Highlights from the Internal Comms Hub

by Luke Dodd, Features Editor, Melcrum

Hi communicators,

You can find a number of new articles on the Internal Comms Hub, looking at topics ranging from internal magazines to volunteerism schemes:

• How to introduce Yammer to your organization
• Internal magazines witnessing a resurgence
• Strengthening the spirit of volunteerism at Deutsche Post DHL
• Designing AMP’s intranet to be a key business tool

If there are topics you think we should be covering, contact me on luke.dodd@melcrum.com.

Until next time,

Luke

Facing the future of internal communication at SCM's UK Summit 2011

by Luke Dodd, Features Editor, and
Nishwa Ashraf, Assistant Editor, Melcrum

"The Future for Internal Communication" was the theme of the SCM UK Summit 2011, held this week on 12-13 October at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower, London, and featured some truly forward-thinking best practice presentations, lively discussion and encouraged knowledge-sharing.

Rebecca Richmond, group director of research & content, Melcrum, chaired the two-day event that also saw delegates enjoy strong case studies and high quality networking opportunities with other senior-level communicators.

DAY 1

On the first day of the Summit, David MacLeod, chair of the Government sponsored employer-led taskforce on employee engagement, and Nita Clarke, director, Involvement and Participation Association (IPA) and vice chair of the MacLeod Review, highlighted the importance of making employee engagement a priority in the workplace while also making sure the commercial needs of businesses are met. They also encouraged communicators to engage their employees in company strategy through innovative methods as, when presented with company strategy, people don't always associate it, or relate it, to what they actually do in their every-day work routine.

A strong theme over the two days was around the use of emotive video, which was a major focus of Siemens' joint presentation with The Edge Picture Company. Claire Jarvis, director of communications, Siemens and Pete Stevenson, owner & executive producer, The Edge Picture Company, spoke about how, by collaborating together, they wanted to ensure employees were at the forefront of innovation through the use of video. They cemented the point that video was the distillation of the company brand and that film can close the gap between brand promise and employee actions. They both agreed that visual storytelling was the chance to grab your audience and an opportunity to make your message stick. When questioned on the issue of a multi-language audience and how to combat this issue when producing a video, the duo believed that less is more and advised to make the visual as simple as possible - sometimes no spoken word is needed.

Closing the first day, the panel discussion was centered around whether internal communication can transform an organization and was moderated by Richard Veal, head of communication & change management, EMEA, Towers Watson. The panel consisted of Rebecca Hilliard, manager, group internal communications, Shell; Niall Ryan, head of internal communication & employer brand, Harrods; Simon Garcia, head of global communications, Gazprom; Will Foy, head of internal communication, NHS Blood and Transplant; and Victoria Mellor, founder and CEO, Melcrum. One question discussed was: "Is there a risk of IC being drawn in and being the 'voice of the people'?"

Mellor said that she believed this was, actually, a great advantage and that the function of internal communication was to ensure the employee voice was heard. Hilliard agreed that, ultimately, communicators were the representatives of the people and Ryan stated that this action was hugely important in shaping company culture at Harrods. Meanwhile, Foy revealed that his organization was currently reviewing its Employee Value Proposition. Another question posed was: "Does internal communication need a rebrand?" Foy believed that internal communication did not need a rebrand but needed to go back to basics, while Hilliard believed that change communication needed to be defined and seen as part of internal communication, not as a separate entity.

DAY 2

The second day maintained the high energy and momentum of day one. The morning heard speakers Nalin Miglani, chief HR and communication officer, and Phillippa Brown, employee communication manager, Tata Global Beverages, describe how they used a period of change at the organization as a catalyst to create a corporate culture that is now owned and evolved by employees at every level. Launched in 2010 in a bid to engage employees and increase innovation and collaboration, the Think BIG initiative was a "Dragon's Den" style competition, which encouraged employees to put forward new ideas and products to ensure the future success of the business. The campaign proved successful; making a significant contribution to the team's strategic innovation agenda and goals; generating more than 1,300 new ideas; as well as helping people feel part of one global organization and engaged in their company's future.

SSP UK's Paolo Peretti, national operations director - rail, and Jenni Wheller, internal communications manager, continued on the theme of employee engagement, connectivity and collaboration. Having over 60 brands and 10,000 people, of which 80 percent are non-wired, the challenge for IC was trying to reach a workforce they had no direct access to. The solution, revealed Wheller, was a news intranet platform that generates communication for offline employees. "The Hub" allows end users to tag content that is relevant to their brand or a division, for example; a unit manager for Upper Crust is able to tick boxes of content they want to see on the home page, such as news about their own brand and global news. This creates a weekly e-zine, which is generated into a PDF that is then distributed to frontline employees, giving employees from all levels an understanding into what's happening in the business.

Finally, Fiona MacAllan, head of internal & change communication, Nationwide Building Society, and winner of Melcrum's Leader of the Year 2011 award, delivered an engaging session on how the internal communication team at Nationwide increased their KPI scores for leadership communication effectiveness, project communication effectiveness, client satisfaction and employee satisfaction, by creating line of sight from the business strategy to the IC strategy and building a measurement framework.

