We caught a wave!

Go on, Jenny... give us a Wave

Hot on the heels of some lesser awards nonsense in America last night, we held our own annual awards today. Called the “Wave Awards” (we deal with a lot of waves - gamma, beta, alpha… and we’re near the sea) it’s seen as one of the highlights of the calendar by many.

That’s not comms hyperbole, either - in most meetings I’ve attended around the business in the past few weeks, the announcement of the winners has been a hot topic of conversation. It’s a reminder that appreciating people, and celebrating their achievements, is a genuinely important part of what any business does.

Even better than that (from my point of view at least) is that the team I’m part of won one of the awards. Under the banner of “cultural innovation” the comms function put forward the work we’d done throughout lockdown to ensure the 10,000-plus people in our workforce were kept informed of what the business was doing. We’d identified early doors that the traditional methods (intranet, newspaper, all-hands briefs) just weren’t going to cut it, post-Covid-19. So, like many comms providers across the planet, it meant a wholesale change to the way we delivered those communications was needed.

Buoyed by some remarkable advances in IT provision, some amazing collaboration with colleagues and more than a soupçon of genuine good will and faith, we ended 2020 providing communications in ways we’d assumed our organisation would never countenance.

And it was that success that was recognised today. I’d imagine there’s nothing particularly unique about this story - as I’ve already suggested, we reacted in much the same way as thousands of other teams. But it feels right to share some of those innovations and the thinking behind them.

gov.uk: As a government led organisation, we don’t have a website of our own, but we do have a section of gov.uk, parts of which we re-appropriated to allow staff without access to our network the ability to keep up with events. We had always had an “employee area” set aside for messages to the troops, but it had always sat unloved in the background. Bringing it front and centre meant we could continue to supply the information people needed as everyone tried to figure out the next steps.

Social media: We’d always used Facebook as “mainly for our own staff” but with only limited success. With no access to information, people came looking for it, and we were able to oblige.

Video: Our CEO wanted to get messages out to staff on a weekly basis, so filmed himself at home with his phone. These short messages were then uploaded by us onto our intranet as would normally be the case, but also to Facebook and YouTube, vastly increasing their reach. What we’d always said - that video would be far more successful if we could just get it onto people’s phones - came to pass. These videos also had a positive effect on the rest of the business, who seemed to suddenly all realise that they too had the means to create video sitting in their pockets, with sometimes amazing results.

Whatsapp: All of a sudden, people had to “get” WhatsApp or get left behind. Far more than Skype messaging, WhatsApp became the tool of choice for quick and simple interdepartmental discussion. For the first time since I started working in our Warrington offices, I felt fully connected to my colleagues in Cumbria. And not just because of WhatsApp…

MS Teams: We all know about this, of course - where would our Friday night family quizzes be without such technology? But because our IT department moved so quickly getting MS Teams set up to run effectively for the business, as a comms function we were able to explore its wider usage - leading to some fantastic opportunities for the business, which included…

Business Brief: Our replacement briefing for senior managers, on ice for months due to insufficient tech, suddenly became a real proposition. You can read more about it here.

Softened messaging: Who’d have thought we’d ever start our internal messaging asking how the reader felt? But we did - existing email groups came into their own, allowing us to help the business understand itself a bit better through targeted messages explaining some of the context behind decisions and making sure that staff were looking after each other.

And finally, some vindication - two of our most popular channels came into their own, and showed that yes, perhaps the internal comms team do know what they’re talking about. Both our intranet and our in-house newspaper had been revamped in recent years with top-down rethinks. The intranet was given a news orientated front end which allowed for the news agenda to be driven by the comms team, rather than whatever came in last - with a series of tabbed pages chunking information into relevant sections. The traditional newspaper was re-born as a digital-first publication with the remit of explaining the business through graphics and imagery. Both were able to work effectively during the darkest days of the pandemic, keeping staff informed and, in the case of the newspaper, not only informing but creating a lasting record of 2020.

As you might imagine, I’m very proud of the people I work with and the things we’ve achieved in the past year. I’m looking forward to progressing this work so it can take us into a post-Covid-19 world and keep that engaging content going.