SAS was delighted to hear that the judges found the work ‘surprising’ and ‘clever’ and felt it ‘must be rewarded’.

Breakfast Event – 8 April 2010 – Andaz Hotel, London
Featuring case studies from Siemens & The Coca-Cola Company

It’s now 15 years since a causal link between employee engagement and business performance was statistically validated, with research and case studies piling higher every day. Why, then, do so many organisations continue to struggle with attracting, motivating and retaining the best talent? The answer, our research has shown, is more often than not in the failure to effectively join things up across functional lines who believe they alone ‘own’ the employee communication agenda.

This event will provide insights and inspiring food for thought about how you – whether you sit in brand, marketing, HR, internal communication, recruitment or change management – can take a fresh look at how to get more from your efforts in employee communications. Global practitioners from Siemens & The Coca-Cola Company will share their experiences of  tackling the sometimes daunting challenge of crossing silos in order to get greater impact from their investment in employer reputation management through the entire employee experience.

This, the third of our knowledge-sharing breakfasts of 2010, marks the launch of the global Brand & Talent Network™ – a group of over 10 agencies around the world, building and sharing capabilities and best practices to benefit clients who need global perspective matched with local market and audience insight and delivery.

Breakfast Event – 25 March 2010 – Andaz Hotel, London
Featuring case studies from Aviva & Land Securities

In this the second event of the 2010 calendar, SAS will be exploring the changing behaviour, needs and expectations of corporate website audiences and how leading global organisations are responding, both in terms of corporate websites and broader online communications strategies.

Two leaders in the field of digital corporate communications – Aviva and Land Securities – will be sharing their different experiences with a combination of strategic and pragmatic advice to help you in developing a corporate website presence and broader digital communications strategy that’s right for your organisation.

Demonstrating the value of corporate website investments remains as difficult as ever. The aim of this event is to help corporate website owners to make smarter investment decisions by providing insights into the latest developments in corporate websites and broader digital communications methods.

With profits down by 92% for the full year, it’s not as bad as the conditions we faced together following the dotcom bubble burst, but it’s still serious. Ericsson remains a leader, but when network operators stop spending, it’s always going to be hard for Ericsson despite the quality of its infrastructure technology, which is world-class.

How should a company in this situation communicate with stakeholders? We learnt some important writing lessons that can help sustain a company’s reputation during such times.

1. Use human, straightforward language. Nothing is likely to undermine trust more than corporate clichés and meaningless platitudes. Sadly we see this in so many annual reports published.
2. Don’t avoid the direct questions on shareholders’ minds. We did not duck the issues, and looked instead to demonstrate that while the short-term outlook was tough, history showed that the roll-out of technology often took longer than anticipated, but always resulted in growth in the end. In others words to show that Ericsson remained a leader – just a leader in a tougher short-term market, which would inevitably turn again.
3. Keep it simple. There is nothing like a crisis to focus the mind. We managed to break legacy writing methods and instead looked to say just three key messages because we recognise that for all the compliance data issued, it is often difficult for audiences to understand what a company is trying to say.
4. Don’t dumb it down. Every message was underpinned by solid evidence to support it. In this, clear structure is everything. The reader must be able to follow the logic of the argument in direct terms, not left to construct the pieces on their own.
5. Avoid spin. Nothing we said was not true. We looked for authenticity in everything that was stated.

When Ericsson emerged from this difficult period, a shareholder wrote to say that because he felt the company had told the truth during the bad times, he felt he could trust the company in future good times.

It remains a high point in 25 years of corporate reporting for me.

Breakfast Event – 21 January 2010 – Andaz Hotel, London
Featuring case studies from Ernst & Young & Sainsbury’s

Fifty-five graduate marketing specialists from the likes of Credit Suisse, Royal Mail, Citi and Co-operative Group were treated to an insight into how leading recruiters are adapting their messages and methods to a changed marketplace. Jason Frank, Marketing and Research Director at SAS, shed light on changing student attitudes and behaviour, evolving marketing methods, and the growing use of social media.

Case studies from two very different recruiters – Sainsbury’s and Ernst & Young – showed how the new economic landscape has created very different opportunities and challenges for different businesses. Jo Gidley of Sainsbury’s showed how changing their campaign to a very different, mature, business-minded tone has helped them to make the most of the opportunity presented by students’ increasingly flexible attitudes. She also talked about their success in establishing a sophisticated new campus team structure and process that is helping to mobilise enthusiastic employees.

Elena Hickey-Saroli from Ernst & Young gave a fascinating insight into how they compete with the very biggest recruiters with relatively limited budgets and resources, focusing on how they have brought their new strengths-based recruitment strategy to life online.

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It had begun to lag behind its competitors – a key objective was to lead the field again. The client wanted a highly functional site with a contemporary look and feel that was quick and easy to use.

The new site creates a compelling user experience that is driven by a wealth of high quality content and sophisticated navigation techniques, catering for the varying needs and behaviours of its different audiences. The design provides fast access to content and gives Land Securities the ability to promote the most relevant and topical stories throughout the site. Bold photography is combined with video, audio and Flash content to provide a taste of the businesses personality and bring the experience of its property portfolio to life.

