Each November, the parent entity of the CEC, the Corporate Executive Board, releases to our members a widely read Executive Guidance briefing outlining management imperatives for the coming year. This year’s document addresses one of the most common challenges raised by Communicators – the promise and perils of globalization. The opportunity is clear: between 2010 and 2030 the percentage of global GDP from emerging markets is expected to grow from 37% to 59%; however, most organizations focus on market-level investments and fail to address how corporate center functions such as Finance, IT, Legal, and of course, Communications need to adapt. The Corporate Executive Board has outlined six management disciplines critical for long-term success in emerging markets (and members will have upcoming opportunities to digest them all); however, one in particular struck me as a place for immediate impact from a high-functioning global Communications department: Accelerated Collaboration and Innovation.

While access to new markets and talent should offer opportunities for market shaping innovation, less than 40% of employees perceive effective collaboration – even in just one location. The results are troubling: innovation vitality (the percentage of sales from new products) is troublingly low to keep up with the necessary pace of growth in these new markets and less than a third of R&D staff in developed or emerging markets report high levels of trust with their global counterparts.

So how is this all a Communications problem (other than the fact that everything is a communications problem!)? Corporate Executive Board research shows that most organizations wrongly attribute these deficiencies to the innovation skills of geographically dispersed R&D centers; however, leading companies instead focus on increasing 1) the willingness of global employees to share and receive information and 2) the strength of connections to actually identify and apply new ideas – in other words, the effectiveness of the communications environment. Two lessons from our research into global intranet platforms suggest some immediate solutions. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

I have a confession: I love Facebook. I use it to communicate and keep in touch with friends and family dispersed globally—and the platform’s functionality makes it easy to do so. In fact, I probably communicate more with out-of-area friends now than I would without the network. Working and on different schedules, it’s often difficult to catch a friend for a phone conversation. Facebook enables me to share photos of what I’ve been up to, and shoot a quick “thinking of you” message that does the trick until we can catch up in full later on.

Even if you don’t use Facebook, odds are that you know at least 2 (or 200?) people who do for personal communications. What if you could transfer this massively popular method of communicating into your business?

The question is, does Facebook, or a tool like it, have a place in your internal communications strategy?

An executive in our Intranets Working Group recently posed this question, starting a dialogue among members. The majority was in favor—as one Senior Manager of Online Comms said, “Business success is often built on strong working relationships, and internal social media can foster those across the organization.” But, they also recognized that tool management is key in order to avoid misuse. Here are a few key takeaways from their discussion: Read More »

My Profile Page on Handshake

Last week Google launched Google+, a social networking site, designed to compete—and beat—rival Facebook. Google+ aims to make “connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world.” Initial reviews have been positive.  I haven’t attempted to use Google’s new toy myself, but as a 7+ year- user of Facebook, I admit that I’ve grown tired of the site…or maybe just the people I connect with on it. My friends’ status updates used to make me laugh, but now they depress and make me feel like a voyeur.

I feel the need to break away from my Facebook-tethered past and Google+ may help me to discover alternative ways to connect, share, and create. While Google+ may not rival Facebook anytime soon, this battle has serious implications for the sharing and connecting that goes on within your organization.

Basically, it puts even more pressure on your organization to employ or develop tools akin to top social networking sites if you want to enable your employees to connect and create value. We at CEC see many companies wasting tons of time and money on employee-sharing platforms that simply can’t compete with employees’ personal options.

Fortunately, there is one company that we think has a solution to rival its Facebook “competition.” The MITRE Corporation. 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 »

By Kirsten Robinson

No intranet is complete without tools that allow employees to connect and collaborate. The good news is, internal social media can do just that.

And, there’s nothing stopping Communications teams from integrating internal social media with their intranets…except for internal stakeholders themselves. Comms teams are facing pushback from the very people they need to work with in order to implement their social media strategies.

Communicators hear the following resistance from four critical stakeholder groups:

1. IT: “IT’s quick to tell us what we can’t do.”
2. Legal: “Legal isn’t comfortable with our employees sharing information with one another.”
3. Executives: “Executives don’t understand how social media can help the business.”
4. Employees: “Our employees aren’t huge social media users to begin with.”

We spoke with Chris McClellan, Sr. Manager of Employee Communications at Best Buy, and Mark Sutherland, Internal Communication Lead at Monsanto, to hear how they overcame roadblocks in ways such as:

• Collaborating with Legal to construct the language around terms of use
• Bringing IT into the implementation process at the beginning
• Understanding that not all employees will choose to adopt internal social media

CEC members, learn more about how Best Buy and Monsanto worked with key internal stakeholders to develop and implement an internal social media strategy by reading our Q&A with Chris and Mark.

