The Melcrum Blog

No bystanders allowed

2009-11-11T15:55:13+00:00

by Claire Leheny, Content Development, North America

If you’re not ready to roll up your sleeves, get involved, and challenge assumptions, then you should skip the upcoming Melcrum Employee Engagement conference, held in Atlanta, February 23-25, 2010.

From a kick-off that demands your total attention to our ever-popular roundtables to interactive sessions, the program doesn’t just talk about engagement, it lives it.

Let’s take a closer look:

Involvement
We’ve custom-built an “Engagement Experience” with Tim McCleary, one of Melcrum’s most highly rated speakers. In Part I, Tim asks you to consider the many – and sometimes competing – definitions of engagement. After a hands-on learning exercise (those of you who were with us in Chicago at the Summit will remember that Tim gets all your senses firing!), you’ll have a framework for what engagement means to for your organization and a plan for getting the most out of the conference. In Parts II and III, Tim sets you for success upon your return to the office.

Social media
If there’s no business reason for social media, then it’s just a collection of really neat tools. Let Francesca Karpel of NetApp show you how the organization built an engine for collaboration and brand engagement. This session is about getting results through the use of social media. No theorizing or wishful thinking – it’s the nuts-and-bolts of setting up a global, online community.

Story-telling
If you’re like me and once considered story-telling to be a “soft” topic, one that didn’t have a place in these hard-edged and turbulent times, then get ready to be proven wrong.

First, Terry McKenzie, formerly of SunMicrosystems and current partner at Fibonacci Design Group, leads a workshop on the power of story-telling and presentation. Attend this workshop and walk away with the tools you need to make connections through stories and ensure your message has impact.

Then, Stacey Clark Ohara of Juniper Networks outlines how the business invested in story-telling as a means to more effectively onboard new employees and articulate its culture.

New CEO – No Problem
Mergers, market turmoil, and constant changes. And your CEO is the “strong and silent” type. Not an ideal scenario. Learn from Susan Nelson of Exterran how she created opportunities for the new leader to connect with their 10,000+ global workforce.

Financial Fallout brings Engagement Opportunities
Remember the Wall Street of hefty paychecks, bigger bonuses and lots of success to go around? Whatever engagement cracks there may have been were easily papered over with dollar bills. Craig Smith of UBS reveals how major investment banks are re-thinking what engagement and loyalty should look like in a post-fallout era.

Finally – we want to recognize YOU. That’s right, we’re running our first-ever engagement awards at this event. This is not about glossy brochures and snappy headlines. We’re looking for submissions of engagement efforts that brought about business improvement. Find out more here.

A new breed of communication focused CEOs

2009-11-10T11:05:58+00:00

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

I often ask myself how seriously high-profile executives take communications. On one side of the mahogany boardroom table there are those business owners whose complete lack of awareness and communication skills has brought their company to the verge of collapse. Take Gerald Ratner, former chief executive of the now renamed British jewellery company Ratners Group who achieved fame after making a speech in which he jokingly referred to his company’s profits as “c***” and remarked that some of the earrings he then sold were “cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long”. Immediately following his gaff Ratner watched as his business’s value plummeted by £500 million.

Read the latest article on the Internal Comms Hub on how to review your communication capabilities - five of the worst communication offenses and how to avoid them.

Fortunately, however on the opposite side of the table sit those execs that have learned from his and the mistakes of others and that have the foresight and vision to realise that a breakdown in internal communication can lead to disastrous consequences. Stephen Martin, CEO of UK construction company Clugstons and guest speaker at the recent SCM summit in October, for example, knew that he had to take evasive action to stop his business from declining. Employee morale was at rock bottom, management simply weren’t listening and, as a result, contracts were not being won and the money wasn’t coming in. So he put his professional reputation on the line and decided to go undercover and find out what the real issues were, all of which was documented on the recent Channel 4 series the Undercover Boss.

I met another of this new breed of comms savvy execs at the launch of the new Sony Ericsson Xperia X2 business phone last night. A device exclusively available at Vodafone, my friends tell me. And she, along with Martin assured me that communication is “the most important element there is in business”.

“Always being the last to know and not being guided or communicated to when there are huge changes going on can be one of the worst things to happen if you’re an employee,” says Karen Brady, the recently departed managing director of Birmingham City Football Club and now non-executive director of Sport England and the England 2018 World Cup bid, Mothercare and, ironically Channel 4 television. “On some occasions my staff were the last to know at Birmingham City,” she added.

From her early career at advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, Brady moved to the London Broadcasting Company (LBC) where she managed an account for publisher and now ex Birmingham City owner David Sullivan, who following encouragement by Brady, spent more than £2m on advertising in just six months. At the age of just 23 Bra then famously spotted an advert for the sale of the football club and persuaded Sullivan to buy it and let her run it. Her business acumen has made her a wealthy woman, however she says it has been her belief in “talking and communicating openly and honestly” that has got her to where she is today.

“It’s very important to always talk with your staff. To manage a team effectively you have to keep an open dialogue, an open means of communication. What you communicate internally should be the same and you communicate externally and I’ve always believed that.”

