The People Business

How Ten Leaders Drive Engagement Through Internal Communications

Annabel Dunstan, Imogen Osborne

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780749479725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Pubbliche relazioni
• Index: Business

Get exclusive insight into the internal communications strategies behind leading businesses like WPP, Heathrow Airport, Pizza Express, BG Groups and more, and learn what 'good' looks like in internal communications, to ensure yours demonstrates a clear impact on ROI and business performance. In many companies, internal communications (IC) is too often not seen as a credible contributor to overall business performance. This book will enable you to prove the value of IC to senior company members by demonstrating its impact on ROI, enhanced employee engagement and improved business functions.Featuring case studies and lessons from leading companies, The People Business offers readers a unique, inside perspective on what works (and what doesn't) in the world of corporate internal communication and strategy, offering tips for success from senior IC leaders, including what they have learned along the way and what remains challenging.Built around interviews with senior practitioners from a diverse range of leading firms, this book offers a refreshingly honest perspective on the practices and challenges facing IC today.

STORIES FROM THE COALFACE

01

Telefónica Digital

How a culture of openness and transparency ensures that employees feel constantly up-to-date with internal change and the impact of external influences in a highly regulated business

LINDSEY MORRELL

Head of Global Internal Communications, Telefónica Digital

Lindsey Morrell came to the discussion steeped in experience both as a leader and in the rich, granular skill set of the professional IC practitioner. What sets her apart is that most of that experience has been gleaned within a single industry: telecommunications, starting out in BT, then O2 and now Telefónica, the telecoms giant. Today, she is head of internal communications for Telefónica Digital.

In her 18 years within IC she has also fulfilled a number of key roles at a regional and local level. During that time, the business itself has gone through many shifts and changes, shaped and occasionally buffeted by the boisterous climate of the international telecoms industry. It’s impossible to conceive that there is any aspect of the operation that has not been influenced by the many internal campaigns she has led, which – as she told us ahead of our conversation – have embraced every kind of bespoke initiative and event, been based on clear messaging above all else, and have focused on engaging Telefónica people in the company story, strategy, objectives and vision.

Changing attitudes

Lindsey started by explaining how she has noticed a sea change in the attitude towards IC from leadership teams and directors. When she was setting out on her career, many companies simply didn’t have an IC function. It fell within the remit of the PR or HR teams, and just kind of blended into an amorphous cloud of internal and employee comms – a perception that probably still lingers in some organizations. Lindsey is adamant that they are in fact two separate functions: employee comms are indeed driven by HR, as well as the individual employee, and focus primarily on operational matters such as holidays, salaries, payroll, sick-pay and bonuses. IC, on the other hand, focuses on company strategy, purpose, goals and direction – the things your people need to know. It’s the latter which, increasingly, is better understood as a function in its own right – not something that is vaguely attributed to HR. It has a direct impact on the bottom line, and it acknowledges employees’ roles as ambassadors. The more they know, Lindsey told us, the more they understand about the direction the company is taking, the more they can be true and valuable advocates for the business.

The idea that IC can really add value to the business is relatively new, but it has gained genuine currency at the top table. This is filtering down through the organization to the extent that people will call upon IC services for support in delivering a plethora of campaigns and messages, via a full range of traditional and digital channels: branding, events, forums, town halls, Yammer, social media, the intranet, newsletters, bulletins, videos and animations. In short, said Lindsey, it’s no longer just about copywriting. IC can work with many different teams, departments and business roles across the company – and this acceptance is the biggest change she has sensed in her career so far.

Annabel: Can you describe how internal comms sits within Telefónica?

Lindsey: Within Telefónica there is a global internal communications function that sits in head office in Madrid. We also work closely with our operating businesses across the globe. Within those, we also have internal communications teams. So, it’s very much a virtual matrix working set-up. For example, we have an IC team in Germany, which would look after all the local assets for internal communication, and what’s happening there, the CEO in Germany, his actual internal activity plan – all the things that are happening on the ground that affect people in their business.

We link in with local teams when anything comes from a global perspective that we want all of our employees to know about or participate in, whether it’s a big campaign or initiative. I would help them to understand the overall context, provide them with the key messages, branding, banners and headers. Then they would launch it at a local level.

That happens with all of our businesses across Latin America, where we have a huge presence. We are present in 21 countries worldwide, most of them in Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. Many of them have their own internal communications teams working to get all of our global campaigns out across the business.

Annabel: How many people and resources are given to IC?

Lindsey: There are currently around 20 of us in the global team, which sits in our main hub in Madrid. Some of the team are dedicated to IT-based comms, looking after the global intranet and the web, and focusing on day-to-day visual campaigns and things like that. The rest of the team are either IC business partners who look after key areas across the organization and work across different channels, or those working on key projects as required, eg the launch of a new global recognition programme, or the launch of a quarterly pulse survey. They are responsible for building and delivering the overall communications plan, and across the business people use our services to support and deliver their specific campaigns and events.

