How do you retain, improve, grow and spread the knowledge kept in the minds of thousands of employees spread out across several continents?

The answer is it’s not that easy. But it’s a challenge that all global businesses have to tackle to ensure that they can survive, succeed and innovate in an unpredictable economic climate.

We all have knowledge and use it everyday, but within any large organisation it needs to be managed and nurtured carefully to make sure it is implemented to its fullest potential and not lost. It is important that employees understand the need to maintain and develop their knowledge, and how their contribution can support their business now and in the future.

We’ve been helping one of our clients, a global power company, to get to grips with the business issue of Knowledge Management. Their workforce includes many highly specialist experts who need to be able to easily pass their wisdom on to others in a way that can be accessed by colleagues anywhere in the world and kept for future employees.

We’re working with them on a strategy to engage their 50,000 employees, spread over 70 countries worldwide, in the concept of Knowledge Management through a sustained and measured communication plan. We’re also currently producing the campaign tools including a training package with a fully animated presentation to be used by key stakeholders to talk to their teams, and what we hope will be an extremely motivating awareness film.

The Knowledge Management techniques are relatively simple in themselves, but it is getting employees to understand the importance of them that is the issue. We believe that the answer lies in giving them a clear understanding of the benefits – which include fewer mistakes, less ‘reinventing the wheel’, faster processes and an obvious competitive advantage. After all when they all put their heads together who knows what they can achieve?

How important is an internal brand in supporting your business objectives? What does a strong internal brand really add to the everyday working life of your employees? And what are dangers /pitfalls that you need to avoid?

These questions and more have been buzzing around the minds of Loopers these last few months, as we have been supporting the development of a suitably robust internal brand strategy for the power sector of a global engineering company, which has recently gone through a restructure.

We have been helping to map out a process for developing the internal brand, including developing brand models to fit the needs of the organisation, conducting desk research to understand the key brand aspirations and developing materials to engage not only other communications professionals in the articulation of the brand, but also senior leaders.