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journalofinternalcommunicationVolume 13

Internal communication insight from inside leading organisations, brought to you by Gatehouse

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THE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13 INTRODUCTION

It is with slight trepidation that we welcome you to this, the thirteenth

edition of the Journal of Internal Communication.

The more superstitious members of the Gatehouse team advised strongly against us publishing a number 13 edition, but we decided to throw caution to the wind! However, if any of our readers suffer from Triskaidekaphobia (yes, it’s a real phobia that was recognised and named in 1911), then we accept no responsibility and recommend you look away now. But we do think you’ll be missing out.

Far from being unlucky, we are once again blessed to have some fantastic contributions in this issue. From our profile of leading light Kate Jones, the IoIC’s Internal Communicator of the Year 2016, to the highlights from our latest State of the Sector census; from the value an international bank gleaned from an IC audit, to one organisation’s experience piloting Workplace by Facebook for a year, there’s something here for everyone.

Mergers and acquisitions are undoubtedly amongst the most challenging of organisational changes we are asked to support. So we’re particularly pleased to have contributions from the teams behind the recent Ladbrokes Gala Coral mega merger and one of the stars of the UK tech sector, ARM, which was itself recently acquired by Japan’s SoftBank. These articles provide a rare and valuable insight into the world of merger communications and show that, whilst flexibility is key, little should be left to lady luck!

Enjoy.

Simon WrightDirector, Gatehouse

Lee SmithDirector, Gatehouse


ContentsPRACTITIONER PROFILE

Kate Jones.....................................4In this issue, we meet Kate Jones, who was named Internal Communicator of the Year at the IoIC’s ICon Awards in November 2016.

STRATEGY

How a transformed Standard Chartered recalibrated its internal communication..................................................7Sarah-Jane Wakefield, Head of Group Internal Communications at Standard Chartered, talks about the benefits of conducting a full internal communications audit and its impact on enabling her team to support the Bank’s new strategy and organisational change.

Navigating uncertainty during Ladbrokes’ merger with Gala Coral......13Four months after betting and gaming giants Ladbrokes and Gala Coral joined forces, Head of Internal Communications Madeleine Porter describes the approach they took to keep colleagues informed and engaged through a period of intense change.

Communicating acquisitions the ARM way................................................................18ARM’s Sasha Watson and Ravinder Johal have led internal communications for a number of global business acquisitions and supported one significant deal which saw ARM itself acquired by Japan’s SoftBank Group. Here, they share their secrets for successful acquisition communications.

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CONTENTS

TACTICS

Piloting Workplace Facebook at Compass UK&I...................................................39 Compass Group UK & Ireland Corporate Affairs Director Michael Kissman piloted Workplace by Facebook. He shares his lessons learnt and discusses next steps.

A new office space to support flexible working at Land Securities........................45Laura Jamieson, Head of Internal Communications at Land Securities, describes how an internal campaign supported not only their physical office move to Victoria, in London, but also more collaborative and flexible ways of working.

CASE STUDIES

Getting mobile and unwired colleagues connected..................................51Head of Internal Communications Zoe Chiverton describes her approach to launching the first employee self-service benefits portal to a largely remote audience at the Priory Group.

Delivering unrivalled customer experience at Northumbrian Water.....55Jane Clayton, Head of Employee Communications at Northumbrian Water Group, led a year-long campaign designed to directly influence the customer experience.

THE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13

OPINION

Welcome to the Post-Intranet Era........26Internal communication as a profession is undergoing a profound transformation, and one of our go-to tools for connecting with employees is transforming right along with us, as Jeff Zwier explains.

Should you use jokes in leadership communication?...............................................30Humour is a strong weapon when it comes to landing important messages. Gatehouse’s Head of Content Ian Harris ponders its use.

Communication with confidence: IC has arrived......................................................34At Gatehouse, we have been taking the pulse of the internal communication and employee engagement profession for nine years now. The 2017 edition of our State of the Sector research report was released in February with a slew of surprising insights to boot.


In this issue, we meet Kate Jones, who was named Internal Communicator of the Year at the IoIC’s Icon Awards in November 2016.

Six questions to...

Kate Jones, Head of Communications and Corporate Affairs at Tarmac Ltd

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PRACTITIONER PROFILE

How did you get into internal communication?

After a BA in English, I started my career as Editorial Assistant in a communication agency back in the 1990s. Internal communication wasn’t very evolved back then – it was mostly about broadcast and delivering content, mostly through print. Intranets were just coming in, but their purpose was mainly to get news to employees. I feel like I’ve evolved with the internal comms industry from the era of editorial into what is now the engagement era.

Tell us about your role today.

I joined Tarmac as Head of Internal Communications in January 2016. I was appointed interim Head of Communications and Corporate Affairs in October, following my manager’s move to a group-level role. It is quite unusual for someone with an internal communicator background to lead Corporate Affairs – it’s usually the other way round. I will never be a PR or

external communication expert, but I don’t need to be. At this level, you draw on the benefits of your own specialism, but must be able to represent the other disciplines and help the team achieve what they need, by providing context and governance and breaking down any barriers and liaising with the stakeholders on their behalf if they need it.

How did you get to where you are today?

When I moved in house after my experience in an agency, I soon found out that I needed to develop a more strategic perspective. I learnt to build relationships with different business functions and take part in discussions about the business, not just strictly communications. You need to talk about the business first, and then apply communication to that conversation. I’m proud that my stakeholders have noticed that in me. The feedback I often receive is that I build up an understanding of the business challenge very quickly. You need to



I also invest a lot in my professional network, both drawing on other people’s experience and supporting those at the early stages of their career. When I started out, it was difficult to find other communication people to share best practice with outside of formal conferences and events. It is so much easier to find inspiration now, with social media, informal ‘unconferences’ and local networking events.

What’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?

The HR Director at Tarmac once called me the “Tiger Woods of internal communications”! I think he was referring to my ability to explore new ways of doing things – not for the sake of changing them, but by using evidence and having the courage to make improvements that will make a real difference.

What’s the key ingredient to success? I think it is about believing in what you do, and sometimes being willing to put aside the modesty! I would recommend to any IC practitioner to a) get qualifications, such as Accelerate or other IoIC certifications; and b) enter awards, because it is great benchmarking and it proves the value you are delivering for your business. It’s a great way of obtaining feedback from someone who is looking across all sorts of campaigns from different industries, and recognising your work as something that others might draw on.

be able to talk about the business before you talk about communications; otherwise you will only ever be asked about newsletters and channels.

It’s also important to build a strong professional profile: attending or speaking at events, helping other communicators connect, and being invested in the future of IC. I do that by volunteering with the IoIC, first as a member of the Central region committee and, several roles later, I’m now in my second year as Chair.

“It is so much easier to find inspiration now, with social media, informal ‘unconferences’ and local networking events.”

“You need to be able to talk about the business before you talk about communications.”

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Biography: Kate Jones

Kate is the IoIC’s 2016 Internal Communicator of the Year. She has worked in employee engagement

for 20 years in a range of roles, both in house and agency side, and covering various sectors. Her contributions to the profession have earned her IoIC Fellowship and over 40 awards for publications and campaigns. Kate is currently board chair of the IoIC and works as head of communications and corporate affairs at Tarmac. You can follow her on Twitter (@how_IC_it).

Any word of advice to your peers?

You must be brave and willing to innovate, and that means figuring out where best to apply your new ideas. Don’t be afraid to try something out, because you will hold yourself back and become your own worst enemy. My answer is to start small – find a project where the stakeholders are willing to do things differently, which will then build evidence that a different approach delivers a better result. There will be a snowball effect as others want the same results! I also couldn’t recommend highly enough building your network. I often say that I haven’t applied for a job for 15 years, and it’s true – people have always approached me thanks to my network. Don’t be afraid to reach out to other IC professionals; drop them a note through Twitter, or ring them up asking for advice. Keep those relationships going, because our profession is built on making the connections.

PRACTITIONER PROFILETHE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13


PRACTITIONER PROFILE

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Sarah-Jane Wakefield, Head of Group Internal Communications at Standard Chartered, talks about the benefits of conducting a full internal communication audit and its impact on enabling her team to support the Bank’s new strategy and organisational change.

How a transformed Standard Chartered recalibrated its internal communication

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Why did you commission an internal communication audit?

Over the last two years, the organisation has been going through a lot of change. We have had a change in leadership, with a new Chief Executive and a new Management Team, and recently launched our new business strategy. It was a priority for us to ensure that our internal communications supported the new strategy for the Bank and our ongoing organisational change.

As a large, complex global organisation, we also wanted to ensure that we were aligned in our internal communications across the whole Bank, that we were

not overloading staff with multiple and dispersed forms of communications and that our messaging was landing as we hoped.

