The Melcrum Blog

Going under the change communication covers

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

First we had the Undercover Boss. Sorry, I mean Melcrum was the first publisher to secure and showcase Stephen Martin, chief executive of Clugston Group and star of Channel 4’s 2009 ‘Undercover Boss’ series, as a keynote speaker for our Strategic Management Communication summit. Now, however, the programme has gone mainstream with a preview from the new American series given a prime time airing directly after last night’s Superbowl, a huge-audience slot normally reserved by a network to launch a new sitcom or drama.

Yes, the Americans have got hold of the format and, like the fast food culture they have so kindly exported to the rest of earth, they've gone large.

But while it might seem that we 'borrowed' an idea from Channel 4 the last time around, on this occasion  it's arguably borrowed one of ours. Tonight at 8pm sees the regular Dispatches documentary team go undercover dressed as agency postmen to find out if the Royal Mail has delivered on claims that it is modernising and improving its service. In 2004 and in 2005, the team also investigated the company and, in Channel 4’s own words, “exposed serious systemic and individual failures within the organisation”, resulting in an inquiry by the postal regulator, followed by a fine of almost £10 million.

But we’ve gone one better. Rather than go undercover we’ve invited Alana Renner, head of engagement & internal communications at the Post Office, to talk about how she has engaged her employees and helped to transform the organisation from a loss to a profit making business at Melcrum's third annual change communication conference. What should be made clear is that the Post Office is a subsidiary of Royal Mail Group and operates under the Post Office brand managing a nationwide network of around 12,000 branches, the largest retail branch network in the UK handling more cash than any other business.

Alongside the Royal Mail, the Post Office has undergone huge upheaval with countrywide branch closures, redundancies and, as the frontline organisation for the Royal Mail, has had to deal with angry customers and equally frustrated employees. Alana will be on hand to answer all your questions so make sure you watch tonight’s show and come armed with any issues you would like to raise.

And if you haven’t yet booked on to the conference and workshops do it now! It's on between 9th and 10th March and is fast approaching. We've got an extremely strong line up this year, including behind-the-scenes case studies from British Airways, Aviva and of course The Post Office.

Vodafone Twitter account suffers internal breach

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

If internal communicators hadn’t realised the power, speed and significance of social media then all you need to do is look at the following photo a Twitter user posted only minutes ago responding to a rather nasty message on Vodafone’s official UK feed. I won’t repeat it within this blog as it’s offensive.

According to @VodafoneUK, that is now having to field thousands of customer tweets complaining about the offensive message, the telecoms company’s Twitter feed was not hacked but the offending message was instead down to, in its own words, “a severe breach of rules by staff”. The message then went on to say: “We're really sorry. Dealing with that internally. Please keep your faith in us.”

The tweet out to customers was at least swift and will have salvaged some pride. In fact many customers have thanked the company for its rapid response, but sadly the damage has been done, spread worldwide and all at the click of a mouse button within a matter of nanoseconds. The tweet may have been hurriedly deleted but hundreds of users chose to retweet the original message.

It is still unclear what exactly happened but this must serve as a warning to all internal communicators whose responsibility it is to carefully manage these channels whatever business they're in.

If you haven't already, sign up NOW to Melcrum's must-attend Social Media Conference for internal communications.

Are caring CEOs a thing of the past?

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

“Though I've never worked at Sun, this is the kind of CEO I'd like to work for.” This is just one of many hundreds of similar tweets posted by people around the world following an all-staff memo sent by Scott McNealy, the co-founder and long time chairman of California-based tech giant Sun Microsystems as he prepares to hand over the reigns to Oracle – a $7.4 billion deal that was initially done in April last year but that has only just been approved by the European Commission this week.

