Grr-r-eat reward communication at Kellogg's Kellogg’s, the world’s leading breakfast cereal producer, has used its marketing acumen to ensure employees buy in to their total reward offering. The company’s first total reward statements mark the beginning of a new way for the company to communicate Reward.
Kellogg’s’ new personalised total reward statements feature some of its best-loved characters to grab employees’ attention and shout about the benefits they receive. Bright, bold, and jargon-free, the statements spell out employees’ reward at a glance. They represent a new initiative in the company’s Reward communication, replacing standard benefit and pension letters for much greater impact to boost employee motivation and retention.
Dave Lowe, Compensation & Benefits Business Partner, explains: “Now, more than ever, we want our people to know they matter to us so we made a conscious decision to ‘sell’ our Reward offering a lot more proactively than we’ve done in the past. Our trademark characters and fun features such as our ‘CornFlex’ section are backed up with a serious agenda. The statements are a new way of talking about Reward for us – they do more than communicate the facts and figures relating to an employee’s pay and benefits; they embed our company culture, inspire employees and demonstrate we value them enough to put serious consideration into communicating their reward.”
Chris Hopkins, managing consultant at Caburn Hope, says: “Workplace communication must never feel like hard work to read. Employees actually want to be engaged, it’s a basic human desire, and good communication strikes an immediate chord. Kellogg’s’ new total reward statement does this straight away by keeping the content personalised and deeply relevant, and presenting it in a highly engaging way, whilst supporting the brand.”
Buying in to buy-in By Chris Hopkins, MD
If there’s one thing organisations forget time and time again when talking about employee engagement, it’s that ‘engagement’ also means ‘buy-in’. Buying and selling underpins the vast majority of effective workforce communication.
A very old marketing adage tells us “marketing is the human activity directed at satisfying human needs and wants through an exchange process.” We know employees want to buy in and be engaged. Research has shown that globally almost 70% of employees are dissatisfied with the quality and quantity of current communications from their employer and I would suggest this is probably even more in the current climate. The employer needs to ‘sell’ productivity, performance and company culture to the employee – essentially their whole relationship with the business. READ MORE
72% of communicators change tack during recession Our industry poll found that almost three quarters of communicators are actively changing the way they connect with employees during the economic downturn:
36% of responders reported they were increasing employee communication activity as it was “even more important” to engage with employees during turbulent times.
28% are cutting back, 8% are stopping comms activity all together and 16% are subject to a budget freeze.
Chris Hopkins, MD, said: “The recession is clearly affecting the methods, and most likely the frequency, organisations communicate with their employees. Whether communicators can still make impact with less resource is a true test of their mettle. Those who succeed understand that there has never been a more vital time to communicate with their workforce.”
“Comms success won’t come from trying to execute the same amount of activity thinly. It’s about doing fewer things but upping the ante; making each piece of activity work much harder for greater impact. Organisations reducing employee communication to less than the bare minimum should reconsider – communications ‘lock-down’ achieves very little and usually ends up costing more in the long-term,” he continued.
Will web 2.0 kill off the intranet? The intranet currently forms an integral part of the internal communication strategy in most organizations as an information provider and collaboration tool. But social media also allows collaboration, dialogue, documentation and much more, at a lower cost and with much less back-end work involved. What does the future hold for the much-loved intranet? Can it survive in a world of tweets, wikis and all-singing all-dancing social networking platforms?
Some worry about the openness of social media and miss the ‘closed space’ old-school intranets provided. However, far from killing off the intranet, social media might just be what saves all that ‘field of dreams’ content and technology investment from going to waste. Social media sites have provided the option to be active rather than passive consumers of information. Isn’t this engagement just what most organisations (and their intranets) need right now? READ MORE ON MELCRUM'S INTERNAL COMMS HUB
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