Archive for Internal Communications

Internal communications on a global scale

22 February 2012 Rachel Communications, Internal Communications No comments

The purpose of internal communications includes creating company pride, helping people to live the values and supporting organisational change. I wanted to investigate how this process worked efficiently when a company is based over a range of regions globally.

For any organisation based over multiple units ensuring cohesion between the business components can offer challenges, but this is significantly escalated when trying operate over different countries.

In our recent guest lecture, Aakriti Kaushik briefly mentioned the impact of global operations on internal communications. She noted that it is extremely important to remain aware of culturally significant events within each of your regions. For example being aware of Chinese New Year, Ramadan among other events. Through neglecting these you are not only at risk of offending your employees but potentially seeing other detrimental effects.

When your operations are based over multiple regions it is particularly vital to ensure that your internal communications works to involve employees, and make them feel part of the organisation, despite the physical distance.

We do have the advantage of instant technology allowing us to communicate in real time with employees around the world through video or instant messaging. We can also adopt social media strategies to improve the effectiveness of our internal communications. There are a multitude of tools at our disposal to help us with the challenge however they do require being used so to benefit the organisation. Possibly the most important requirement of internal communications is research. Research what your employees expect, what they are not getting, how they want their information, what has been successful in the past. The limit for research is not set low and it can make the difference between a bad internal campaign and a good internal campaign.

As we continue to embrace globalisation I believe global internal communications is going to grow in importance. Organisations employ staff across the world and to that they run effectively it is important they concentrate on each of their staff to ensure they are all working to the same values.

Global internal communications is an area which offers challenges but rewards and I am keen to continue my education within this area.

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Cross cultural PR

21 February 2012 Rachel Communications, Internal Communications, Public Relations, Social Media One comment
English: Blank globe, focus on Africa. Deutsch...

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 A common theme over my blog is the importance of gaining experience while studying a degree. As important as this is, our degree would count for nothing is we were not receiving world-class education from intelligent and informed tutors. I would like to say we are quite lucky in this respect, but what is particularly great is when our university invites guest lecturers in to teach us. This semester one of our modules includes a series of brilliant guest lectures, which so far has included crisis communications and digital communications. Today it was the turn of Aakriti Kaushik, PR Manager for Global and European PR at Premier Farnell. With an impressive CV Aakriti came to lecture us on cross cultural PR, something which seemed coincidentally relevant to me after my recent article on understanding cultural sensitivities.

Key things that I brought away from this lecture included the importance of understanding what works in one region may not work in others. Aakriti brought up the example of the Ben Heck show, something which had been a huge success in the USA but did not manage to translate to other cultures.

It is important to research local cultures before designing communications schemes, she highlighted this with the examples of the Ford Pinto, meaning penis in Brazilian slang. In reference to Premier Farnell she explained how their new brand name, Element 14, did not translate into Chinese and as a result they had to find an alternative.

Finally, an interesting point was raised about social media. This platform has changed the way we communicate, and allows messages to flow instantly around the world. It is important that while using social media that we ensure our messages are suitable for all of our audiences across all cultures.

Recently I have been taking a huge interest in global communications and how we respect cultural differences, so this lecture was perfectly timed and has upped my interest in the subject.

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How can we control social media?

9 January 2012 Rachel Communications, Human Resources, Internal Communications, News, Social Media 2 comments
Texting on a qwerty keypad phone

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Reading about the social media restrictions placed on Olympic volunteers had me thinking about the ways we can control the information that is shared on social media.

Social media has encouraged us to share our lives openly with many people but there are things that organisations can not have shared for a variety of reasons from security to competition.

How do we control information that has been unofficially put on social media? The simple answer is inevitably it is extremely difficult, but there are two important approaches that can be taken, proactive and reactive.

Proactive: Naturally it is important to ensure as an organisation that you have policies in place to ensure that staff or individuals know precisely what they can share and what information is prohibited. Most organisations have these in place but there is plenty of advice on compiling such a policy. As we know the online world moves very quickly so it is important to ensure that the policy is regularly reviewed and updated.

Reactive: I also believe it is important to have an official presence on social media platforms. If a fact is released which is inaccurate this source can react and correct the mistake. In other cases when information is released without permission while they may not be able to prevent it, it does mean that the organisation may receive the news sooner and therefore have more time to react. A social media presence does not necessarily have to be an active poster, it could simply be used to monitor information for use during a crisis or as an aid for general organisation activity.

The two approaches are most effective when combined. Human nature means we love to share information and therefore even if an individual is aware of a policy and the repercussions of sharing information they may still not behave as desired. In this case it is important to be able to react effectively.

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Social Media and Internal Communications

12 December 2011 Rachel Communications, Human Resources, Interests, Internal Communications, Social Media One comment
An example of the share buttons common to many...

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It would be fair to say that social media has changed the way we communicate and it looks set to continue to create Zuckerberg‘s vision of an open and connected world.

While many people have let social media into the personal areas of their lives I think it is important to embrace the technology and look at how we can utilise it in other areas of our lives in the mission to create this open and connected world.

This is a hot topic at the moment, particularly after Atos announced ambitions of a workplace free of internal email. It is also something I am very interested in personally, being a perfect combination of two of my interests, HR and social media.

Naturally some organisations are hesitant in contemplating giving up some of the technologies they have come to rely upon and adopting social media inspired systems, however there are some obvious benefits in such a change.

There is nothing more frustrating than not knowing about something that affects you and in the workplace this can lead to disgruntled employees. Well designed internal communication systems can ensure that staff are notified of matters concerning them, from job opportunities, to events, to changes in contracts. The nature of social media means that staff are able to have conversations about these matters which can help an organisation understand the opinions of their workforce.

Intranets have been the most popular choice of system for sharing knowledge and while I would not dream of indicating they are redundant, they can certainly be improved by social media tools. For example an organisation could create a wiki style system allowing all employees to submit additions or edits to articles for approval. Alternatively if an employee is struggling to understand a topic or task even after reading an article they could post a question in a forum where anyone in the organisation would be able to offer feedback.

When an organisation is spread across different units nationally or even internationally it can lose its company identity. Social media is able to reinstall this identity. It allows easy communication between teams who may have never even met and allows a constant connection to the heart of the organisation, be that in the Head Office or another unit.

One of the most inspiring men I know is the director of a medium sized organisation. Speaking to him it is impossible not to understand his vision for the organisation and be motivated to achieve better results. Everyone who speaks has a conversation with him respects him and believes in his passion, unfortunately the logistics of the organisation mean that while he is dedicated to his staff team there is not always the opportunity to talk to all of them individually. I believe one solution to this would be for him to write a blog available to all the organisation’s staff, allowing his message to reach and inspire everyone. Social media brings down barriers meaning that he could have conversations with his staff even when he cannot meet his staff.

A very important aspect of social media is monitoring conversation and opinion. Within the workplace this can be used to see reactions to announcements or blog posts. It can be used to see how many staff are accessing company newsletters, or looking at job opportunities. There are many ways an organisation can monitor usage and get an improved understanding of their organisation’s people.

There are also potentially significant financial benefits as demonstrated by this article from Simply-Communicate, these systems return on their investment through saving on costs such as printing and recruitment.

Obviously it is important to be careful when introducing social media into the workplace, a model such as Facebook or Twitter is more likely to cause loss of productivity. It is important that a system based on social media is designed for maximum productivity and minimum distraction.

Social media is not a completely new tool in the internal communication’s toolbox, rather it is a natural progression of the current tools such as internal emails and intranets. I think it is important to look at using the successes of social media to continue the development and effectiveness of internal communications. The possibilities of how we can utilise social media seem endless and with innovation and development we could certainly see some beneficial changes within our internal communications.

Does your organisation use social media in their internal communications strategy?

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