Tim Rutter, Tata Steel, The offline audience, #makinganimpact15
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Tim Rutter of Tata Steel gave a presentation about communicating with offline audiences. He discussed the importance of producing a company newspaper to engage employees and share news and information. He explained that the newspaper covers a wide range of topics from the company, both positive and negative. Survey results showed that the newspaper and intranet are among the most popular sources for learning about what is happening at the company. The presentation emphasized that communications are critical for creating sustainable change in a company.
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Tim Rutter, Tata Steel, The offline audience, #makinganimpact15
- 1. MAKING AN IMPACT Presentation: The offline audience Tim Rutter Tata Steel
- 2. Tata Steel Slide Tim Rutter +44 (0) 7850 990755 @timrutter Communicating with an offline audience
- 3. Tata Steel Slide 3CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 4. Tata Steel Slide 4
- 5. Tata Steel Slide 5CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 6. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 7. Tata Steel Slide 7CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 8. Tata Steel Slide 8CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 9. Tata Steel Slide 9CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 10. Tata Steel Slide 10CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 11. Tata Steel Slide 11CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 12. Tata Steel Slide 12CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 13. Tata Steel Slide 13CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 14. Tata Steel Slide 14CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 15. Tata Steel Slide 15CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 16. Tata Steel Slide 16CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 17. Tata Steel Slide 17 Process control intranet page
- 18. Tata Steel Slide 18
- 19. Tata Steel Slide 19CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 20. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 21. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 22. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 23. Tata Steel Slide
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- 25. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 26. Tata Steel Slide 26 Be careful what you wish for You might just get it CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 27. Tata Steel Slide 27CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 28. Tata Steel Slide 28 Whether you BELIEVE you can do something, or you BELIEVE you can’t . . . . . . you’re probably right CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 29. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 30. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 31. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 32. Tata Steel Slide
- 33. Tata Steel Slide 33 There is no such thing as INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 34. Tata Steel Slide
- 35. Tata Steel Slide “Content is king” CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 36. Tata Steel Slide How do we get enough content to fill 12 pages every 10 working days? CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 37. Tata Steel Slide There’s the stuff we can always rely on • Director’s column • Reverend’s column • Community pages • Industry News • Puzzles & competitions CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 38. Tata Steel Slide And then we chase news around key topics CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 39. Tata Steel Slide “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story” CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 40. Tata Steel Slide
- 41. Tata Steel Slide
- 42. Tata Steel Slide Never let a good story get in the way of a the truth CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 43. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 44. Tata Steel Slide But it’s not just what you say, it’s also about how you say it CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 45. Tata Steel Slide
- 46. Tata Steel Slide And it’s not just about how you say it, it’s also about how it is presented CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 47. Tata Steel Slide 47 Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 48. Tata Steel Slide Content, style, messaging and layout is worth NOTHING if no-one gets to see it CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 49. Tata Steel Slide It’s also about making it available CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 50. Tata Steel Slide And the paper has covered it – warts and all • Safety records • New starters • Investments • Royal visits • Customer wins • Excellence • Promotions • Community support • Amazing personal achievements • Fatal accidents • Job losses and closures • Divestments • Thefts • Customer losses • Strikes • Customer wins and losses • Environmental impacts • Shocking behaviours DownUp CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 51. Tata Steel Slide Still developing • Customer Focus campaign • Europe-wide editorial call and calendar • Shared content • Style guide • Message matrix • Online / mobile Working together CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 52. Tata Steel Slide Things we’ve learned • Remember your audience • It’s called a newspaper for a reason • If it’s boring to you . . . Guess what? • Design is not just an art, it’s a science CapabilityContent CIPR Inside #makinganimpact Design & Layout A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people Capability
- 53. Tata Steel Slide So, is it all worth it? CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 54. Tata Steel Slide Communications Survey: Which of these sources do you prefer? Top 2 Hub newspaper 77% Weekly email update 25% Local Plant / Function Newsletter 19% Monthly team brief 25% Intranet 35% CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 55. Tata Steel Slide Communications Survey: Where do you learn most about what is happening in the company? Top 2 Local hub newspaper 33% Intranet 32% Face to face manager / supervisor meetings 44% Monthly team brief 13% Town Hall meetings 7% E-mail 26% E-Newsletters 4% Weekly Update 9% Posters / notice boards / billboards 3% Rumours / informal networks 33% CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 56. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 57. Tata Steel Slide Communications is critical to effect sustainable change 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 05/06 06/07 07/08 09/10 10/11 11/12 12/13 13/14 14/15 Lost time Accidents per million man-hours worked CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 58. Tata Steel SlideCIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 59. Tata Steel Slide And tomorrow, we’ll do it all over again! CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
- 60. Tata Steel Slide Thank you CIPR Inside #makinganimpact
Editor's Notes
- Good morning / afternoon ladies and gentlemen. It is fantastic to be here representing the manufacturing industry – an often unloved if not entirely unforgotten part of the communications profession.
