OgilvyEarth & The Climate Institute

OgilvyEarth has been a proud Major Climate Partner of The Climate Institute (TCI) since March 2010, supporting TCI’s vision for Australia to lead the world in clean technology use and innovation. Part of our contribution to this partnership is supporting the TCI team with strategic communications planning and media outreach.

This year, OgilvyEarth has had the pleasure of being involved in the promotion of a number of world first initiatives led by TCI, including the launch of the Climate Advocacy Fund – a joint initiative with Australian Ethical Investment. The Fund works on the ‘power in numbers’ principle to influence Australia’s biggest companies to better manage climate change risk through constructive engagement and the provision of Australia’s first climate change shareholder resolutions. The Fund gives shareholders the opportunity to positively shape corporate behaviour in relation to sustainability. Media interest in the Fund has been positive, with stories reported by The AFR, The Age, SMH, Business Spectator and ABC News.

More recently, TCI in conjunction with Vivid Economics launched a pioneering research report that compares Australia’s efforts in driving carbon pricing within the electricity sector against its major trading partners China, US, UK, Japan and South Korea.

The report, titled “Putting a Price Tag on Pollution: Driving Competitiveness in the Clean Energy Economy”, revealed for the first time that Australia is lagging significantly behind its major trading partners in putting a price on carbon, therefore dispelling the myth Australia is at risk of leading the world and ‘acting too soon’ in making businesses responsible for pollution.

To maximise media coverage of the report, an interactive media release (IMR) was used in place of a traditional media release. The IMR featured the announcement of the report, links to an executive summary and the full report, an infographic, video interviews with two key spokespersons, and links to TCI social media platforms.

Media coverage of the report has been phenomenal with over 170 pieces of coverage appearing on the day of launch, including local stories in the AFR, SMH, ABC News and The Economist. The report has also attracted international coverage in the UK, US and China. The IMR drove a great response online, both from the media and international government staff and policy makers.  Numerous bloggers posted links to the IMR and infographic, there were over 1260 views of the infographic on Flickr and over 345 views of the YouTube videos.

The report has been recognised by industry experts as an important piece of work which uncovers where Australia really stands on the issue of carbon pricing:

Dr Martin Parkinson, Secretary of the Department of Climate Change: “Vivid and the Climate Institute are to be congratulated for attempting to quantify the implicit carbon price imposed by policies to reduce emissions”

Heather Ridout, CEO Australian Industry Group: “I think it really does attack that idea that Australia was going to go it alone, that was a straw man and it’s been shown to be one.”

Professor Ross Garnaut: “The Climate Institute analysis was a very good first step that probably underplayed how far Australia was behind China and the US.”

Our team at OgilvyEarth continues to support the great work TCI is doing to make clean and low carbon a part of our everyday life.

Driving Sales Powerfully

In 2006, food and beverage giant Nestlé acquired the iconic Australian brand Uncle Tobys, its sales team and its range of products, bringing Nestlé’s total range to over 3,200 products. Nestlé faced a significant communication challenge: How to communicate business and product priorities simply and consistently whilst merging the new sales team into the business, and, at the same time, increase sales.

Impact and the Nestlé sales team developed a strategic and highly creative engagement event, based on strong employee insight, to engage Australia’s largest field sales team in plans for the year ahead, encouraging less risk-averse behaviour which contributed ultimately to an increase in sales.

Tactically this included employee focus groups, leadership workshops, a strong visual identity and theme, dedicated SWAT teams working with over 20 presenters, as well as highly-creative delivery of messages over an energy-filled two days.

A combination of anecdotal feedback and quantitative survey results from the field revealed an immediate behaviour change across all state teams – higher productivity, teamwork and collaboration across the states.

The campaign was awarded the 2008 IABC Gold Quill Award of Excellence and the 2007 Asia Pacific PR Week best employee communication campaign.

Building A Brand

Three years ago Leighton Contractors set an aggressive strategy to build a strong and profitable business across its core markets of Construction, Mining, Industrial Services, Investment, Building and Telecommunications. To do this, the business recognised that employee engagement was a critical driver in supporting and motivating the workforce, and made the strategic decision to focus on building the brand from the inside out.

