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The New Imperative:
Tough Times Demand Fresh Thinking
4th Annual Best Practices Summit on Change and Internal Communications |
On December 1, Edelman Change and Employee Engagement hosted its 4th Annual Best Practices in Change & Internal Communications Summit in New York. This year we offered a live video Webcast of the event, which was held in New York City, enabling the Summit to be a truly global event. Communications professionals from Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires and Sao Paolo - to name a few – participated. Check out insights from each of the speakers below:
Reframing the Purpose
Gary Grates, president and global managing director, Edelman Change and Employee Engagement
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Gary kicked off the Summit (click here to watch highlights) by highlighting the new role of organizational communications based on key transformations occurring in today’s environment.
Gary touched on insights, research, and observations gathered through Edelman’s global reach and through the firm’s Public Engagement strategic lens. For Edelman, public engagement is viewed as the advancing of shared interests in a world of cross-influence. The implications of this new ecology are many: |
- The new ecology is bottom up and democratic – Old institutions have lost much of their power. Companies no longer control their brands. Instead, consumers can “make or break” companies’ brands depending on what they say to each other and in public spaces. More than 75 percent of survey respondents from Edelman’s 2009 Midyear Trust Barometer said recommendations from friends or family and recommendations from a "person like me” were important in determining how much they trust a product or service brand.
- Transparency is key – Globalization and technology have made the world smaller. Information now passes seamlessly and instantaneously within and beyond an organization, making it impossible for organizations to keep secrets. Even if they could, they would be wise not to. In the Trust Barometer, 93 percent of respondents trusted a company more when it demonstrated transparent and honest business practices.
- Actions speak louder than words – Transparency means businesses cannot get away with just talking. Instead, they will be measured by their deeds. And those deeds increasingly will be done in concert with others in the ecology.
- Old alliances are crumbling – New and often unexpected partnerships will emerge, as new interests surface.
- Rise of values-based management – As the world and organizations become increasingly democratic and new influencers surface, companies must act in accordance to stakeholders’ expectations or be prepared to answer to these constituencies. The world has shifted. Customers’ interests rank as most important to a CEO’s business decisions, followed by employees and then investors (Trust Barometer).
For communications professionals who heretofore were asked to implement tactical actions to address company issues, the time is ripe to reframe the purpose of communications as a strategic element in decision-making. As such, there are two questions that any CEO or leadership team must answer to fully comprehend and assimilate their workforce situation in order to best address the opportunities or challenges in a constructive manner:
1st Question: How smart do you want your employees to be? – Technology is giving us the ability to catalogue, identify, aggregate and access all types of information in ways that dimensionalize the business, providing context and perspective while allowing for new voices to be heard. The how, why, what, when and where of internal communications is crucial to ensuring people are informed, engaged, motivated, and recognized. It is truly the last bastion of competitive advantage.
2nd Question: How smart do you want to be about your employees? – Equally important is how we use technology to better understand who our workforce is, how they connect to the business or brand, how they interpret information, how they respond to specific management practices and how they interact with each other.
What if We Treated Employees Like Customers?
Bernadette Wade, vice president for global internal communications at PepsiCo
"What if we treated employees like customers?" This simple yet profound question prompted Bernadette and her team to first delve into the reasons why this doesn’t happen and then to explore ways that it could. This lead to the second question in their process: “What if we developed a process for collecting employee insights that mirrored our process for collecting customer insights?”
Most organizations spend neither the time nor the resources to fully assimilate the inner makings of their workforce to the degree that they do with their customers. If this information could be assembled, dissected, and understood, the group surmised, business leaders could more astutely manage, motivate, engage and communicate with employees.
Armed with this construct, Wade and company set out to develop a communications architecture for uncovering and collecting employee insights – not an easy task for a company with 200,000 global employees, two-thirds of which worked in front-line field positions.
To begin, the internal communications team brainstormed specific things they wanted to learn about PepsiCo employees that would help them address employees’ most important communication needs. They asked:
- What do you need to do your job?
- How can we reach you?
- What media do you consume?
- Do you speak English?
- Where do you get information to do your job?
- Do you own a computer?
- Do you own a mobile phone?
Analyzing employees’ responses identified opportunities for PepsiCo to improve its internal communications and address employees’ needs more effectively, including:
- Demonstrate “glocalization” –To be relevant to PepsiCo’s global workforce, communications need to be consistent at the global level, yet customized to specific situations and employee needs at the local level. PepsiCo calls this simultaneous blend of global and local relevance “glocalization."
- Aligning communications to support the company’s Power of One goal – Aligning communications from different parts of the organization makes information and messages more consistent, enabling everyone to work together more effectively as a single integrated organization.
- Leveraging communications to endorse PepsiCo’s Performance with Purpose mission – Internal communication needs to reach and engage PepsiCo’s workforce in ways that motivate employees to achieve business and financial success while having a positive impact on society.