The memo, sent this Tuesday under the subject line “Thanks for a great 28 years”, was described by one US blogger, as having “more genuine emotion than you’ll see in a year's worth of official communications from most corporate leaders”. I’d be very interested to hear from you to see if, as internal communicators, you agree. Is your organisation’s CEO or managing director like McNealy or is he/she someone who hides away from staff in his/her ivory tower who communicating and engaging with employees about as often as Halley’s Comet orbits the earth? Email me at james.bennett@melcrum.com and let me know. I'd love to hear your stories.

McNealy, however, was clearly a man manager, a people person and a boss who understood that without great employees he wouldn’t have got as far up the corporate ladder as he had and, more importantly, the business wouldn’t have been so well respected. Just take the language in the memo. It’s full of ‘we’s’ and rarely about ‘I’s’, it's full of gratitude for “the Sun community” and how they made working at the company, as McNealy says, “really cool”, and above all, it's honest, something every employee yearns for in an organisation. Here’s are some of the highlilghts form his memo:

On innovation

“First and foremost, Sun innovated like crazy. We took it to the limit. And though we did not monetize our inventions as well as we could have, few companies have the track record in R&D that we had over the last 28 years. This made working at Sun really cool. Thanks to all of you inventors and risk takers who changed how we live."

On customer care

“Sun cared about its customers. Even more than we cared about our own company at times. We looked at our customer's mission as more important than ours. Maybe we should have asked for more revenue in return, but our employees were always ready to help first. I love this about Sun, which I guess makes me a good capitalist, if not a great capitalist."

On having fun at Sun

“Sun employees had way more fun than any other company. By far. From our dress code (“You must!”) to beer busts to our April Fools’ pranks to SunRise to our quiet enjoyment at night of a long, hard, well-done day of work, no company enjoyed “work” more than Sun. Thanks to all of our employees past and present for making Sun such a blast.”

Rather ironically and like the majority of CEOs, however, McNealy is also an admirer of the market economy and couldn’t resist Oracle’s multi-billion dollar offer. “To be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write,” he said. “Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company.”

He may have been a great boss, but what we as communicators should also bear in mind when dealing with a chief exec, is that leaders may often say and act as though they care about their staff but they are ultimately there to make money. It’s only then that genuine emotion is rapidly and often rightly, as in McNealy's case, replaced by hard economic reality.

* It’s also interesting to also see that a couple of key new chief executives have been announced in the UK in the last 48 hours. Adam Crozier has moved from one troubled business to another leaving the Royal Mail to go to terrestrial television channel ITV. His appointment brings to an end a saga lasting almost eight months since shareholder unhappiness persuaded Michael Grade to quit as executive chairman. He was replaced on January 1st by Archie Norman, the former chairman of Asda. Even more interestingly, accordingf to the Financial Times, he also beat internal candidates including John Cresswell, the acting chief executive, who will now leave the company.

Meanwhile, UK supermarket Morrisons, that has recently undergone a successful re-brand, has hired Dalton Philips, a relative unknown CEO from Canadian retailer Loblaw. At 41 years of age, he’s also one of the youngest chief executives to lead a FTSE 100 company.

Let’s see how they get on, and if they last as long as Mr McNealy.

Research reveals widespread adoption of social media inside the firewall

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

Melcrum has embarked on a global study on large organizations’ use of social media to engage employees, deliver strategy and drive business results.

Preliminary findings from the Use of Social Media in Internal Communications 2010 survey sent to 50,000 global communicators, has revealed widespread adoption, a clear business case and visible return on investment for communicators.

Highlights of the survey findings will be presented at Melcrum’s Social Media for Internal Communication  conference in London on February 9th to 10th, 2010, while the full results of the survey will be published in a comprehensive Melcrum report on sale in March this year.

Internal communicators are increasingly turning to Web 2.0 tools, such as employee and executive blogs, online video, and internal Twitter-style forums, to deliver key strategic messages, stimulate collaboration and knowledge sharing and boost productivity.