Online reporting has grown in terms of the quantity of companies providing HTML versions of their reports and also in terms of the quality of content. This event brought together experienced communications practitioners from two FTSE 100 organisations, J Sainsbury plc and Diageo, who shared specific experiences of online reporting that have pushed the medium to achieve their individual communications objectives.

A number of communications professionals attended, from organisations such as Home Retail Group, Aviva, Barclays, Unilever, Land Securities, Marks & Spencer, Tate & Lyle  and BT, and were provided with an informed perspective on what defines current best practice both in terms of content and reporting models.

Marketing and HR don’t talk enough. That means missed opportunities and glaring inefficiencies. Nowhere is that brought into more stark relief than in the increasingly critical area of alumni programmes, sitting as they do at the intersection between talent and business development and acquisition. No longer the domain of Oxbridge colleges, leading organisations like McKinsey and London School of Economics have blazed a trail in demonstrating how alumni networks can add real value to organisations’ talent and business development activities. Professional services firms in particular are recognising the value of alumni programmes. In the past two years we have helped organisations such as 3i, Deloitte and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer to establish new alumni networks, centred around web-based hubs.

Employees who leave to become in-house counsel are a potentially rich source of future revenue and talent (1 in 4 UK employees returns to work for a former employer). However, many firms we’ve spoken to tend to be relatively haphazard in terms of tapping into this area with more formalised relationship-building programmes, relying instead on haphazard personal partner-led forms of relationship-building.

Our recent work in establishing alumni networks has led us to benchmark a number of alumni networks and interview members of both the McKinsey and London School of Economics (LSE) programmes. The findings were fascinating, giving us a real insight into what high-value professionals do (and don’t) want from such programmes. Ultimately, in a world where the best people construct their own complex web of networks with current and past colleagues, clients and headhunters, it’s all about making your firm’s ‘network’ more desirable and useful than everyone else’s. Half-hearted programmes will deliver half-hearted results.

Harvesting low-hanging fruit
Not only are alumni programmes proven to increase the likelihood of generating revenues directly from former employees, but also indirectly – more actively engaged former employees are simply more likely to recommend their former employer to contacts. Our experience shows that the creation of an alumni programme acts as a catalyst for greater focus on business development amongst these ‘low-hanging fruit’. And programmes should always be designed to support, complement and maximise existing business and client development programmes, leveraging existing events and content. In terms of return on investment it takes just one small engagement/instruction to offset the initial set-up costs.

Online appetite
At the core of an alumni programme is a web hub that facilitates networking and content-sharing between both firm and member, and on a peer-to-peer basis between members. There are a few tricky decisions to be made here about how to facilitate and maximise these interactions. One could argue that groups within professional online networks such as LinkedIn should suffice, and in some cases they might, but our research shows that members like a little more exclusivity and privacy than such networks allow. Those who argue that the most senior people tend not to really interact meaningfully online are only partly right – that’s why other face-to-face networking opportunities, offering focused professional content are a vital part of the overall mix. Recent Legal Week research showed that 40% of all corporate counsel report an interest in joining an online professional network specifically designed for lawyers, and 54% say that the ability to link to other lawyers would be the most important feature of the network.

PICTURE: http://www.freshfields.com/aboutus/alumni/

Talent and the culture effect
It’s not rocket science – by maintaining a dialogue with former employees firms can increase the likelihood of re-hiring talented individuals. Enterprise Rent-a-Car is an example of a leading organisation in the field of HR. It has an active alumni programme that has helped to attract 68 senior employees back to the organisation in the last three years a handy recruitment channel considering how so-called ‘boomerang hires’ are highly cost-effective.

However, perhaps a far more profound effect of having an active alumni programme is the pervasive influence it can exert on leadership, management and culture. Our research with McKinsey showed that one of the biggest positive impacts of having an alumni programme is the effect it can have on partner, manager and employee behaviour within the firm. Put simply it helps them to see that the experiences of their employees now will have commercial implications later. By giving the employee experience a clear and tangible life beyond the firm, people come to be more mindful of the fact that the departure experience should ideally be a positive one. Indeed people tend to become more mindful of ‘life after the firm’ in their behaviour towards colleagues generally – the above behavioural change, though not immediate, can lead to significant cultural and financial benefits, for instance in terms of retention of talented people.

‘Legal Week research showed that 40% of all corporate counsel report an interest in joining an online professional network specifically designed for lawyers.'

Getting started
Setting up an alumni programme needn’t be prohibitively complicated or resource hungry. However it does require some focused thinking and sensible answers to some critical questions. Why exactly are we setting up the programme? Who are we going to focus our efforts on? What value can we realistically add to their lives?

There’s no doubt that at a time when firms need to exploit every possible opportunity they can, alumni programmes present a glaring opportunity.

If you want to talk more about SAS’s alumni programme research and experience call Jason Frank on +44 (0) 20 7243 3232 or  email jfrank@sasdesign.co.uk