Having recently joined Standard Chartered, I wanted to get a real sense of the effectiveness of our current communications, our messaging and its delivery and the role of our leaders in communications. As a result of all the change, it felt like the right time to take a step back, and identify where we needed to and could make improvements and look at how we might do things differently. We also wanted to create a benchmark, so we could use it to measure progress over time.

We appointed Gatehouse to undertake the research, which covered three distinct phases: a series of qualitative interviews with members of the Management Team, an online quantitative survey, and a series of face-to-face focus groups in some of our core regions around the globe – ensuring that we best represented Standard Chartered’s diverse audience.

What did you find most valuable?

We have been positioning ourselves across the wider internal communications function, as a strategic advisory team rather than strictly tactical and undertaking this audit has supported that drive. How often do you get the opportunity to talk to the

“I wanted to get a real sense of the effectiveness of our current communications, our messaging and its delivery and the role of our leaders in communications.”

STRATEGYTHE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13


entire Management Team individually about their thoughts on internal communications, what they see as their role in communications, what they expect of us and where we can add real value for them going forward. We were able to make recommendations on how we should change our internal communications, supported by real evidence and detailed insights. This enabled us to show how we can be the ‘eyes and ears’ of the organisation, providing valuable insights into how our staff think and feel.

The audit was also really reassuring. Most of the things that came out of the audit were not a surprise. The things that we thought were challenges and difficulties, or that needed improving, were the right things. You could ask “well what’s the point of doing the audit then?”. But it gave us the evidence to make the changes we needed to, and confirmed that we had a good sounding of the organisation and knew what needed to be tackled. It is important to have independent ‘sanity’ checks.

One of the really interesting things that struck me was that we needed to ensure that our communications ‘matched the reality’. Often in organisations, one of the biggest complaints is that communication is not done in a timely manner; here we identified the opposite problem. In the organisation, a top priority is to drive efficiencies and improve our

processes and this had also been a top communication priority. The audit showed that people had got the message, understood it, knew it was important and that changes need to be made, but they themselves weren’t seeing any change – for them the communications did not match the reality on the ground.

They wanted to hear about the reality ‘now’ – tangible things they could see and feel. We are now taking this principle and applying it to our change communications. Instead of telling staff when we have new initiatives, what we are going to do or when we are implementing changes, we are waiting until we have real stories, evidence and examples of the change. We are communicating the reality that staff can relate to, see, and feel. This has been a key takeaway for us.

It is not always easy to implement, as stakeholders often want ‘launch’ / big bang communications for new initiatives, but this change is already making our communications much more meaningful.

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What changes have you introduced as a result of the audit?

We are making a range of changes, but we are also using the audit to focus on the approaches, methods and campaigns that were highlighted by staff as successful and really impactful like our recent Conduct, #customersatourheart and #whyIworkhere campaigns.

Some of the changes we have made are small, simple and quick things we can do to improve communications for our staff straight away. These include keeping our messages short, concise and less corporate, remembering that for the majority of our staff, English is not their first language, giving people headline information, and including subtitles in all our videos to aid viewing... things that are basic best practice.

As always, we can’t do everything at once, and so we have prioritised the changes we need to make, with an initial focus on streamlining our communication channels and activities, addressing the barriers to using our new social collaboration platform and introducing improved measurement and evaluation.

We focused on our internal communication architecture – both in terms of streamlining channels and activities and how we communicate across regions, businesses and functions. We are a complex matrix organisation with multiple levels of

communications, and we want to ensure we can reduce the noise for staff, and provide clarity on what content will be communicated by which mechanisms. We’re now in the process of re-launching some of our communications channels to be more effective and switching off others.

Over the last two years, we have been introducing a new social collaboration platform – the Bridge. The Bridge is the cornerstone of our channel architecture, but the audit found that whilst some

“We are communicating the reality that staff can relate to, see, and feel. This has been a key takeaway for us.”



people loved it there were real barriers to using it for others. As a result, the Bridge was not being used to its full potential. We have increased our investment heavily in training, education, awareness, sharing success stories and we have launched a new homepage to help people understand what they can do and find it easier to navigate. We’ve still got a long way to go, but the research has given us a clear direction and the changes we are making are already being positively received.

We’ve focused on our measurement and evaluation strategy for internal communication, including implementing quarterly dashboards for the Management Team, which link all our internal communication activities to a strategic objective and show the outcomes.

What are you planning to do next?

Some of the changes we want to make are harder and will take longer to implement. We know we need to do more to support our senior leaders and our line managers to be better

“We’ve focused on our measurement and evaluation strategy for internal communication, including implementing quarterly dashboards for the Management Team...”

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Biography: Sarah-Jane Wakefield

Sarah-Jane started her career as a journalist before changing path and amassing 17 years experience working in PR across all communications disciplines in fast-moving, high profile organisations including the Bank of England, HM Treasury, Audit Commission, Human Tissue Authority and the Healthcare Commission. She joined Standard Chartered in 2014 leading the CEO’s communications before starting her current role

as Head of Group Internal Communications in 2015. She is a CIPR accredited practitioner, a Certified Member of the Institute of Internal Communications, has obtained the CIPR PR diploma and has an International MBA in Communications and Leadership.

“...it’s not enough to just get the evidence; it’s only valuable if you are prepared to do something with it!”

communicators. We need to get both groups to a point where they will be driving and leading communications in a more personal and open way with the eventual aim that they will need minimal central support. To do this, we need to understand more what skill development they need, and what further support we can provide. We’ve started work on this, but it is a big project and we want to take our time and make sure we get it right.

What would you say to a practitioner contemplating doing an audit?

I would say, “Do it!” I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s given us benchmarks we will be able to look at in a year’s time to measure how we’ve improved. It demonstrates how we are prepared to evolve as a function and ensure we can support the organisation as it changes. It also shows how we add real value as a function.

My piece of advice would be to not underestimate the resource and time involved, if you want to do it properly and get the most from it. For me, the

focus groups were hugely valuable as they gave me the opportunity to hear first hand what people had to say and to better understand our markets and our staff. The result is absolutely worth the effort and energy.

Finally, I would say that you’ve got to be prepared to take actions in response to the findings. I know that sounds like an obvious thing, but it’s not enough to just get the evidence; it’s only valuable if you are prepared to do something with it!



Four months after betting and gaming giants Ladbrokes and Gala Coral joined forces, Head of Internal Communications Madeleine Porter describes the approach they took to keep colleagues informed and engaged through a period of intense change.

Navigating uncertainty during Ladbrokes’ merger with Gala Coral

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Ladbrokes is the best-known bookmaker on the UK high street,

with more than 2,500 shops, 14,000 employees, a growing digital business and a substantial international footprint.On 22 June 2015, we announced our intention to merge with Gala Coral Group, to combine more than 230 years of heritage and become the biggest bookmaker in the UK; with ambitions to be the best in the world.

‘Subject to completion’

While the impact was limited for customers (we have maintained our brands), naturally for our people it was big news. It meant teaming up with one of our biggest competitors, streamlining back-office operations to achieve significant synergies (which would mean a number of redundancies) and a large-scale office move. We would also need to sell some 360 shops to other bookmakers for the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to allow the deal to go ahead.

People wanted answers fast, but due to the complexity of the deal, it

took almost a year and a half to go through the CMA approval process and get the green light to merge. Legal obligations meant that we could never communicate in a way that assumed that the deal would go ahead and could not announce anything as definite, always ‘subject to completion’, creating a long period of uncertainty for our people.

We also had to maintain our position as competitors right up until the time

“While the impact was limited for customers, naturally for our people it was big news.”



we merged – this meant not sharing anything commercially sensitive and continuing to compete for customers. As our CEO, Jim Mullen, put it, we would be out to “eat each other’s breakfast, lunch and dinner before getting into bed together”. That presented a huge challenge, as we had wanted to lay the foundations for a future as one team, while very much needing to maintain the view that we were on opposing sides.

‘Me’ and ‘Us’ phases

Central to our merger communication strategy were two important phases. We acknowledged that people have very little interest in the big picture vision for the merger in the early days; instead, they want to know if they will still have a job, and, if they do, where they will fit in the new organisation. In other words, you need to first address the ‘me’ before you can engage people with the future of the company- the ‘us’ phase.

We decided to keep this first phase of communication very factual, and

agreed a set of principles about the way we would communicate, with honesty, transparency, and consistency at the core. This meant communicating regularly, even when just to say “there is no news”, and communicating key decisions as soon as they were known, not when it was convenient to do so.

We introduced a dedicated merger site; a central place where any colleague, regardless of which company they worked for, where they were based, or whether they worked in an office or shop, could access the latest news and updates. What we could say at that stage was limited and there was lots of speculation in the press, so it was important that all colleagues could easily access a single version of the truth. It also gave people the opportunity to submit their questions

anonymously, which gave us a useful insight into what was on people’s minds and made them feel listened to.

We relied heavily on leaders to take responsibility for effective communication, maintain focus on business as usual and take their people on the journey – despite the fact that they were going through their own personal uncertainty. To help make that happen, we brought leaders from across the two companies together for an off-site and issued each attendee with some simple guidance to help shape their approach, including a narrative to help them bring the merger rationale in ‘shareholder speak’ to life for our people, best practice communication and dos and don’ts for leading through change.

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When we finally gained CMA approval to merge and officially closed the deal on 1 November 2016, it was a massive milestone in our company’s journey and was the culmination of a huge amount of work for a number of people. However we were still very much in the ‘me’ phase and for many, it was the start of an intense period of change. Our key principle for ‘day one’ was to mark, but not celebrate. Our offices were re-branded overnight and we

launched a video of our CEO, COO and CFO discussing what day one meant for our business and the opportunities the merger presented, but importantly acknowledging the challenges that would come too. Arguably the most important piece of communication was our day one guide, a printed document that clearly laid out what colleagues needed to know – simple things like what was going to happen to their email address and if their line manager was changing.

Bringing the energy back into the business

Day one was just the start of our journey – our Executive team were only allowed to begin discussions on strategy and share commercially sensitive information at that point, so despite the fact that integration is moving at pace, there will be no ‘big reveal’ for some time. But we have to acknowledge that for most of our people it has felt like a long process – we’re beginning to move into the ‘us’ phase, and colleagues now have a thirst for information on what’s next for the company.

So, now we are kicking off some initiatives to unite our people and bring the energy back into the business.

As leaders in betting and gaming, we’re in the business of fun. While there will naturally be differences in our cultures and the way we operate, everyone who works for Ladbrokes Coral Group has that in common. As such, it’s our firm belief that that’s where any engagement campaign should begin.

We launched a sporting advent calendar and every day throughout December, employees could answer questions on that day’s fixtures for a chance to win 50 pounds in retail vouchers. Thousands of colleagues from across our shops and offices entered, and it made for some healthy competition and interesting water cooler chat. It also engaged our people with the big events in the betting world – Boxing Day is a huge day in sport and has the potential to make or break the bookies’ year, so we ran an extra ‘Boxing Day Bonus’ competition on 26 December to make sure everyone had one eye on the results, whether



“You need a long-term plan and lots of tricks up your sleeve to keep up the momentum.”

Biography: Madeleine Porter

Madeleine Porter is Head of Internal Communications for Ladbrokes Coral Group plc.

She joined the small and relatively young internal comms function at Ladbrokes two years ago, having spent the early part of her career in internal communications for professional services.

or not they were working. This led us into a new year campaign using the themes of sport and opportunity to unite our people and build some pride and excitement around the future of Ladbrokes Coral.

By mid-year, we hope to be in a position to re-launch our strategy and corporate values – an amazing opportunity to re-engage people and involve them in the future of the company.

Lessons learnt

My advice to any internal communication practitioner going through a merger would be to never underestimate how long these things take. We’re more than 18 months in and there’s still a long way to go. You need a long-term plan and lots of tricks up your sleeve to keep up the momentum.

It’s also really important to focus on where you can truly add value. Stakeholder management is tough at the best of times, but with effectively two of every role, everything can turn into design by committee if you’re

not careful. Someone once referred to a merger integration as the world’s longest job interview – people are facing uncertainty and are determined to make their mark.

With a huge focus on achieving cost-savings and meeting operational deadlines and targets, businesses can lose sight of the importance of getting the message right with your people, and so rely on the counsel of communicators for this. Take every opportunity to remind stakeholders of the importance of making information really clear and accessible – that’s what people really value during change.

For the internal comms function, the merger has presented an opportunity to set a new standard. Coral did not even have an IC function before now, so the process has enabled us to demonstrate our value and fix things that have never been prioritised in the past. With a new suite of channels to launch and a series of live events to engage colleagues across the business with the new company’s strategy, vision and values, we’ve got an exciting year ahead!

1919 www.gatehouse.co.uk19 www.gatehouse.co.uk

ARM’s Sasha Watson and Ravinder Johal have led internal communications for a number of global business acquisitions and supported one significant deal which saw ARM itself acquired by Japan’s SoftBank Group. Here, they share their secrets for successful acquisition communications.

Communicating acquisitions the ARM way


Awarded Britain’s most admired company, 2016, ARM is one of

those companies that most people have never heard of. The fact is that ARM® technology is at the heart of the computing and connectivity revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. From the unmissable to the invisible; their advanced, energy-efficient processor designs are enabling the intelligence in 90 billion silicon chips and securely powering products from the sensor to the smartphone to the supercomputer.

To help enable more of this success, M&A has become a key part of ARM’s ambitious growth strategy. Over the last five years alone, ARM has acquired around a dozen businesses across many global locations. So it has had to develop a real expertise in communicating these deals to both existing and newly acquired employees.

“It is understandable when companies are undertaking high-profile, expensive and complex activities like M&A that senior executives push internal communications down the list, or simply

consider that an email will suffice. We work hard with our leadership teams to remind them that often, without the people, without taking them on an authentic journey, an acquisition can go very wrong. Maybe not on Day One, but over time you lose people because you never had them in the first place”, says Sasha.

“ARM’s technology touches the lives of more than 70% of the world’s population and this is enabled by our amazing people! So our M&A activity looks for

extraordinary talented people, who can help enable ARM to shape a smarter, more secure and connected world. This puts the people and culture aspects of the acquisition centre stage and means the role of internal communications –before, during and after the deal – are so important!”, says Ravinder.

Our people are our most important asset, and so internal communications, and ensuring that they are completely connected, play a large role in our M&A process. At ARM, we have an inclusive and open workplace; we encourage our people to live our core beliefs and to be their brilliant selves and share their ideas – supporting their growth and celebrating their unique contributions. Fortunately, from our experience, people from acquired companies usually tend to be very positive about working with us!

ARM has a dedicated M&A team made up of professionals from many ARM groups which manage the process from beginning to end. We work very closely with them and at deal time pretty much join them to meticulously plan, welcome new people on board and

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“The research phase is critical to understanding the company we’re acquiring and its people as quickly as possible. It is the difference between generic M&A comms and authentic, impactful communications.”

set about quickly to help them connect their current world to their new reality at ARM. We want people to be really clear on what we’re trying to achieve and why we make the decisions we make, so that they understand the important role they play within ARM. This applies to people within organisations we’re acquiring, as well as those within ARM – we want them to know how they help us to deliver our strategy, and have pride in that knowledge. But we also work hard to give them information they really want as quickly as possible. You will often find us with a whiteboard with what feels like a thousand post-it notes answering the question “what does this mean for me?”

Although our approach is unique to every acquisition, it usually follows three stages.

Planning

In this first phase, we need to understand the acquired company as quickly as possible. There’s a tremendous amount of information to research, collect and digest to ensure we get an accurate picture of who they are, what they do



management becomes even more vital, and is another key consideration during this first phase. This is also where the messaging piece is crucial, because leaders are too busy to review multiple documents.

Day one

One of the challenges around the go-live is that things can change right up until ‘Day One’, so you need to be ready to change plans up until the very last minute and be the voice of reason when multiple demands present themselves.

It’s also critical to be absolutely aligned with our external communications. News should be issued simultaneously.

Day One is really about making people feel as special and welcome as possible. We give them an opportunity to network and give away ARM ‘goodie bags’. One of the key pieces of material included in the welcome bag is a “Welcome to ARM” booklet. Though this may seem a very traditional communication tactic, it’s important when people begin to reflect on the practicalities – “When will I know my new benefits package?”, “When will I know my salary?”, “I’m travelling next week, so how do I get my train tickets? How do I get my expenses?” Making sure that FAQs are covered as soon as possible, as well as our company’s history, why we’ve acquired them and

and how they communicate. With only one opportunity to make the best first impression, this research phase is critical. From considerations such as language, location, culture, organisational strategy and structure, through to how and what they communicate as a business and how their communications function runs (if they have one) – all are key components that inform the acquisition communications plan.

We also need to understand the background to the deal – why we are acquiring the company, how it will support ARM’s strategy and the benefits across the board. Working closely with external communications, we develop a set of core messages to help ensure consistent communications. Whether somebody picks up a newspaper, hears it on the news or reads the announcement internally – it all needs to align.