Impact has partnered with Leighton Contractors on this three-year journey, helping to align a geographically dispersed workforce with the business direction, strengthen the connection between the leadership team and employees and build a can-do values based culture. In this time, Impact has provided strategic counsel and planning, executive leadership coaching, supported and managed the delivery of events (like their group wide company updates, safety and leadership summits) and conducted qualitative ‘Word On The Street’ research with their employees.

The strong focus on employee engagement has paid off with 72% of the workforce reporting high engagement levels with the business. And Impact continues to work with the Leighton team to ensure the ever expanding workforce, which has increased from 2,500 to over 8000 employees, is engaged.

Recruiting Through Facebook

Graduate recruitment among Australia’s ‘big four’ accounting firms is a very competitive business. Each firm wants the best recruits – the highest achieving, the biggest all rounders and the most motivated.

In 2008 one of the big four accounting firms approached Impact Employee Communications to develop a Facebook page to attract graduates via Facebook, a widely used social networking site in Australia and overseas. Impact was engaged to develop the communication strategy and messaging for the Facebook activity.

From a tactical level, Impact created the Facebook page from scratch, which involved the development of regular written content, such as career tips, myth busters, monthly features and interviews with employees. Impact also filmed employees and developed video clips which appear on the page, providing Facebook users with first-hand knowledge of life at the firm. To ensure the interactivity of the site, Impact developed a close relationship with the firm’s recruiters, who regularly post responses to queries put up on ‘the wall’ of the page.

The Facebook page has been highly successful, based on feedback from within the firm and from viewers of the page. In the review section of the page, the majority of reviews have been 4 or 5 stars, with very positive comments about the method of using a social networking site to reach their target audience. After four months of the Facebook page being live, the total number of fans on the page was over 1,497 and is steadily on the rise.

Giving Change a Personality

In 2005, Nestlé began the rollout of a global business excellence program which included a transition to the SAP enterprise set of procurement, distribution and sales management systems to its markets – the largest infrastructure project it had undertaken to date, affecting nearly 6,000 employees at 20 separate sites across Australia and New Zealand.

Successful implementation would mean no interruption to Nestlé customers at the same time as delivering all projected revenue, sales and growth targets for the year. Implementing and going live carried with it the risk of major disruption to the business if employees did not embrace change actively in all areas.

Impact worked with Nestlé to combat resistance to change, developing and implementing a collaborative, creative and a phased engagement solution, quickly building employee support. Tailored engagement sessions at each site leading to real communication ownership at site level and the use of former Australian cricket captain, Steve Waugh, as a celebrity ambassador to front the campaign, were vital in ensuring a successful launch across the business.

The campaign achieved its over-riding objective of generating a positive environment and fostering a winning attitude, with Australia and New Zealand being Nestlé’s fastest, most successful implementation globally. Productivity was maintained throughout, notably also ensuring the company’s 11 factories and five distribution centres were back to full production levels in only seven days from ‘go live’, substantially less than the average. The company’s head office in Switzerland described it as ‘the best it had seen’.

Global Safety Leaders

Qantas is Australia’s largest domestic and international airline. The Qantas Group employs approximately 36,000 people and offers services across 140 destinations within 37 countries.

Qantas needed to improve the level of workplace safety with all ground services. A new safety program required large-scale behavioural change for thousands of people and compliance with different legislations. Qantas wanted this new safety program to be regarded as world best practice in ground safety.

Impact created the strategic campaign ‘Safe Airline For Everyone (S.A.F.E)’. It was rolled out to all Qantas ground service employees in May 2002. Manager engagement was a key element of the approach and a tailored toolkit was created for each manager to use when educating their teams about the new workplace safety procedures. The campaign was highly visual to ensure high impact with posters, presentations and a video. The ground work behind the strategy came from Impact’s research engagement tool, ‘Word On The Street’. It ensured the messages and strategy were developed with the key audience’s issues and needs as a priority.

The campaign was incredibly successful and highly regarded. Qantas experienced more than an 80% reduction in the ‘lost time due to injury’ frequency rate. There was a significant increase in productivity equating to millions of dollars in savings. The effectiveness of the campaign has ensured its long life in Qantas and it has since been refreshed with a target for ‘No Injuries’.

