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We all recognise the importance of meeting people face-to-face and last week I had the opportunity to do just that with lots of people I’m connected to via Twitter. I was invited to attend what was billed as “the first UK HR Tweet Up” (#ConnectingHR), an event organised by Courtenay HR and advertised via Twitter and LinkedIn. Its aim was to gather HR professionals and Communicators together to discuss all things social media and provide people with a chance to network.
It took place last Monday at the oddly named The Square Pig pub in Holborn, London, and was well attended. The room was packed with people all interested in cramming in as much knowledge (and arguably the free drink!) as possible during the session. @joningham and @garelaos hosted the event and the lively atmosphere generated some really interesting discussions. Highlights for me were chats with Abi Signorelli and Jon Weedon ‘in real life’ rather than virtually.
Another highlight was listening to an HR professional share their worries about social media (before confiding they had never actually used Twitter but ‘assume it is a negative thing’). I hope by the time they walked away I had removed some of the seeds of doubt. The key finding for me from the whole evening was amazement that people who haven’t tried something for themselves can form such strong views. I’d like to think I wouldn’t pass judgement on a car and ban it without taking it for a test drive first. It surprised me the amount of people with very strong views and concerns on social media tools, who hadn’t tested the water first themselves. I think events like this are a great idea to get those discussions and the creative juices flowing, so well done to Courtenay HR and I look forward to the next one.
This morning I went to a Communications Cafe breakfast event hosted by Sequel Group, at the  Soho hotel in London. Also known as an aspic seminar, it gathered comms professionals to discuss Real resilience in tough times and the ability to adapt to change.
Winston Churchill’s down-to-earth advice for those facing difficulty was: “If you’re going through hell, keep going”. Definitely advice being taken to heart by many organisations, not least by Eleanor Tweddell from Virgin Atlantic and Justine Stevenson from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO). They both gave presentations of how they weathered the storm that was 2009, the communications strategies they had in place and how 2010 is shaping up.
Eleanor talked about how Virgin celebrated its 25th anniversary last year as well as having pre-tax profits at a time when the aviation industry was at an all-time low. She shared how focusing on a back-to-basics communication strategy helped the company put the right information in front of the right audience at the right time.
More Foreign, Less Office was the title of Justine’s talk and referred to a change programme at the Foreign &Commonwealth Office. She described how they used an FCO Jam event to bring together employees all over the world in an on-line global conversation so they could all have the chance to take part in discussions about the FCO of the future.
As ever when comms professionals get together, topics spark the interest of people in the room and lead to further discussions. What I found really helpful was the opportunity to hear from people in the room about their experiences and what they’ve found works well. Conversations included employee surveys and credit crunch communications. I found both Justine and Eleanor’s presentations interesting and was left with lots of thoughts whizzing around my head on the train afterwards and all day.
Have you been to any interesting talks recently? Do let me know your thoughts, Rachel
 This week members of the press, bloggers, photographers and stakeholders are visiting some of our stations to see what’s happening behind the scenes to prepare for the opening of the East London Line section of London Overground.
As a company we have been giving our employees the chance to see the new stations first for themselves as a series of open days are being held for people from any department. This works particularly well in encouraging employees who wouldn’t ordinarily visit these stations to discover them first hand rather than just read about them through internal communication channels. It also means they can ask questions from people at the frontline and have the chance to work across functions while talking with employees they may not ordinarily encounter.
I went to the first open day at Shadwell station on Thursday and was shown around by some of our newest Customer Hosts (pictured). Their enthusiasm was infectious as they guided me around the platforms, ticket office and even up onto the roof. I was shown pretty much every last centimetre of the place by the team, who have an incredible sense of pride and were happy to pose for the photo on this page.
What is your policy on new products, offices, etc? Do you give your employees the chance to discover them first? The phrase ‘brand ambassadors’ is bandied about a lot but how does your organisation turn this into reality? I believe giving employees the opportunity to discover what is happening inside the company first is key. I’m interested to know your thoughts on what your company does. Do leave a comment and share your thoughts with other readers.
This week I finished media training my Executive team thanks to another informative training session from MS&L. I found the whole experience really interesting and enjoyed working through the scenarios and seeing how people react under pressure and communicate when put under the glare of a camera and spotlight. I have to say I particularly relished my role as a journalist grilling the Exec during a mock press conference! Thanks to Verity Lowe and Paul Maguire from MS&L for their innovative and thought-provoking training.
Today we had our informal ‘coffee and cakes’ briefing at Overground House for the Directors to update employees on the past month, which then gets shared to the frontline via line managers. With such rapid change going on with new trains, stations, employees etc I think we could fill daily briefings. What do you find is the best way of guiding your employees through change? I’m using a range of communication channels and ensuring there are consistent messages in all of them. It’s not rocket science but extremely important as I want to ensure our employees are getting a constant flow of information and have the ability to feed back their views.