Across the local teams, it depends on how big that business is. In the UK we’ve got 6,700 employees and a relatively small team of around eight internal communicators. But somewhere like Paraguay or Uruguay, which is a comparatively small business, there might just be one person who deals with the internal communications, because the actual employee base is that much smaller and there’s not a requirement for such a big IC team.

Annabel: What are the challenges of millennials and Gen Z in the workplace for you?

Lindsey: We’ve been talking about millennials for a long while. Over the years, Telefónica has very much shown itself to be a cool company to work for – and a lot of people have worked there for a long time. Four or five years ago, there was a real push to get some younger people into the business, bringing both fresh blood and fresh thinking. We set up various initiatives and programmes, including one which is all about young start-ups coming into the business and helping them to find sponsors who will give them a certain level of financial support. They don’t necessarily work for Telefónica.

In fact, there is now a pile of activity that we do around young people. We invest a lot in millennials. IC is heavily involved in ‘One Young World’, an initiative where we take about 30 young graduates from the business and get them to participate in a forum. It’s akin to a United Nations – bringing loads of our young people together to talk about various initiatives and campaigns, and about bigger world issues. In our UK business, we started a programme called ‘Think Big’, which is very much directed at young people and helping them to realize their full potential. We help them launch ideas and programmes that use technology to benefit the places. However, I do think that maybe we’re using the word ‘millennial’ to death, and sometimes we might be too specific about the initiatives that have been targeted at that audience. We’ve had some feedback from our other employees, asking why we do campaigns or activities directed solely at this group of people. After all, it’s not just that particular generation that can be entrepreneurial, have a different outlook about the way things should be run, or bring different insights to the table. You can be 45 or 50 years old, and still be very tech-savvy and know what’s going on. So perhaps our focus shouldn’t just be targeted specifically at the ‘millennial’ audience.

On the other hand, we do have quite a lot of fresh, young people in the business. And that’s why we have our own millennial network, driven by the growing number of young people, which is about encouraging everyone to share their experiences. But I think we now need to look at what we mean by ‘millennial’. Is it less about age and more about a particular mindset or attitude? We’re working on a campaign at the moment focused on this actual topic, and we’re doing plenty of things around it to collect and gauge people’s responses.

Rebooting perceptions

So according to Lindsey, ‘millennial’ is a phrase that is overdue for a reboot – and we thought this highly significant coming from a telecoms industry insider. The sector is among the most regulated in the world; perhaps one of the main reasons why, despite the rapid advances of underlying technologies, it is also often perceived as a very traditional business to work in, where checks and balances are always intervening to hamper creativity. Lindsey’s observation refutes that clichéd view. More importantly, it also throws down the challenge for an IC practitioner in any sector to take a long hard look at the accumulated received wisdom on best practice, and challenge the very language that we use to label our most common tropes.

Visions of trust

This plays out in some interesting ways when it comes to looking at the requirement for transparency. Regulation, she pointed out to us, has constantly been part and parcel of the telecom company’s existence. As each new phase of technology comes forward, things like spectrum, consolidation, 4G and 5G all bring new possibilities for the mining and exploitation of Big Data. With that wealth of customer data, the big question that telecoms companies like Telefónica must address is how to monetize it while retaining the all-important trust of the customers who have provided it. The need to establish trust boundaries within its networks while being innovative in how it charges for its services and bills people, means that there will be some interesting challenges around branding and engagement messaging for the IC in the not-so-distant future. With that in mind, we wanted to know Lindsey’s thoughts on the annual employee engagement survey – and were left in no doubt about her vision: that pulse surveys, with their flexibility, versatility and capacity for timeliness, are the future.

Annabel: Do you believe the annual employee engagement survey is dead?

Lindsey: One hundred per cent yes. We’ve always done an annual engagement survey, for many, many years. I think for a lot of big companies there is a legacy issue that means an annual employment survey is still the way things are done. But with a single survey I just don’t feel you can gauge what people are thinking, and how they’re feeling, because when they’re doing the survey, they will answer those questions according to how they’re feeling on that particular day.

So, if the survey is carried out in the first four or five months of the year when everything’s been great and they’ve seen some brilliant campaigns, they’ve had training and development, that’s one thing. But what if it’s later, when they’re not having such a good time and things aren’t working out. Everything affects how they will respond to those questions. That’s why I think it’s difficult to really gauge how your workforce is feeling if you’re just doing one survey a year. Having said that, we have reduced our survey dramatically over time, from around 100 questions to 70, then 50. At the moment it’s down to just over 30 questions.

We are also now doing quarterly polls and I think that is definitely the way to go: smaller, more regular surveys with different demographics, and not using the same audience each time. With pulse surveys you don’t need to target the whole of your employee base. You can just choose your demographics and then run it with smaller groups. This means that, suddenly, you’re getting a steady representative drip-feed of views from a wide sample of people, fo...