We Are Iluka Video

Iluka Mining is a major participant in the global mineral sands sector, with a workforce of over 2,500 in mining and processing operations spanning across Australia.

What this business was craving was a creative way to motivate, inspire and unite all employees – from their operators and engineers, to their geologists and professional management positions. They needed something that would align their people with a common vision and direction, and most importantly get their people talking about the great work they do.

So we turned to employees for their stories about the business and created “We are Iluka”, a film which told the Iluka story through the eyes of their people – a simple idea but one which was sensitively captured through powerful imagery of their vast operations and voice over.

Film screenings were held in groups across the company so that employees could collectively enjoy the experience. Not only did the film receive positive reviews from employees, but it was also loved by the judges at 2007 New York International Film and Video Festival, winning a finalist award.

Refining Talkback

Caltex Australia Limited, the largest refiner and marketer of petroleum products in Australia, recognised engaging their 1000 refining operations employees was critical if they were going to achieve their goal to be a high performance, continuous improvement organisation.

From our ‘Word On The Street’ research, a key challenge identified was the need to strengthen the connection with the leadership team and improve the cascade of open, honest information down the line.

As part of a broader engagement strategy, Impact produced the Refining Talkback radio program, where the senior leadership team openly discussed employee concerns with representatives from across their two refining plants. This program gave employees, many of whom work shifts, the opportunity to hear the senior leadership team responding to their questions. Accompanying this program were support materials for supervisors to help them stimulate discussion around key workplace issues in their weekly meetings.

A pulse check survey revealed that 75% of employees had listened to Talkback and over half of the employees sampled believed that the program demonstrated that the leadership team cared about addressing employees’ issues.

Constructing Leadership Capabilities

With significant forecast growth continuing to increase pressure on recruiting, retaining and developing a 7,500-strong workforce, a key priority for Leighton Contractors was strengthening leaders’ capabilities in aligning its people with the business strategy.

Through qualitative research, Impact demonstrated employees were positive about the increasing number of engagement opportunities with the CEO and Executive Management Team, but wanted more localised information about where the business was going, and more visible leadership and greater recognition from the tier below.

Impact partnered with the CEO, Executive Team and Corporate Communications to create the company’s first ever leadership summit for their 100 top leaders. The two day event gained leaders’ commitment to engage their people with the business strategy and the brand, and gave them the skills to deliver consistent, credible messages confidently to their teams.

The results speak for themselves: 96% of participants agreed they understood their role in communicating the brand, values and guiding behaviours; 89% agreed that they knew how to localise the business direction for their team and 96% of participants agreed that the event was worthwhile.

Making Values Fashionable Long Term

Specialty Fashion Group (SFG) is an established Australian fashion empire, comprising over 5,000 employees and several of Australia’s leading high street retail fashion brands, such as Katies and Millers, each with its own identity and culture.

The business had a common challenge. How to create a sense of shared culture, encouraging a greater sense of team leading to improved knowledge share across the business.

Through a series of interactive high-energy workshops, Impact worked with a new SFG leadership team, educating on the business benefits of being a values-based business (that is, what’s this going to do for me?), strongly aligning them to the company’s values and importantly getting their genuine commitment to action with their own teams.

Other employees were then engaged using tactics relevant to the company’s young and dynamic culture, such as collecting employee feedback on values through a Big Brother Diary Room style experience.

The company’s values are now every day speak and firmly embedded across a diverse team.

Here’s what Specialty Fashion Group’s CEO, Gary Perlstein, said about the importance of shared values:

“Our business comprises some extremely diverse brands, each very distinct, each with its own culture and personality. Impact worked with our leaders to demonstrate the business benefit of having shared values, embedding them firmly at the top and then making sure they were cascaded through the company. This process has ensured true ownership of our values, with all our people now walking the talk and we can genuinely call ourselves a business which has service focused values at its heart.” Gary Perlstein, CEO, Specialty Fashion Group

Reducing Energy Consumption

In line with the company’s sustainability objectives and with the support of NSW’s Department of Environment and Climate Change, packaging giant AMCOR recognised in order to reduce energy usage at its Smithfield plant, a critical success factor would be shifting employee behaviour.