Her communication mantra as well as her skills will soon be put to the public test in the forthcoming sixth series of the BBC’s Apprentice where she has recently replaced the stern and steadfast Margaret Mountford as one of Sir Alan Sugar’s two chief advisors.

But will the next series of The Apprentice be as “backstabbing” as the last where, in my view, communication often broke down between contestants as they threw barrage upon barrage of insults and personal attacks on one another in order to survive another week on the show and become Sir Alan’s new protégé?

“We’re still filming so I can’t say that much but we are really trying to get across to the contestants that communication between the two sub teams is crucial in learning how to manage and become a good manager,” she says.

I’m sure there are more executives like Brady and Martin out there. Now all I have to do is find them.

Leadership 2.0: 10 ways a CEO should communicate to employees

2009-10-22T12:36:47+01:00

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

Stephen Martin, CEO of Clugston Group and star of hit Channel four television program 'Undercover Boss', delivered an inspirational speech at last week's Melcrum Strategic Communication Management Summit in London, Europe’s largest annual gathering of senior communication professionals.

"The tough times are far from over and we must react now by communicating far more effectively with our employees,” said Martin. Now is the time for leadership 2.0!

Here are his 10 tips on how CEO’s should communicate to employees during and after a recession:

Communicate, communicate, communicate: Communicate more regularly then ever before.
Always be seen by employees – leave your ivory tower and listen to what frontline employees have to say.
Inform widely and get large-scale opinion form employees.
Eliminate the culture of executives in suits and workers in overalls/uniform – this puts employees off and communication is immediately lost.
Brown bag lunches – my door is always open and I regularly have lunch with my employees but only when it suits them.
Refresh your communications as often as possible.
Ask and consult your employees at all times – go around the office/construction site/shop floor and ask all of them what they think.
Demonstrate you have listened and stick to your promises.
Talk to them at a time that suits them.
Invest in training of frontline supervisors and managers – if you don’t nothing will change.

SCM summit London 2009: The 10 communication commandments

2009-10-20T14:31:23+01:00

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

Vivienne Huybrecht, general manager group communication at KBC Group gave a fascinating insight into her tumultuous year at one of Belgium’s largest financial institutions at this morning's 8th annual Melcrum Strategic Communication Management Summit at London’s Tower Hotel.

Vivienne wasn’t just in charge of internal communications, when the financial crisis hit KBC faster and harder than anyone could ever have predicted she was also charged with looking after every aspect of external communications and media relations – a huge task for anyone but somehow she managed it and survived. Mainly, she told me, because of her sporty nature and her motto of never giving up. Look out for a quick video interview in the next few days.

At the height of the storm she was receiving more than 100 phone calls from journalists day and night, saw KBC’s share price plummet and to top it all off her chief executive had a heart attack in May and had to stand down. It was sobering stuff and one of the best internal communication stories I have ever heard.

One of the best elements of the presentation was her 10 communication commandments during a crisis. Here they are:

Visible leadership – staff should be able to see the whites of their eyes
Be honest and open at all times
Tell it like it is
Be confident!
New CEO mantra – overperform and under promise
Be clear and keep it simple
Move fast and decisively
Make no promises about the future unless you can achieve them with absolute certainty
Use face-to-face communications as much as possible
Never give up

Living in the clouds: Is this the future of comms?

2009-10-12T17:42:17+01:00

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

As business and the world around us continues to evolve and speed up we constantly need to adapt to our surroundings, more so now of course as companies across the globe cut back, trim budgets and get used to life in a long-term recession.

So what should they do? I’m sure if everyone knew the answer they’d have done it by now. But it only takes one and the rest will follow. The one in this case being global services firm Rentokill that is switching all its 35,000 employees in 50 countries from 180 different email domains and 40 mail systems to ‘cloud based email’ (email that sits within a virtual online server and that is managed by a cloud service provider such as Google or Yahoo) provider Google Apps by 2010 savings them millions in costs and at the same time encouraging all of its employees to use a far simpler, more integrated and collaborative set of tools with which I’m sure the majority are already familiar. We all know how to use Google effectively; we don’t all know how to use Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook.

Google Apps is a service from our friends at Google that allows you to use custom domain names with several Google products featuring various Web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, and Docs. The standard edition is free and offers the same amount of storage as regular Gmail accounts. The Premier Edition, which offers 25 GB of email storage, is around US$50 or $33 per year, per account.

This could well turn out to be an internal communication masterstroke both in terms of cost but also by bringing every employee closer together onto one system allowing them to share calendar information, chat live to one another, and have access to email translation and video.

Not only that the system will also provide email access to 20,000 regular PC users, as well as 15,000 on-the-road staff. The remote workers, who did not originally have a company email account, will now be able to access Google mail from any internet-connected device such as a PDA, iPhone or home computer.

Are any of the businesses you work for/with considering this or have they already switched over? Let me know either on email: james.bennett@melcrum.com, on Melcrum Communicators' network on Linked In that has 2,500 active users or tweet us on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you!