Today’s the day that CEC has been counting down to all year… No, it’s not the renewal date of your CEC membership – it’s our Christmas party (at least, it is in our European HQ, where I’m based). I must say, I’m looking forward to it, and most of the CEC crew assures me that they are as well. However, in speaking to several of my friends from other companies, I’ve been struck by their negativity, cynicism, and trepidation at the prospect of navigating an event that one of them described to me as “the most socially awkward of the year”.

Of course, for CEC’s audience of loquacious communicators, “social awkwardness” isn’t an issue – we’re good socially! But remember – not everyone else is. What happens at one of these parties when you’re stuck between the weird lady from the IT help desk who’s pushed past you at the coffee machine all year, the social recluse  from Finance who prefers spreadsheets to his own family, and the spotty graduate whose name no one can remember, but is irritatingly keen to impress?

This, of course, leaves you with two options. One is to politely excuse yourself and head for the bathroom, the bar, or – if things have got really bad – home. The other is to use your skills as a communicator to enable some social interaction between your colleagues.

Building Social Connections

And funnily enough, this is something that CEC can really help with. One of the things we often get asked is how communicators can encourage peer sharing among employees. As companies become more complex, organizational barriers increasingly prevent employees from connecting, sharing and learning with each other. And, interestingly, the same principles that will help a couple of socially inept guys from IT to open up at a Christmas party will also apply to creating an organization in which peers open up and share their expertise with each other. Read More »

If someone asked you today how you feel about your job you might say all positive things—you’re on a roll on your current project, you’ve gotten some good feedback recently from your manager, and right now you’re contributing to the organization in a way that you might not get to do elsewhere. But how did you feel about your job six months ago? And do you think you’ll still be at your company in a year?

The various changes and related stress that employees have faced over the past few years may not impact engagement today but it does have a great impact on their engagement capital—a look into engagement that includes employee perceptions of the past, present, and future.  Creating an organization with high engagement capital is a top priority of both Communications and Human Resources team.  How aligned are your current efforts? Read More »

Safety communications has received a lot of interest from CEC members in recent months as more organizations look to Communications to aid in (re)engaging employees around safety.  Unfortunately, it is often a tragic event or disturbing trend in employee accidents that leads business partners to approach Communications for help.  Regardless of initial spark for these campaigns, one thing is clear: organizations are seriously concerned about safety and want to know what they can do to help prevent accidents, injuries, and unsafe behavior.

Through my conversations with communicators who’ve recently worked on safety campaigns, I’ve found that their first step is often to build awareness of safety policies and procedures.  In the more effective campaigns, communicators help employees to build personal, often emotional, connections to safety issues.  For example, several companies have seen significant reductions in accidents by helping employees consider how an injury could affect their families and friends, often through victim storytelling and subsequent dialogue sessions.

While effective in some situations, this tactic is best used when the safety challenge can be solved by awareness alone.  A common challenge cited by communicators is complacency.  In these situations it’s often not that employees don’t know how to work safely, but rather that they’ve performed the same tasks over and over, without incident, and have developed bad habits or have lost appreciation for the dangers of cutting corners.

But what if there is a more complicated challenge to address – say, between productivity and safety — where an awareness campaign alone won’t work?  Here are a couple communications tactics that will help: Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Imagine that the competitive landscape surrounding your company is dramatically shifting. As a senior leader, you know that the company needs to shift its strategic direction and that it will take the entire organization to effectively respond to these changes. How do you get employees to lift their heads up from their immediate role and consider the broader picture?

In order to help employees become more change-ready, Saudi Aramco implemented strategy dialogue sessions with employees to personalize information—and with great success. Recognizing that traditional communications channels for sharing such information were unlikely to broaden employee perspective, the company’s strategic communications team partnered with senior leaders to create a “Speakers Bureau” made up of passionate advocates from the business. Within group dialogue sessions, these peer speakers share their personal connection to corporate challenges—giving employees tangible, credible examples to emulate.

Saudi Aramco’s personal connection modeling is three-fold:

1. Present employees with information on market trends
2. Share speaker’s personal connection to issues
3. Prompt employees to make their own connections

CEC members, get more in-depth details on how Saudi Aramco helps employees become change-ready by enabling them to personalize information.

Read More »

You’ve made it to the end of Q2—congrats! Was the journey a bit bumpy? Did you ever sigh aloud, “If only there were a template for that, it would make my life so much easier!”?

Alas, you can’t change the past or recapture time lost, but you can do something about the rest of your 2011. You can make a commitment to spend more time being proactive and thoughtful in your role instead of feeling reactive and at the mercy of change—change in your team dynamics, your industry’s environment, your business partner’s expectations, or even your office coffee! And, we at CEC can help.

We took a look at the top tools and templates downloaded and used by your CEC Communications peers. These tools have helped your peers get their jobs done faster and more effectively, and they can help you do the same!

Download a tool, give it a try, and share your feedback (right here on this blog post) on how we can improve certain tools. See below the jump for the Top 5 Tools for Communicators. Read More »

Despite the “DO NOT RUN” sign on the pool deck, every kid at the pool ran until being whistled at by the lifeguard, being yelled at by Mom, or experiencing their first good scrape from the cement. And how many times were we reminded to put on a helmet, wear our seat belts, make sure our laces were tied tightly, or stop running with scissors? While we often test the limits, safety has been instilled in us all from a young age.

