how credible is the information that comes from our peers?
A: No one's saying that leaders have no part to play in this. The initial corporate message still needs to come from the CEO, but employees then need to have the opportunity to discuss it, as many times as they wish, with their colleagues, talk about how they feel so that they then internalize the message. It's about giving them the platform to do this and making it very explicit that the company actually wants them to be honest and is actually interested in their opinions. Pfizer have demonstrated this very well.

Q:We've known this stuff for years, we know that employees talk and that we need to tap into what they're saying, i.e. the water-cooler conversations - so what's changed?
A: Yes this is true, but the communication tools we have access to now, make it both easier and more urgent to understand informal employee conversations, and pick out the key influencers to help spread messages about organizational changes.

Q: Our organization has a rigid corporate culture, would a viral communication method still work?
A: (Nigel Edwards) If yours is a command and control organization, then you should probably avoid something like this. Employees should be trusted to sit in the driver's seat, while leaders should be able to sit back and enjoy the ride! "There has to be will and freedom to operate if this is to be successful," says Nigel

I could go on writing about this forever, but I'll stop there. Peer-to-peer communication is a vast area of internal comms that is even more exciting now that we have excellent communication technology to encourage it. What are your thoughts?

Sona

P.S Watch out for the next Melcrum members-only event in London in Feb 2009. More events across the country are planned for the near future.