Last night one of our employees, Peter Stoneley, was highly commended at the London Transport Awards in the Frontline employee of the year category. This is such good news as he does a fantastic job at Bushey station and we often receive letters from happy customers praising his hard work, so it really is a well deserved award. I’m looking for more ways we can promote the brilliant job our employees do and see the value in awards like these.
Today was also the final day of LOROL’s annual employee survey, View Point. I extended it by a week and was pleased to get back more responses than last year’s survey. I’m looking forward to seeing the results and creating a plan of action based on the feedback. Hope you have good weekends, Rachel.
Supporting fledging Communications and PR professionals is extremely important and I’m in touch with and supporting various students to encourage them and help showcase their opinions and insights. The post below is written by Sarah Whyte who is studying the use of social media particularly for crisis communication. Please do share your thoughts with her, Rachel.
Hello, my name is Sarah Whyte and I am a final year PR student at Bournemouth University. I had the pleasure of working with Rachel while on my placement year at Tube Lines and she has been kind enough to allow me to write for her blog.
While studying at the PR degree at Bournemouth I have been fortunate enough to get involved in numerous “real life” scenarios which include, producing a live campaign for a South West PR company, developing a working website , designing a magazine spread and most recently co-writing an article for Behind the Spin.
The article, which focuses on the public perception of Gordon Brown, was developed out of an assignment for our politics module and was co-written by another student and myself. Have a look at the very topical Politics issue of Behind the Spin and feel free to express your views on all the published articles.
Dissertation
Now as I am in my final year I have to submit a dissertation as part of my degree. Like many PR students up and down the country, I have chosen to do mine on the growing use of social media with a focus on the use of social media and crisis communications.
While online crisis communications has been practised and analysed for a few years now, the use of social media as a tool for disseminating information in a crisis has not been extensively explored. What I propose to do is look at the advantages and disadvantages of using social media in times of crisis. Through this dissertation I would like to gain a more thorough understanding of how social media can be used within crisis communications.
Best practice crisis communication
One crisis that, as PR students, we are taught is an example of best practise is the 1982 Tylenol recall. The fast, controlled and honest response shown by Johnson and Johnson managed to save a potentially company ruining incident from permanently tarnishing Johnson and Johnson. In crisis management speed has always played an essential part, but should speed be the most important aspect of crisis management or are there more important features that need to be considered? With so many people online and a growing amount stating that it is the place where they first find out about issues, are the organisations that don’t use social media leaving key stakeholders in the lurch or are they being responsible by using more traditional methods of communication?
What do you think?
I would love to hear some professional views so if you have any comments or insights about the use of social media and crisis communications then please contact me at sarahj.whyte@yahoo.co.uk. I also have a blog which I will use to update people on the progress of my dissertation and share my general musings about PR.
Post author: Sarah Whyte
Csaba continues his diary of an internal communicator at Vodafone in Hungary…
As I mentioned in my previous post we use bit.ly to shorten the URLs, which we place into the newsletter. After the first time we used it something turned out. Colleagues in the shops, who are dealing with customers do not have access to the internet – or have very limited access. That’s why they were unable to open the shortened URLs. Fortunately, after we were informed about the issue we managed to resolve it within an hour. (I wanted to share this little story to remind you all that there is always something which you can’t foresee.)
Flips are on their way
During a discussion I talked about Flip to my superior and shared with him how they are tiny cameras being used by internal communicators abroad. As it turned out he knew what I was talking about because he pulled out one from his bag. He received it as a gift while he was working for his previous employer so I didn’t need to persuade him to invest into these cameras. Soon we will order them and after that every unit / department will receive one.
Intranet re-brand: Phase 2
Simplicity is among our core corporate values so our intranet needs to be modified too. Technical and design changes were made – simplified colour palette, new icons, buttons and so on. Major changes happened during one weekend so it was interesting to see the new one. I also started to simplify things on the intranet but it’s not as easy as ABC. Tiny tasks – uploading content, overwriting files on the server, changing banners (these are not ads) are time-consuming ones and distract me from planning a new structure, which would serve the colleagues better.
Vodafone Tube
One of my recent tasks has been to create some pages and portlets for images which were made during several company related events in the past. We do not have anything like flickr but at least the image gallery portlets are easy to create and use. I also needed to upload the video clips sp I suggested Vodafone Tube for that purpose. Yes, we have something like YouTube but – of course – it is a far cry from it. I have already uploaded two of our videos – it works great, however that also quite time-consuming to do. I suppose I will work on that project during the following weeks.
I believe these topics from the previous fortnight are quite interesting to share with you all and look forward to hearing any thoughts or comments you may have, Csaba.
