The wonderful wizard of OS

 

Originally it was going to be called "Our Sledge-afield"

One of the things we wanted to do when we revamped our internal newspaper a couple of years ago was broaden its appeal, and make it useful.

The previous newspaper had become a bit of an anachronism – the standard “tabloid newspaper + PDF on the intranet” approach that has been a staple of internal communications since the turn of the century.

Obviously you don’t want to reinvent the wheel completely – especially if you’re changing something that the audience doesn’t necessarily feel it has a problem with.

But I have to admit I was a bit fed up with it as it stood. It felt like we were filling blank pages with whatever came to hand, rather than driving the narrative. I also found myself questioning exactly what benefit our people were getting from the usual puff pieces accompanied by staged group shots or whatever flowchart lay to hand.

So we went back to the drawing board, with just a couple of deal-breakers – we would still need something in printed form, and it should carry on coming out on a monthly basis.

Apart from that, all bets were off. We engaged with our wonderful design agency and chucked a few ideas around. I had some ideas of my own, and we were able to create something a bit different… but not too different.

The end result – Our Sellafield – fulfils its remit well. We have something that people want to read – and, I hope, something that people want to contribute to. OS plays to the strengths of the business – such as our clear remit to make the site clean and safe for future generations, whilst ensuring articles don’t get hamstrung by the issues that plagued its predecessor - a lack of photos, a need to fill acres of tabloid space each month whether content existed or not, and a lack of clarity of what the newspaper was being produced to achieve.

Its printed edition (when produced, it is currently on Covid-19 enforced hiatus) is a pocket-sized just-under-A4 – making it portable and giving that immediate cue to contributors that a 1,500 word epic isn’t going to make the cut.

Its ethos is “digital first” – with the ability to link to other content in a wide variety of formats (or even include video embedded in its pages).

Much of its content is led by illustrations – our business may have a simple purpose, but getting there will be insanely complex. We want people to understand how thing work and where they fit. This approach also gets around the issue of photography being hard to source sometimes.

And it has been created for use beyond a quick read once a month. We wanted to offer the design skills to the business to create beautiful spreads that could be used again and again – as part of presentations, on TV screens, as posters, to save time and money. Not only does the artwork provide this but the digital aspect of it allows for those spreads to be separated and downloaded quickly and simple with a built-in button. Nice.

Here's a few examples of recent spreads I think fit that bill very nicely:


Agile working

Talking of “insanely complex”, like the rest of the world we’re trying to figure out exactly how the return to the workplace is going to work. It’s the kind of messaging a good infographic works wonders on.

How we value each other… each day (calendar)

Our theme in April was “we value each other”, and the team promoting this behaviour wanted a calendar of different ways through the month our people could do just that. We were able to offer up two pages of OS to create that design at no extra cost to the business – one of the fundamental ideas behind the publication.

A long history (worth anyone reading)

This is a good one… a timeline of the organisation, pulled from an existing table of content but run through our designers eye to produce a slide that would add a bit of interest to any presentation. I know I learned a few things about the business when I first saw it.

A year of OS during the Pandemic

We stopped the printed version of OS when Covid-19 arrived and most of the workforce got sent home. Which meant that the front covers got less of a look-in. This spread in the April 2021 edition attempted to redress that, whilst showing how the publication has created a lasting history of a turbulent time.

Channel guide

Sometimes it’s worth reminding the readership that “internal comms” is more than just getting an article in the internal newspaper. So in March we pulled together a quick guide to what we offer our audiences, in a handy downloadable poster.

Big photos

One of the things I’ve been desperate to do for years is give our wonderful photographers the space their skills deserve. It’s a tricky sell – the general view appears to be “why would you use up valuable space that would be better suited to another quote saying how great we are?” Well, it’s because a good picture, used well, tells a thousand words. As does this one of our Sellafield Retreatment Plant construction site, complete with mean n’ moody Cumbrian sky.

Programmes and projects – showing the golden thread

Finally, a spread from last December’s issue, which was a real opportunity to show the ethos of OS, writ large. An entire edition given over to one theme – our programme and project delivery. This spread shows what we in internal comms were fighting for – the chance to give space and time to explain a few fundamentals, like the golden thread which links our projects to our programmes to our portfolios. It was, I think, a real example of the value internal comms teams can add. The people within our programmes and projects didn’t see the value of explaining something they themselves understood, and the audience didn’t necessarily see why they needed to know it, until they read it. We had to fight to get some of the content, and then fight again to ensure it was pitched at the right level, but it was worth it. And that content can be used again and again.



OS has been with us for nearly three years now and although it has had numerous successes, I believe we’ve not yet realised its full potential.

We in the internal comms team know we’ve got to continue the fight, challenging back when asked to “put a story in the newspaper”, perhaps suggesting an infographic instead, or a board game, a comic strip, or something else which seems mad at first but offers a creative solution which fits the bill and widens the opportunities for the message.

But it’s when the business comes to us with those ideas we’ll know we’ve cracked it.

Strike a prose

Who needs commas?

I wrote a piece recently about all the weird little rules I tend to follow when writing, that were beaten into me by successive angry news editors, proper editors and assorted grizzled old hacks who didn’t want the responsibility of high office but still felt the need to bully their younger colleagues.

I’m not much of a grammar expert, but I do have my rules, right or wrong.

I also know a few harsh truths – that a lot of people don’t read past the third paragraph, and that of those who do, many often skim stories in an “F” shape to get the general gist.

And I’m fine with that.

