Introduction

It seems we can't open a magazine or book on internal communications without reading about the headlong advance of social media and online communications.  Whilst these areas are very exciting, and as communicators we do need to make sure we move with the times, we mustn't forget that many of us work with or in companies where there are many 'unconnected' employees.  Most professional communicators now agree on two fundamental principles -  that communications should be an engaging, iterative flow, not solely 'tell and sell'  (though there is at times a place for that), and secondly that within any employee group there are sub divisions and sub cultures and the communicator needs to use a variety of communication media to do their job.  Developing engaging and innovative ways of communicating with the unconnected presents its own challenges, which we are going to examine in this chapter.

 

Who are the unconnected?  We use this term to describe those who do not have the same opportunities for access to information resources as employees usually do.  There are three main reasons for this - access, training or education.  It could be that they don't have access to online media because of the nature of their work - they may work 'direct to site' in manual jobs, for example, and never actually enter an office or defined place of work.  It could be that they have online access to company systems but are technology phobic or may never have been given the appropriate computer skills training.  For others, their educational background means their reading and writing level inhibits their ability to respond easily to online or traditional print media.

 

How is the environment of the unconnected employee changing?  Even in companies where there are employees who are remote workers, manual workers, or workers who are geographically disperse in some way, the impetus for communicating with this audience is changing.  Today's companies want, and need, to be much smarter about how they relate to employees.  They might be doing this to enlarge opportunites for communicating with them, to facilitate change more easily, or they might be doing it to reduce paper based processes (e-hr for instance) or to gather customer and process data in the field.  Employees themselves might be 'unconnected' at work but, increasingly, not at home where their families are probably surfing the net, writing blogs, or getting involved in online social networking sites.  They probably have a digital television and digital camera and are experiencing the interactive revolution at first hand.  These environmental changes have one of two effects - either it alienates the employee who feels that technology is passing them by, or it raises the employee's expectations that they should have access to such technologies at work.  

 

In most organisations there is not parity of information sharing through communication channels, however hard we try.  This is because communication relies essentially on human interaction -  either the skills and ability of the person delivering a message or the recipient being interested/engaged enough to receive, understand and engage with it.  In companies with a large 'unconnected' demographic we can often find an acute split between information elitism and information poverty.  Usually we find that there is a large proportion of the employee demographic who receive internal tv, radio, intranet, newspaper/magazine, briefings and have regular access to employee events.  And there are other parts of the demographic who receive only some, or occasionally, none of these channels.  The concerning factor in this is that these people are often 'at the coal face' - making or building or packing the product, or fixing the pipe or the cable out in the field.  They are often the human face of the company, and the quality of their work is what the customer directly sees.  If these employees don't know what's going on in the company, why changes are being introduced, or indeed are not allowed a channel to give feedback and suggest improvements, then the company is taking some huge operational and reputational risks.

 

In this chapter we're going to explore a systematic approach to finding out who your unconnected audience are, and the best ways to engage with them.  At the end of the chapter there's a case study from Scottish Water called 'Making the Connections' - an award winning project which bought fresh ideas and imagination to engaging the unconnected employee group.

 

 

fig. Findlay 1 - Getting connected illustration

 

Situational Analysis  - Knowing where you're starting from and who you're dealing with

 

Geography

Employees are often based in many different geographic locations, and geography can be one of the biggest influencing factors in the levels of connectivity an employee experiences.  As a communications professional there are a number of ways you can get to grips with the geographic breakdown of the employee base.  One way is to work with the Human Resources function to gain access to the current HR information system.  In many instances this will give you details of the employees' main work base and whether the employee is a remote, direct to site or lone worker.  This probably won't tell you what systems or channels they have access to, but you at least you will be able to see where the unconnected groups are sited.  If your organisation is unionised, it's important to build a good working relationship with employee and union representatives.  There is a mutual shared benefit in communicating effectively with all groups of employees and often union officials are extremely knowledgable about where employees are based and the types of sites in which they work.

 

Education/Training

If you have an organisational learning and development area within your organisation you can work with them to find employee information such as educational level, results of training needs analysis, and personal training records.  Keep a record of the training subjects which are most popular, any educational issues, such as whether there are employees who have reading or writing or learning difficulties, and which training methods have worked particularly well (whether on the job, practical, classroom, or coaching/mentoring).

 

Social Context

The social context in which employees operate is harder to quantify, but you can get a feel for this by using networks and contacts within the employee base to assess how the unconnected group is broken down.  You may want to conduct an informal survey.  What publications do they read?  What television programmes do they enjoy?  What are their interests outside work and how do they spend their time?  Do they listen to radio, and if so, which station? 

 

Age/Gender/Accessibility

Your organisation's HR system is likely to be able to provide a reasonably thorough breakdown of employee demographic factors such as age, gender and accessibility.  Study these breakdowns - what do they tell you about the unconnected audience?  Is it mostly male or female, and which age groups are you communicating to?  These statistics will help you think through the type of communication and channels which might work with your audience.  It's classic segmentation analysis, allowing you to tailor your messages appropriately.

 

Current engagement levels

Finally, assess the current engagement levels among your unconnected audience.  A source for this can be existing employee surveys and anecdotal feedback from managers, team leaders and union representatives.  By engagement levels we mean an assessment of contributing factors, possibly including levels of committment to the organisation, satisfaction with 'basics' such as terms and conditions, and other factors such as levels of satisfaction with recognition.  Try to assess whether engagement levels are constant across the demographic (this is unlikely) or whether there are variations from geographical area to area or age group to age group, for example.

 

Pulling all this demographic information together takes a lot of time and effort up front, but it is a worthwhile exercise in really getting to grips with your unconnected audience, their needs, likes, dislikes, and expectations.

 

 

The Organisational Strategic Context - Know where you are now and where you need to be

 

Once you have gathered enough demographic information to give you a clearer picture of your unconnected audience, you can start to assess their communication needs within the context of your organisational strategy.  You will need to satisfy the answers to some fundamental questions - What are the market forces in your industry? What are the strategic imperatives for your organisation? What's the brand strategy? What is the current culture of your organisation and how might it need to change?

 

Market Forces

Take a look at the external environment in which your company operates.  This is the environment your unconnected audience lives in, reads about in newspapers, and talks about with friends and colleagues.  External forces such as political pressures, economical/financial changes, legal changes, competitive changes (new/emerging/existing entrants to market), environmental changes, and technological advances have a huge impact on the nature of the audience, and the ways in which you could or should communicate with them.  For example, competitive changes may mean that the unconnected audience has to change the way they work, either because they need to work faster, and more efficiently to sell more products than a new competitor, or because the service they provide to the customer is changing in line with what competitors are offering.  Your communications to the unconnected audience need to take into account what is changing in the way this audience works.  If market forces are leading your company to produce new products then you need to plan for that within your communications.

 

Reputation Management

Reputation Management is about considering the reputational environment of your organisation -  in which your employees operate.  What does it mean personally for employees that they work for your organisation - and how might they be judged by others when they reveal who employees them.  Are employees working for an organisation they can be proud of? How does your 'unconnected' employee base understand the corporate brand and it's values?  Would they be able to describe what the organisation stands for?  Perhaps, for example, your employee drives a liveried vehicle for work, or works in a remote location.  That employee is the living embodiment of the marketing strategy and brand for everyone in the local community.  It really doesn't matter how great your marketing strategy is on paper; if that employee doesn't live the brand and company values in the way they act and behave, the strategy is pointless.  Your communications with the unconnected audience need to reflect your brand and organisational values.  This is what employees must engage with.