Due to the sensitive nature of many M&As, there is usually only a small set of people involved at this stage (in comparison to more traditional change programmes), so stakeholder

“We only get one opportunity to make the best first impression.”

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“There is no such thing as business as usual because being acquired or merging with another company is extremely unusual!”

what we’re about, provides people with the basic information they need at this early, and often uncertain, stage.

Follow-up Day One is just Day One. The follow up is absolutely so, so, so important and where the real work begins.

At this stage, it’s crucial for key ARM people to spend time with the acquired company and be physically on site as much as possible. Being on the ground allows us to react quickly to initial feedback, and adapt our approach to make sure new employees feel fully supported and engaged each step of the way. That said, we don’t want to get in the way of their work or make their environment feel completely overrun with new people. There is a balance.

“Post Day One communications never really end, and there is no such thing as business as usual because being acquired or merging with another company is extremely unusual! It’s now about keeping very close to the acquired organisation to make sure that

the communications plan and activity, and engagement with all people, is happening”, says Sasha.

The measurement piece is also fundamental during follow-up. Along with providing on the ground support and creating a culture where they feel part of ARM, any concerns, queries and legacy issues that surface need to be addressed as soon as possible.

Initially, a lot of feedback comes through informal conversations and through HR and operational processes – this captures how people are feeling about the communications, what they think of the journey so far and how it can be improved. Along with a pulse survey three months or so after Day One, this feedback informs the ongoing communications plan.

“It’s quite interesting with acquisitions, because usually you would develop your communications plan from Day One onwards. With acquisitions, the communications plan is based on the feedback we receive post Day One and usually a month or two afterward – so



the plan itself is flexible and constantly evolving. Once the news of the announcement has settled, we use the feedback and the pulse survey to inform a robust communications plan. This also allows us to test and socialise the plan with people across both businesses to ensure it will work”, says Ravinder.“This part of the process is all about real time information and responsiveness. It’s about listening and gathering insights, and then responding accordingly. You’ve got to remember that we have acquired the company for their talent and capability – therefore, our people are the most important focus!”

Our advice

When it comes to acquisitions, the key thing is you’ve got to do the research and listen. Find out as much about the company and the people, and make sure messages are consistent both internally and externally. From a tactical point of view, it’s about being highly organised, reacting to change quickly, working with ambiguity, and understanding something completely different and new to you – and turning that into a

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communications plan, into messaging, into presentations and into speaking to people. What makes this less generic is listening, observing and ensuring that the communications are personal and accessible.

As the person leading internal comms for an acquisition, you also need to ensure you’re pulling all relevant information together so people don’t feel bombarded with communications. Do this by staying close to your network and the people involved, from IT to HR to Operations – people don’t need to see 10 emails on their HR policy, their travel policy, etc. when one will suffice.

Lastly, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the people being acquired: “If it were me and I were getting this communication or if I were going through this process, how would I want to be treated and communicated with?” Remember the flip chart with 1,000 post-it notes, what does this mean for me? This is important because so much of what we do is common sense; it is just bringing that common sense to the fore when things are extremely busy.



BiographySasha Watson

Sasha is an extremely passionate communications professional who has spent her entire 21 year

career in communications roles, at agencies and in-house. She chanced upon internal communications when it was in its infancy and found it to be the perfect blend of her first love, PR, and a professional interest, HR. Her role at ARM now spans the entire internal communications remit for the company including M&A as well as corporate volunteering. These days she never goes anywhere without post-it notes!

BiographyRavinder Johal

Ravinder Johal is an experienced internal communicator who is passionate

about delivering the right message, at the right time, in the right way, with the maximum impact! With over twenty years’ financial services experience, she has enjoyed a successful career with progressive growth in responsibility and challenge and is now a Senior Internal Communications Manager supporting the Senior Director of Internal Communications and Corporate Volunteering at ARM.

Company InformationFor more information about ARM please visit www.arm.com

Play your part in shaping the extraordinary. A career at ARM surrounds you with the world’s best. From students to seasoned veterans, there’s a place at ARM for you.

Please visit: www.arm.com/careers


Internal communication as a profession is undergoing a profound transformation, and one of our go-to tools for connecting with employees is transforming right along with us, as Jeff Zwier explains.

Welcome to the Post-Intranet Era


“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” *

The Millennial generation is also beginning to show their strength of numbers in the workforce, and their preferences are clear: work is what you do, not where (or even when) you do it. The continuing battle to recruit top talent is forcing companies to reconsider tying staff to a desk, regular hours, or even a laptop as this highly-educated, smartphone-centric group becomes a large percentage of global corporate teams. And responsive design just hasn’t been enough to provide a compelling intranet experience on a smartphone.

Internal communicators are not the only source of news

This is something we all know, but we seldom acknowledge the impact of this phenomenon on the communications channels that we use. While not every company has found its way to an integrated communications strategy, most employers already recognise that their external social media channels are a significant source of news for employees. And we already know the power of enterprise social networks (ESNs) that paved the way for Jive and other ‘social intranet’ solutions.

Is the intranet dead?

News of the wholesale death of the intranet has been, as the saying goes, wildly exaggerated. But intranets are fundamentally changing and, in many cases, are simply disappearing as organisations and technology evolve. Why? There are three big trends driving the final few nails into the intranet coffin.

We live in a distributed, mobile world

Thanks to the improved availability of high-speed Internet access and ever-increasing cost of real estate, fewer knowledge worker jobs are tied to a desk than ever before. Almost 40% of Fortune 2000 knowledge workers in a recent Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) study reported working from at least two locations on a regular basis. And almost three in ten workers in a recent US mobile technology survey reported using their smartphones to access information vital to their job while in transit.

In 1993, the idea of cyberspace – a shared electronic experience where

ideas and information could be freely and instantly exchanged – was just emerging from science fiction into reality in the form of early online communities. In the years since then, technology has given us the World Wide Web, instant messaging, and intranets. Today, when my clients ask me, “what can we do to refresh our intranet?” my response has been more and more often that intranets are part of our organisations’ past, not their future, and that they might want to seriously consider some alternatives.

* William Gibson, science fiction author and inventor of the word ‘Cyberspace’, in a 1993 radio interview

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“...intranets are part of our organisations’ past, not their future...”

human). A surprisingly small amount of programming created a resource that was informative, conversational and quite popular, answering text-based questions like “What is the deductible amount for our premium health plan?” with both plain-language responses and links to relevant online documents – all without a click into the dreaded “search” box or a single visit to the company intranet.

So what’s next?

Here in 2017, cyberspace is on the verge of looking a lot more like the stuff of 1993 science fiction. Mixed reality, chatbots, machine learning-driven assistants (like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri) and immersive video experiences will be part of every internal communicator’s daily work in the near future. Some of us are implementing these technologies right now. But the future is not yet evenly distributed.

For most of us, 2017 promises to be a transitional period where the past and the future of business communications will coexist. Advanced enterprise social

And not all of that conversation is going on exclusively between humans. As part of a consulting engagement, I recently helped a mid-sized health care organisation script a chatbot to answer questions about employee health care benefits on the company’s Slack platform. (A chatbot is a program that can draw upon a set of rules and a database to have a conversation with someone on a narrow set of subjects. If you’ve interacted with someone offering to help you in a chat window of a commercial web site, there’s a better than even chance you were “speaking” with a bot, rather than a

None of these have had the success of their external counterparts like Twitter or Facebook. However, there are plenty of case studies that demonstrate that a conversational, crowdsourced approach to creating company news and job-relevant information is far more engaging. Ironically, successful social intranets provide the ability to subscribe to topics or project-related sites and drop information into an email digest – avoiding a visit to the intranet at all. These tools get far more engagement than those that force browsers to seek out the data that they need by navigating through a series of menus and pages.

Conversation is the new search engine

Would you rather type a question into Google’s search box or ask a colleague about that latest project or initiative? Last year, the number of people using the top four messaging platforms was larger than the population using the top four social media platforms for the first time. This demonstrates not only the shift to mobile as the platform of choice for Internet-based communication, but also the preference for conversation over browsing.

OPINIONTHE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13


chatbots can find it, and ensuring that both leaders and employees have the tools they need to create and share content that moves the organisation towards its goals.

What will be the preferred channel for “official” company news by the end of this year? Email may still be the business as

Biography: Jeff Zwier

Jeff Zwier is a strategic communications leader and consultant helping organisations navigate change, implement cutting-edge communications technologies, connect with their employees, and get the most strategic value from their communications function. In addition to his current consulting role, he is an active author and instructor on organisational communications

and change management. You can learn more about Jeff’s work by following him on Twitter (@jzwier), via his LinkedIn posts or through his blog, The Art and Science of Business Communications (www.artscicomms.com).

usual solution for a lot of us. But some employees are already following their CEO on Workplace or subscribing to a particular Slack channel (or on one of their competitor’s platforms). Whatever the future of IC looks like at the end of 2017, for leading edge IC teams it probably won’t be yet another page on the company intranet.

networks like Facebook’s Workplace are running at some companies right alongside SharePoint 2010 intranets. Slack communities are emerging as a popular mobile collaborative platform inside companies where Yammer groups are languishing.

