Join the Internal Communications Camp in picturesque Paris on 9th October 2015!
For BOC, this year has been marked by some great Internal Communications and Employee Engagement events, including the Internal Communications Conference in London and the Internal Communications Camp in Barcelona. The speaker line-up at these events included names like Virgin Atlanctic Airways, Heineken, Elsevier, eBay, BBC,London Underground and many other global brands. Alex Kalomparis, Head of Internal Communications at Rolls-Royce, also shared his insights with the audience. imgZine got the opportunity to interview him and learn more about this exciting topic.
Rolls-Royce has a very personalised approach to its products. Do you also personalise your communication to employees?
We personalise and tailor our communications considerably as we have a diverse business structure. First of all, we have two divisions: Aerospace and Land & Sea. Within those divisions, there are a number of business units including: Defence, Civil aerospace, Nuclear, Marine and Power Systems. Secondly, we tailor for the different geographies. Our internal communications teams focus a lot of their time and effort to tailor any corporate communications and make it meaningful for their audience. Where we are not good at personalising communications is based on employee profiles, for example for the Traditionalists, Gen X and Millenials. We need to do more work in this area, but we do have some exciting plans!
Which elements do you think internal communications need to have to be successful?
It is important to have a good balance of digital and traditional channels, be a centre of excellence in change communications. You need to have clear and compelling content, a flexible approach to strategic business partnering, and communicators with generalist capabilities. By far the most important, in my view, is to have a strong focus on equipping leaders to become truly impactful communicators. The internal communications teams that get that last point right are the ones that are the most successful.
What new innovations are you looking to add to your existing internal communications strategy?
We are putting a strong focus on balancing our channel mix. If we have a good balance of traditional and digital channels, we can cater to all employee profiles across all ages and communications preferences. Currently, we are focusing on crowd-sourcing and social collaboration tools to allow peer-to-peer communications and also engage employees by providing them with the opportunity to provide input into our strategy.
What would the ideal internal communications situation be for Rolls-Royce 5 or 10 years from now?
Ultimately it is all about the employees. If we have leaders that are strong communicators, with an authentic voice, and we have equipped them to engage our employees, the ideal situation would be that we have employee sustainable engagement scores that are comparable to the highest performing companies. Being recognised for this achievement as a team would also be nice.
About the Author: Kelly Verdonk is Communications-Researcher at imgZine. She writes posts and reports on the latest internal & external communications trends, market research and customer insights.
