We have such sites to show you

One of the great things – possibly the best thing – about working in communications is that we get to go where few others ever do. As a humble newspaper reporter I drove supercars, went behind the scenes on film sets and had the grand tour of endless numbers of ancient buildings, crime scenes and celebrity homes. Later my police ID gave me open access to pretty much every part of the constabulary I worked for, from the firing range to the forensics lab.

And now I work for Sellafield Ltd, which necessity has seen become one of the most inaccessible places in the country.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way, we used to have a visitor's centre and bus tours, open every day except Christmas Day. But these days the average punter isn’t getting anywhere near the site on any day of the year, let alone 364 of ‘em.

So it feels like a real privilege to be able to spend the day there on a site visit, as I and my colleagues in the internal comms team did on Tuesday.

We were there with purpose – to re-acquaint ourselves with the place after a long time away, and to gain some insight into how we can deliver our messaging to a workforce scattered across a group of operational buildings with varying degrees of communications infrastructure.

As always, it was fascinating. We visited the Fuel Handling Plant and Magnox Reprocessing, two facilities tasked with taking on and dealing with used nuclear fuel. We were lucky enough to see decommissioning in action as a seven-tonne piece of concrete was craned off the remaining Windscale pile chimney. We talked to people whose pride in what they do shines through. We went through the complex processes needed to gain access to, and exit from, some of our most sensitive areas.

Like every time I visit the site, the scale of what my organisation is doing blew my mind. The place is HUGE, and the amount of change since the last time I was there (pre Covid) is extraordinary. Buildings have vanished, and been replaced by new ones. Cranes are everywhere, it’s like Manchester city centre.

The visit was invaluable, and well worth the seven hours I ended up spending in the car to do it. I came back invigorated and ready to communicate. I feel I have an inkling of how we might achieve our communication challenges. I still don’t know enough about how the site works, but I know a little bit more… and the next time some mentions Magnox Repro, I’ll be clear in my head exactly what we’re talking about. Just like previous visits have clarified my understanding of impenetrable ideas like the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond, the Sludge Handling Plant, the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo and the Silos Maintenance Facility.

What we do is amazing, it’s such a shame you can’t see it. But we’ll do our best to tell you all about it.

Comic sans (magic)

When I set up this blog I decided to call it “can you just wordsmith this”, because it’s the kind of thing people ask me to do in my job.

They don’t think anything of it, and to be honest neither did I really… until it was pointed out to me that it’s the kind of thing people ask comms professionals to do which unwittingly demeans the role to a certain extent.
A bit like “can you just work your magic on this?”, it suggests that “doing comms” is a job anyone can do, given the time. Therefore it’s a simple job to knock something together that’s nearly there, and then just hand it over for publication. Just stick a funny headline on it, make sure it’s got all the necessary full-stops, and voila. Comms!
Never mind if it’s not planned, or has no strategic value, just stick it out there and tick a box. If no-one reads it, or it has no discernible effect, that’s probably because the comms person didn’t work enough magic on it.

To illustrate the point I drew up this little cartoon. It’s a little bit of fun which I hope you enjoy…

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.