But for some of us, the post-intranet era has already begun. Someone you know will very soon start speaking to their computer about your company strategy and get back meaningful, relevant answers. And sometime this year, I’m willing to bet that one or two of your co-workers (perhaps in IT, perhaps in marketing, maybe even your CEO) will be regularly putting on an Oculus, Magic Leap or Microsoft HoloLens headset to explore how a virtual world can support your corporate narrative.

What we’re eventually headed towards is a future where our conversations about the intranet won’t be about taxonomy, navigation, or even any other aspect of user interface. In the post-intranet era, we’ll be talking about how to best encourage crowdsourcing of stories, indexing compelling content so the

31www.gatehouse.co.ukwww.gatehouse.co.uk

Humour is a strong weapon when it comes to landing important messages. Gatehouse’s Head of Content Ian Harris ponders its use.

Should you use jokes in leadership communication?


Somebody in a group I’m part of asked an interesting question the

other day: should you use jokes in your leadership communication?

Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minster, was famous for flubbing jokes her speechwriters had written.

Once, as a response to opposition leader James Callaghan comparing himself to Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, she was supposed to read the line: “Keep taking the Tablets”. Except, she didn’t get the joke and delivered it: “Keep taking the pills”.

Today, leaders are told to stay away from comedy. But I think that would be a missed opportunity.

There’s one business writer who does use jokes to marvellous effect: the legendary investor Warren Buffett.

Every year on the last Saturday in February, Buffett issues his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.

This document is gospel to investors. They scrutinise its predictions, trying to read the macro-economic tea leaves.

But what many overlook is that Warren Buffett’s annual letter is also a masterclass in business communication.

Part financial document and part grandfatherly lecture, Buffett’s annual letter has folksy stories and homespun wisdom. He has a knack for making the most complicated financial shenanigans as straightforward as cheese on toast.

Over the years, Buffett has perfected the art of explaining difficult concepts in a simple way, without dumbing them down. And jokes are one of the key tactics that he uses.

Here’s one example from Warren Buffett’s 1984 letter to investors:

“I heard a story recently that is applicable to our insurance accounting problems: a man was traveling abroad when he received a call from his sister informing him that their father had died unexpectedly. It was physically

“Today, leaders are told to stay away from comedy. But I think that would be a missed opportunity.”

33

impossible for the brother to get back home for the funeral, but he told his sister to take care of the funeral arrangements and to send the bill to him. After returning home he received a bill for several thousand dollars, which he promptly paid. The following month another bill came along for $15, and he paid that too. Another month followed, with a similar bill. When, in the next month, a third bill for $15 was presented, he called his sister to ask what was going on. “Oh”, she said. “I forgot to tell you. We buried Dad in a rented suit.”

Great! Here’s another:

Ben Graham told a story 40 years ago that illustrates why investment professionals behave as they do: An oil prospector, moving to his heavenly reward, was met by St. Peter with bad news. “You’re qualified for residence”, said St. Peter, “but, as you can see, the compound reserved for oil men is packed. There’s no way to squeeze you in.” After thinking a moment, the prospector asked if he might say just four words to the present occupants.

That seemed harmless to St. Peter, so the prospector cupped his hands and yelled, “Oil discovered in hell.” Immediately the gate to the compound opened and all of the oil men marched out to head for the nether regions. Impressed, St. Peter invited the prospector to move in and make himself comfortable. The prospector paused. “No,” he said, “I think I’ll go along with the rest of the boys. There might be some truth to that rumour after all.”

An annual letter to shareholders might seem an unusual place for comedy. But Buffett seems to have a keen sense of when a joke will bring a business concept to life. Jokes are tricky to pull off. But they’re great for holding people’s attention – and they have the obvious advantage of making the reader smile.

Once you decide to use more jokes in your writing, you’ll find you suddenly start spotting jokes that you can use in all sorts of places. They make a great introduction for forewords and corporate reports.

If you want to learn to use jokes and stories in your writing, download our free e-book ‘Hooked On You – The Genius Way to Make Anybody Read Anything’ from our Knowledge Bank at www.gatehouse.co.uk/knowledge- bank-download.


Biography: Ian Harris Ian Harris is an experienced communicator with a passion for clear communication.

He has spoken for some of the world’s largest organisations, including Google, helping them to produce impactful messaging. As Gatehouse’s Head of Content, he regularly applies these skills to organisations’ strategic messaging.


Are your internal comms hitting the spot?

Research is a critical part of the internal communication mix. Without it, you can’t demonstrate your value to senior leaders, build a robust strategy or know whether your channels or messages are really making a difference.

Over the past decade, Gatehouse has conducted internal communication audits for some of Europe’s biggest businesses – from Bupa to GSK; TfL to Virgin Media – as well as a host of public and third sector organisations.

The insights we deliver help our clients get a handle on their internal comms and drive through improvements.

Call us today on +44 (0)20 7754 3630 or visit www.gatehouse.co.uk to find out more.

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TRENDSTHE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13


At Gatehouse, we have been taking the pulse of the internal communication and employee engagement profession for nine years now. The 2017 edition of our State of the Sector research report was released in February, with a slew of surprising insights to boot.

Communication with confidence: IC has arrived


“In this year’s study, we have seen evidence that internal communication is increasingly seen as a value-adding function.”

In 2017, over 450 internal communicators worldwide took part in Gatehouse’s

annual survey, meaning this edition of the State of the Sector is our most detailed and representative yet. The study revealed six standout themes which we’ve summarised here.

Professional confidence is on the rise

The good news is that, after years of feeling like the poor cousin of PR and the misunderstood sister of HR, there are today clear signs that the confidence of internal communicators is on the rise – and for good reason! In this year’s study, we have seen evidence that internal communication is increasingly seen as a value-adding function and a maturing strategic discipline. IC practitioners worldwide have been acting to cement their advisory role to senior leaders for years. Now, an ever-broadening range of activities handled by IC functions on behalf of other divisions points to an improved reputation of IC across organisations.

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Line managers are the new battleground

We were delighted to see that practitioners have responded to our call to action following last year’s study and are beginning to take line manager communication more seriously. Improving line manager communication is now part of the top 5 priorities listed by practitioners, which is an encouraging sign, although our view is that more effort will be required to tackle a challenge of this magnitude. Training is only part of the key to making managers more engaging, but it is an important one, that is all too often disregarded.

The Office 365 effect is fueling the rise of social channels

The report points to a notable increase in the use of social channels in the workplace – driven specifically by the rise of Yammer and SharePoint. Whilst there is evidence of other channel providers making ground, the gap between these and the Microsoft supported products is significant. We feel this is down to the ‘Office 365 effect’. The switch from the traditional Microsoft Office model to Office 365 gave many organisations automatic access to Yammer and Sharepoint as part of the software bundle, likely pushing them to include these social channels in their IC channel mix.

But is it built on shaky foundations?

But there remains a paradox at the heart of our profession. Whilst confidence is on the rise and there are many signs that IC is winning more respect and recognition in 2017, our ability to gather insight, develop strategies and plan effectively is questionable. Once again this year, we have seen that some of the foundations upon which any respected corporate function is based – the ability to take a long-term view, to align to corporate strategy and to effectively plan tactical delivery – are below par.



Digital isn’t the panacea

Linked to the previous point, this year’s research shows that, whilst the channel landscape is certainly changing, digital isn’t the game changer many thought it would be – at least not yet! Technology not being fit for purpose was named the second biggest barrier to success by the communicators who participated in our study. The reality is that for every organisation innovating in this area, there are many more with outdated technology and systems. It is perhaps no surprise then that face-to-face channels remain king – and that, once again, there was no notable decline in print channels this year.

More to do to unlock employee voice – and demonstrate our value

If, like us, you believe that internal communication is key to unlocking engagement, then our ability to give employees a voice must be high on the professional to do list. What we see, however, is that approaches to organisational listening remain fairly unsophisticated. For instance, despite predictions about the demise of regular ‘set piece’ engagement surveys, they remain the most used feedback tool for practitioners, with email a close second! Turning our attention to impact measurement, a similar pattern appears – with the engagement survey being the most used impact tool, despite it very often being ‘owned’ by another function and relatively limited in its coverage of internal communications.

