How innovative technology opened up communication channels at Telstra
Using its own Next G™ network, Telstra has been able to communicate with its employees more easily.
by Anthia Galanis, Manager, Corporate Employee Communications, Telstra
Telstra, a telecoms and information services organization, has more than 46,000 permanent employees, a large contingent of contractors and our subsidiaries’ employees.
The challenge for the Corporate Internal Communications team is to be the single voice that cuts through the buzz that pervades such a large organization and connect our people with the news, views and information that are shaping the company’s agenda.
The virtual news bureau
Sol Trujillo, CEO, joined Telstra in July 2005, and kicked off a business transformation on 15 November 2005. Three years into this 5-year business transformation, Telstra has undergone a radical change in the way it thinks about itself, its products and its customers. We've been evolving from a traditional telephone company into a fully integrated media communications company.
During this time, the Corporate Employee Communications team has also undergone a massive evolution in the way it communicates and engages staff around the issues that matter to our business.
The Telstra intranet homepage, the main channel for mass communication with our people, used to be a static frame that was updated a couple of times a week with memo-style communication from senior managers.
The communication flow was very much one-way with little or no interaction with staff. The daily news summary email bulletin was a straight text document that took, in some instances, up to 6 hours to be distributed throughout the organization.
Using Next G™ technology to communicate with employees
As Telstra transforms into a media comms company – developing and marketing new technologies that deliver content and facilitate communication – our challenge was to harness this new technology to open up innovative employee communication channels that delivered a message that matched the medium.
High-speed mobile communications is very much the way of the future for Telstra. Telstra sells this technology in the marketplace as a result of building the Next G™ network: a major 3G network.
We thought, “What better way to have our employees advocate the benefits of the Next G™ network than to have them experience its possibilities?”
The Next G™ mobile device provides both the internet and TV content. With more than 22,000 Next G™ devices in official circulation within Telstra, we decided to harness the power of the Next G™ network – the capacity for video and internet-based communication is now mobile, compact, affordable and extremely "do-able" – to communicate with our staff.
Innovative CEO communication channel
For such a large organization, Telstra has the added pressure of trying to give each and every one of our staff members equitable access to our CEO, Sol Trujillo.
But the simple fact of the matter is that our CEO cannot meet face-to-face with every employee at every important juncture. Instead, over the past 18 months we've developed the ability to deliver 30-second MMS messages – videos, images and text – to our employees' Next G™ hand-held devices.
The Next G™ network has enabled us to send messages out to this mobile base and push them to the intranet homepage news portal for the news – including video, multimedia, images, audio and text.
The must-see communication channel
This channel is used infrequently to maintain its currency with the audience as a must-see/must-have communication channel. It's reserved exclusively for the CEO’s communication.
The audience is now conditioned to know that MMS will always deliver the biggest news, not spam.
The audience is now conditioned to know that MMS will always deliver the biggest news, not spam.
So far, the team has delivered 30 MMS blasts from the CEO to promote the company’s annual Investor Day, half- and full-year results, and significant announcements relating to brand and retail strategy.
Benefits of MMS-style communication
This type of communication can be put together in a very short timeframe.
- Because messages are limited to 30 seconds the initial video shooting time is short (15-45 mins).
- Capturing, editing and exporting files to a 3GP (a file format like the Windows Media Video format, but highly compressed for delivery on a hand-held device) format can be completed in a couple of hours.
- The file then undergoes a series of tests to ensure that it can be viewed on as many devices as possible. This can be completed in a 2-hour timeframe.
- The IC team recently gained access to Telstra’s commercial MMS tool, used by both internal and external marketing groups. Previously we were using an external platform. The benefit for us is that we can now distribute the message to 22,000 devices in around an hour and a half where it used to take 6 hours.
New team structure
Our previous days of top-down messaging, flat content and corporate buzzwords are now long gone. Today, the Corporate Employee Communications team is organizationally grouped with the media relations and communication functions within Telstra’s Public Policy & Communications business unit.
The team operates as a virtual news bureau with tentacles into the business units.
The team operates as a virtual news bureau with tentacles into the business units and centralized public affairs, media relations, issue management and corporate relations functions.
Our corporate employee engagement approach borrows more from the classic news model than the traditional internal communication function.
Have your say
Have you used MMS or some kind of internal TV broadcast to your advantage? Which team is responsible for compiling the content? Was it difficult to get buy in for such a project? Share your thoughts with us, below.
Recommended resources:
Streaming multimedia: live broadcasts, internet radio
and dial-up connections
AUDIO GUIDE: What should your internal TV cover?
Anthia will be speaking at Melcrum's Sydney networking event: 29 January 2009
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