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.

It’s good to know that Britain’s other ‘PM’, Lord Peter Mandleson, puts a high value on internal communication and even makes employee engagement central to his strategies for bringing the country out of recession.

The Secretary of State has written the foreword to a report commissioned by the UK government entitled ‘Engaging for Success’ which looks at the many benefits to business of a happy workforce.

He says, ‘This timely Report sets out for the first time the evidence that underpins what we all know intuitively, which is that only organisations that truly engage and inspire their employees produce world class levels of innovation, productivity and performance’.

And the in depth research, carried out over a period of eight months and examining hundreds of cases, categorically endorses the theory that employees who feel valued and listened to will be motivated and perform better. The report says that ‘employee engagement is the difference that makes the difference – and could make all the difference as we face the realities of globalised competition’. It cites Tesco, Google and O2 amongst the extremely successful companies whose achievements can be directly linked to employing people that feel informed, appreciated and respected, and urges other companies to follow their example.

It’s an eye opening read and of great value to Senior Leaders and Communicators alike. The report can be found at: http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file52215.pdf

Quotes © The Crown

A simple but compelling way to explain the business’s journey from the beginning through to the prize at the end. Our client, the Marine business in a global engineering company, is at an exciting point in its history – and growing. However it needs to change its business structure fundamentally. The senior leadership has a clear strategy to achieve this – and happily they’ve asked us to assist. Our job is to create the tools and capability to help local managers engage their teams. Their workforce needs not only to understand the strategy but, importantly, be able to deliver it. Easier said than done, when the workforce is very mobile, spread over 30 countries and many are new to the business.

Our approach is to create a ‘story’ for the strategy – a simple but compelling way to explain the business’ journey from the beginning through to the prize at the end. This approach helps to keep the message consistent and makes it easy to understand. As well as defining this ‘story’ we’re creating a ‘story box’ tool kit and running training courses to help managers deliver the messages face-to-face with their employees.