A recent Melcrum member survey at the end of last year found that 40% of respondents said the business case for social media within internal communication was clear and that there is visible return on investment, while 53% of the 2,212 senior communicators who responded said they were planning to increase investment in their organization’s intranet in 2010.

When asked about channels used for internal communication, online video and webcasts were cited as of increasing importance, with the intranet ranked as the most effective channel by 73% of senior communicators worldwide.

The business benefits of investment in social media highlighted included improved levels of employee engagement (21%), better communication with remote workers (16%), knowledge management and collaboration (25%), improving employee feedback (20%) and making business leaders more visible and accessible (14%).

Melcrum’s forthcoming report will concentrate on the role communicators perform in getting the most from social media, how they monitor and measure results, how they make the business case for additional investment, how they protect their organizations against misuse by employees, and social media’s impact on other channels such as email.

If you are interested in contributing to or finding out more information about the forthcoming Social Media Report 2010 please contact me, James Bennett, Head of Content at Melcrum at james.bennett@melcrum.com or Alex Manchester, senior consultant, Step Two Designs at alex@steptwo.com.au.

For the full press release click here.

Melcrum is also carrying out a series of interviews ahead of next month's social media in internal communications conference in conjunction with ipadio. Check out Abi Signorelli, social media consultant's great blog post and ipadio intrerviews now!

The internal communicator: The must have for 2010

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

It’s a new decade and a time for a new perspective, so what does 2010 hold for communicators?

The noughties started where the nineties left off. Blair and New Labour continued to drag a kicking and screaming Cool Britannia down the corridors of power with them until everyone realised just how uncool they all were, the age of spin was born but soon came to an embarrassing end when the media discovered politicians were using taxpayers money to buy moats and fund their husband’s adult entertainment habits, and to top it all off, no one managed to predict the swift collapse of global financial markets leading to worldwide recession, riots and mass redundancies. However, all these events have something in common: they’ve served to put communications and in particular internal communications, on the map.

Faddish public relations, misleading messages and messaging, and unethical leaders and the fraudulent and mismanaged companies they helped to run and ultimately ruin, along with Cool Britannia, spin, and corrupt corporate fat cats are over. The public, employees and shareholders are demanding results not just when it comes to a return on their own cash investments, but also when it comes to how they are being invested in themselves; in their votes, their careers and their livelihoods.

If you, as a company, don’t invest in your people and fail to maintain adequate levels of engagement, then you yourself will fail. This is something even the present Government has recognised in the MacLeod report that suggests that business and organizations function best when they make their employees’ “commitment, potential, creativity and capability central to their operation”. Having enough cash, and a sensible strategy, are clearly vital it adds, but “how people behave at work can make the crucial difference between business and operational success or failure”

A report by executive search company Watson Helsby out in the first week of the New Year that polled 250 corporate communications directors from some of the UK’s largest organizations, uncovered a series of key trends for 2010, the most evident of which found that two-thirds of respondents expect budgets to be cut back even further. This is hardly surprising following the downturn of the last 18 months, but as companies decide to shelve projects and/or cut back on agency spend, this will inevitably mean a return to investing internally both in companywide and internal communication talent. In leaner times when we, regardless of status or seniority, are demanding more efficiency for less outlay, turning to those existing internal stars who can drive engagement levels and at the same time show a direct correlation to rising profit levels will be a must have in 2010.

Never has the role of internal communicators been more important. Whose role is it to eliminate the charlatans from the profession; whose role is it to create honest, thought provoking, informative and ultimately engaging messages, branding and campaigns across organizations to ensure the well-being, happiness and longevity of millions of workers; and whose role - one of the most crucial areas in business in the next 10 years – is it to train, coach and advise leaders as firms enter one of the biggest make or break years since the second World War? I think you can guess the answer.

If you haven’t got a star individual or team in place already then go out and get one. But remember you won’t find them in the January sales.

