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The most successful businesses are those with the most open employee communications. Simon Ward explains how you can strengthen staff engagement and morale as your business grows through a comprehensive internal comms strategy.
It’s good to talkA flat hierarchy with good communication across the organisation is easy to manage when you’re a small company. And it’s desirable. Morale and work output suffer when you feel you’re being treated like a mushroom.
The difficulty comes when your organisation grows. As you increase in size – and expand across various sites – regular on-site team meetings become unwieldy and impractical. It’s easy for operations to silo and people to become blinkered to what’s happening outside their immediate environment.
We’ve grown from a few dozen people five years ago to over 550 people now. A lot of this expansion has been in the past two years, and it was clear the existing internal comms strategy would soon become woefully inadequate.We’ve found there isn’t one single way of cultivating engagement and ensuring knowledge is shared: we have to use multiple channels to ensure no-one is missed. There are the obvious, of course: social media team pages where account members share ideas that motivate others; various cross-site social and sporting activities, which help to break down silos.
But we’ve also recently introduced the idea of largescreen videoconferencing across the entire organisation, where everyone can question me directly about the direction the company and put forward suggestions.We’ve also launched a rewards portal that features benefits and more light-hearted communicatons about the business (two-thirds of employees signed up on the first day). We also join schemes that enable employees from different departments to spend a day on joint charity projects.
I’m also told we’re about to run an inter-site Mario Kart tournament over the net.
The ideal is that the employee-run channels inspire constant willing engagement, but peaks and troughs are inevitable. Therefore, the channels have to be managed. We’ve recently expanded our comms team, and they work very closely with HR to ensure that all activity is working to inform and inspire those about areas of the company they’re not directly involved in.
As we continue to grow, the challenge will only become greater. But the key is never to let up and ensure internal comms remains a constant priority.”Until next time
Simon Ward
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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Simon Ward explains how a day can make a big difference to marketers – especially when it’s dedicated to innovation.
I’ve always been immersed in technology. As CEO of SP Group’s digital arm, I was at the cutting edge of what was on the face of it a very traditional industry – printing.
At ITG, our core offering is based around automation technology, and we’ve just taken our first steps into the big data arena, with our recent addition of ITG Creator.
But even people who run technology companies can struggle to keep up with every development – the time investment can be daunting, especially as not every invention will make it off the drawing board.
Pace of change in technology
It took decades for telephones to reach 50% of the population. It took five years for mobiles to achieve the same penetration. Innovation is not only getting faster, so is its adoption.
Companies with a competitive technology edge are better placed to attract customers than those who are baffled by technology. But there are so many areas of innovation out there, how is a marketer to find the time to keep up with them all?
We decided to help.
Over the past week, our offices have been teaming with clients. This was an innovation for us – generally we only entertain one or two clients at a time. However, over 140 clients, most of them marketers, visited our offices together, but it wasn’t just to see us. We’d invited some guests.
An appetite for innovation
Augmented reality, 3D printing, virtual reality, 360 degree cameras, interactive video, HyperSound technology – there are a huge number of technologies designed to improve retail customer engagement. We sought out the best, and invited their keepers to demo them for our clients.
Marketers from Heineken, Puma, Tesco, Boots, Sainsbury’s and numerous other retailers and brands moved from area to area, scrutinising innovation after innovation, interrogating the technology, and putting faces to buzzwords.
It’s not the most obvious tactic for a technology company, to showcase other people’s products alongside your own. But building a partnership with your clients is about more than simply selling your wares – it involves providing added value, just as they aim to give added value to their customers.
It was an exceptionally successful day, eliciting numerous positive comments. But perhaps the most satisfying were from those who said, “I knew about this technology, but until I saw the demo I didn’t realise it was for us.”
This shows that even marketers who keep up with technological innovations rarely have the time to delve deeply enough to see all the angles. Even when you attend technology exhibitions, you often spend a lot longer tracking down items of interest than you do experiencing the innovations.
A single day spent looking at a dozen specially selected technologies, with the ability to question experts in a relaxed and engaging environment, can give you a significant catch-up.
It’s certainly something we’ll be doing again.
Until next time
Simon Ward
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.
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In every company there are disagreements. It wouldn’t be healthy to employ people who agree with you on everything. You need people who not only come up with their own ideas, but who question yours.
It’s good to draw your talent from different pools: people who have different experiences and approaches to issues. Sometimes they can show you an angle you haven’t considered, and as a CEO you have to be prepared to say, “you know, you may have a point.”
In this instance, however, I’m sure that I’m absolutely in the right. I don’t care what my fellow board members and marketing department say. They’re wrong, I’m right.
There is absolutely no way I should be sitting here writing a blog about winning an Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Blowing my own trumpet
It’s really good to get it out there, they say. Read the citation. It talks about our passion for innovative technologies, pioneering new approaches, how we help marketing departments operate more efficiently. We can’t bury that under the carpet.
No, I tell them. It sounds like I’m blowing my own trumpet, and people don’t like that. And we should listen to the people.
Then I get the long faces. Can’t you just slip it in somewhere – mention it in passing?
How do you mention something like that in passing? Spent a joyous weekend painting the shed and polishing my Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
But it’s not about you. It’s the company, the people who work with you. Think how good they feel knowing that Inspired Thinking Group’s achievements are being recognised.
And there they have me a little bit. That damned new angle. Because they’re right, of course. The nice people who award these things like to pick out individuals, as if everything good about a company comes from one person.
Entrepreneur of the Year award
But every CEO knows that’s not the case. Yes, you can set the course of the ship, but without top quality engineers stoking the engines, skilled navigators adjusting the course to steer you through the turbulence, and team players across the vessel striving in a common cause, no amount of good ideas are going to come to anything. Enterprise doesn’t stand alone.
So the truth is, the people who work for ITG have just won me an Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and publicly thanking them for all their hard work and dedication does, after all, seem a pretty reasonable topic for a blog.
Until next time…
About Simon Ward
Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.
Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein