Internal Communications
Interview with Peter Mayne (transcript)
Previously Manager, Internal Communications
Now in HR: Organizational Culture
March 19, 2007
By Simone Hoedel
Peter: Culture is very relevant to employee communications especially.
I will also be working on what is called the employee experience, which is pretty much everything that touches the employee. I want to design it so that we attract the best people, keep the best people and create an environment where they can be their best every day. I’m working on Workforce planning strategy stuff that HR department do.
We have a broad Internal Communications strategy that sets our priorities for our employee audience.
Some of the key things we want to achieve are helping employees understand where the business is going. That’s the biggie right there: getting employees engaged, coming to work to give it their all. If they understand what the business is about, what the business strategy is about, where it’s going, and how they connect to it. That makes a big difference in engagement. That’s where we put a lot of our time and effort is explaining the business strategy and helping people find that line of sight to the strategy and to our customers.
And the other piece is just making it easier for people to do their jobs. So what kind of information do they need to go about their daily work and make it easier for them?
And thirdly, would be just giving people the information they need to know about things like benefits and performance reviews and all that stuff that makes up the employee experience. There’s a list of about 17 of what we call drivers, things that affect the employee experience. Things like do they have the resources to do their jobs, do they perceive that they have career opportunities, are they satisfied with their pay, their work/life balance, does their manager do a good job in coaching and motivating them.
The other key thing we want to achieve through our broad communications strategy is building in two-way communication between employees and management. People are more likely to feel engaged if they think that senior management is good at what they do, have a vision for the organization, and care about the welfare of employees, care about what employees think.
We’ve done a fair bit to build those two-way links between employees and senior leadership.
1) SMT Exchange: Senior Management Team
Program where people can submit questions about business, or policy or whatever is on their mind. The question goes into a mailbox, and then we get it in Communications. We submit it to the senior management team and one of them will answer that question. Whoever is the most appropriate senior leader. They will write the answer to that question, and the answer will go directly back to the person who asked it. And the question and the answer gets posted on the internet for everybody to see. So it’s just a way to get answers from senior management, and building that two-way communication.
2) The SMT Dine Around
Every month, two SMT Members will hold a luncheon. It’s open to all our staff in Regina here, which is almost half the company. The invitation goes out via our Thursday morning email bundle, which goes out to our corporate office. People can respond to sign up and up to 12 people can go on each lunch.
It’s an opportunity for one of the SMT Members to host a lunch with 12 employees, and to just engage them in dialogue about what’s going on in the business, get to know them, and build up some rapport. It just makes our SMT’s seem all that more human and approachable, and breaks down barriers.
3) SMT Dialogue Direct
A program where we take SMT Members, whether they’re traveling around the country, or whether they’re here in Regina, we organize it so they can attend some sort of employee meeting that’s already ongoing.
For instance, our HR Department has a monthly meeting. We might arrange for one of the senior management to drop in on that meeting. They would have a bit of the agenda to talk about who they are, what they do and answer some questions. For the back half of the meeting, they might just hang out and observe, and find out what’s happening in our part of the company.
So again, it’s just another way to get people connected to senior management.
4) AgriCulture contributes to that as well in that sometimes we have features in AgriCulture on a Senior Management Team member, or we quote them in articles. But I wouldn’t say that’s the primary focus of AgriCulture.
When we started AgriCulture about 3 years ago, really the focus of it was to build community across the organization. We’re a widespread company: we have 100 offices across Canada. About 500 people are here in Regina, and about 700 spread across the other 99 offices. So this is a national newsletter that goes out to everybody. So the intent was to solicit stories from people in various areas, you know, what’s going on in Quebec, what’s going on in Ontario. So people can really get to know their colleagues across the country, and find out what’s happening.
We did that for a while, and it was pretty good. But what we found in our research though, we did some research of the employee body last summer. We asked them about all the different communications vehicles we have, everything from the internet, to AgriCulture to SMT Programs to our employee conferences, and we wanted to know how effective these vehicles were in helping people do their job.
I guess we were a little bit leading in the way we phrased that, but we in communications need to help people understand where the company is going, and to make it easier for them to contribute, do their job. We found that the things that were deemed most effective were the informal communications channels, for example face-to-face with my manager, talking to colleagues, the informal stuff. AgriCulture came in below the half way point, in terms of a list of what was effective for people.
So we thought it was time to have another look at what we were doing with that newsletter, what the focus of it is. We’ve got these articles across the country, which are turning into not quite babies and bowling scores, pretty soft content. We want to re-focus the magazine to focus on business issues. More focused on where the company is going, what the big projects are, and always trying to build in a link as to what does it mean to me as an employee.
So we’re in the midst of changing that right now. We don’t have the regional editors
anymore. We are going to ensure the stories reflect the different parts of the company as much as possible, but it won’t be as literal as it used to be. We’d try to get a story from each region.