Merry whatever! The annual Christmas e-card dilemma

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

Ah Christmas! A time of giving gifts to loved ones, a time for families to unite and a time for communicators to tear their hair out when they realise it’s that time of year again when they have to debate the appropriate message to deliver to their employees on the annual festive e-card.

We’ve been inundated with responses on the Melcrum Listserv about how communicators should approach this yearly ritual. But surely we should know what to write by now? But no, we’re still umming and ahhing and concerned that if we deliver the wrong two-word greeting to our globally, religiously and culturally diverse workforce we’ll upset employees.

I for one don’t believe in political correctness and nor do millions of you I’m sure. We now live in a world where you literally can’t say anything without someone being offended and filing an official complaint.

Christmas is a great time of year for us all. It’s the end of the year and a time to celebrate. It might not always be for religious reasons and if you do celebrate it by going to church then that’s great, you and I, as communicators must respect that and we do, everyday of the year. A communicator that doesn’t respect diversity and choice needs to rethink their career path.

But we shouldn’t be ashamed to use the word Christmas. There is simply nothing wrong with choosing to deliver a Christmas message. At its core it symbolises and celebrates togetherness, peace and goodwill to all mankind, something that all major religions, faiths and cultures uphold and try to live by. For example, I used to live in the Middle East and during Muslim celebrations would regularly wish my Islamic friends and colleagues a happy Ramadan or Eid. I wasn’t offended when Arab media contacts would send me baskets of dates with which to break the fast when Ramadan ended, and nor where they when I offered them my Christmas wishes. I was honoured they had thought of me in that way and visa versa.

I do agree with many of you, however, that in the corporate world many of us have been backed into a corner with very little choice left but to comply with a series of generic messages that for me, sap the spirit of Christmas from its roots. But choose we must, because if we don’t someone, somewhere in the organisations in which we work will undoubtedly complain and it will feed its way to a higher authority.

So, with that in mind we polled you, the decision makers, and asked how should organisations offer best wishes for the holiday season (see what we’ve done there) to a culturally diverse workforce and what non-specific and non-denominational message you have been obliged to type, design and deliver to the masses. I’d be interested to hear your feedback as to whether this has worked or not.

In descending order 3.6% of you said that you had tailored your messages to your audience in order not to upset anyone; 12% said you would focus on the New Year and not the religious occasion, a fifth of you (20.4%) chose the “Merry Christmas” suggesting that this was what most people were celebrating; 25% chose to deliver the rather bland and US-inspired “Happy Holidays”; while the winning gesture was “Seasons Greetings” with almost 40% of the vote.

I agree it’s a tricky one to decide what to deliver across a large organisation and it's worth the discussion but if it means destroying the essence of what the majority of people are celebrating is it worth it? I don’t think so.

One of the benefits of being a Melcrum member is the access to the Communicators’ Network Email Listserv. This is an email-based discussion forum for communication professionals worldwide. It’s a lively community that helps you find answers to your communication questions fast. The discussion is monitored so you won’t receive any unsolicited email and you can opt for a weekly round-up email if you’d prefer. To learn more about becoming a Melcrum member, or to join the Listserv, contact Laura Hassan at laura.hassan@melcrum.com

Could salary disclosure lead to higher levels of engagement?

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

In my previous position working for a newspaper in the Middle East I remember walking into the newsroom, sitting down at my desk, switching my computer on and checking my emails. It was a day like any other. What I didn’t expect was complete silence. The usual buzz of mobiles, sound of scurrying feet and crashing of keyboards had been replaced with the low hum of staff whispering to one another. Something was wrong. I’d heard it all before. It was the sound of sackings, budgets being slashed, staff being asked to take voluntary redundancy and the imminent arrival of the editor in chief employee list in hand ready to wield the axe of doom. But it wasn’t. I was wrong. It was worse.

A disgruntled employee had managed to not only abscond the country (the UAE) with hundreds of thousands of dirhams worth of debts and leave his car running at the airport, he had also managed to hack into the company’s system, copy and paste everyone’s salaries and post them on a site called Wikileaks, famous for its ability to destroy reputations in one email. His plan to get back at his superiors had worked perfectly.

Two things happened, one that affected all the employees and caused huge unrest for months afterwards, and another that affected the relationship between employees and senior leaders. Firstly, several members of staff were found to be earning far larger sums than their so-called equals and rumours rapidly circulated this was because of either their gender or their nationality, not because of their superior work experience or qualifications. Then, we all discovered how much our line managers and some of the senior staff earned, a small number of which were being fed more annual income into their bank accounts than Barack Obama or Gordon Brown. One even earned more than the GDP of small third world nation - not the best morale boosting news for a company that had only been running for less than a year.

Today’s news, however, that UK banks will be forced to disclose the number of employees who earn more than £1 million a year will bring a smile to many consumers who have watched from the sidelines as government and essentially taxpayers money has been used to prop up several large failing financial institutions. Oh, and don’t forget the bonuses, billions of pounds of which has been given to those who landed us in this mess in the first place.

As Sir David Walker, who led the report, says: “We're going to have to fund the problems generated by the banks not only this year but it's our children and grandchildren who are going to have to pay these costs."

But what about those poor old bankers who will, like me, wander onto the trading floor one day soon to discover that everyone knows exactly how much they earn? In their case it’s arguably needed. The financial services industry should be more transparent and risk averse in order to avoid another collapse. We need to know how much is being spent on salaries, especially when the money being spent is effectively ours.

I have nothing against the banking and finance industry but change here is clearly needed. The question is, should this apply to other industries and what effect would it have on the overall communication policies of thousands of organisations? The experience I went through was wrong, out of control and hit the employees hard and without warning. Done within a controlled manner and for good reason - transparency and a “nothing to hide here” culture being just two - disclosing everyone's salary from CEO to the cleaning staff, could well have a positive effect on morale, engagement and employee confidence during the toughest of times.

Let me know what you think either by emailing me at james.bennett@melcrum.com or on Twitter either at Melcrum's Twitter feed or my own.

A new breed of communication focused CEOs

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

I often ask myself how seriously high-profile executives take communications. On one side of the mahogany boardroom table there are those business owners whose complete lack of awareness and communication skills has brought their company to the verge of collapse. Take Gerald Ratner, former chief executive of the now renamed British jewellery company Ratners Group who achieved fame after making a speech in which he jokingly referred to his company’s profits as “c***” and remarked that some of the earrings he then sold were “cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long”. Immediately following his gaff Ratner watched as his business’s value plummeted by £500 million.

Read the latest article on the Internal Comms Hub on how to review your communication capabilities - five of the worst communication offenses and how to avoid them.

Fortunately, however on the opposite side of the table sit those execs that have learned from his and the mistakes of others and that have the foresight and vision to realise that a breakdown in internal communication can lead to disastrous consequences. Stephen Martin, CEO of UK construction company Clugstons and guest speaker at the recent SCM summit in October, for example, knew that he had to take evasive action to stop his business from declining. Employee morale was at rock bottom, management simply weren’t listening and, as a result, contracts were not being won and the money wasn’t coming in. So he put his professional reputation on the line and decided to go undercover and find out what the real issues were, all of which was documented on the recent Channel 4 series the Undercover Boss.

I met another of this new breed of comms savvy execs at the launch of the new Sony Ericsson Xperia X2 business phone last night. A device exclusively available at Vodafone, my friends tell me. And she, along with Martin assured me that communication is “the most important element there is in business”.

“Always being the last to know and not being guided or communicated to when there are huge changes going on can be one of the worst things to happen if you’re an employee,” says Karen Brady, the recently departed managing director of Birmingham City Football Club and now non-executive director of Sport England and the England 2018 World Cup bid, Mothercare and, ironically Channel 4 television. “On some occasions my staff were the last to know at Birmingham City,” she added.

