Putting best practices into practice: new IABC research highlights four key challenges in corporate communication Our panel discusses how those scenarios play out in real life

Communication World, July-August, 2005

Best-in-class employee communication addresses four business-critical challenges ranging from motivation to measurement. That's according to a new IABC Research Foundation study conducted by Right Management Consultants. Sounds good in theory, but how does it work in practice? And how can communication help bring employees in line with business strategy? Earlier this year, the IABC Research Foundation convened a panel of top communication executives to find out. Here is the report from that discussion.

Moderator: What business strategy would you say has been implemented effectively throughout your organization?

John Santoro: Pfizer went through two integrations in the past five years and effectively doubled our sales inside of five years. If you look at the internal reviews, generally speaking, people feel that they're treated fairly, that they're part of the company and that things have gone reasonably well--probably better than expected. As you probably know, the first integration between Pfizer and the member companies started off with a hostile takeover. But we really worked hard to preserve a very honest and candid line of communication, including saying up front that this was not a merger of equals and that Pfizer was going to be the overriding partner. We made it clear that if you want to stay in the neighborhood, you want to land with Pfizer. This was a hard message for employees. At first people had unrealistic expectations, and it was only after those expectations were managed that people recovered and started working for the resurrection of the company. There was a grassroots effort by colleagues who understood that the future of the company was at stake. So, in a sense, the real integration emanated from the bottom up.

Judith Jones: At The New York Times Company, we have an employee profile that's typical of a newspaper population: They're iconoclastic. They're not interested in being part of the room; they're not there to sing "Kumbaya" and hold hands. Our people--whether they work in any of our 16 regional newspapers, or at the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe or The New York Times, or our television or radio stations--are ultimately on the same page. They don't see their work as being about just the numbers. It has to do with enhancing society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment, and that is very big. So we've extended our brand, but we have not changed who we are and why we are here: excellent journalism. Now we deliver it in multiple media, but the core business will never change.

Moderator: In these days of mergers, outsourcing and distributed workforces, how do you motivate all those hard-to-reach frontline employees to align with the business strategy? Rob Hallam: When outsourcing is a big part of your business, it's a real challenge. You've got to respect the host company's culture, but you've also got to make sure that employees understand what's important to your company. Pitney Bowes recently won an outsourcing contract with Bank of America [BofA], which is a huge account that presented an interesting systems challenge. Suddenly we had all of these employees--most of whom are hourly and formerly associated with another BofA vendor--coming on board. We created an orientation to facilitate that integration, and next we're going to ask leaders to finish the sentence "Pitney Bowes is...." We've got to make sure they understand our strategic architecture and how it applies to them and their work.

Moderator: How do you avoid message overload?

Nancy Redmond: Sometimes there are subcultures within an organization that need to communicate their own way. For example, Pepperidge Farm has eight manufacturing facilities all over the U.S., and their employees, most of them hourly, make up a big part of our workforce. Their engagement is really important to our business, but their focus is mostly local. Each plant has its own culture to some degree--which allows them to have a very engaged population. As long as they're aligned with the values and goals of the company, you want to let them continue doing this. Otherwise, you can have so many levels of messages spinning around that people can't process them all. As communicators, the challenge is to figure out what is relevant and useful both for the company and for the people.

Ray Stevens: Staples' biggest challenge is also our biggest opportunity. It's consistency, consistency, consistency in communication, just like it's location, location, location in real estate. You lead the challenge of millions of customer interactions a day and want every single one to be a quick, hassle-free process. How does that happen each and every time in New York, California, the U.K. and Germany? We've done a lot of work toward that. We changed our corporate mission statement and retooled our values accordingly. We're still going through that process to make sure everybody understands the importance of consistency.