While the internal communication and employee engagement profession has seen some growth and improvements since our last report, there remains much to be done. We look forward to conducting our tenth State of the Sector study and finding out how successful (or otherwise) we have been in tackling these challenges.

If you’d like to read about the above trends in more detail and see how your organisation stacks up, you can download the full State of the Sector report and infographic at www.gatehouse.co.uk/download-state-sector!

“...approaches to organisational listening remain fairly unsophisticated.”

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www.gatehouse.co.ukwww.gatehouse.co.uk

Compass Group UK & Ireland Corporate Affairs Director Michael Kissman piloted Workplace by Facebook. He shares his lessons learnt and discusses next steps.

Piloting Workplace by Facebook at Compass UK&I


When I joined Compass, the first thing I did was commission a

review of our internal communications. In the UK & Ireland business it was clear we had a challenge; we have 60,000 colleagues, delivering food and support services over more than 10,000 sites, from oil rigs in the North Sea to hospitals, schools and sports stadia as well as offices up and down the country. What the review showed was that, in a business where most people don’t sit at a desk and only 10% have access to a work email address, we were still relying heavily on email as a major form of communication.

I was aware that Facebook was looking for partner companies to trial Facebook at Work (later rebranded ‘Workplace’). After just a few weeks in the company, I realised that it had the potential to fix many communication challenges faced by the UK & Ireland Compass team.We took the opportunity to test it for free the first year. Two things made it relatively easy to persuade our Executive team of the advantages

of the platform. First, unlike other IT solutions, its roll-out requires zero training – our employees are not tech-savvy, but anyone using Facebook in their private life is immediately familiar with Workplace. Second,

now that it’s launched to the market, Facebook only charges for active users - so if someone logs in but never returns, or stops using it after a few months, there’s no cost to the business. This reduces the risk of investing in the platform to a minimum.

Facebook recommends a ‘big bang approach’, which involves launching the platform to everyone at the same time and letting people use it as they deem best. However, due to the size and complexity of our business, we didn’t take that approach: instead, we decided to start with a small-scale pilot, and gradually built upon it. I believe this was the right approach for us, as it’s given my team, and a number of colleagues across the company, time to understand how it can support us as a business, and think through the details of its implementation.

We are still in the process of rolling it out to the business, with only a small proportion of employees using it so far, but we’re already seeing the benefits.

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Connecting a diverse organisation

A key challenge is that Compass is an extraordinarily fragmented and diverse organisation, and Workplace has a huge potential to make people feel more connected.

As a food and service company, we work across a wide range of sectors, and operate under a diversity of brands; Eurest in business & industry, Chartwells in education and Medirest in healthcare, for example. A large proportion of our 60,000 UK&I employees work on client sites, where they serve food or offer facilities management services, such as cleaning or security. Many identify with our brands or our clients’ brand. This isn’t necessarily a problem, as it demonstrates commitment to the client and the client’s customers. The real problem is that they don’t realise the breadth of our offering and are sometimes unaware that other sectors and brands are all part of the same company.

Although our operational communications are working quite well, the communications around identity, change and collaboration has been piecemeal. We’ve got effective mechanisms to get information on health and safety, menus, pricing and regulations to frontline colleagues. What needs to work better is the sharing of ideas and best practice across sectors.

One of the most attractive elements of Workplace is its ability to provide communications on many different levels. The platform provides an opportunity to communicate not only on a one-to-one level but on a one to many and many to many basis too – connecting leaders to the business and also encouraging feedback. The ability to create communities breathes life into our corporate identity,

“Compass is an extraordinarily fragmented and diverse organisation, and Workplace has a huge potential to make people feel more connected.”


helping people to feel part of the “Compass family”. We can celebrate success and achievements in a more timely and personal way. One of the biggest advantages is that Workplace

facilitates sharing best practices and collaborating. On the functional side – it’s also a project management tool and a place to share factual information and updates.

Workplace has the potential to connect people who’ve never, ever been connected before – both to their colleagues and the wider business. We are a ‘business of experiences’, whether it’s giving customers the best possible experience during a difficult time in hospital, at an international tennis tournament, or a premier league football match. Suddenly, we are giving our colleagues a platform to share their stories through live video and photos.

Extending the reach of communications

We are using Workplace as a complementary communication channel and although I don’t expect it to ever reach 100% adoption, it is a powerful addition to our channel mix. Having a platform that enables employees to access business information using their personal devices is extremely powerful. It’s unrealistic to think that we will ever equip each of our 60,000 employees with a work mobile, so enabling people to use their own device is quite critical to us.

“The platform provides an opportunity to communicate not only on a one to one level but on a one to many and many to many basis too.”

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We have an employee portal, which provides colleagues with the tools they need to do their job. We have a printed and digital bi-monthly company magazine which is very well received, but only reaches a portion of our employees. There isn’t any real mechanism that flows ideas back up to support two-way communications.

Sharing real-time, authentic updates

We’ve set up a good old corporate news feed on Workplace via a group called Compass News, which is curated by my team. Not only has it increased the reach of our announcements; it’s also changed the style of our communications. For example, we now live stream our internal award ceremonies, simply using our iPhones. The result doesn’t have the refined feel of formally approved communications. It is less polished, but much more authentic – and people have noticed. We get immediate engagement, with people congratulating the winners.

It helps our leaders lead. As well as our thousands of client sites, we’ve got a

number of central offices, which makes physical face time with our leaders virtually impossible. Workplace enables them to share real-time updates and communicate with

colleagues in a much more informal way. When our Managing Director and Finance Director hosted a range of “townhalls” across our central offices this year, we were able to film them and share the updates on Workplace, giving many more colleagues the opportunity to hear key business objectives and activities directly from our senior leaders. And the beauty is that they get feedback as well.

I believe that it is the role of the communications team to ensure that our executive team is regularly posting,

and it takes planning to achieve this. My team has developed a proper content plan which identifies opportunities. For example, every Thursday one of our senior leaders posts a review of the week; if there’s an event coming up, we book some time in the relevant person’s diary to record their thoughts in a video and push it out.

Supporting collaboration

Having tested it with my team, I can see how Workplace drives much more effective collaboration. Instead of using emails, we share documents and updates in a private group. It’s also proven very effective for managing reactive media issues as they arise. I asked them to ‘like’ posts after reading them, which gave me reassurance that they were up to speed.

I believe the same can apply to our operations team and we’ve already seen our healthcare colleagues set up an innovation library specifically designed to spread best practice and innovation through ideas-sharing. There’s so much potential and it’s really


“...enabling people to use their own device is quite critical to us.”


Biography: Michael Kissman

Michael Kissman joined Compass Group UK&I as Corporate Affairs Director two years ago. Prior to this, he held a series of senior communication roles at Boots the Chemists and Tesco PLC. His experience covers the full breadth of corporate affairs disciplines, from media relations and corporate responsibility through to government relations and internal communication.

exciting to watch how the business is adopting the platform and the ways in which they are already using it.

Rolling out Workplace to the frontline

Now that we’ve reached good levels of adoption with support functions and operational management, we are working with IT to open the platform to our unit manager population and beyond that to our frontline colleagues, where I think the opportunities are limitless.

As many of these colleagues don’t have a work email address, we are looking into an alternative route to authenticate them. For this reason, we know that it’s important to tread carefully. With varied ways of working and shift patterns, they may be uncomfortable using it outside of their working hours, so we need to find the right way to encourage adoption without our people feeling like we are forcing it on them. It’s hard to imagine now, but I’m sure many

businesses faced similar challenges when email was first introduced as a communication tool and with all these things it’s about bringing our teams on the journey.

I believe our gradual approach will pay off. I’ve heard of too many enterprise social networks ‘looking for a purpose’

after being launched without proper planning. In my view, making sure you think of all the implications before pushing the button completely is key to success.

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Laura Jamieson, Head of Internal Communications at Land Securities, describes how an internal campaign supported not only their physical office move to Victoria, in London, but also more collaborative and flexible ways of working.

A new office space to support flexible working at Land Securities



Land Securities is the largest listed commercial property company in

the UK and has around 600 employees, including 400 in London. A few years ago, staff feedback told us that our historical head office, located on the Strand in Central London, was no longer fit for purpose.

Despite being spacious and based in a premium location, the setup meant that employees were spread over eight floors, and had developed a silo mentality. Employees also felt that our head office did not showcase our expertise, nor reflect our position as one of the leading property companies in the country. We are very proud of the great office and retail space we provide our customers, and we understand better than anyone the huge benefits that the right office space brings to a business in terms of health and wellbeing, increased productivity, and attracting and retaining talented people.

It became clear that if we wanted to work together as one company and continue to live our values, we needed a new inspiring head office, owned by us,

that would support employee pride in what we do – as well as more innovative ways of working.