Customer experience is one of the big things right now. We did a story on one of our
offices in Abbotsford, some of things they’re doing to create the customer experience in their area.
We have a large communications area: 12 people, plus in-house creative design department, have our own in-house print shop. We have an editor, one staff member, a part of their job is to be the editor of the newsletter. We also set up an editorial board, mostly people across the division called Strategy, Knowledge and Reputation. It includes our Corporate Communications Group, our Brand Group (advertising, creative, and publications). We don’t have on that board people from across the business. If I were there, I would be wondering if maybe we should.
The editorial is board is a good idea. There’s two ways to look at that: one, you would have people basically from the communications area, because they are working with clients from across the organization, and they have a good feel for what’s going on out there. The programs and issues out there that deserve to be profiled. Or you could have people from across the business part of the editorial board. So they directly bring in different perspectives from different parts of the organization of what people need to know about.
The advantage of that is rather than just have one person as an editor; you have a broader range of perspectives. It’s like a reality check to make sure you’re covering what’s important. Your editorial board would meet well in advance of every issue, and decide: what are the issues we need to cover in this next issue. And then they would hand that off to the editor and he would decide what those stories would look like, and assign people to research them and write them. And those are internal people and each person would have one or two stories.
I read some great research recently in Communications World. It was an article by T.J. Larkin, and he was talking about the three main channels of communication. There’s print, there’s electronic or online, and there’s face-to-face.
The print channel is really great for new and complicated ideas. If you’re like me, if someone sends you an email or document that’s a little bit weighty and you want to study it, the first thing you do is print it out. People find it hard to absorb new information online. Print is really good for things that are complex, new ideas.
Online is great for information retrieval, like when people need to search around for information on, for example, pay scale or pay and benefits. And online is also good for immediacy: it’s so quick to get something written and published. You know, print takes forever.
The advantage of face to face is in situations where you need people to do something differently. Change management, where you are trying to persuade people to adopt a new way of thinking, or new way of doing something. Because you’ve got the power of people being right there, talking to the person, persuading them.
So the three all work together, but in our research, and this is not new at all, when you ask employees how they like to get news about something that is happening in the company, they like to hear it from their supervisor, face to face.
What really works well is having the CEO, the head guy or gal, announce the change at the broad level, and then connect it to the business strategy. And here’s why we’re doing this. And then have the direct supervisor follow up with their teams, and say here’s what it means to you.
I’d say we’ve got a little work to do on our face to face channel. We do a decent job on it, if we’re making an announcement on, let’s say, pay & benefits, we’ll send something out ahead of time to the managers, with some key messages, here’s why we’re doing this. And then it goes out to all the employees a little bit later. So the managers have a little bit of a head’s up and can support the change.
Ultimately we’d like to go further down that road and provide speaking bullets, more support materials for our managers, so they can get out there and talk to their teams about the stuff that matters.
Simone: Can a Newsletter have an equal amount of Human Resources top down sort of info and the People’s Choice type material so popular with staff? There seems to be almost a conflict of strategies here.
I think the two can co-exist. You can mix corporate messages with some staff type news. A neat way to mix them too is when there is a change being announced or some corporate news, to be able to tell the story through the experience of one person, like TV journalism.
Rather than just announce a change, find a person who’s affected by that, and write a story around them and the issue. If there’s a way to do that top down corporate type news, but put some colour into it by interviewing some people, that warms it up a little, makes it more relevant.
If you’re doing a business story, if you tell it through the lens of how is this going to help our clients?
I think there is room to tell stories about people too. That’s what makes it interesting. People love to see photographs of themselves, and their colleagues. We have our employees submit photographs, or if we’re out interviewing, we’ll take a digital camera and shoot them. For the cover shot, we have a professional photographer we use.
You might want to think about some sort of feedback mechanism, so people can send in comments or ask questions.
Cross-promoting is good too. An article in your newsletter, might be a survey or poll where we drive people to (my I-net) to read more about this topic, or to vote or answer a poll question. On the internet, you might promote the newsletter when it comes out, by putting in a little teaser about one of the stories. To reads more, pick up or click here to read the new newsletter delivered today.
A readership survey would be a good idea too. It could be paper-based: just insert it in all the newsletter and people will fill it out and drop it in the internal mail. Or you could drive people to the internet to fill out a survey. Or deliver a survey to everybody’s inbox. Are you familiar with Survey Monkey? It’s an online Survey tool (surveymonkey.com), free to use, although it takes a little bit of learning to learn how to build a survey. Then you just send a link to people, they click the link, takes them right to the site, they fill out the survey, and it automatically tabulates all the results for you.
Once you’re clear on what the objective of your newsletter is, then you can measure and see if you’re meeting those objectives.
