by | 10 Apr 2018 | AllthingsIC
How can you enable employees and leaders around the world to contribute their own take on your company culture?
How could you curate and share it? Today I have a guest post for you by Erika Lee, Internal Communications Manager at Aggreko in Houston, Texas.
The company is the leader in power and temperature control rental and operates globally in over 200 locations and they’ve been using video to capture their stories to help embed their culture.
What is culture? I use and like the Deal and Kennedy (1982) definition: The way we do things around here.
I’ll hand you over to Erika…
How to use video to communicate culture
Here at Aggreko we’re going through a business transformation programme. This follows a year-long discovery project which informed refreshed purpose, values, and behaviours for the business.
With the transformation, Aggreko looks to both strengthen and evolve the very best parts of our culture. We wanted to evolve the culture framework, but avoid the top-down “telling” nature that too often comes with it.
Therefore, communication had to be authentic and peer-to-peer.
So, we created and implemented a powerful employee brand and engagement campaign. This capitalised on our cultural engagement work by:
- winning hearts and minds, connecting their people to the new purpose, values and behaviours
- hearing person stories and reflections
- empowering their people to act differently to create a better future
- unleashing a groundswell of energy
- feeling ‘Orange’ – a key piece of the Aggreko passion.
A huge part of the campaign’s success would be enabling employees and leaders globally to contribute their own take on the new culture in a way we could easily curate and share – that’s where Seenit, a video collaboration platform based in London came in.
We needed something fresh, innovative and readily accepted by our people across every level of the organisation.
The Seenit Capture app allowed any of our ambassadors – our “Orange Champions,” to contribute content instantly using only their own phones and for us to manage it all and create impactful films from their clips:
We ran test missions prior to launch day, asking Orange Champions to read and record insight on how various language resonated with them.
Our values:
Recording with Seenit was so successful at authentically transforming our culture, we started to use the platform for a host of other projects.
These included:
- on the spot learnings
- quarterly executive updates
- cascade videos from leadership conferences.
Further reading on the All Things IC blog: Jargon buster – see my internal comms glossary.
This was particularly effective, “humanising” our leaders and creating content that really spoke to our employees and the shared values from top to bottom.
We now see collaborative storytelling as a whole channel unto itself, the question as we plan newsletters or events often being “can’t we do that in video?”
It is unquestionably more engaging and a huge part of our efforts to be more digital to attract and retain millennials who expect to communicate and contribute in this way.
Top tips we’d like to share with All Things IC’s readers
Now we’re well versed, these are our top tips on helping your colleagues to collaborate via video;
- Help paint a picture of the final product you’re hoping to achieve through a combination of footage. If they understand what the end goal is, they more readily understand how to frame their contribution.
- Let them practice. The ability to record until it feels right, is a huge benefit.
- Share the stats. Our exec team jumped on the video train right away – and even more so when we were able to share the viewership results from the first few videos.
- Share it out in the business. It’s absolutely a key tool for communications and learning teams, but our PAs now all have Seenit – and are quick to capture footage of their respective leader bosses while out and about in the business.
Post author: Erika Lee.
Thank you Erika.
Are you using video internally? If so and you have a story to share, do check out my guest article guidelines and let me know if you have an article idea.
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