Realizing RBC's new vision for employee communication

What would you do if you had an employee communication program that had been generating above-average awareness and satisfaction scores for many years, but was largely dependent upon legacy tactics and tools? Some organizations might have chosen to tinker around the edges, bolt-on some additional capabilities and hope for some incremental improvements. But at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), we decided to reinvent our employee communication so that it would not only inform employees, but do a better job of engaging and aligning their performance with our vision and business goals.

 

Genesis for change
The genesis for this transformational change started with a major restructuring of RBC in late 2004 based on the needs of our clients. Known within RBC as the Client First Initiative, the plan resulted in a new management structure for our business, an aggressive plan to grow our revenues and increased energy and focus on a more collaborative and accountable culture that always puts the customer first.

We looked upon this restructuring as the perfect opportunity to reassess the effectiveness of our employee communication in terms of the needs of our employees, our return on investment, and the external trends affecting communication in general.

While RBC’s employee opinion survey had consistently rated our internal communication above the norm for high-performing companies in North America, we had the sense that our performance was beginning to plateau. In addition, we felt there was an opportunity to create a more dynamic communication environment that would continue to inform employees, but increase engagement by providing a clearer line of sight between their day-to-day efforts and the vision and goals of the company.

 

Four key employee trends
Our first step was to research and analyze some of the primary trends affecting communication with employees in medium-sized and large companies. What we discovered can be summed up in four key trends.

1. Technology, speed and access have created a sophisticated and cynical knowledge worker who demands honesty and two-way, adult-to-adult dialogue in return for buy-in to the business direction.
2. The value-to-cost ratio for the employee communication function is shifting towards allocating more resources to “outcome” rather than “output” communication, focusing on supporting initiatives that will generate the most revenue or cost savings.
3. Employees become more engaged in their work when they have a clear “line of sight” between their personal contribution and their organization’s strategy and objectives.
4. Organizations that succeed in creating a clear “line of sight” have a strong alignment between their formal communication (the “say”) and their organizational actions (the “do”).

Changing our communication model
In order to address these trends, we decided our current employee communication model and strategy had to be changed. Up until this point, our strategy had been largely based on the traditional model of developing effective outputs (e.g. tactics and processes) to efficiently inform employees (e.g. create awareness) of company news and objectives. Now, we realized we had to move closer to a new model of engaging employees (e.g. generating desired behaviors) that would help create outcomes (e.g. measurable results) in support of business objectives (see Figure 1, below). This was a much more difficult, yet potentially rewarding challenge.

 

Figure 1: RBC's new model of employee communication

Feedback from employees
In order to validate these findings and establish a starting point for our new strategy, we invited 10,000 employees (out of a worldwide base of 70,000) to participate in a survey about our existing internal communication capabilities, and their current and anticipated needs. We received 4,200 responses which revealed the following insights from employees:

• 91 percent said online communication was their primary source of information;
• 88 percent said they wanted more information that impacted their clients;
• 79 percent said they wanted more information about corporate strategies and goals and how it connected to their jobs;
• 33 percent said we needed to provide better context and understanding of how events and information affect them as employees; and
• our feature magazine for employees, the most expensive and labor-intensive vehicle we produced, failed to rank in the top five sources of information valued by employees.

Changing our strategy and tactics
As a result of this survey and our analysis of employee communication trends, we decided to make some significant changes to our internal communication strategy and tactics. In making these changes, we wanted to accomplish four objectives:

1. Help employees develop a better understanding of how what they do relates to our organization’s vision, strategies and goals.
2. Create a more dynamic and interactive communication environment that involves employees in thinking about and understanding how they can influence business results.
3. Ensure employees are getting the information they need to help frame and guide their day-to-day decisions.
4. Promote and recognize the desired behaviors and outcomes in our communication.

Replacing our flagship publication
The first change we made was to eliminate our flagship employee magazine, which had been a mainstay of our internal communication program for more than 25 years. This full-color feature magazine, which was published five times a year, consumed an inordinate amount of our time, effort and money, for the return on our investment. This was equally true of a static, online version of the magazine.

In its place, we developed a number of vehicles and tactics that were designed to involve and engage employees in communication, rather than just inform them. For example, we created a state-of the-art online newsletter site called “INsite” to provide employees with a dynamic and interactive communication experience every month. Much of the content for INsite comes from an editorial board comprised of senior corporate communicators and our partners in HR, all of whom are well connected to business initiatives and activities. Also involved is a unique group dubbed “The Inner Circle,” an online  community of 321 employee volunteers – all avid INsite readers – who provide story ideas and suggestions on a regular basis.