 

You will also need to understand your crisis management and emergency stakeholder procedures.  Unfortunately the unconnected employee can be the last to know about emergencies and crises as they occur, because of the difficulty in getting urgent information to them.  It's best to draw up a plan in conjunction with your emergency planning team, for how you will approach communication with different groups of unconnected employees in the event of such emergencies.  

 

Organisational strategy

Consider your organisation's operational strategy.  Identify the main components of the strategy and how communications approaches might deliver these.  For example, does your operational strategy have a focus on environmental or sustainability issues?  This will impact on not just some of your key messages to your 'unconnected' groups but also how you get those messages out there.  There's no point mailing out CDs or tapes to employees when your strategy is driving sustainable messages.

 

Culture 

Either your own communications team or your HR function may have carried out a formal culture analysis on your organisation.  Whilst there are no 'right' or 'wrong' cultures, it is useful to have a clear understanding of accepted behaviours and norms so that you can learn how to engage with the employee audience.  A culture analysis can include such information as social rituals, hierarchies, leadership styles, and business language - the outputs can be a useful tool for analysing the types of communications activities and channels which might attract and engage the unconnected audience.  What is the prevailing culture with the 'unconnected' group - do they predominantly like  traditional styles of communications, are they hierarchical, formal or progressive?  Do they enjoy team working or lone working and what is the most common reporting style and why?  In what ways does the culture needs to change?

 

 

 Taking Action - Know how to get there and do it!

• Spend time getting the messages right - use the knowledge you've gained on organisational, operational and brand strategy to develop the right messages which are aligned to your organisation's goals.  Plan these messages carefully so that they are pitched at the right level for the 'unconnected' audience to make sense of and understand in a personal context, and include the 'what's in it for me'.
• Develop and use the right channels - you will probably need to use a mix of channels across various unconnected groups.  Break down the appropriateness of each channel according to your demographic analysis and the organisations strategic imperatives.  Scottish Water introduced a fortnightly radio style programme accessed by mobile phone, as many of their most unconnected employees were remote workers who did not have a base or access to a computer.  They did however do a lot of driving and enjoyed listening to the radio.  The radio news programme was therefore accessible via mobile phone from the van.  Each programme has two hosts and is professionally produced to sound like a traditional news bulletin on a radio station.  This regular programme receives a host of listeners from the more hard to reach audience groups, and employees can leave feedback or comments at the end of each broadcast.  The facility also gives the organisation the ability to record and broadcast 'special bulletins' for special announcements or emergency information.  These specials are quick and easy to record and employees can be alerted to their release via text message, allowing early notification of emergency information, even for the most 'unconnected' employee.  For publications use your social and demographic information to assess what you need - such as a stylish magazine, or a tabloid style newspaper. 
• Develop the right employee experiences - the case study within this chapter on Scottish Water's award winning 'Making the Connections' programme is a good example of how to use your knowledge of your employee base to design the right communication experiences for employees.  Employee events and communications activities are an important part of the range of communications channels, but will only be useful and engaging if delivered with professionalism, creativity and energy.
• Cultivate and teach the right communications skills - in some cases the managers or team leaders of groups of unconnected employees have been promoted to these roles on the basis of technical ability or merit, whether they are good communicators or not.  If this is the case in your organisation, think about what kinds of communications skills might be required in order to give these managers and team leaders the support required to deliver your communications channels and messages.  If, for example, you want to roll out team discussion or briefing sessions, either face to face, or by phone, and you want it to be delivered by managers, then you must support them with appropriate communication skills training.  They may need support with presentation skills, facilitation skills or interpersonal skills.  Research suggests that most employees want to receive important information from their line manager - in which case you need to make sure the managers are equiped to make the communication clear and meaningful.
• Develop and support the right types of recognition - how will you recognise and reward good communication within your organisation?  How will you know who the local heros of your unconnected audience are?  The culture of some organisations is such that peer recommendation and nomination can work well.  For others managerial recommendation works whilst for others, customer feedback or the more formal performance review system provides you with information on who's doing well, and why.  You will need to assess your strategy, employee survey outputs and your culture web in order to decide on what type of recognition might be best received.  Some organisations have recognition schemes, others have awards ceremonies, others use their performance management structure to reward the right behaviours.  Your organisational culture will dictate what works.
   