Allowing flexible working

The office move was the opportunity to revisit our whole people proposition. Our ambition was to create an innovative, shared working environment in which collaboration can thrive. This involves encouraging activity-based working, where staff can decide how, when and where they work depending on their requirements.

Our new office space is across one floor, with our 400 staff members encouraged to not restrict themselves to sitting in one place all day. The open-plan has been broken into ‘neighbourhoods’,

each of which has various collaboration spaces, breakout areas and the latest technology. Within the shared space, we have introduced a space for quiet working, an IT support bar and the social hub. Whatever task it is that you need to do, we have a space designed to support it.

To support flexible working, we have introduced a range of new technology, through Office 365 and Surface Pros, which started to be rolled out to employees before the office move and enables employees to be more agile in the way they work.

Pulling all communications together

The office move was in response to employee feedback so there hasn’t been

47


much resistance to it. Describing how it would help us operate as one company and showcase one of our own buildings was a straightforward sell.

Our main challenge was to ensure that employees would embrace the desired ways of working and new technology from the start. Change doesn’t come easily to everyone and to help people understand what this meant for them, we had to help them visualise what changes we were going to introduce and what benefits it would bring to them personally. This meant communicating a huge amount of information and

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still

app

lies

for m

ore

subs

tant

ive

varia

tions

HEA

LTH A

ND

WELLBEIN

G

Promoting active w

orking is very important to

us which is w

hy we are introducing different

kinds of furniture such as sit/stand desks.

Our free food offer is also being chosen w

ith

wellbeing in m

ind to suit all dietary needs.

We are contracting w

ith a national provider of

GP surgery and nursing services to replace the

on-site doctor and nurse service currently only

available to 5 Strand employees.

Easy access to a

national provider of

GP and nursing services

Healthy

food offer

Different kinds of furniture

such as sit/stand desks

available to encourage

active working

TECHNOLOGY

Everyone in the business will be issu

ed

with a Microsoft Surface Pro device to

support activity-based working and

improve our ability to collaborate,

innovate and work productively.

Surface Hub for

meeting spaces

to share screens

New printers

Microsoft Surface Pro

devices to replace

current computers

Upgraded

meeting-room

booking system

Discounts available from

retailers around Victoria

FOODThere is a refreshment area in

the new office. The Cardinal

Café just outside our floor

space, serves hot-lunch options,

wraps, sandwiches and salads.

Microwaves and

fridges in the office

Cloud-based

software

products

Great coffee, breakfast

items, fruit and other

snacks, all day, for free

Less paper and

digital signage

system to improve

communications

TRAVEL AND FACILITIES

The Victoria transport hub is just a short

distance from the office, with access to

mainline train, tube and bus services. The

shared basement space houses the building’s

showers and cycle-parking facilities if you

are cycling or running to work.

Victoria Travel Hub –

Our existing travel policy applies

Showers and parking for

bicycles and motorbikes

Free towel service and

lockers in basement area

OFFICE ETIQUETTE

Altering our ways of working will be accompanied by

some other changes so that we can all work together

effectively in our new open-plan environment.

Clear workspace with

assigned locker to lock away

all confidential information

and personal items

Hot food in designated areasActivity-based

dress code

Discipline around use of

booked meeting rooms

Our people proposition is integral to a shared working environment that encourages more human interaction, with a strong focus on health, wellbeing and employee mobility.

MAKING THE MOVE

“Our ambition was to create an innovative, shared working environment in which collaboration can thrive.”


messages, on top of all the day-to-day communication that our employees were already exposed to.

To avoid monopolising communications, we pulled together all the information under a single campaign banner called ‘Making the Move’ and we established a visual identity to easily identify all office-related communications.

To ensure we were communicating relevant messages at the right time, we created a ‘Move’ committee with representatives from HR, IT, Facilities and Engineering to speak for our people, our technology, and our space. We met weekly to review our progress and identify what we needed

to communicate, such as training or technology roll out timelines. It was fundamental to have an overarching move plan, with a clear focus each month.

This programme meant we could be more creative and innovative with our communications. The ‘Making the Move’ visual identity was used to create materials such as infographics, an interactive PDF and Prezi presentations where the employee journey was mapped out month-by-month.

We mapped out the people proposition, which looked at the principles by which we wanted to operate in the new space, in an interactive PDF. This allowed us

to translate what otherwise would have been a five-page document into a visual, digestible and easy to navigate interactive document covering: ways of working, dress code, technology, travel, and health and wellbeing.

Change Champions

From early in the process we introduced a Change Champions network, made up of representatives from every part of the business. Champions’ responsibilities included feeding information to their colleagues but, most importantly, they were also tasked with getting feedback from colleagues on every aspect of the office move. This helped us stay on the pulse of the organisation –

49


avoiding general corporate messages and shaping messages based on how people were feeling about different elements of our communications at different times.

The Change Champions also became our pilot group. They were early adopters of the new technology, not only so they could promote the benefits, but also so we could test it and fix any bugs, before it was rolled out to the whole business. They also helped us think through our employees’ needs in terms of collaboration spaces and equipment. They influenced much more than our communications; we embedded their feedback into our whole thinking and planning.

Closer to the date of the office move, they led familiarisation visits to take staff to the new space and help them understand what it was going to be like so everyone could hit the ground running from day one.

In parallel, we set up a Yammer group where people could ask questions and a dedicated intranet space where they

“...it’s amazing to see how quickly people have adapted - all our collaboration spaces are buzzing with people around the clock.”

could access all information. Consulting the staff the whole way through has made a real difference. We have taken them on a journey, responding to their feedback and continuously communicating with them every step of the way.

Next steps

We successfully moved into the new office in January, and getting used to the new space and ways of working has taken some adjustment. However, it’s

amazing to see how quickly people have adapted - all our collaboration spaces are buzzing with people around the clock. Gone are the days when people were tied to their desk or locked in a meeting room. It’s great to see.

Now we need to focus on reinforcing the new ways of working. We have allowed time for people to acclimatise and get used to the new space, to have a play with the new technology and feel comfortable. However, we are planning to do a 100-day review to see how far


Biography: Laura Jamieson

Laura Jamieson took over Land Securities’ Internal Communications function last year. She has a decade’s experience working on strategic internal and external communication campaigns for a variety of industries. She has specialised in IC for the past six years, developing and delivering impactful communications with a strategic focus.

employees are on the journey, and introduce new improvements where needed. For now, we are keeping the Change Champions network in place to understand what staff like and what they may be struggling with.

Digital signage is a big feature in our new office. It’s a great new communication channel and is keeping me busy. We have around 30 screens across our floorplate and the amount of content required to keep them engaging is phenomenal – it’s certainly a learning curve. So far, so good – staff seem to love them.

I have worked on large-scale transformation and change projects in the past, but this particular project has been a level above, thanks to some very talented individuals on the project and the level of commitment of the company. The amount of attention, resource and freedom I have been given has allowed me to hand-hold people every step of the way and to be extremely innovative and creative with communications – and ultimately to achieve a very rewarding result.

51

OPINIONTHE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13 TRENDSTHE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13

www.gatehouse.co.ukwww.gatehouse.co.uk

Head of Internal Communications Zoe Chiverton describes her approach to launching the first employee self-service benefits portal to a largely remote audience at the Priory Group.

Getting mobile and unwired colleagues connected


The Priory Group is a behavioural healthcare company dealing with

mental health and addiction. We’ve got 20,000 employees spread across 400 sites in the UK. I joined two years ago, in a newly created role within the Corporate Affairs team.

Despite an attractive employee benefits offering, uptake was low. Employees didn’t know what benefits were available to them and there was no self-service, which made our people reliant on the HR team, having to call them to ask what their pension contribution was,

for example. Our objective was to modernise our benefits processes, raise awareness of the benefits available to our people and give them the flexibility to choose and change their benefits themselves.

A culture change

We decided to launch a web-based solution where people could simply log in to access their personal information. To align the new portal with our internal branding, we called it the ‘Your Priory, Your Benefits’ website. We also decided to make payslips available on the portal and go 100% electronic. It was not only a huge cost saving for the business and a significant reduction of our environmental impact, but also a key driver to boost adoption of the website.

In an organisation where most staff don’t sit at a desk and many don’t even have a work email address, this was a significant behavioural change. Communications had to educate people that they had to take control of their own benefits, and could do so from anywhere.

Involving the staff forum

We rolled out communications in two phases. In December 2015, we gave employees a heads-up that this was coming by weaving the message throughout all our business as usual communications, such as the quarterly CEO conference call and the CEO’s Christmas message, to introduce people to the idea early on.

