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Over the past few months 20 year old French student Aurore Cazal has been working for me at London Overground Rail Operations Ltd (LOROL) and she recently returned home and send me this post for my blog. Aurore is pictured undertaking a communications audit at one of our stations.  Here is her post:
Successful companies communicate. The company must be considered as a skills network, allowing every individual to know her/his place, to feel valued and useful to the company and the society. This is the role of internal communication: developing a corporate culture. The internal communications manager must be aware of all the company’s strategies to inform the employees. This is why they have to be really close to the work, they have to implement a corporate language, a corporate culture, in order to create a real cohesion within the group.
LOROL began in 2007 and created its communication department in August 2009. The Head of Communications is Rachel Allen, my tutor. I think the creation of this position was obvious; LOROL is a company with two really distinct departments. One working from offices, with computers and another working on trains or in depots, often without computers and never going into offices, which makes the contact with the Executive team and managers hard. My two month placement led me to believe that the internal communication mission at LOROL, led by Rachel, is to create a genuine corporate spirit even if the structure of the company could be seen to make it complicated.
While I was there Rachel challenged me – newsletters already existed but how could we make them accessible to every employee? How could we make employees feel close to executives and valued? How could we evaluate their satisfaction? This is the role of internal communications and during my placement, I was asked to help solve these problems and find solutions…in English of course! (Which wasn’t always easy, particularly at the beginning…).
Internal communication is an essential tool for a company to run smoothly and I found the work placement very interesting as I arrived at the beginning of the communication strategy being created. Everything had to be set up, particularly explaining the role of internal communication to employees and making them understand that it is for them to feel as involved as possible in the company. Thank you Rachel, it has been an incredible experience. I learnt a lot and had a lot of fun, I hope we meet again. Sincerely, Aurore Cazal.
 The past couple of weeks at LOROL have been busy ones. I’ve now been here just under six months and one of my projects I’m most proud of is Long Service. The company is just over two years old and didn’t have a formal long service process in place. I worked with the Exec team, HR and the unions to put together a plan of action to thank employees for their service to the rail industry. We all know the benefits in terms of employee engagement that an action like that generates, however I believe it also helps instil a sense of pride. A total of 206 employees had their long service backdated from when the company formed in November 2007 until the end of this financial year.
That means we recognised a fifth of our workforce. Not a small task as I’m sure you can appreciate, but an important one. Employees with 5,10 and 15 years were given certificates and vouchers and those with exactly 20,25,30,35,40,45 and even 50(!) years’ service were invited to a Long Service dinner as well as having certificates and vouchers. I’ve mentioned Sarah and Aurore here before; my team who were heavily involved in helping me scope out this process and particularly organise the event. They did a fantastic job and on 21 January we held the dinner at the London Transport Museum (pictured). This was a particularly fitting venue as we were surrounded by the history of trains, buses etc and it was fantastic to see so many smiling faces and to hear the stories of the railway from days gone past and hear why people dedicate their careers to this industry.
Work-wise for me at the moment I’ve nearly finished media training my Executive team. I met Verity Lowe from MS&L a few months back at the PR Week ‘29 under 29′ photo shoot and commissioned her for the task. Last week we put two thirds of the Exec team through their paces, I was impressed with MS&L and would definitely recommend them for training. Verity, Paul and Adam had obviously taken time to get to know our company and this for me resulted in a really beneficial couple of days and I know the final session will go well too.
Today is the start of my month-long annual employee survey. I’m determined to encourage as many employees as possible to complete it so the feedback reflects as much of the company as possible. Last year’s feedback showed communication was one of the key areas that needed work, which was the driver behind my role being created. I’m hoping to see that people feel more informed as I’ve put different communication channels in place, which my own audits show are getting to the frontline. Will be very interested to see the feedback.
My thanks to Csaba for sending me his weekly diary, I’m always interested to know how other people approach their roles and am enjoying hearing about life as a communicator in Hungary. I’ve asked Aurore to write a post for my blog as she has now returned to France to continue to study communication and I hope to be able to publish it soon.
What are your views on employee surveys? Do you think they are relevant? What is your ideal response rate? Let me know your views.
The latest installment from Csaba…
Two weeks ago I downloaded and installed FeedDemon onto my laptop at my workplace. With the help of Google Alerts and monitorThis and grabbing the RSS feed of a Hungarian blog monitoring site I started to look for any posts, articles, which mention the company. Yes, I know that’s related to PR but I will explain it to you right now. Our company is really customer focused so I believe we should incorporate the customers’ opinion into internal communications – for example we could share the collected information via the intranet with our colleagues. (By the way the line between internal and external communications is fading I believe.)
During the week I discovered that there are two ways to start a blog inside the walls of the company. In the first case you can send a request to the HQ and you have a bog within a day – or the possibility to start one. In the second case you can send a request to your superior and after that you can start to write. The difference is that in the first case you “receive” only a simple blog, while in the second case you can use a more complex one, which is more than a simple blog. You have the opportunity to open discussion board and many other useful things. (By the way that’s the reason why MySite was not used here in Hungary because there is an other option, which could provide almost the same features.)
