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.

IC professionals from Alstom Power met us for ‘aperos’ at the Paparazzi bar in Baden, Switzerland this month. The event attracted around 30 people and gave some of us more office bound Loopers a chance to meet a selection of our ‘star’ clients in person over a drink and quality snacks. We even got them to compete against each other in a modified version of a flash game we’d recently made for them – modified to star our very own MD Kami Lamakan. It is always good to put a face to a voice and everyone enjoyed themselves, chatting until late evening!

BP’s lubricants business has, with our help, just launched an extensive Learning and Development toolkit entitled Gearshift. The toolkit is part of a global campaign designed to help managers to explain the importance of Learning and Development to their teams and to direct them to heart of the toolkit – the intranet site. The Loop was brought in from the start of the development and carried out a communication audit to establish the right messages and channels.

We went on to design and write content for the intranet portal and all of the tools to accompany it, which included a user-guide, presentation, posters, brochure, animation (see below) and video which was packaged into an easy to use, interactive CD-ROM. An enclosed user-guide explained to the managers how they could adapt the tools to suit their local audiences. The toolkit is now being distributed around the world.