This ‘soft launch’ was complemented with a pilot with representatives from our staff forum, which we call the ‘Your Say

“Communications had to educate people that they had to take control of their own benefits, and could do so from anywhere.”

53

Forum’. This channel enables us to both listen to frontline colleagues’ feedback as well as get the message out to them, ensuring that all our communications are inclusive of staff without email or intranet access.

We gave them a sneak peak of what was coming and demoed the website to them so they could advocate it to their teams after the go-live.

Their feedback was invaluable because it helped us to see how our messages were landing and gave us a chance to adjust them ahead of the go-live. We tweaked the wording to ensure that our communications matched the language used in the portal, for example. Being heavily involved in the project, it’s easy to forget that people don’t have the same level of understanding of the portal as you have, and may get confused if you don’t align your wording across all communications.

Monitoring adoption rates

The portal went live to the whole business just a few weeks later.

CASE STUDYTHE JOURNAL OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 13

“For the first few weeks, it was a case of identifying areas of the business where adoption was lower and targeting specific groups with additional messages.”


Biography: Zoe Chiverton

Zoe runs internal communications and staff award schemes for Priory’s 20,000 staff in over 400 sites. She is the driving force behind the group’s new in-house IC function, which she has spent the last two years establishing. She has worked for international companies, gaining experience of both internal and member

communications. Zoe was highly commended as Internal Communicator of the Year at the CEB Awards and holds a Diploma in Internal Communications from the CIPR.

Having done a pilot, all communications were ready to go, so this freed up time for me to monitor login rates across each of our four divisions and adjust the communication plan accordingly. For the first few weeks, it was a case of identifying areas of the business where adoption was lower and targeting specific groups with additional messages.

For example, one of our divisions was quite behind the rest of the business one month after the launch. We decided to keep the paper payslip for an extra month and hand out a leaflet with personal log-in details to the portal when people came to collect their payslip from their site manager. This way, we made sure they had all the information in their hands that they needed to log in and this removed all the barriers for them. The adoption rate of that division jumped up after doing this.

Exceeding expectations

The campaign delivered a fantastic result, with 69% of employees having signed up within three months of the launch. This is double what the portal provider expected us to achieve based on their experience with companies similar to us.

We keep improving the platform and launching new benefits. A year later, the website has reached over 190,000 logins and 84% of employees have signed up, with their personal or work email address, which is something we can leverage for our future communications.

55

Jane Clayton, Head of Employee Communications at Northumbrian Water Group, led a year-long campaign designed to directly influence the customer experience.

Delivering unrivalled customer experience at Northumbrian Water



Northumbrian Water Group is made up of two separate water

companies: Northumbrian Water, based in the north east of England, and Essex and Suffolk water, which operates in the south. Overall, we have 3,200 employees and another 300 contractors and agency workers.

Our vision is to be the best in our industry and beyond. Being in a heavily regulated environment, we have very clear metrics to measure our progress and find out how we compare with other water companies. One of them is the service incentive mechanism (SIM)

– which measures customer service performance and is published by Ofwat, the regulator of the water sector in England and Wales.

Although our overall performance is very good, we have been second or third place for SIM in the past few years. In 2016, we decided to try to make it to the top spot by launching an ambitious customer-focused campaign.

A strategy informed by customers and employees

The start of the campaign was to understand what customers expected of us. We held focus groups with over 500 employees and contractors (most of whom are also our customers), as well as 100 customers. We listened to their thoughts about how to take our service to the next level.

We used their input and articulated a clear customer service strategy built around four commitments: ‘Keep your promise to me’ (“If you tell me you’re going to call me back, do so”), ‘Make me feel special’ (“When I call, know

something about me beyond my customer reference number”), ‘Care about the environment’ (“When you finish a job, make sure you put everything back in place.”), and ‘Tell the community what you are doing.’

None of what we heard was a surprise to us, and we were doing a lot of it already. These four areas became the guiding principles we wanted everybody to live by internally.

Living Water, Loving Customers

We launched our Unrivalled Customer Service strategy at a conference with our top 80 leaders in early 2016. Our CEO introduced it to them and asked them to explore it, critique it and expand on it a little bit further.

We then used our Team Talk cascade process to roll it out to the whole business. Twice a year, we do a special edition called Team Talk Takeover where we focus on a specific topic to give it some real focus and get everyone thinking about it. We gave managers facilitation packs to run their own

“The start of the campaign was to understand what customers expected of us.”

57

90-minute session – this included some giveaways, collateral such as wall charts to print off, and DVDs. The objective was for our people to explore the four areas, so we gave them two hands-on exercises to make this happen.

First, we asked every employee to think of a time when they had delivered an unrivalled customer experience, write it down on a postcard, and share it with their team. Each group had to select the best story, record it on their phone and post the resulting video clip onto Yammer, our internal social network. We distributed selfie sticks to people with the best stories to encourage them to take selfies with customers. We received hundreds of stories, including pictures with customers who had been delighted by our service. Our campaign had a dedicated hashtag, #Livingwaterlovingcustomers and a big smiley icon using bright colours to use throughout all our communications.

Second, we asked teams to create their own customer service improvement plans using the four key areas. This got them to think of what they can do

and the objectives they can set for themselves over the next two months. We reviewed all individual plans to identify best practice stories and share them with the business.

The campaign created so much energy around the business at that time. People were talking about it, and over the coming months we tried to build upon the momentum. Performance plans have been discussed in each Team Talk session since then, and we have asked our top 80 leaders to hold people accountable for delivering them.


“The campaign created so much energy around the business at that time.”


Since the launch of the strategy and the campaign, our service levels have continued to improve. We were absolutely over the moon that in the last wave of the Service Incentive Mechanism, all our scores had gone up, and we were in the top spot for that particular wave. More than that though it put us in first position on a rolling basis for 2016/17. We now have to keep all the hard work going to stay there, though we know we can do it and with the last wave being measured at the end of January, there’s still much to do and everything to play for.

Our Net Promoter score, which indicates the willingness of customers to recommend us, has gone up two points, to 48.

Make My Day campaign

The community piece was probably the one we had put the least focus on, so in October 2016, we launched our Make My Day campaign. We asked our customers and employees what would make their day and looked at which of our community groups

deserved special attention. A panel of 15 employees from across the business selected customers and communities we should really thank. For example, Café JJ, a community café run by people with special needs and learning difficulties in Darlington, aims to deliver a five star service, even though none of their staff has ever eaten in a five star restaurant. We arranged for their 25 employees to go to Rockliffe Hall, a local five star hotel, for afternoon tea on us. We also helped a little boy with cerebral palsy reach his funding target to afford a beach wheelchair.

With a budget of just £10,000, we managed to touch 3,000 people. The campaign inspired a few people to pitch in and give donations, so we made our initial budget go a lot further. Some employees went the extra mile and completed projects such as building an access ramp to help one of our employee’s wives get in and out of her home more easily in her mobility scooter.

Everywhere we went, we took pictures and posted them on Yammer, so our

“...being part of the steering group has allowed me to influence our customer service performance, as opposed to just communicate it.”

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Biography: Jane Clayton

Jane Clayton is the Head of Employee Communications at Northumbrian Water Group (NWG). Along with her team of four comms professionals, she is responsible for leading communications to inspire and engage over 3,200 employees, who deliver clean clear drinking

water to the taps of over 4.5 million customers in the north of England, Essex and Suffolk.

In three years, Jane and her team have delivered an award-winning IC strategy which has completely changed the landscape of internal communications in this utility. They also use a variety of low-cost communications channels to engage and inspire the NWG team to ‘live water’ and ‘love customers’ on their journey to achieve their vision of becoming number one in the water industry.

efforts were visible to the whole company throughout that period. Our in-house videographer captured stories on film, so by 7p.m. every night, we had a summary of the day on our YouTube channel. The next morning, people coming into work could see the amazing things we had done the day before.

Lasting impact

Today, Living Water, Loving Customers is still the big thing that people are talking about on Yammer, with selfies with customers being posted every day.

In 2017, we want to take the messaging further. We plan to carry out a review of how well our customer service strategy has been embedded and see how we can shift things even further. We have just invested in a new system, which will consolidate all client information in one place and enable our contact centre staff to help customers with any aspect of the customer service, from sewerage issues through to questions about billing.From a personal point of view, being part of the steering group has allowed me to influence our customer service

performance, as opposed to just communicate it. It’s been amazing to be able to demonstrate how you can drive this from a communications perspective and show the value that my team can bring to the table when they are considered as an integral part of the organisation.



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Documents

journal ofinternal communication - Gatehouse · latest State of the Sector census; from the value an international bank gleaned ... I’m proud that my stakeholders have noticed that