From her early career at advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, Brady moved to the London Broadcasting Company (LBC) where she managed an account for publisher and now ex Birmingham City owner David Sullivan, who following encouragement by Brady, spent more than £2m on advertising in just six months. At the age of just 23 Bra then famously spotted an advert for the sale of the football club and persuaded Sullivan to buy it and let her run it. Her business acumen has made her a wealthy woman, however she says it has been her belief in “talking and communicating openly and honestly” that has got her to where she is today.

“It’s very important to always talk with your staff. To manage a team effectively you have to keep an open dialogue, an open means of communication. What you communicate internally should be the same and you communicate externally and I’ve always believed that.”

Her communication mantra as well as her skills will soon be put to the public test in the forthcoming sixth series of the BBC’s Apprentice where she has recently replaced the stern and steadfast Margaret Mountford as one of Sir Alan Sugar’s two chief advisors.

But will the next series of The Apprentice be as “backstabbing” as the last where, in my view, communication often broke down between contestants as they threw barrage upon barrage of insults and personal attacks on one another in order to survive another week on the show and become Sir Alan’s new protégé?

“We’re still filming so I can’t say that much but we are really trying to get across to the contestants that communication between the two sub teams is crucial in learning how to manage and become a good manager,” she says.

I’m sure there are more executives like Brady and Martin out there. Now all I have to do is find them.

Leadership 2.0: 10 ways a CEO should communicate to employees

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

Stephen Martin, CEO of Clugston Group and star of hit Channel four television program 'Undercover Boss', delivered an inspirational speech at last week's Melcrum Strategic Communication Management Summit in London, Europe’s largest annual gathering of senior communication professionals.

"The tough times are far from over and we must react now by communicating far more effectively with our employees,” said Martin. Now is the time for leadership 2.0!

Here are his 10 tips on how CEO’s should communicate to employees during and after a recession:

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate: Communicate more regularly then ever before.
2. Always be seen by employees – leave your ivory tower and listen to what frontline employees have to say.
3. Inform widely and get large-scale opinion form employees.
4. Eliminate the culture of executives in suits and workers in overalls/uniform – this puts employees off and communication is immediately lost.
5. Brown bag lunches – my door is always open and I regularly have lunch with my employees but only when it suits them.
6. Refresh your communications as often as possible.
7. Ask and consult your employees at all times – go around the office/construction site/shop floor and ask all of them what they think.
8. Demonstrate you have listened and stick to your promises.
9. Talk to them at a time that suits them.
10. Invest in training of frontline supervisors and managers – if you don’t nothing will change.

SCM summit London 2009: The 10 communication commandments

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

Vivienne Huybrecht, general manager group communication at KBC Group gave a fascinating insight into her tumultuous year at one of Belgium’s largest financial institutions at this morning's 8th annual Melcrum Strategic Communication Management Summit at London’s Tower Hotel.

Vivienne wasn’t just in charge of internal communications, when the financial crisis hit KBC faster and harder than anyone could ever have predicted she was also charged with looking after every aspect of external communications and media relations – a huge task for anyone but somehow she managed it and survived. Mainly, she told me, because of her sporty nature and her motto of never giving up. Look out for a quick video interview in the next few days.

At the height of the storm she was receiving more than 100 phone calls from journalists day and night, saw KBC’s share price plummet and to top it all off her chief executive had a heart attack in May and had to stand down. It was sobering stuff and one of the best internal communication stories I have ever heard.

One of the best elements of the presentation was her 10 communication commandments during a crisis. Here they are:

1. Visible leadership – staff should be able to see the whites of their eyes
2. Be honest and open at all times
3. Tell it like it is
4. Be confident!
5. New CEO mantra – overperform and under promise
6. Be clear and keep it simple
7. Move fast and decisively
8. Make no promises about the future unless you can achieve them with absolute certainty
9. Use face-to-face communications as much as possible
10. Never give up