That said, safety often comes at the cost of efficiency (and sometimes a little bit of fun). In parts of our lives there is still someone there to demand a certain level of safety from us—be it a traffic cop, a TSA security guard, or a Mom (yep–she’s still around!). But at work, even if it is a small part of a manager’s role description, no one can be a full-time “safety cop.”

Many companies, particularly those in the energy/utility, manufacturing, and other heavy industries have been asking us about how to increase awareness of safety goals within their organizations. What is most critical for communicators, however, is to understand our role in helping employees align their everyday behavior to these safety goals—independent of a manager being there to remind them to use the handrail, drive more carefully, wear a helmet, etc. Read More »

By Rebecca Canan

Every week we get questions from CEC members about internal social media. Who does it well? How do they get employees to actually participate? Have they been able to tailor and use SharePoint?

These are all great questions and well warranted. Indeed, we’ve found that “peer support”—defined as the opportunity to access and share ideas and best practices with peers—is a major driver of building an agile, highly motivated workforce. Communications can directly increase peer support by providing internal social tools that map to employee needs and preferences.  However, this isn’t always easy to do.

I recently had a chance to talk to a few members of the Communications team at UniCredit, an international financial institution with more than 161,000 employees. The team there is committed to this idea of peer support and is in the midst of launching a company-wide platform aimed to increase collaboration to reach concrete business results and “IOR,” which stands for Impact of Relationships, and isn’t exactly the reverse of ROI as it may seem. Find out more about the team’s effort and their “obsession with usability” in the interview with UniCredit’s Head of Corporate Culture, Monica Poggio, below.

CEC: Ciao, Monica. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Our CEC members are VERY interested in internal social media…it’s great to speak with a company – especially one in the highly regulated financial services space – that has a success story to share.

Let’s start with a quick overview of what you’re doing with internal social media…why did you decide to offer it to employees? What need is it meeting among your employees?

Monica Poggio (UniCredit): UniCredit’s banking group is the result of many mergers and acquisitions. These began in the 1990s, with several Italian banks, followed by additional banks in Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe.

Within the context of this series of integrations of many banks, we have striven to develop our identity by promoting a common culture and ensuring consistent Communications across our Group. We believe this process is critical to our success and enables us to generate valuable synergies.

For these reasons, UniCredit introduced OneNet, an internal social media tool accessible to all colleagues. Based on a Web 2.0 platform, OneNet is designed to:

• facilitate networking, knowledge sharing and online collaboration within our organization

• offer user-friendly new features and Web 2.0 tools that facilitate and accelerate internal processes.

Read More »

It’s NCAA Tournament time. Ten years ago you’d see stacks of brackets from the USA Today littered around the photocopier. A guy you’re pretty sure works in IT would walk around collecting $5 per draw.  And to catch the early games, employees would linger over a long lunch at Chili’s or hover around someone’s woefully inadequate portable television – completed bracket in hand, of course!

Today, most pools are entered, scored, and paid for through sites like ESPN and PayPal, and the afternoon games are easily accessed through online video sites and even on your iPhone or iPad. But just as surely as the inevitable winner bases their picks on a preference for Blue Devils over Bulldogs are you confronted with an annual set of statistics estimating $1 – $4 billion in lost productivity during March Madness and dire warnings of federal gambling statutes. As communicators, often charged with promoting awareness of and compliance with corporate policies, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of policing our communication tools to prevent  these legal or productivity risks. A compelling case could be made that those efforts would be misplaced – in fact, let’s go out and encourage participation in the office pool. Read More »

Following years of layoffs or hiring freezes, many organizations are looking to grow their workforce again. Recruiters and team leaders  are doing this with a conscious eye—closely evaluating the skill sets and alignment of potential new employees with the strategic direction of the company (hopefully one of the attributes you are hiring for is an adaptability to change.)

Successful recruiters are being more than just thorough as they weed through an increasing pile of applicants. They are re-strategizing how to capture the attention of the highest performers in the marketplace (between jobs or not) to lure them into their organization. This often starts with a look at the organization’s unique employee value proposition (EVP.)

What makes the job worth it in the eyes of your employees? What motivates them to not only show up  but to put in the extra effort to succeed at their jobs? And how would they describe their experience to a potential employee?

HR may use employee engagement data and say the EVP is centered in good benefits and attentive managers, but the true value proposition of your company for potential employees lies is in the eyes of your current employees. The key to a winning employee value proposition comes down to understanding employees values and then translating their story to potential hires. To define and translate this winning EVP, the HR Recruiting team needs Communication’s help. Read More »

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the title character is born old and progressively gets younger.  In his early life as a physically elderly man, people assume that Benjamin has seen a great deal whereas later in life after experiencing much sadness and adventure, those around his adolescent exterior presume he is naïve.  It is from this essential irony that the movie explores how perceptions of age affect our relationships. 

The utility industry is experiencing its own “curious case” at the moment.  While the American workforce as a whole gets older – a trend that may accelerate in the U.S. with the raising of the social security retirement age – many of our utility members report that their workforce is rapidly getting younger, perhaps due to a set of private retirement benefits that allows for more turnover.  In the movie, Benjamin ultimately connects with those who appreciate him as an individual more than an age.  For utility members to seamlessly transition their workforces, so too must they embrace individuals over demographics.  Read More »