In the chill of a recession, with employees increasingly glancing over their shoulders, effective employee engagement can galvanise ideas and prepare people for change: So what efforts have impressed internal communicators of late? Jon Barker found out

Lord Saatchi put it best. “In all forms of competitive human activity, a clear sense of purpose is a prerequisite for success. There must be a noble purpose… there must be a fight against injustice… there must be a sense of direction… and there must be a destination.” From opening up to the possibilities of social media to confessing all to Jeremy Paxman, each of the following examples of innovative internal communication adhere to Saatchi’s notion of purpose – and the need for companies to pull together. We asked the top UK media  communication and PR agencies to pick their leading examples. Here are the top five ‘emperors of employee engagement’, as chosen by those in the know.

Westminster City Council
Westminster City Council employs more than 2,400 people to deliver over 100 different services. As with the majority of organisations facing up to the current economic climate, fundamental changes were required that would involve redundancies. But a highly successful  internal comms campaign, ‘Your Voice’, not only attempted to engage with staff, it also challenged them to agree on how to improve the organisation. The campaign was both fresh and cost effective, good planning and clear success criteria.

Chief executive, Mike More, announced the launch of a staff survey with a poster and an email campaign, ‘Hey Mike!’, to which some 1,227 staff responded online and by post – an impressive 49% response rate. He then reported back the findings in a series of face-to-face meetings with staff. The launch of the campaign was preceded by a series of management briefings explaining what had improved as a result of the last staff survey. And a special edition of the council’s internal magazine ‘WestWords’ was produced which outlined the main findings.

Following this, managers were asked to come up with one clear action they would do as a result of the campaign, leading to five corporate actions and 100 team action plans. A follow-up progress report was carried out three months later and the findings were reported to a conference of the top 60 managers, who used them to agree the implementation of the Chief Executive’s reorganisation plans.

The council used a variety of ways to engage with staff and created real change in the organisation – it also gave the CEO the strategic information he needed to help meet his objectives.

“Westminster’s internal communications works because it uses the skills and talents of our staff to build trust and generate innovative ideas to deliver more efficient and effective public service,” says Alex Aiken, director of communications at Westminister City Council. “We do lots of routine broadcast communications, so they understand what is happening, but our USP is campaigns that invite colleagues to help management solve problems. Our recent ‘Keep Your Real Boss Happy’ campaign, for example, generated 200 ideas to improve customer ervice and helped drive up customer ratings by 10% in six months.”

Southern Water
When Southern Water’s new management team discovered that the company had historically defrauded customers, leading to a record £20 million fine by regulator Ofwat, it decided that honesty was truly the best policy.

Employees were alerted about the fine via the intranet, while field staff received text messages. A detailed supplement in the staff newspaper, which revealed improvements since the discovery of the crime, plus a DVD of an apologetic chief executive being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight – and a programme about excellent performance in key areas of Southern Water – were posted to employees’ homes.

The chief executive also held a series of face-toface briefings with staff. Nearly all 1,600 employees have since completed online training in guaranteed service standards, while more than three quarters have been trained in Southern Water’s whistleblowing policy.

“The campaign was successful because of its openness and transparency in telling a bad news story,” says Geoff Loader, director of communication at Southern Water. “We used a whole range of communication methods, from director briefings, to a DVD and the front page and centre spread of a special edition of our in-house newspaper.

“While the investigation was under way, the information we were able to give staff was limited so it was important that once the investigation was complete, we told the whole story. I think it was this warts-and-all account that gained the respect of staff and plaudits from external experts. It was also important that the internal campaign completely tied in with what we were doing externally and the messages remained clear and simple.”

Cisco
Online conversations have become a productive and cost-effective way for employers to communicate with staff and keep them engaged.  Cisco chief executive John Chambers recently called on his global HR team to use Web 2.0 tools to produce a cultural transformation within the organisation, moving from a command-and-control leadership style to one based on collaboration and dialogue.

Cisco held a ‘Global Virtual All Hands’ video conference in which Chambers communicated with 600 HR employees across the globe. Traditionally, this kind of event would have been limited to a small handful of senior leaders, who would have been expected to travel the world, hear the messages and communicate them to their teams. Instead, in an auditorium in San Jose, California, Chambers gathered the US HR staff, and the event was then streamed live to HR teams across the globe via internal web channel Cisco TV. Staff could raise their ands virtually, vote on his thoughts, and submit questions.