- This year, at Tata Steel, we were absolutely thrilled to win the CIPR Inside award □ for best internal newsletter / magazine.
- We like to call it ‘the paper’ □
- Where our site is classified as a Tier 1 COMAH site – that’s Care of Major Accidents and Hazards. That means that because of the potential hazards on our site—which is around 13 square kilometres—and has on it three gas holders□, each with 325,000m3 it means we have to limit the number of visitors we have, and know exactly who is on our sites at all times.
- Which isn’t easy when you have the largest privately-owned beach in Europe on your site
- If you read our marketing material, you may see pictures like this
- Or this
- Or this
- If you’re lucky enough to get onto site for a visit, you might even see this
- Or this:
- Or this:
- Or this:
- What you might not see, however, is many people.
- Because although across the two main sites in South Wales we employ about 5000 people directly and a shed load more through contractors—sometimes thousands more when there’s a big capital investment like this £200M blast furnace project, the majority of our employees work on 4 rotas on 12 hour shifts across huge geographical areas – The Port Talbot site is 13 square kilometres
- Two thirds of our employees work 12 hour shifts and utilise the latest technology—to the extent that 80% of the steels we make for the automotive industry today weren’t even invented 10 years ago. So you might now be wondering if our production crews are all using computer technology, why is the title of my talk today, “Communicating with an offline audience”?
- Well because even in the production pulpits□, it’s only the team leader that has email, and THIS is what they think of as the intranet.
- Not this
- So we have thousands of people like this
- Working in places like this
- And this
- this
- Of course, the use of printed material to communicate with large numbers of remote employees is not a new phenomenon – certainly not in our industry.
- As recently as the 1980s, we had this Some of this news seems all too familiar! We sometimes use these archives for #throwbackthursday on our twitter feed!
- And then we had this This looked lovely. It was on brand, full of colour, on good quality paper and everything. We even went to the trouble of sending it to people’s homes so we could make sure that every single employee got to see it. They could even share it with their families, who we knew also have a stake in our business that has for over a century been part of the community in which it sits. On my appraisal form back in those days, it would read something like: “Produce a quarterly publication for employees that reflects the key themes of the company strategy” Tick. Every quarter, regular as clockwork. On brand. On message. But do you know what? No-one read it! Not only did no-one read it. We all knew that no-one read it. And yet we carried on regardless. Why? Maybe because we didn’t know what else to do? Maybe because we could put up a strong case for the defence saying we’d done our bit, and it wasn’t our fault that people chose not to engage with company communications. Maybe because we got a big fat tick on our appraisal form every year? The reality was, that our communications was indicative of the organisational culture. We did things because they ticked a box rather than because they actually made a difference. We did things that looked nice on the surface, but when you looked underneath there wasn’t actually much substance. And it cost a fortune.
- So when a few years earlier, my boss had asked me what the organisation could do for me, I replied, “I just wish someone cared about communications.” Now this phrase came to mind “Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it” Because now someone REALLY cared about communications. The challenge was on. And one of the challenges was to reach the shop floor population
- People like this This was on average a man, who was 42, and on average had been in the organisation for 17 years He was unlikely to have access to email, intranets and websites, and may not have taken part in any briefings other than on a shift handover. He did of course have the company magazine at home, but as we know, no-one read it. So some bright spark decided we needed a newspaper
- Now we had a change consultant in the business at the time used to live on clichés. He would ram down my throat the old chestnut that □“Whether you believe you can do something, or you believe that you can’t, you’re probably right” And to be fair, it’s a pretty good one. But on this occasion, he was wrong. “We need a newspaper” he said. I ABSOLUTELY didn’t believe it was possible. “Well, we might be able to do a two-side A4” But the team did some digging around and came across a local company that produced a ‘newspaper’ for students at Swansea University. So we got them on board, trawled around the business for some stories, and within a couple of weeks, had produced
- This Although I have to admit that we ended up binning every single copy and having it re-printed. Naming the paper hadn’t been easy, and until quite late in the day it was to be called “The Strip”. So late in fact that in the MD’s column, that’s what it was called. That first paper was eight pages.
