Hub member profile: Colin Archer
Like many companies in the finance sector, Experian recently faced the challenge of cost reductions in the workforce as a result of the economic downturn. Colin Archer, head of people communications and community, describes how his team managed messaging around the redundancies in a way that caused little disruption to engagement levels.
What has been your path into internal communication?
A varied one! I started out as a marketing trainee with British Gas the year before it was privatized and from there moved into IT. When Centrica was formed from the British Gas demerger, I did some project management and then moved into account management.
Finally, I found my true vocation and moved into an internal communication role supporting a culture change program in the IT division. Since then I’ve headed up internal communication in the energy sector, business process outsourcing and financial services.
What are your current communication and engagement challenges?
Bringing about culture change to a diverse and disparate organization in the midst of a global recession. Keeping people feeling like they still belong and more importantly, ensuring that they want to belong.
We’ve got our most senior leaders holding informal breakfasts, lunches, coffee and doughnut sessions and just simple open forum Q&A sessions.
How are you overcoming these?
We’re currently running a “Back to Basics” campaign, which involves a lot of leadership communication, allowing people to really see who’s leading the organization and connect with them. We’ve got our most senior leaders holding informal breakfasts, lunches, coffee and doughnut sessions and just simple open forum Q&A sessions.
In addition, we use our People Forum to get to the heart of tough questions and involve them in deciding how we do things. The forum representatives have been a superb sounding board and have come up with great suggestions, as well as being on the ground to provide feedback to us when things aren’t going smoothly. The key to it all is to help our people and our leaders connect with one another in simple ways which encourage understanding.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a big thing at Experian, why is it so important for you and how has it affected the corporate culture?
At present, I perceive a loss of trust in many of the things people have taken for granted. Some of our largest companies and even our governments are seen by many of the public as greedy, self serving and untrustworthy. People today care about more than simply how much money a company makes. A successful CSR program then, is one through which the organization can prove something else about itself. CSR is one way to address the issue of continuing disillusionment. Organizations that do well in the future might well be those who do most to show they behave differently towards current and prospective employees, suppliers, customers or even shareholders.
Our employee survey told us again this year that one of the three key drivers for engagement among our people is being a good corporate citizen. So we help our people to achieve that feeling of contribution and involvement in a number of ways; we give every one of our people up to three days a year to volunteer, our people choose a charity of the year, and we also match any of their own fund raising efforts for other charities. In addition, we seek to make the process two way so that people gain from the experience through personal development or skills enhancement.
Which communication channels are most effective at Experian?
The intranet is really good at getting information to people on a regular basis, and for keeping static information in one place. Many people heavily rely on it.
However, the most effective channels are those we’ve introduced recently with our leadership team, whereby leaders talk to people directly and informally. We’re experimenting now with online interactive sessions to see if we can get a balance between the live and electronic elements that our people seem to like.
We managed to help most people through the changes in a way that has had no detrimental effect on engagement.
Downsizing has occurred at Experian as a result of the UK recession, how have you communicated this and maintained engagement levels?
By being completely open. As soon as we knew we were going to have to take action we communicated. This was a first for us, we hadn’t worked out all the details but took the decision that if we needed to make changes, then we should tell people as much as we could as soon as we knew it. I was a little nervous about the impact, but I believe in treating people with the respect I’d like to be shown if I were in the same situation. Our people appreciated the openness at the beginning of the program and by keeping a regular flow of information going with planned updates that everyone knew were coming, we managed to help most people through the changes in a way that has had no detrimental effect on engagement.
Have your say
Has corporate citizenship been a key driver for engagement at your company? Can you think of other ways Archer and his team can overcome their key challenges?
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