Chambers also records his ‘On My Mind’ and ‘On Your Mind’ video blogs every other month. The company’s I-Zone wiki gives all employees the opportunity to submit new product ideas or build on their colleagues’ ideas. Employees have submitted more than 500 ideas through this interactive online forum, including input that led to Cisco’s TelePresence collaboration solution. “By creating business networks around functional groups, each headed up by two senior leaders, Cisco has created a collaborative culture that encourages each network team to form the thought process of the company,” says Sheila Parry, founder and MD of internal comms agency Theblueballroom. “The ideas and information gathered in this way form the basis for decision making and implementation, which Chambers calls ‘leading from the middle’. This shows us that, by embracing the collaborative culture and the moving to a more democratic style of communication, companies can achieve maximum engagement.”

Northern Rail
Rumours are a part of everyday life, but they can be a major barrier to effective communication and can destroy morale. Northern Rail, a complex rail franchise formed in December 2004, operates 2,600 trains a day, more than any other train operator,and has to motivate some 4,600 employees. That’s a lot of rumours to contend with to keep staff on the right track.

‘Tell Heidi’ is a channel where employees send in rumours they have heard to Heidi Mottram, managing director, and she answers them through a monthly newsletter, or replies personally. There are typically 75-100 replies a month. All informationm is logged then attended to, and – if necessary – it also provides a temperature check of how people are feeling at any particular time.

Building on the success of ‘Tell Heidi’, Northern Rail took the concept on the road for ‘Tell Heidi Live’ – a series of roadshows involving Heidi, and an area director, running a drop-in Q&A session for employees to attend. As well as giving people an outlet to discuss issues, they have also used it to mention ideas, resulting in improvements in business performance. It runs 20 roadshows every six months in different locations across its network – some 800 people have attended 60 roadshows.

Additionally, Northern Rail’s communication KPI in its 2007 Employee Survey, ‘I am kept up to date with regular news/information relating to ur business’, increased from 59% in 2006 to 82%. Clearly, the network’s strategic approach to internal communication, using a human face, was both refreshing and effective in an industry where it is typically top down.

Jane Lawrence, internal communication manager Northern Rail, says: “As a result of the engagement around our internal communication initiatives, we have started to see changes in employee behaviour. As they realised their views were valued by Northern, employees became more focused on helping the business to succeed. Bottom line, we have attracted 34% more customers than when Northern Rail first started in 2005 and are now delivering ever higher levels of performance.”

SABMiller
SABMiller, one of the world’s largest brewers, is also one of the largest bottlers of Coca-Cola products in the world. But there was no bottling it when it came to communicating its knowledge-sharing programme across marketing teams spanning six continents.

The Marketing Knowledge team wanted to introduce new media to improve, enhance and encourage the sharing of knowledge among staff in a more creative, fun and inspiring way.

Having been impressed by what Peaches Geldof had achieved with the Flip Mino HD camera in Cannes earlier that week, the Marketing Insight team decided to use the same cutting-edge technology for their project.

Cantos Communications helped to distribute the video footage online. Diane Faulks, client director at Cantos, says: “Cantos helped SABMiller to distribute ‘viral’ style content internally. The videos, filmed by and featuring members of the marketing team were designed to demonstrate how the company’s ‘Marketing Way’ concept is being interpreted and delivered on the ground. Fundamental to their success was that they employed humour to make important messages on best practice more engaging for internal audiences.”

Marketing teams from around the world gathered for training on ‘Marketing Way’. Following the training, teams were tasked with gathering real life examples - using the Flip Mino camera - of beers being marketed in SABMiller’s ‘Way’. The brief to the teams was to make it inspirational and engaging – more YouTube than corporate documentary - to encourage multiple views and repeat visits. The finished videos are now hosted on SABMiller’s global marketing intranet, ‘BigM’.

“The exercise was hugely successful. It generated real enthusiasm and some fantastically engaging films,” says a member of SABMiller’s Marketing Knowledge team. “It also created a lot of interest in the cameras and how they could be used elsewhere, and a real appetite for teams to get their films on BigM.”

“Less than a month later there is clear interest in extending the exercise to become an ongoing way of sharing best marketing practice. Work is going on to see how it can be deployed in other areas of marketing knowledge sharing.”