Post author: Csaba Szucs
Last night I went to a Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) Inside event to hear John Smythe talking a bout his book “The CEO, Chief Engagement Officer, Turning Hierarchy Upside Down to Drive Performance” and his upcoming book on employee engagement.
It was the first time I’d been to a CIPR Inside evening and I was glad to be among 20 comms professionals gathered in Piccadilly to hear John speak. He gave a whistle-stop tour through his current book and pulled out key learning points, which led to discussions on employee engagement in action and what exactly everyone means by the term. What stood out for me was the idea of CEOs no longer being ‘Gods’ but ‘Guides’ and how communication and engagement shouldn’t be ‘egotainment’ for senior leaders, but a sense of shared power and decision making.
What does it mean?
John said that in his opinion engagement means: “A culture of distributed leadership which enables people at work to liberate their creativity to deliver surprisingly good results for their institution and themselves.” I’ve been thinking about that statement and I wonder how it plays out in reality. Do you know of any organisations which can say hand on heart they have reached that goal? He also described a healthy culture as being “one where you tell people when things are s***.” Can’t quite imagine that word making it through corporate IT systems, but you get the meaning.
I was particularly interested by the myths around communicating change and engagement strategies as John said there is a false perception that “frontline employees won’t understand strategy as they are so focused on operational matters”. This then led to a discussion about this myth and how to make connections with people across organisations and involve them in what is happening. What do you think? What’s your experience?
Who owns engagement?
In the questions and answers session following his talk the topic of who ‘owns’ employee engagement was raised. This included thoughts about whether it is an HR or Communications issue, whether engagement is a ‘function’ or should in fact be business as usual, embedded into strategy and part of the core business thinking. It was good to meet new people and share stories about how theories actually translate in real life and what does and doesn’t appear to work.
Work-wise, I’m currently into the third week of our annual employee survey and am looking forward to seeing what the results are. Yesterday I met up with Jenni Wheller from The Blue Ballroom who filmed me talking about communicating with remote workforces and I also wrote an article for a magazine PR students at Greenwich University are putting together. If you want to help them out see www.twitter.com/greenwichprnews
One of my course tutors at Kingston Uni/Capita Internal Communications Management course, Jenny Davenport from People in Business got in touch this week and asked me to talk with the current students in April during their teaching sessions. I remember hearing from a past pupil during my studying and found it helpful to be able to ask questions about the dissertation so I’m hoping my session will be helpful for them. Following my chat with Jenny we decided to set up an alumni group on LinkedIn for past students to have another way of keeping in touch with other, so we made that live.
Thank you to everyone who has emailed me via my blog over the past few weeks asking questions about certain topics, my advice on issues and to be put in touch with some of the people I’ve met. I’m always interested to hear what people think when they read what I’ve written, so do keep in touch, Rachel.
This week Csaba is continuing his weekly diary of life as an internal communicator in Hungary and sharing his experience via my blog. Here he looks back on the past week and reveals what kept him busy this week and how he has been discovering ways of making life easier through measurement.
In the beginning of the week I started to work on the restructuring of the homepage of our intranet. The first steps covered only deleting or removing certain links, which were there for ages so to speak. The issue was that several images were used as links and because of that the homepage was quite crowded. So I removed those images and created the links in an appropriate way. In some cases I used images, however I created new and smaller ones. After that I reorganised the portlets on the homepage so that the user can avoid scrolling in the future. By the way I intend to recreate the homepage according to those seven roles, which I read about earlier on the website of Step Two Designs.
During the week I dealt with several smaller tasks covering updating content, changing forms, reorganising links and so on. These tasks are not so interesting but at least you can see the result of your work immediately so to speak. In the meantime I wrote down every idea, which came to my mind during the routine work. For example, I noted that we should use an RSS portlet to show the recent press releases to the internal audience, too. Unfortunately, our press releases do not have an RSS feed yet so I sent an email to the responsible ones to ask them to manage that if it is possible.
I must mention the following one. My superior asked me to create a survey – using our online survey tool -, which will be our virtual opinion box in the future. Feedback of the colleagues is important an we need a tool, which can be used easily. I prepared it but I have to do some minor tasks regarding that during the next week. For example, placing a link on the homepage and so on.
As I suppose some of you using a newsletter to inform colleagues about the latest news regarding the company. We also do so via an online weekly one. Although, we use it only to direct colleagues to the intranet. So the newsletter, which we send out via email contains only titles and short sentences. Titles are direct links to the real content. I suggested that we should use bit.ly so that we can measure, which one is interesting for the colleagues. It works great. I must mention that my idea came after I read the post of Wedge about Using URL shorteners for your intranet. Although, he covered a slightly different topic in his post but I recognised that we also could measure the efficiently of our newsletter thanks to that one.
Post author: Csaba Szucs
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.
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