 

It's true that you need to try to engage with all of your employee base, but some audiences are easier to get to than others.  By ensuring the remote worker, the customer facing employee, the home worker or the shop floor worker has effective opportunities to understand the organisation and the part they play in driving it forward, you can greatly improve engagement levels, customer service and customer perception, potentially lower sickness and attrition levels and, ultimately improve performance and enhance value.  You'll make yourself critical to your organisation in the process.

 

 

Case Study: Scottish Water, 'Making the Connections'

 

Scottish Water is the only publicly owned water company in the UK, providing water and waste water services across Scotland.  It was set up in 2002 with almost 6000 employees, formed of three previously separate Scottish water companies, and was set a massive challenge to improve customer service and reduce operating costs by 40% over a four year period.  Two years into this programme of change it became apparent that the organisation's ability to drive out costs was slowing down.  This was primarily because the focus needed to shift from driving down costs in specific business units, to making end to end processes across the whole organisation more cost efficient.  Employee surveys were also spelling it out loud and clear, namely that employees didn't feel 'connected' up - that they did not or could not understand the remit of others outside their own team, and didn't understand the impact of their actions on others.  This wasn't helped by the fact that many of the then 5,500 employee base were based remotely and had little or no access to traditional communications channels.  Scottish Water had a huge challenge to communicate to these 'unconnected' groups.

 

The Board and Directors of Scottish Water realised the need for decisive action and agreed to invest in an innovative programme of change in order to help employees become better connected.  The change programme became known as 'Making the Connections'.  It went on to win numerous awards, including the CiB Gold Award for best internal communications project.  The objectives were simple:

 

• To help people understand why their job was important to the business and to the strategy
• To help employees understand how they connected with others in the organisation
• To bring a sense of pride and ownership to making change happen
• To encourage learning and communication in a fun and innovative way

 

Central to the success of the programme was that it was run collaboratively - reflecting the message of the programme itself.  Two main teams led the project group - internal communications and organisational development.  Critically, the project group was also made up of trades union representatives, interested employees and sponsoring senior managers.   The make-up of the project group was crucial in gaining a sense of the social context for the change programme.  Having a range of employees in the group also helped to 'ground' the elements of the programme in events and activities which would genuinely appeal to the audience.  There was a strict reporting mechanism within the project team, so that others could see what had been achieved, what was planned, and how resources were being spent.  Clarity and openness around these points was important for fostering a sense of 'shared ownership' about the programme.

 

The programme had three key phases which ran over a 6 month period:

 

1.   An event for leaders within the business to gain their buy-in and feedback and support to the process of making connections

2.  Team sessions called 'mapping sessions' where teams began to think about who they connected with and how those relationships worked and could be improved

3.   A series of experiential employee events specifically aimed at the more 'unconnected' employees where the learning experience was driven by existing knowledge of the demographic breakdown of this segment of the audience base

 

Leadership Event

The leadership event was held off-site and was facilitated by managers themselves, an important part of the ownership process.  With a geographically audience base, it was important to get leaders on board who could go back to their various regions and drive and support the programme and its messages.  At the event, the importance of needing to 'make connections' was explained in the context of the organisation strategy, and leaders were given an opportunity to experience the mapping sessions and learn about the approach to the employee events.  Leaders were taken through a number of high octane experiences and the outputs were made into useful booklets full of ideas called 'tools and techniques for making the connections' which were distributed to all leaders after the event.  The event was high energy, fun, professional and celebratory in feel.  It encouraged the most senior management population in Scottish Water to see the importance of 'connections' and gained their buy in for the roll-out of the remainder of the programme throughout the organisation.  It also started to create a buzz around the programme and it came to be seen as a desirable and positive project to be associated with.