Why bother with measurement? MacAllan stresses three reasons:

• It builds great credibility for you and your team;
• It justifies your team, your budget;

And most importantly…

• ...No one can argue with hard facts.

 

Hope to see you all next year!

Luke and Nishwa

IABC 2010: Meet the Anti Social Media Guy

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

It’s Sunday afternoon in Toronto and the unseasonal rain has given way to bright sunshine. The brightest spot of my day at the IABC’s World Congress so far, however has been meeting a beaming David Grossman of the Grossman Group, friend of Melcrum, leading consultant, and speaker and author and one of America’s foremost authorities on communication inside organizations. Not only is he celebrating the birth of his first child (David – many congrats from everyone at Melcrum) but he’s also here to deliver one of the main presentations at the annual Congress and sign copies of his book, You Can’t Not Communicate, now, according to his website, in its second printing due to popular demand.

David, and his dozen strong team, consult and coach some of the world’s largest organizations and their leaders including Heinz, Lockheed Martin and McDonald’s so his session is arguably one of the highlights of an action-packed program. He gave me an exclusive insight into tomorrow’s session entitled “The communication leader as a coach”.

“I’ll be sharing with delegates what we need to be thinking about as leaders because many of us forget we’re in fact leaders ourselves. Many of us are not trained in leadership or even as communicators [because of our varied backgrounds and training] so this is crucial. I’ll also be sharing best practice on strategy and influence,” he said.

“There is an increase in the number of cross functional teams so having influence and great influencing skills is possible the most important skill a communicator can have today,” he added.

David will also explore how we as communicators can be more purposeful in how we communicate and therefore be more effective as well as the issue of self-awareness and that to be more influential we need to know ourselves more.

Rather interestingly, however, when I mention the fact we’ve both been tweeting in the last 24 hours using the hashtag #IABC, he tells me he likes to call himself the “Anti social media guy”.

“I believe face-to-face communication is on life support and that so many companies are simply attracted to social media because it’s new and shiny,” he said as I lowered my iPhone, put my Flip camera back into my bag and shut down my MacBook. “Too many companies are using social media as an ‘it’ and not as an ‘and’. It’s not the be-all and end-all shiny solution we all think it is, it’s an added extra that companies can use.”

He believes the majority of the world’s largest businesses are using social media with little thought as to how it can contribute to the organization’s overall strategy and that its use is destroying the integrity of face-to-face conversations and replacing it with “hidden conversations”. This is arguably true to some extent with many companies confused as to the role it should play inside the corporate framework. There are, however some successes. He cites IBM and Cisco Systems as two obvious examples. If you’re struggling with social media why not read Melcrum’s new 150-page report that will be on sale next week. Email me your details and I’ll be sure to send you more information.

In the meantime I think I’ll tweet this blog.

Everybody in this company can read and write, right?

By Belinda Evans, Communications Content Manager, Melcrum

In my former role as a communications practitioner I spent many a happy (and often not-so-happy) hour crafting the perfect message, hoping to both engage and inform with my paragraph-perfect constructions. I may not have always achieved the desired effect, but I always took my ability to construct a sentence and the ability of my audience to read and comprehend that sentence for granted.

With around 40 percent of the Australian workforce not reaching the minimum literacy level needed to meet the demands of everyday life*, it appears that I should have worried less that people wouldn’t bother to read my carefully-crafted messages, and more that they actually couldn’t.

In a report published by the Australian Industry Group yesterday, more than 75 per cent of Australian companies reported that their business was affected by low levels of literacy and numeracy among their employees. The report is based on the results of a survey completed by 338 Australian organizations representing 56,000 employees in total.

Employers reported that the impact of low levels of literacy was broad, affecting productivity; workplace communications and relationships; workforce planning and training; and safety and compliance. Although labourers and process workers were the occupational groups most affected, the report indicated that poor literacy affected relationships at all levels in the workplace, from management to the shop floor. Unsurprisingly, employers also identified communication difficulties between different occupational groups, such as between engineers and customer service departments.

Of the employers surveyed, 38 percent believe they have a role to play in improving workplace literacy and numeracy skills among their workers, however, only eight percent of employers reported they had the capacity to assist their employees to improve these skills.

So, how best to connect with and support a workforce lacking in literacy? Should organizations invest in programs to improve their employees' literacy and numeracy skills, or concentrate on creating an internal communications strategy and channels that meet the challenges of communicating with employees struggling with literacy?

Have you created internal communication channels designed specifically to commuicate with employees with limited literacy skills, or has your organization run any programs to assist employees to improve their skills? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Email me at Belinda.evans@melcrum.com

* In a 2006 Australian Bureau of Statistics survey 40 percent of employed Australians achieved prose literacy scores at level one or level two of a five-point level scale, with level three regarded as the minimum level required to meet the demands of everyday life.

Thanks to the CIPR

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

Just a quick note to thank the CIPR for inviting me as Melcrum's head of content, to be the external judge for its internal communication category which took place this morning.

Six very strong shortlisted companies presented their case to myself and two senior internal communication judges and we deliberated for a long time before making a very tough call on which one should be the worthy winner.