Using the navigation management tree of the intranet I started to check what I can find on it – I mean on the “local” one. (This is a complicated issue because we use shared pages at the moment.) As it turned out there will be a lot of work with it. Outdated content and so on.
An interesting part of the week was when we recreated the newsletter. (FYI: we have a blog, where each post covers some news, it is being updated weekly and after that a newsletter has been sent to colleagues via email to inform them about the new ones.) Earlier it was plain text but from now on we will use a HTML template, which we received from the UK. Of course, we change it a little but it was a useful help anyway.
I should mention that I discovered that I must learn a new language, which will be very useful in my job. That is the Wiki Markup Language – we can edit our blogs with that one.
Until next week, Csaba.
Csaba is now settling into his role at Vodafone Hungary and here he shares his diary with us.
This week Kelly Kass from simply-communicate.com saw on LinkedIn that I left DENSO and asked me to write some sentences about my new role and my plans regarding the job. You can find it in the movers + shakers section (pictured).
Let’s see what happened during the third week. On Monday we had our internal communications team meeting, which will be a recurring event from now on. We discussed several topics. Managing the rest of the budget is one of the most important tasks now as the financial year ends in March. (Due to certain and obvious reasons I cannot share any details regarding that one.)
During the week I gained all of the necessary rights to manage the local intranet. Now I have access to almost everything, which I need to do my job. If I feel that I need something else that’s not an issue either because we have a very helpful intranet service team (they are located abroad).
Our intranet is huge – if we consider the global one, although, it is not proper to use such a distinction like global or local. Every day if I scan through it I always find something, which may not be known by my colleagues – i.e. those, who are not working in communications – but could be very useful to them. For example, I discovered MySite. I suggested that we could use it to introduce new employees to each other. So every new employee can complete their profile then we could place their name and a link to their MySite on the intranet. That way we could promote that tool to other employees, too. (If you are curious why this tool has not been used until now than check my following post.)
Finally I would like to share with you that Vodafone has got a Group Internal Communications blog – an internal blog, of course – and during the week I subscribed to every kind of alerts so I will know if anything is updated from now on. Also I made my first comment on it regarding internal RSS feeds.
Here is the second part of Csaba’s diary…
Before I share the details of my second week at Vodafone Hungary Ltd I must mention the previous one. The views and opinions expressed here – via posts and comments written by me – represent my own and not those of my employer. Last time I only introduced myself so I didn’t feel necessary to do so.
Please allow me to jump back in the time a little because I forgot to talk about an interesting visit, which I took part in it during my first week. Colleagues of mine and I took a look at the Vodafone Operations Centre Hungary (VOCH), which is also located in Budapest. Interesting part is that it has its own individual business structure – its own entity. From this reason my colleagues and I were only guests there so to speak. The internal communications of VOCH is managed by its own employees. We were interested what they have done lately in this field. They showed us the structure of their intranet and we discussed some technical questions also. They informed us that they are planning to use digital signage devices and certain tools for internal communications purposes.
So now onto my second week. As I am still quite new there were a few things to sort out including receiving the basic equipment but also certain software which will be important to manage the intranet efficiently and access inboxes etc. During the introductory training I also received a sneaky peek into the work of different areas.
On Thursday we visited Vodafone regional customer service centre in Miskolc. As I saw their working environment, which is quite nice, I thought that they are hard-to-reach employees. They receive plenty of calls a day so they have less time to read the intranet. So if we want to recreate a user-centred intranet than we definitely should create a sample persona, which is about them.
That’s all for the second week. Of course, I had more things to do but I wanted to highlight the interesting ones here. I welcome your comments, Csaba.
 Today I had the pleasure of graduating from Kingston University’s Internal Communication Management Post-Graduate Diploma course. Congratulations to my fellow classmates; the year of sheer hard work while holding down a full time job at the same time paid off as we made it.
We are from a variety of organisations – from transport to banking and retail to public sector. A handful of us are pictured with Course Director Liz Cochrane. The other successful 32 Comms professionals who graduated are: Marilyn Austin, Sarah Avison, Lynsey Beahan, Kim Borrowdale, Chelsea Charles, Helen Clear, Jennifer Clowes, Angelisa Conby, Joyce Dalgleish, Tracey Dyer, Madeline Fisher, Nicola Flook, Jasbinder Garcha, Chris Geppert, Ellen Hall, Allison Loftfield, Suzanne Masters, Sinead Nic Oireachtaigh, Alison Ochiltree, Tracy Phillips, Meg Pratley, Graham Reed, Adriana Ribeiro Pires, Sarah-Jane Savage, Guliz Schaefer, Martin Scott, Katie Simpson, Louise Smith, Liz Tessem-Cotton, Geoff Timblick, Liz Walsh and Louisa Wilson. Well done to everyone!
 While researching my dissertation in March 2009 I came into contact with Csaba Szücs in Hungary via Twitter. Since then we have exchanged countless ideas and many emails in our search to increase our knowledge and share what we find. Csaba has kindly agreed to write a diary of life as a communicator in Hungary through my blog, so I will hand you over to him.
