Sabrina trumps one for Impact

Sept, 2 – This week, Ogilvy PR Australia announced its first Trumpet winners. The Trumpets is Ogilvy PR’s formal employee recognition program launched in May this year. Our company culture is built on three core values – Partnership, Learn & Grow and One Step Ahead – which are the foundations of the way we work with our clients, each other and our environments. As you would expect Impact to counsel, Ogilvy PR’s values are definitely not just a poster on the wall. Our leaders take them seriously and as such this program recognises those who exemplify them across the Ogilvy PR businesses.

We are delighted to report that our very own consultant Sabrina Herbrik, has won one of these inaugural award for ‘partnership’ to the senior team around client service and driving new opportunities.  Still at only the tender age of 23, Sabrina is already in her third year at Impact and has built outstanding client relationships with all her clients.  It is this which has led Impact to developing further employee engagement and change communication projects for a range of leading Australian organisations, and importantly allowed them to achieve their business goals.

We are absolutely delighted she has been recognised in this way. Sabrina will now compete at the end of the year for a bigger annual award to the value of $4,000.

A big congratulations from the Impact team also go to Rudolf ”One Step Ahead’ Wagenaar and Skye ‘Learn & Grow’ Lambley from Howorth who were recipients of the other two quarterly awards.

Tam Sandeman

Managing Director – Australia

Regional Director (APAC)

As regional director for Ogilvy Impact (APAC) and managing director in Australia, Tam has been developing and driving strategic communication campaigns for a range of major organisations across employee, corporate, crisis and issues management and consumer disciplines in Australia, Asia Pacific and the UK for over 15 years.

Heading up Impact’s major change communication practice, much of Tam’s work focuses on tackling some of the toughest people challenges which come with today’s ever changing business world. Her work has covered complex restructures, mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing and associated culture change—ensuring strong alignment of internal messaging with business goals.

Tam’s employee communication clients, many of which have been with her for years, include Nestlé, BlueScope Steel, NAB, Blackmores, Sony Australia, Dymocks and Hudson. And, while they’re diverse in industry, they all have one thing in common: diverse and disparate workforces with tough communication challenges. Her change work has taken her as far afield as South Africa, Korea, Malaysia and China.

Previous experience includes a senior role at Ogilvy PR’s Pulse Communications, eight years at GCI London, two years with an NGO in Central America and Fiji, as well as other in-house marketing and PR roles in the UK.

An exceptional all-round communicator, Tam’s work has won industry recognition annually both in Australia and the UK, most recently winning two global gongs. A 2010 International Gold Quill of Excellence for work with Ford Australia.  This work was also awarded the Best of the Best in the 2010 Gold Quill awards, receiving the highest accolade in international issues management – the Business Issue of the Year award.  She has been a judge for the IABC gold quills and is a regular speaker on employee engagement. She also drives Ogilvy PR’s internal corporate social responsibility program, So Inspired, and is a board member of Australian charity FebFast.

Tam holds a BA (Hons) in Public Relations from Bournemouth University in the UK. She’s an active member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) and Australia’s Change Management Institute (CMI).

Outside Impact, Tam enjoys climbing small hills (most recently Kilimanjaro).

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’.

IABC World Conference 2010 – Day One

June, 9 – BY TAM SANDEMAN – This week, the home of the Blackberry (the phone not the fruit), Toronto, sees the world conference of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) which had its fill of Ogilvy Public Relations.

Scott Kronick, president of Ogilvy PR North Asia, represented us in speaking about “Brand Building in China”. Scott’s insights reflect his 19 years in Asia, complete with success stories and failures of brand building efforts. The thirst for knowledge about China was evident through a very well attended session.

However, I am here to attend sessions on employee engagement, communication and change – hear and possibly bring back new thinking.

Day one saw various themes running through a packed agenda of sessions – change management, employee communications and leadership communication.

From the first sessions, the most obvious issue presenting a significant opportunity for improvement for internal communicators, is that there is now a recognised lack of confidence in senior leadership from employees.

This problem has grown since 2003, as cited by Professor Veronica Hope Hailey, from Cass Business School in London, who has been researching change communications for over 20 years (including Australia). Interestingly, she sees real danger in 2010, that leaders will attribute the reason for this breakdown in trust to the economic downturn. And, more importantly, going into recovery will NOT rebuild trust in organisations. Leaders need to invest time in improving the way they communicate and engage, and do it better than they ever have before.

Secondly, (and unsurprisingly) all sessions I attended highlighted the strong need for authenticity in leaders. As communicators we must work with senior leaders enabling them to communicate strategy and direction in a real, authentic manner. Only then will we ensure we turn business strategy into action.

Lastly, as with all our work, driving interaction and conversation will be fundamental for success as leaders trying to engage employees in business critical initiatives.

One particular first day highlight was hearing keynote speaker, Kevin Warren, CEO and President of Xerox Canada. A leader who truly lives and breathes employee communication and engagement and one who directly attributes positive outcomes on the bottom line to their investment in this area. Even better was his inspiration – a sign he’d seen on the wall of Ford Motor Company – “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, emphasising your strategy is nothing if you can’t get the people piece right.

Another highlight for our team must be our attendance at the prestigious IABC Gold Quill Awards dinner which saw us collect our two Gold Quills of Excellence for work with Bayer ANZ and Ford Australia, as well as a best of the best award for the Ford work. No other consultancy took as many awards and proved again, Australia and particularly Ogilvy Public Relations punches well above its weight on the world stage.

So far, Toronto has treated me well, and I’ve also managed to catch the BlueJays vs the New York Yankees before the conference started. Given Toronto is also the city of choice for this year’s very imminent G20 frivolity…  if they coped with an Ogilvy PR invasion, they’ll be OK.

More from day two to follow…

Triple Global Recognition

Apr, 16 - Today we’re delighted to share that Impact has been recognised on the world communication stage not once, not twice, but three times over.  In the year we celebrate our fifteenth birthday, we’ve won two International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Gold Quill Awards of Excellence and have also just been named best in show, winning the IABC’s annual 2010 Special Business Issue Award.  The awards are recognised as the most prestigious and highest level of professional acknowledgment within internal communication globally, and we’re ecstatic.

Our first Gold Quill of Excellence and the 2010 Special Business Issue Award were won by our change communication team for our work for Ford Australia. The awards recognised what was a complex campaign for a company in an industry facing a challenging operating environment. The work ensured crucial public employee and union support for a difficult business announcement, contributing to an overwhelming raft of positive media articles across all media outlets.

Our second Gold Quill was won together with Bayer Australia and New Zealand.  This award recognised communication excellence for the development and execution of Bayer’s B-Green project which drove and achieved measurable behaviour change across its Australian and New Zealand workforce around sustainability.  The project, steered our specialist sustainability communication team operating under our OgilvyEarth practice, led to a raft of energy, recycling and other initiatives and was also recently awarded the best internal communications program for all Bayer companies worldwide.

“These awards demonstrate Impact can compete on a world communication stage and recognise we’re delivering the highest possible level of strategic and creative counsel to gain vital employee support for business critical initiatives for companies in Australia,” says joint managing director, Tam Sandeman.

“This is the first time two top awards have been won by the same company in Australia and winning the overall Business Issues award was the icing on the cake.  More importantly, it showcases work in two areas gaining increasing importance on every Australian business’ agenda – sustainability and change,” adds Stephen Hale, co-MD.

The awards will be given at the IABC’s international conference in Toronto in June 2010.