Watch this space when I'll be blogging live from the London awards ceremony when the CIPR announces the winning entry on June 16.

Employee engagement 2010: Day one highlights

By Nishwa Ashraf, Editorial Assistant, Melcrum

After six months in a new job, engagement levels rapidly drop for the majority of audiences, according to Wayne Clarke, managing partner at Best Companies Partnership and keynote speaker said on day one of Melcrum’s sixth annual employee engagement conference in London today.

Keeping that brand new, shiny, happy feeling that new employees have and the energy they bring with them, is a major challenge that almost every employer repeatedly faces.

But one business that’s well and truly bucked the trend is high street retailer Mothercare. Employee engagement has played a huge part in transforming the company’s fortunes and performance in the past six years, particularly in its profitability, international reach and through the successful acquisition of the Early Learning Centre. As a result it was rewarded as being one of the best big companies to work for in 2009 in the Sunday Times newspaper.

Rob Jones, head of learning and development at Mothercare and one of this morning’s conference presenters, gave delegates a great insight into how, through the use of collaboration, quality dialogue, and storytelling, the group saw its international revenue rise by 28.4 percent to £188.8 million compared to 2007 results of £87.1m, with a budget of precisely zero.

Yes, you heard right, rather like that clever Volkswagen Polo car advert on the London Underground that continually repeats the “low” price of its latest model, Jones and his team contributed to this rise in profits with zero budget. Not only that, the group has also managed to engage its employees and improve customer service.

It’s not possible I can hear you cry. Well, the figures speak for themselves and as Jones states, the groups’ engagement strategy “wasn’t exactly rocket science”. Forget social media, it did it simply through the power of collaboration, quality dialogue, and the intelligent use of storytelling. When the team hears a really positive story it’s passed on in the right way and by simply listening to its employees it’s kept that line of communication open.

Recognising employee efforts is also a big factor, proving financial gain isn’t the only way to thank employees. Mothercare has monthly awards for outstanding staff contributions, with staff receiving gifts, flowers, dinner or hotel vouchers, for example, for a job well done. In addition Ben Gordon, the company’s chief executive, and other senior leaders recognise exceptional effort at company meetings, road shows and in personal telephone calls.

The group’s elements – caring for parents, pulling together, getting it done and making the business stronger – define the culture or “company DNA” as Jones refers to it, which are set as annual objectives for all staff, with messages providing a clear line of sight and constantly being reinforced.

Jones’s best practice presentation was a real reminder that listening to your employees can make a huge difference to the way they feel about “their” organization, their belief in company values and how they align their work ethic to achieving company objectives.

So how are you engaging your employees? Have things changed in the last two years due the perilous state of the global economy? Is engagement still relevant? Let us know your stories at nishwa.ashraf@melcrum.com.

James Bennett, Melcrum’s head of content, will be covering day two tomorrow (Thursday 13th May) so please follow us on Twitter and come back to the blog for more highlights from Melcrum’s sixth annual employee engagement conference.

When will internal comms finally make a TV appearance?

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

Just like the viewing patterns of the majority of people who watched BBC 2's 'Inside John Lewis' documentary last night I'll keep it brief.

Now that internal communicators and the value of the function is finally being recognised by global executive boards, surely now is the time for us all to step up and step out of our shells and into the public eye? Rather than the head of PR or a shaky-handed cameraman (it may work for Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker but not when you're touring the homeware section discussing how many bathmats have been sold in the last hour) and his documentary team guiding us round Lewis's British stores, it should have been the retailer's head of internal comms. They could have highlighted how well the comms team coaches the CEO, explain the work they've done to engage employees during the toughest year in the company's history or perhaps guided viewers through the ins and outs of the its change comms strategy?

The BBC described it as a "television first" going behind the scenes of "one Britain's biggest and best known department stores - as it tackles changing tastes, tougher competition and the worst recession for 80 years". And that's exactly why I watched it. But no. Opportunity missed. Instead it was simply an exercise in self-promotion.

John Spedan Lewis, the Partnership's founder, pioneered the commercial co-operative making every staff member a partner and handing out a share of the profits - a unique selling point to any employee current or prospective. We saw none of that in yesterday's episode. Sure, the majority of employees seemed happy to be there. No wonder, each one received a 13% bonus last year. Even the robotic wedding list sellers, who walk innocent newly-engaged couples through which brand of bread bin they should allocate to their guests (on average £60 per head and £1,000 per wedding) seemed engaged enough but it always felt as if the real story lay elsewhere.

A preview for next week's instalment showed a group of disengaged employees complaining that being part of John Lewis wasn't what it once was. Good enough TV fodder perhaps, but again, why didn't the internal comms team step up to the plate and explain what they're doing to turn this situation around?

Judging from Penny Lawson's comments, head of internal communications at British Airways, at this week's Melcrum third annual Change Communication conference - who took time away from an incredibly stressful situation dealing with a severely disrupted workforce - (search #changecomms on Twitter for some of the highlights) I'd much rather be a fly on the wall inside BA. Now there's a story.

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.

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!