Aussies win award for pimping up IT change

On Friday 30 March, Ogilvy Impact Australia won Campaign Asia Pacific PR Awards’ Employee Communication Campaign of the Year for our All About Me McDonald’s Australia IT major change management program.

The Campaign Asia-Pacific PR Awards have become an unrivalled benchmark for the region’s external and internal communication industry and showcases the industry’s best and brightest strategies that have truly transformed businesses and brands.

Up against the likes of other major agency networks, we successfully beat the competition with a program that enabled McDonald’s Australia’s 600-strong corporate team to continue providing exceptional service and support to 85,000 employees across its restaurants following the introduction of a complex technical IT change.

Productivity levels were maintained throughout the introduction of new technology tools and survey measures identified 100% of employees supported the change and 88% believed IT was making it easier for them to do their jobs.

Using a robust, change management methodology ensured the strategy was tailored to the audience, change impacts and operational challenges. But what set this program apart was the creative genius applied to the messages, brand and execution, taking IT change to new heights.

Surprise, intrigue, experiential and interactive communication lay at the heart of the tactical plan and along with leadership endorsement and a change champion network in full swing, we ensured a highly complex IT change agenda was implemented successfully on time.

A big congratulations and a sesame seed bun to our employee engagement experts – Megan, Sabrina, Lori, Stef and Tam.  Please call us if you’d like to hear more about this program and our change management methodology.

Ogilvy Impact is McCelebrating

Nov, 4 – We are very excited to announce that Ogilvy Impact Australia won two awards at Ogilvy PR’s own internal Professional Achievement Awards (PAA) this week.

The PAA’s are Ogilvy PR’s worldwide awards which give teams the opportunity to share accomplishments and recognise great work across the globe. The awards were hosted in New York, which meant a small team stayed back to represent Australia in the early hours of the morning (getting into the spirit fully and embracing the time difference by donning the latest in midnight fashion – dressing gowns and cuddly toys).

This year, it was our work for McDonald’s Australia which caught the judges attention. And even better, not only did we scoop the internal communication category, but we were also named number 1 in the Corporate category, beating off competition from our Ogilvy PR Beijing, Moscow, Taipei and San Francisco offices. The ‘All About ME: Super-Sizing IT change’ change management program turned complex technical IT change into a creative engagement piece, driving early adoption of new technology tools from all employees and lifting the culture of the organisation at the same time.

The Impact team is McCelebrating!

Ogilvy PR Australia was in total shortlisted for eight awards, and Impact was not the only one with a win. Our wonderful friends in the Ogilvy PR Melbourne team won the Social Marketing category with their ‘Organ and Tissue Authority: DonateLife Week’ campaign. Big well dones to them too.

Cath Lawrence

Senior Strategist

Cath Lawrence is an experienced change management and communication consultant with over 20 years business experience working both nationally and internationally.  Her work has covered a number of industries including financial services, manufacturing, transport, FMCG, professional services, pharmaceuticals, local government and health and beauty.

During this time, Cath has worked alongside senior managers throughout many change situations including mergers and acquisitions, cultural change, business re-engineering, organisational redesign, crisis management, team development and downsizing. Through this experience, she has been able to relate to a wide range of business and personal challenges that people face and therefore provide a deep level of understanding, knowledge and guidance during change.

Cath’s enviable experience provides a strategic backbone for the change team, and as such she has developed and implemented campaigns for Pfizer, Heatcraft and Woolworths. Cath’s experience enables her to understand the organisational change challenges and the journey employees experience as change happens. She is able to facilitate the change process and work with the client to build meaningful change and communication strategies.

She has a BA in Business Studies from Sheffield University in the UK. She’s  a Certified Master Coach, a Master Practitioner in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), and a member of the International Association of Facilitators.

Outside work, Cath enjoys taking her clubs out and hitting a small ball whilst out for a long and pleasant walk. Her enjoyment of teeing off is closely followed by watching a good game of rugby or a trip to the theatre.

Lori Sarakinsky

Strategist (currently on maternity leave)

Lori brings over seven years of change management experience from Accenture where she worked on a variety of large scale global and multi-national business and IT transformational projects for a number of market-leading blue chip clients.

She has developed specialist knowledge of change projects relating to key business functions and processes, large-scale systems implementations and employee communication initiatives. Working on long term and often complex programs across IT outsourcing, HR transformation and Organisation restructuring, Lori has built solid consulting skills mainly in the areas of stakeholder management and communications.

She has wide cross-industry exposure in both the public and private sectors (including ‘The Change Program’; one of Australia’s most complex IT change initiatives implemented at the Australian Tax Office).

Lori has significant experience in building strong relationships with her clients. She has worked closely with senior management teams to develop change communication strategies and has managed the delivery of a variety of internal communication programs requiring global, local and external implementation.

She has worked extensively in developing communications strategy, change impact and stakeholder analysis and business readiness assessments. She is familiar with the challenges that face senior management throughout change programs and has helped her clients to engage and effectively communicate across diverse workforces to minimise the impacts of change.

Some of her client work at Impact has included projects with Johnson and Johnson Pacific, Surf Life Saving Australia and a large FMCG organisation.  At Accenture, Lori worked on a number of client engagements both in Australia and the UK: RailCorp, Unilever, Pfizer, Schering Plough, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) and the top UK retailer Sainsburys.

Lori holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She worked in London for nine years, five of which were with Accenture working on projects in the UK and Europe.