 

Mapping Sessions

The project group decided to hold team sessions which would allow employees to think about and discuss connections with and between themselves and other teams.  The project group drew on demographic information about the employee base to develop team mapping sessions.  The employee base demographics suggested teams would respond to experiential learning activities, particularly using discussion and visual based media.  Learning maps had been used successfully before and were ideal for this purpose.  Each team was given one giant laminated 'map'.  On one side were islands depicting the 'directorates' of the business and the islands around these became the business units.  Teams were required to draw lines and links between their own team on the map and 5 other areas they currently connected with and did not connect with.  Then they were asked to describe the nature of these connections - did they work well, could they be improved, and if so, how? 

 

 

fig. Findlay 2 - learning map

 

Each team mapping session lasted about one hour and was facilitated by the team manager.  The outputs consisted of a set of actions team members agreed to take to improve or set up connections with other parts of Scottish Water.  This exercise encouraged Scottish Water employees to start thinking about the nature of their connections within their day to day work, and was excellent preparation for the employee events which took place about a month later.  On completion of the mapping session many employees had identified parts of the organisation they wanted to know more about.  The employee events would help them do just that.

 

Employee Events

Using demographic analysis, input from employees and unions, and feedback from the senior managers, the project team devised a series of employee events which would appeal to a wide range of employees, but in particular the 'unconnected' group.  The objective was to really engage employees in the messages of making the connections, to enable them to meet each other, understand a bit about where the organisation was going, and of course, to have fun.  The project team was keen to steer clear of 'traditional' tell and sell type corporate events.  We knew that many of our more remote or field workers did not like traditional conference style events, nor large amounts of listening or reading, or lots of corporate content.  In addition we knew that our target segment led full community lives - attending community events, auctions, farmer's markets, fairs, sports events and so on at weekends and holidays.  This was the type of event our audience was used to and valued.  The project team therefore decided to use this format for the employee events and the 'funfair' idea was born.  Twenty different areas of the business, from waste water treatment, to finance, to the contact centre and the laboratories had 'stalls' at the fun fair, each manned by enthusiastic employees.  The 'stallholders' job was to communicate what their area did in a fun and enjoyable way, whilst engaging the employees at the event to talk about how they might be connected with their area, and how they could work together.  There were activities at each stall to appeal to each different learning type - visual, taste, physical, touch.  The atmosphere at each event was deliberately hyped - full of music, laughter and fun much like a traditional funfair.  Prizes were awarded to those who managed to visit all twenty stalls and complete the activities on offer.

 

The funfair toured Scotland from North to South so that employees could attend a session close to them.  They were highly successful, not just because they were managed and run 'in-house' (therefore had full employee ownership - over 200 employees were responsible for running each event), but because they also tapped into our knowledge of the 'unconnected' employee base and their likes and dislikes and information/learning needs.  An employee did not have to be well versed on corporate strategy to be able to understand the goals of the event, he or she did not even feel like they were directly 'learning' as they participated in the engaging event.  The events did not feel like a typical corporate event at all.  The feedback was enormously positive almost 100% said they enjoyed the day and that they felt committed to improving their connections at work. 

 

Scottish Water did go on to beat its target of reducing operating costs by over 40% in 4 years, and is now working on delivering against another set of challenging targets to be delivered by 2010.  Levels of employee engagement have also increased dramatically since 2002.

 

 

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Ruth Findlay has over a decade of experience working at a senior level in internal communications.  She has worked for the Japanese Government and Bank of Scotland and is currently Internal Communications Manager for the public water authority, Scottish Water.  She is also a Non-Executive Director of Carnegie College in Fife, and a Member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.  She was one of the first UK practitioners of AI (Appreciative Inquiry) and has won several awards for her innovative approach to communications projects and channels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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