I believe I definitely should start this post with an introduction. Who am I? My name is Csaba Szücs, a Hungarian guy, who is especially interested in internal communications. You may encountered me on the internet – thanks to my blog, which I closed down permanently. I started that one more than 1 year ago but due to a workplace change I decided to finish it. (Also I learnt a lot along the way and I thought I could do much better than that one. I have plans regarding a new blog but that will focus solely on an internal communications toolkit.)
I worked for DENSO Manufacturing Hungary Ltd. for more than 3 years as an internal communications specialist.
In November, 2009 I saw an ad about an internal communications specialist position at Vodafone Hungary Ltd. I was very interested in the position because some months ago I watched a video on YouTube and I was amazed by what I saw. I applied for it and after two interviews they decided to appoint me.
After I heard the good news I discussed it with Rachel and I decided that I will contribute to her blog on a weekly basis. I believe my updates will be interesting for other internal communicators to read. What will I be posting about? In the beginning I have to focus on managing the intranet as it has to be refreshed. (I bet the social media tools, which can be used internally, will be important here in Hungary, too. On a global level the employees of the company use them more frequently.) So my posts will cover that and I also have several other tasks to do, which are not less important but they are simpler. The work will be definitely interesting because during the end of 2009 there were some changes. The Head of Internal Communications, who is also a new employee from January, will report to HR instead of Corporate Communications.
If you have some specific questions I am happy to answer to you if I can. You can comment, of course, I will read and react on them. If you want to contact me, I am an avid Twitter user and my username is: @ICsaba. Your feedback is appreciated – even if you express your disagreement! Csaba.
 The year ahead should prove an interesting one for communicators as we take into account the possible change in Government, ongoing economic situation and continue to strive for value for money at every turn.
What are the biggest challenges facing your organisation this year? How are you planning for them? I’ve been putting a plan in place for the next 12 months, looking at our key milestones and asking teams across the business for their important dates and projects to make sure the communication channels are full of what is relevant to our employees and keeping them aware of what’s happening. Documents like this are never fully completed as things always crop up but I find them useful.
Next week I will be going to Kingston University to meet with my fellow Post-Grad Internal Communications Management Diploma group as we are graduating. Pictured is the group at our final teaching session last year. Lots of us have remained in contact since handing in our dissertations in April 2009 through meeting face-to-face at various conferences and training courses, informally and virtually through Twitter and Facebook. I’ve noticed familiar names cropping up as speakers at events and am proud of how our group has progressed since finishing. It will be good to catch up.
What are your plans for this year? Happy new year all.
 The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of new changes, fresh challenges and lots of spreadsheets! As well as working full time I’ve moved house and started to plan my wedding so it’s all systems go on every front.
There was good news for my mentee Sarah Hodges at the Communicators in Business (CiB) awards a couple of weeks ago as she scooped Newcomer of the Year. I’m thrilled for her as she’s worked incredibly hard and is a deserved winner. She has just sat her Diploma of Proficiency in Internal Communications exam so we have our fingers crossed the result will be a good one, which I’m confident it will be.
Work-wise I met up with Verity Lowe last week who is a fellow PR Week ‘29 under 29’. We met at the PR Week photo shoot a few months back and are looking at the possibility of media training.
My two placement students, Sarah and Aurore have been doing a sterling job conducting communication audits. I wanted to gauge perceptions and get even further behind our employee survey results. One particular survey they ran was a sheet with photographs of the Exec team on. They went to mess rooms and asked our frontline employees who they recognised. In my experience visibility of the senior management team is always a pretty standard question in employee surveys and usually rates among the highest areas of concern. So it is important to understand the reasons behind the results. The audit findings provided a couple of surprises and we’re putting plans in place to continue providing opportunities for employees to meet with the Executive team face-to-face.
Sarah and Aurore have also been doing a fantastic job planning our first long service event. It is taking place in January and we’ve set up the process from scratch to honour our employees who have served the railway for many years. I’m hoping this will be a milestone event in our calendar and am pleased with the work they have done to date.
It doesn’t seem possible that we are nearing the end of this year. For me personally it’s been one of change and transition as I’ve changed job and moved house twice. I created my tag cloud (pictured) based on some of the topics that have been part of my year. It’s certainly been one of big changes in the communications world with many seminars being held on the challenges of delivering value on a budget and credit crunch communications. How will you remember 2009? As the year social media moved from ‘out-there’ to ‘in-here’? Did you start blogging, tweeting and linking in? I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the best and worst aspects of corporate communication in 2009 and what you will associate with this year – do get in touch.
After spotting a message on Twitter from someone (@felmundo) looking for recommendations on information to help him write an thesis on social media’s role in internal communication I offered to send him the bibliography from my dissertation.
I have now had six requests via direct messages on Twitter to share my bibliography so thought I’d upload it here in case it is of use to anyone else. The majority of the books and websites I read as part of my research for my post-graduate diploma in Internal Communications Management were provided to me by communications professionals and social media experts via Twitter and LinkedIn, so it seems appropriate to return the favour and share that information back. Hope you find it useful.
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Here is her post:
