Employee Communications

Project Year: 2015

The Challenge

GRU was struggling with employee engagement. The utility had gone through drastic leadership restructuring, and much of its internal culture was characterized by negative perceptions, lack of engagement, and siloed groups struggling to coordinate.

They attempted to solve the problem by updating internal communication procedures, including an attempt to introduce more modern corporate communication platforms such as Yammer. Adoption was critically low and employees expressed little enthusiasm for similar solutions.

The communication team was sending a daily email summarizing media mentions of the utility. While the email was structured manually and contained only summaries of GRU media appearances, employees seemed to engage with it more than with other mediums.

Approach

I conducted an assessment of the internal communication problem to understand:

• The existing communication protocols
• What went wrong with the introduction of new platforms
• The makeup and structure of the employee base

My analysis revealed two important findings: 1) the average age of GRU’s employee base was above 45 and 2) employees primarily used email to communicate with each other and stay informed about company news.

In working to resolve the wider communication problem, I decided to optimize the daily media mentions email as the primary source of internal information sharing. This was accomplished in several steps:

1. Introduced an automated email marketing platform for internal use
2. Developed a newspaper template for the daily email:
   • I chose this template because it is a news medium the majority of the employees had an existing, deep familiarity with
   • The structure included a cover story, media mentions, major team announcements, employee praises, and a feedback form.
3. Trained communication interns to source internal stories, update and deploy “The GRU Daily”

Impact

• The GRU Daily reached an 80% engagement rate within the first month of its existence
• Within two months, employees started submitting news and announcements to the Daily for wider distribution
• Internal communication improved significantly (>40%) across multiple metrics
• the Daily created a bidirectional information-sharing modality for internal communication (see Communicative Constitution of Organizations Theory)

I worked as a marketing and communication specialist leading a variety of internal, external, and crisis communication projects.