Employee research carried out by Impact revealed the majority of employees did not understand the environmental consequences of their behaviour and were unfamiliar with switch locations or start-up / shut-down procedures.

The subsequently award-winning Project GreenLight campaign – bright ideas for a green future – was developed providing training and guidelines around the desired behaviours. Tactics included a video with employees talking about the environment, global warming and what it meant for them, as well as reminder cards produced in a number of languages.

Sustained employee behaviour change resulted in a 30% reduction in base load energy consumption overnight and a 70% reduction over the weekends. At launch AMCOR Smithfield saved the equivalent of two weeks worth of energy use simply through employee behaviour change.

This campaign was recognised both internationally and locally in 2006, winning a prestigious IABC Gold Quill for communication and a NSW Green Globe award.

Communication Skills Training

In 2002 the NSW Government was in the process of selling the state’s largest rail carrier, FreightCorp. This created uncertainty for thousands of employees and the company faced big challenges in communicating effectively with its decentralised, shift-based, 24-hour workforce.

In this period of significant change, management felt frontline employees were not sufficiently informed of organisational goals and initiatives. Operational requirements needed to continue, but employees needed to hear about and ask questions on the issues. Driver coordinators and driver trainers came in regular contact with train drivers and were well positioned to communicate to frontline employees if provided with the appropriate skills and confidence.

Impact conducted 17 one-day communication skills workshops for 160 FreightCorp employees. Training was made relevant by the inclusion of key findings from qualitative research with employees. Foundation skills were covered including presentation skills; negotiation; counselling; and team dynamics. Follow up check-ins with workshop participants were completed to keep the training front of mind and to offer additional support to individuals if required.

The training paid off. For the first time in NSW, employees voted in favour of a privatisation. The sale totalled AU$1.172 billion for the NSW Government.

Creating Big Change for Bayer

22 March – There is an ever increasing demand from a diverse range of stakeholders for companies and their employees to go about business in an increasingly responsible manner. However engaging employees in an internal environmental sustainability strategy and maintaining momentum can be challenging. Organisations consistently face the same questions – how do you get employees to see the link between the company’s environmental performance and their individual actions? What needs to be done to make a difference? Who needs to be involved? Where do we start? How do we convince them this is not extra work, just a more responsible way of going about our business?
Bayer Australia and New Zealand is one organisation that, working in partnership with OgilvyEarth, has successfully designed and implemented an internal environmental sustainability communication program. Bayer’s employees are engaged, empowered and motivated to make a difference and are provided with the tools, resources and support required to be part of the solution to improving Bayer’s sustainability.

So how did they do it?

Made up of multiple elements, the B-Green program rollout inspired employees to make a difference, reinforcing throughout communication “lots of small changes x 850 employees + family + friends = big change”. There were three things Bayer wanted their employees to do – Consider the environment in everything they do, take personal responsibility for their actions and embed care for the environment as part of their every day. This led to the development of the B-Green charter – “Think.Act.Live.”

The B-Green program provided employees with educational tools and resources to understand what daily actions they can take not only at work but at home as well, such as printing smarter and considering what can be re-used even before recycling; and what positive effects this leads to in the bigger picture.

Initial research had identified the need for leadership to demonstrate their personal commitment and support, so Bayer’s leadership team were actively involved from day one and continue to play an important role in communicating sustainability as a business imperative.

Bayer set specific reduction targets for their Australia and New Zealand operations and regularly measures and informs employees of progress.

The result?

Bayer Australia and New Zealand’s environmental performance has significantly improved.

Employees have taken up the challenge to make a change, providing a comprehensive list of their own ideas on what could be done to improve sustainability based on their first hand experiences in their role and area of the business; and the program continues to be an ongoing part of life at Bayer.

As just reward for their efforts, the B-Green campaign has won a prestigious internal global award for Bayer Australia and New Zealand, the “Bayer Award for Excellence in Communications – Employee Communications”. This is an international award with more than 800 submissions.

Just goes to show that employees are a big part of the solution. Remember – lots of small changes x lots of people = big change!