Internal Communications
Interview with Josephine Bricic (transcript)
Director of Internal Communications, SaskTel
March 21, 2007
By Simone Hoedel
Simone: What Internal Communications strategies have been successful for SaskTel?
Josephine: Well, I’m not sure if you can call them strategies or philosophies, but: Employees First. So for any communication, say for you at Ag and Food, for any policy direction that might impact them, we want our employees to know first, at a minimum, the same time as external. After that was implemented, we stuck to it. I think that’s important component.
We’ve tried to provide context on the communication now: information overload. In the past, anyone could send an email to anyone. We changed that – we centralized that – we do that.
Simone: So you centralized that. What do you mean by that?
Josephine: Only Corporate Affairs, that’s us, and IT, can send out emails to the whole company. That’s a small example of context. But an important one, I think. There’s prioritization to it, there’s a publication rigour to it. What’s important, what’s not. So that was fundamental: we’ve done that for a while now.
So – employees first, context, really trying to use the right medium for the right audiences. Really trying to target that. Now that’s an ongoing thing. That’s not always as easy, and you would know that.
So really trying to figure out: what is the newsletter for? What is the intranet’s purpose? What’s the broadcast email system for? What do we want to use streaming video for? Face to face? That kind of thing. So we really try to hone that, the last little while.
We wanted to ensure also that every medium or message is integrated in a way. Let’s say, we announce an expansion of our cellular network somewhere. We would probably use a variety of medium, but we want the key messages to be the same, in a way. Whether it’s someone on the front lines, they’re better equipped to sell it, or something to general employees, or to managers, or to the media, insist on continuity and consistency.
We have been trying to do Consistency Context: Collapsing the gap between upper and rank and file. Technological ?
We have an open forum to the President, where they can ask questions: his video-streamed monthly addressees to employees. Gives updates on things. Not live video, we could do that, it’s a little more complexity in that though. Webcasting with 5000 people: Complex. No – he does a monthly broadcast of the same topics. He reports on certain metrics to the business, and then adds material. But it’s every month. And, anytime, people can ask him questions on his website. So there’s more accessibility. So that’s a change.
So those are some foundations and principles, really, for me. It’s really funny that you called, because we were just looking at some different things like, how do we want to treat face to face? Because of email overload. One of the principles for me has always been face to face: very valuable. How are we using it? And we use it in a variety of ways. Today, the President goes out, he does a sort of employee roadshow, we do it for other significant things. We’re also doing it for our leadership team, the management team. It’s an annual thing. We just finished up a day and a half of face to face. There’s a variety of face to face. So we want to evaluate them: is there redundancy? Are we talking about the same things? Is it effective?
Simone: Evaluating strategy or evaluating people’s competency?
Josephine: Both. I think people misuse it. But it’s important. And people are feeling saturated by meetings as well. Are they good at conducting meetings?
To us, though it’s an acknowledgement of the 5000 employees, it’s a distributed workforce. It’s an acknowledgement that not everyone is a knowledge worker, not everyone is fixed to their computer: important: Important with email, important with internet, important with our newsletters. Print remains important.
We stopped sending out a print newsletter a while ago, to leverage the internet, quite frankly. We do a weekly newsletter. I’ll get into the mediums we do weekly. We do a minimum twice weekly broadcast emails to all employees. We change our internet main page a minimum of twice a day, with new items. The problem with those mediums is inherently there’s an expectation they are going to be timely.
When I say print remains important, though, we’re not using it. We know there’s a gap. We always do an annual communications survey for our employees. We know for front line, those in the fleet, or those that are servicing customers online on the phone, they’re not going to have the luxury that you or I have to go check something out. To read about our colleague in the newsletter, or to read about the strategy. So we’re mindful of that and we want to look at it in a new way, I guess. I don’t have a solution, yet I just know that it’s something that’s on the radar for this year.
So, primary communications tools:
• the internet;
• broadcast emails, Net Notes, is what we call them: we issue them to all employees, and we also issue them to management only;
• we also have streamed video updates of the President and CEO;
• along with his website.
Other things we’re testing right now
• corporate television in our head office
• screen savers for different things
• we’re testing monthly quarterly management conference calls with the President and CEO
• establishing an employee 1-800 emergency line. In the past, if we had a situation, let’s say, you couldn’t get into head office. We wouldn’t have a good way of reaching everybody. Sometimes it’s looking at old tools for a new purpose. We’d send a talk-mail out to everybody. And there was concern about the maintenance lists etc. So we’re looking at a 1- 800 line where people would phone in, and if there was nothing, they’d get a message, there’s nothing, or whatever that may be. If it was for example the Royal Bank not being able to process your pay stubs, we had to (devo?-ate) to something. Looking at other ways to get the info out.
So really we’re in a phase of evaluating each piece for its maximum benefit. You’re not just doing a whole bunch of stuff for the sake of doing it. And not just (dismissing?) it in print. Utilizing, thinking about where it works best. So that might give you a picture of just the overall.