- Digitizing communications to make information more accessible – With an already large and growing portion of PepsiCo’s workforce using social media and accessing company information from mobile devices, the company is exploring how to use technology to further support employee communications.
Most importantly, feedback revealed that although employees received a lot of messages, there was often no structure to them. In response, Bernadette and her team developed a communications architecture focused on the core areas of feedback and analysis. The result was three new offerings, which PepsiCo launched in 2009:
- Tales from the Road, by Indra Nooyi (CEO Blog)
PepsiCo’s CEO blog, called Tales from the Road, is one way the CEO shares with employees her thoughts, concerns and questions on a range of topics. Challenges include keeping the content brief, making it feel personal and transparent for employees (instead of sounding like “corporate speak”) and discussing topics that are timely and relevant for the company’s global population. Nonetheless, Tales from the Road has been highly effective in engaging employees in the latest company developments. To date, 16 blog posts have received a total of 37,000 visits and a total of 300 employee comments.
- “Sound Bites” Podcast – Big Ideas, Small Portions
Audio podcasts are a quick and efficient method of communicating to employees on specific topics (e.g., H1N1 flu virus, diversity and inclusion, healthy eating). Keeping podcast content brief so it requires minimal time commitment and preparation has encouraged senior leaders to contribute and participate in podcast episodes. To date, there have been 2,000 visits to PepsiCo’s podcast library.
- Idea Network
The Idea Network is a virtual space on PepsiCo’s employee portal where employees can post questions, thoughts, comments and vote on colleagues’ ideas, regardless of location. To date, the Idea Network has uncovered new product ideas and actionable solutions that are unlikely to have surfaced in other ways.
Bernadette and her team continue to observe results from the new approaches they implemented for improving internal communications at PepsiCo. That said, by reviewing employees’ comments and discussions to podcast updates, blogs and Idea Network suggestions, the team is already benefiting from more accurate employee insights and a better understanding of what employees think.
The Age of Streams: Helping companies go with the flow
Steve Rubel, senior vice president and director of insights, Edelman Digital
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Steve demonstrated how today’s digital realities are playing out in the workplace reinforced the immense potential companies have to successfully embrace these realities in how they communicate with their employees. (Click here to watch highlights.) He shared several key ways people are consuming digital information that have real and direct implications for how companies communicate internally:
- We are now a culture of “snacking,” meaning we like to consumer our information in small pieces throughout the day (e.g., Twitter, YouTube).
- The continuing rise of mobile technologies is causing even more digital distractions that spill into every place we go, including our workplaces.
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- The increasing presence of digital technologies in peoples’ personal lives is carrying over into the workplace. Employees expect the equipment and capabilities they have at home to carry over to the office.
- The competition to capture peoples’ attention is at an all-time high and continues to grow. The average American now visits 111 different Web site domains each month and only reads about 20 percent of an email or Web page
So what does all this mean? In Steve’s words, we’re in an “Age of Streams,” with an endless flow of digital information and content from which to choose. And he recommends three key ways companies can cut through the clutter and engage employees:
- Create “digital embassies” – Equip employees to become company ambassadors by finding the social media spaces where target audiences are spending their time, and then give employees the freedom (with guidelines) to participate there.
- Embrace multiplicity and transparency – It’s no longer about a single message or story. Don’t be afraid to tweak your communications for different audiences through multiple channels at the same time.
- Use the force, don’t fight it – In other words, go with the flow. Social networking is a force to be reckoned with that isn’t going away, and companies trying to “lock it down” in the workplace will learn that employees will find ways to take part in it anyway. So why not use it to your advantage?
The headline for Steve’s talk might easily have been – “No Boundaries” – as what he described is a world where people’s personal lives and habits are now one with their work lives and habits.
Values-Based Management: Translating CSR priorities into actions employees can take every day
Chris Deri, Global Head of Edelman Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
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Click here to watch highlights from Chris's presentation on the shift from a shareholder’s world to a stakeholder’s world, which puts increasing pressure on companies to address social responsibility and sustainability as a core priority. He notes that the changing demographics of the workforce place values-based management at the center of an organization’s management model. With that said, there are significant opportunities for leaders to translate company-wide CSR priorities into meaningful actions that employees can incorporate easily into their day-to-day roles and responsibilities. |
For those of you who did not participate live or via webcast, we look forward to seeing you next year.
Click here for information on our 2008 Summit.
Copyright ©2009 Edelman Change and Employee Engagement. All rights reserved. |
Gary Grates, president and global managing director, Edelman Change and Employee Engagement
Sharon Wamble-King, vice president, corporate communications, insurance provider
Katharina Auer, head of global internal and management communications, Shell International/Royal Dutch Shell
Michael Lampe, vice president, corporate media relations and reputation management, Wyeth; and Bernadette Wade, vice president, internal communications, PepsiCo
Steve Rubel, senior vice president and director of insights, Edelman Digital
Chris Deri, global head of Edelman corporate social responsibility
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