Intranets – they spark joy and frustration in equal measure (often tipping in favour of frustration). Joy because we now have an easy and effective way of getting important information to our employees without bombarding them with emails. Frustration because no matter how hard we try, the feedback is still that when employees need something it’s hard to break through the maze.

It’s not like we aren’t trying. Communications teams (in partnership with IT and HR) are always looking for better and smarter ways to leverage this golden tool. What we’re all aiming for is employees who actually use the intranet, on a regular basis, to do their jobs better and faster. But how do we know that it’s really working? Most communicators keep close track of intranet metrics like clicks and views.

However, these volumetrics reveal nothing about what employees may have intended to do on the intranet, or wish they could do. Employee needs and goals are constantly changing, so how do we measure whether we are keeping pace? 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 »

Outside of access to hiking, skiing, amazing food, and CEC’s awesome West coast members, one of my favorite aspects of my new home in SF is the presence and energy of the cutting-edge Tech world. I spent this past weekend face-timing, checking out the iPad 2, and getting caught up on the buzz from South by Southwest by friends who work at Facebook, Linked In, Google, and the MLC.

Influencers. Gaming. Digital Wallets. The Cloud. What does the interactive nature of communications really bring for us all? In marketing and external communications we’re looking at immediacy, relevancy, and accessibility. Our employees demand these things in their external lives. In their professional lives they are quietly (or not so quietly) demanding these things as well—they want access to the tools they need when they need them.

To achieve this, Communicators in many high tech companies are expanding to mobile access to their intranets. Today’s intranets house company news, directories, business applications, internal discussion forums, business applications, or even the menus to the onsite cafeteria. Whether your staff spends its time on the road, puts in a few work hours in their evenings, or spends the majority of the day in meetings away from their desks, adapting internal channels to provide “always on” access is a critical step to making this channel as user centric as possible. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

It’s no secret that the growth of digital publishing has required communications departments in all industries to rethink content delivery. And it’s not just for external audiences. Internal communications are also changing. Many companies are shifting from publishing a monthly magazine for employees to posting short blogs on an intranet. When channels change, your approach to the content itself must also adjust. Traditional print stories call for formal, fact-heavy text, while web writing should take a conversational tone.

Regardless of format, sources are what make a news story credible, and for most companies, valuable quotes from employees are essential for internal stories. But, transitioning print news to internal blog posts affects attribution—so, how do other companies incorporate employee voice without sounding too “newsy”? An executive in our Employee Communications Forum recently asked a similar question. Here are a few takeaways from that discussion:

• Avoid ghostwriting. CEC members who contributed to the discussion agree that attributing a blog post to an employee who didn’t write it will raise credibility issues. Ghostwriting also engenders homogeneity, as blogs lack the individual writing styles of each employee.
• Use a conversational tone. Blog posts are less formal and should have a free-flowing, personal voice. Try cutting back on jargon and corporate-speak. One member recommends removing quotation marks to make employee attribution more casual.
• Add videos. Putting employees on camera can be a great way to supplement posts or cover full stories. Short videos enable employees to add their own voice, and also make it clear who’s providing the information. Using a simple Flip camera works well here.
• Use quotes to tell the story. Instead of quoting an employee once, one member suggests using their quotes to write the post. Other members suggest using a simple Q & A structure.

How do you keep blog posts from sounding too “newsy”?

Related CEC Resources:

• Create content that will be easily shared. See how Intuit crafts “Tweetable” speeches.
• See how Aviva, Sprint, TD Bank, and Sabre source stories from employees and allow them to share their own with one another.
• Help executives tailor their voice for the web:Westpac’s Internal Discussion Forum

Click to watch the video from Best Buy

By Kirsten Robinson

Companies recognize that they live and die by the extent to which they understand their customers’ wants and needs. But are they tuned-in to what their own employees are thinking?

Think about it…most communicators have a general sense of what matters to employees based on the organization’s annual engagement survey or informal pulse surveys.  But, do you, as a communicator, know what’s on your employees’ minds right now?  Do you know how they are reacting to a company decision or change?

Best Buy’s internal communicators came to the humble realization that they weren’t experts on their own employees.  When they realized this, they decided to learn more and created a solution off the strategy the company used to gain knowledge about their customers.  They developed an employee listening system, which uses open communication to uncover the unmet needs of workers.  The end result is a deeper understanding of employees, which has allowed the company to correct (previously unknown) problems and make communication more effective.  It has also allowed them to improve their understanding of business partners, which in turn opened up possibilities for new opportunities with internal clients. Read More »