Newsletter:
It’s been five or six years since we took over all emails. We wanted to put some context in. Your bake sale or mine didn’t have the same weight as benefits information for all employees, or an expansion or a strategy. You do need an editorial view on that. Because everyone will think theirs is most important. It’s inevitable. And the reason we did the newsletter is to channel some of that, you know, so and so is the Woman of the Year, we have that balance in our newsletter, we have a minimum, there’s always a business side of it in our newsletter.
Simone: Newsletter aligned with your corporate strategy?
Josephine: I think so. When we talk about corporate strategy and what we’re trying to achieve, let’s say, for metrics. We profile our products and services. We had developed a framework for that. Submissions, what the newsletter focuses on. You know our values are certainly about teamwork, mutual respect, excellency, you could argue any of those individual profiles are all about that as well.
But no we don’t say, Josephine had a baby the other week, congratulations. We don’t do that. The lightest we go, we have classifieds that are on there. Which is a draw, I’m not going to lie to you.
• Right now, we have on our cover this community project, where we’re donating supplies to a project in Tanzania. SaskTel does work in Tanzania, through its international subsidiary, so there’s a connection there.
• We’ve done a quick story about the leadership conference, our management conference that just took place. A summary.
• We also did Big Shots Big Saves, 25th annual SaskTel Hockey Tournament.
• Do you have ISP? Employee designations.
• We also have a series of columns, one’s called Safe Space. Because safety’s an issue.
• We have flashbacks, where we regurgitate old newsletters, old stories that we’ve had.
If you think of the Globe and Mail, the National Post, CBC, there is levity to it. There has to be moments of, whether it’s flashbacks or timelines or contests, you need to have – what would make people read it? You want to have compelling content, well written material and stories. But you have to have the flexibility to write in a way – I say this to my team all the time – you have to write it so we would want to read it after hours. Or readership – it shouldn’t just be Corporate Babbling. (Pablum?) And then, if you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter if it’s a ?, no one will read it. You know, you need that.
So that’s kind of my underlying philosophy, treat employees first. They know first, but you also treat them with respect. You write some things, you communicate it in the best way possible. Because they deserve that.
Simone: What are your objectives with internal communications?
We want our employees to be overall, knowledgeable about the business, and their role. We want them to be ambassadors. Now these are lofty.
We want the program to be high caliber, reflecting best practices.
We want to ensure the mediums in our communications processes help people do a better job of communicating to our employees, and achieve business goals. Measurable, difficult, but we have some specifics on that. We can see some metrics and some of our tools. So it’s nothing really grand.
Simone: How do you measure how you’re doing on your goals?
Josephine: Well we did an annual survey, specifically on communications. We do an employee engagement survey, through an agency which ranks communications as strong. We have other things, they look at all of our mediums, and we generally rank fairly high.
The A+? Yeah, they look at all the material that we send out. That’s in addition to say, you look at the metrics of the website or the readership hits, or the number of contributions. We very rarely do searching for stories. People feed us content. I mean that’s one measure. There’s specific ones that are ? that my team has, but you can always ? a measurement certainly. Because communications is one of those very ubiquitous things. Just like advertising, can you really say you’ve effected much of a change? It’s hard, but we can for certain things I think.
I explained the fundamentals we hold true to, and we increasingly want to educate employees on the business, because they’re part of the role in achieving it. They need to know the strategy. And we’ve been plugging away at that all along.
We want to enable people to be better communicators, in whatever way we can. Just as we spoke about people not being able to facilitate meetings. Communication is part of that. People often think that communication is just the communicators’ jobs, not theirs. I don’t know if you find that where you work, but I think it’s just kind of human nature sometimes. When really it’s management competency. We’re trying to coach people on that too.
The average age of our work force is 43. Due to the nature of the industry, we have a stream that come into marketing, a stream that are technical, the engineers; just the nature of the industry will draw younger people into it. But the other thing I should say as far as a principle to the program is, despite this, or regardless, we look at the demographics as important, that’s why you have the flashbacks, your history. You have to be balanced about it, it can’t just be the new and groovy people. You have to respect the people who have been three, that are there.
Face to face is important, but time is precious, so you better make that face to face worth people’s time. What is it you want to address face to face? What is your objective? Where are the gaps? Whether it’s face to face or otherwise. You need to know what each channel will be used for, potentially, or what it is you need to get out there on a regular basis. You need to find what needs to be sent out regularly, where are those two way communications that you want?
Special projects, you always analyze. Say Sask. Ag and Food goes in an entirely different direction, you’ll probably utilize the full depth and breadth of all the communications mediums that you have. But building credibility with the internal program will mean some regular methods of communicating. And that people can communicate to you. I think that’s important too.
(See attached: sample of SaskTel’s online newsletter, Ink.)