Every reader can instantly rate any INsite article on a scale of one to five, and see the cumulative ratings of their colleagues. Stories are short and easy to read, but if employees want more information, they can click on a link which will instantly take them to additional sources of information within the organization. And every edition of INsite has a live poll that checks the pulse of employees on important issues, and provides them with an ongoing tally of the results. In the first four issues alone, more than 10,000 employees took part in an INsite poll.

Navigating through the intranet
While INsite is the most dynamic vehicle we’ve created to involve employees in dialogue and discovery, it isn’t the only one. Several of our tactics are designed to help employees navigate through RBC’s extensive intranet site.

“FYI” is an online corporate literacy site that provides employees with one-stop shopping for information about our history, culture, policies, issues, organization and more.

“Take 5” is accessible via an icon on the landing page of our intranet. Each week it showcases something interesting or new about a business or function that employees can learn about in only five minutes. And the “New and Notable” section of our landing page provides breaking news and important information about the organization on a global basis.

We also understand that online communications must be balanced with print and face-to-face opportunities. So the flagship employee magazine mentioned earlier has been replaced with a companion print piece to INsite. Sent to all employees twice a year, it focuses on storytelling to support organizational behaviors and themes, and is particularly well-received by employees who still prefer print to online communication, or who do not have regular access to our intranet.

 

Connecting with the CEO
We’ve also revamped our CEO’s quarterly conference call with employees to make it more useful and engaging. While not exactly face-to-face, employees can connect with the CEO every financial quarter by telephone or webcast, submit questions orally or in writing, follow the supporting slides on paper or over the internet, rate the usefulness of the call electronically, and view a transcript or listen to a replay of the call for up to a month.

By expanding the ways employees can access the call, most notably by webcast, we’ve seen a significant increase in participation, questions and satisfaction ratings overall.

 

Developing strategic themes
In order to ensure internal communication is integrated and aligned to the greatest extent possible across the organization, we’ve developed a set of eight strategic themes in tandem with RBC’s strategic business leaders. These themes are used as a guidepost in choosing topics for our various communication with employees and in ensuring our messaging is on strategy.

The themes include topics such as talking about how to build successful careers at RBC, how to enable client success, and promoting collaboration and teamwork across various businesses and functions. If a story or message does not support one of our strategic themes, it’s usually dropped and replaced with something that does.

 

Establishing line of sight
In addition to developing more effective ways to involve employees in our communication, we’ve also created a process to help them build a stronger line of sight between their day-to-day efforts and our organizational goals. This process is called the “RBC Leader Led Dialogues” and it involves of series of cascading meetings in which managers and their direct reports discuss the relationship between their personal contribution, their unit’s priorities, the goals of their business or function, and the overall vision of RBC.

Connecting these four items and providing an opportunity for employees to discuss them in detail with their manager, make it easier for employees to understand how their work is contributing to the overall success of the company and increases their level of personal engagement.

 

Leader-led dialogue in action
As an example of how this process works, let’s take a look at how it was successfully used to improve employee alignment within the Global Technology and Operations (GTO) group of RBC (see Figure 2, below).

Figure 2: Communications alignment within Global Technology and Operations

 

The first step was to show employees how the strategic themes of the GTO group could help RBC fulfill its vision of “Always earning the right to be our clients’ first choice.” This was achieved by linking to the GTO goal of making it easier for customers to do business with RBC through more innovative, simplified and effective processes and technologies. The next step was to discuss the various initiatives within their work unit that supported the broader GTO goals. And finally, the last step was to discuss the work and performance of everyone on the team in terms of their everyday jobs.

The impact of this process in the GTO group was powerful and impressive. Prior to engaging in the Leader Led Dialogues, GTO employees rated their understanding of business strategy and its connection to their work as 5.9 out of a possible 10 points. After the dialogues, they rated their understanding at 8.2 out of 10 – a significant improvement with positive bottom-line implications.

 

Solid results
While it is still early days, the transformational changes we have made to employee communication at RBC are beginning to show solid results. The involvement and participation of employees in almost every one of our communication media is up. Employee alignment and engagement scores are improving, and the company has reported strong revenue growth and record financial results for the past two consecutive years. In addition, we’ve reduced our annual budget for employee communication by more than CAN$300,000.

As for 2007, we plan to roll out the Leader Led Dialogues to a much wider audience, update our strategic themes, make more strategic use of our employee-polling technology, and improve our employee engagement and employee alignment scores. At present, our employee alignment is at 68 percent, which is just past the two-thirds mark that generally separates the best-practice companies from the rest of the pack. We want that score to move well into the 70 percent range over the next few years.

Meeting this kind of challenge, anticipating communication trends, and desiring to be leaders in employee communication best practices, drove us to reinvent our internal communication strategy and transform the way we communicate with our employees. And it’s this approach that will ensure we continue to provide a great return on investment for employee communication at RBC.