- Ten working days later, edition two popped out. Looking at the two headlines today, the juxtapositioning of triumph and disaster feel all too familiar
- And two weeks after that edition three – 12 pages It was largely off-brand – on purpose. We were trying to show people this wasn’t a company propaganda machine; we were trying to make something that looked like it was ‘for the people, by the people’. And when I look back now at the writing and the layout, I think we were very successful! It quickly gained traction, and whilst stories weren’t exactly flooding in, there was certainly something new that people were latching onto. Now, at the heart of the change programme was a need for openness and transparency – to fix something, we really had to get it out on the table, no matter how painful it may be to the business. It was a culture that was developed and promoted by the Director, and people were hailed for pulling all of their skeletons out of the cupboards. For a newspaper, this was pure gold, as it gave ready access to some really juicy stories – good and bad—that human nature dictates would pull in readers. It also gave licence for a language that was less corporate and more communal
- Things like this
- The paper quickly became the ‘go to’ communication vehicle for an unprecedented level of honesty, that certainly brought about a new culture in the business. Now PR people will tell you what a huge risk this was □ “There is no such thing as Internal Communications” What if the local papers get hold of it? What if our local politicians see it? What if our customers see it? Well let me tell you, none of those people were in a place where they thought of the steel industry as some paragon of virtue. The long and sad history of accidents, redundancies, financial losses and environmental concerns wasn’t exactly a secret. So what would you rather they thought – that those things were inevitable in such an industry, or that here was a business who was really trying to do something about it. OK, there was a bit of stakeholder management to do – which was a key part of the change programme. Customers, Politicians, customers, Trades Unions were all involved in the programme in different ways, but all were asked to help us through it.
- So when the CEO of the local authority came to visit, not only was he subject to the same rules as employees, when he broke them, we told our employees! What greater demonstration can there be of a company’s determination to uphold its values?
- The modern mantra seems to be that content is king, so there’s some stuff you can rely on
- And fairly quickly we got into the routine of planning our content around key business themes. OK so it’s not the most scientific tool in the world, but it was at least a conscience check
- The modern mantra seems to be that content is king, so there’s some stuff you can rely on
- Like this
- And this
- The modern mantra seems to be that content is king, so there’s some stuff you can rely on
- Like this
- One of our early frustrations was that it didn’t really look like a proper paper. We went through a couple of design houses that claimed to have taught design and layout to newspapers, but it still wasn’t quite right. Some years ago on a “getting to know the media” session run by Media Wales in Cardiff, □ <<Media Wales>> I put my conundrum to one of their editors. □ <<Simon Farringdon>>
- It has been so successful that others have followed where we led:
- One of our early frustrations was that it didn’t really look like a proper paper. We went through a couple of design houses that claimed to have taught design and layout to newspapers, but it still wasn’t quite right. Some years ago on a “getting to know the media” session run by Media Wales in Cardiff, □ <<Media Wales>> I put my conundrum to one of their editors. □ <<Simon Farringdon>>
- One of our early frustrations was that it didn’t really look like a proper paper. We went through a couple of design houses that claimed to have taught design and layout to newspapers, but it still wasn’t quite right. Some years ago on a “getting to know the media” session run by Media Wales in Cardiff, □ <<Media Wales>> I put my conundrum to one of their editors. □ <<Simon Farringdon>>
- But there’s a difference between the oputside world knowing about a parking offence,
- Maybe, given where our journey started, this is the most powerful slide of all
- Like this
- One of our early frustrations was that it didn’t really look like a proper paper. We went through a couple of design houses that claimed to have taught design and layout to newspapers, but it still wasn’t quite right. Some years ago on a “getting to know the media” session run by Media Wales in Cardiff, □ <<Media Wales>> I put my conundrum to one of their editors. □ <<Simon Farringdon>>
- One of our early frustrations was that it didn’t really look like a proper paper. We went through a couple of design houses that claimed to have taught design and layout to newspapers, but it still wasn’t quite right. Some years ago on a “getting to know the media” session run by Media Wales in Cardiff, □ <<Media Wales>> I put my conundrum to one of their editors. □ <<Simon Farringdon>>