I try and liven things up occasionally. Depending on the content, I might inject a bit of humour (not always appreciated, it has to be said… particularly in the nuclear decommissioning industry). If I can’t be overtly funny, I’ll try my hand at a pithy headline, or wrack my brains to get in a few puns or a bit of clever wordplay.

Hey, it keeps me sane.

I also like to try out some of the tricks of my favourite authors, where I can – a bit of poetic repetition, to reinforce a point or to jog along a list. A stop-start narrative injecting in lines like “And I’m fine with that” or “Hey, it keeps me sane”.

A random reference to something vaguely cultural, like the 1973 film Westworld. An idle messing about with sentence structure, fracturing a few rules to make the narrative flow better.

I even have treatises on writing by my faves, including Stephen King’s On Writing and Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This, two books about writing fictional prose which I would recommend to anyone wanting to improve the way they write… whatever writing that may be. I know they’ve helped me in a day job where there’s not an underground fight club or haunted hotel to be found. And far more than anything which might purport to tell you how to write an intranet article.

One author I love who I’ve not dared nick the style of (yet) is the guy responsible for the paragraph above. That rule-breaking piece of prose comes from the book I'm reading at the moment, the second in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, The Crossing.

All his stuff is like that. Enormous sentences with no punctuation. Speech with no speech marks, or explanation of who said what. It takes a bit of getting used to, but he has his own rules and once you get used to them, his stories are stunning. They tend to be about tough, no-nonsense people, and he writes as you’d imagine his characters think and speak. If they were explaining to you how they got out of bed and got dressed, they wouldn’t flower it up with punctuation, so McCarthy doesn’t either (at least, that’s my interpretation).

I don’t think the decommissioning world is ready for the full McCarthy, but there’s a few things I might try, if I get the chance. It would be nice to replicate the process of moving through our change rooms in the cadence of a sentence, or recreate the metronomic beeps of a personal radiation detector via some short. Sharp. Sentences.

Something to think about, anyway.

Robot the boost

The robots are coming, and we'll make sure Yul understand why...

This weekend I watched the 1973 movie Westworld, mainly because it popped up on the BBC iPlayer but also due to my love of old b-movies. I’d misremembered Westworld as “not being as good as its reputation”, but it actually stands up well as a film from its era.

This is the film that spawned the recent remake on Sky, and there are similarities – but it’s a much simpler tale of mankind playing god, getting cocky and its creations going nuts and killing everyone.

The reason why I mention it here is not to remind everyone of my impeccable credentials in the appreciation of old tat, but because after I’d watched it, I remembered that coincidentally this week, robotics and artificial intelligence has been on my radar.

I’m working with the team that is bringing together all the robotics work being done within the organisation I work for. It’s my job to help them communicate out what their objectives are and help the people in the business understand how this technology will be central to us achieving our mission.

We won’t be bringing in robotic gunslingers (fun as that would be), but we do know that people have very real concerns that need addressing as this work goes on.

There’s a simple over-arching message that our robots, working on land, in water and in the air, will be able to do jobs that humans either can’t do or that they really shouldn’t be doing.

It is drones checking the integrity of our buildings, stopping the need to do it using scaffolding and ladders.

It is submarines scouring the nooks and crannies of our legacy ponds.

And it is mini tanks negotiating the narrow entrances to silos that are literally inaccessible to humans, then sweeping up and sorting the waste inside.

And while all this is happening, the people controlling the machines could be sitting metres, or even miles, away.

It is this “removing people from harm’s way” aspect that chimes well for a business where safety is its overriding concern. But it’s also the message that has the potential to upset people who might feel that their job is being threatened. Their role may be at the sharp end of the nuclear industry with the attendant risks that come with that, but it’s what they do, something they feel proud of doing, and something they may even miss if taken away.

Unlike many businesses, ours is not focused on profit but instead has a defined purpose of creating a safe environment for future generations. So if we do move people out of a role, the chances are they’ll be found something else to do to help us get to that end goal. But that doesn’t stop people from worrying, from feeling a sense of loss, and going through that old change curve us comms people are so fond of talking about.

I see it as my job to help people through that, as well as all the other stuff around making sure our stakeholders understand the clear and defined objectives for bringing in all this “shiny stuff”.

If we in the communications department get that right, then all that remains is for someone else to make sure we don’t allow those robots to get ideas above their station.

We have baloney in our slacks*

Walt, doing it properly

A couple of weeks ago I took delivery of a MacBook brimming with tech designed to help me deliver the kind of comms people expect these days - audio, video, animation.

I'm a big fan of animation as a tool to get messages across to people - especially in these days of skimming through content with your phone. Even the most pedestrian of messages can be livened up by putting the key points into a quick text-based animation and have them flying in and out over a colourful background, and it's hardly rocket science to create.

But back in the day (I'm talking early 2010s, folks) it was more of a punt. A case in point was a request from the organisation I then worked for to produce "one of those new whiteboard animations" to illustrate systems thinking. We knew there would be some cutting edge animation company out there who would do it for us using snazzy software, but we also knew we had zero budget to achieve it.

So we got our heads together and produced the below, by ourselves, with a budget of:

One (1) packet of Sharpie pens;

One (1) roll of lining paper;

One (1) shopping trolley to move the camera on;

One (1) empty police gymnasium;

Two (2) enterprising young(ish) comms people;

One (1) police inspector press-ganged into doing the narration.

To this day I have no idea how we possibly thought it would work, how I managed to do the entire drawing in one take, or what "systems thinking" is. But it's pretty impressive.

*We're Animaniacs (in case you were wondering)