Ogilvy: "Internal comms: How Telkom built engagement for success

Internal communications offers powerful opportunities for organisations to align people around one vision, and to unlock everyone’s full participation in working to achieve it. It can be fun, challenging, inspiring and empowering. It can also help businesses boost their bottom line, and navigate operational challenges.

Not all businesses take full advantage of the possibilities that internal communications offers. When neglected, or treated as a formality, it can become a somewhat boring, limited platform, which is even ignored by the internal staff whom it is meant to impact.

A massive opportunity

Telkom, though, sees internal communication as a massive opportunity to use fully owned platforms to inform and inspire employees, and to unlock a fuller contribution to organisational success.
This has seen the business unearth a range of powerful ideas, align thousands of staff members, and significantly raise morale, even at a time of serious business challenges.

Some of this innovation has been in the realm of new platforms. Telkom Times is a monthly digital periodical that keeps Telkom’s people informed of developments within the business, but which also adds value, connecting them to wellness information and training opportunities.

For real-time announcements and punchy updates, we devised Telkom Bulletin – a weekly digital newsletter – which delivers crucial business information in bite-size chunks.

Communication is at its most effective when it is reciprocal. We therefore ensured that our Blue Space intranet allows for easy notifications and engagement. The platform offers numerous channels – surveys, interactive screensavers, pop-up notifications; ticker-tape news; desktops; and lock-screen updates. The Telkom Teams app also provides a gateway to the Intranet where they can stay engaged and informed, while Viva Insights helps staff improve focus and productivity, and Viva Learning encourages development and growth.

To raise the production values of Telkom internal content, we used the Telkom Studio, a dedicated production facility, equipped with industry-leading sound, video and lighting gear, for live broadcasts, off-site events and studio recordings. This gave us content that grabbed audience attention and showed Telkom was serious about quality.

We reinvented staff engagement using Microsoft Viva Connections on the Microsoft Teams App, which became a gateway for a far better communications experience. Users could discover and search relevant content – direct from the Teams App bar, and also share and collaborate. This empowered employees with the tools they needed to be their best, from their laptop or their smartphones!

People first

Ogilvy PR MD Samantha Presbury

From the communication team’s side, building a successful platform has required constructive community management – immediate responses to queries, rapid implementation of ideas, and acknowledgement of achievements, so that staff feel heard. It’s another expression of Telkom’s people-first approach.

This focus on reciprocal engagement, saw readership of Telkom internal communications skyrocket by all metrics. From a situation where only 300 staff might engage with a piece of content, we began to see engagements of more than 7,000, with reach of 80-90%.

These metrics also gave a clear indication of what content resonated with the Telkom people. We learned that people like to see themselves and their colleagues, they want to learn about issues affecting them and they want opportunities to improve the lives of themselves and their loved ones.

We provided profile content, showcasing the people who make Telkom great. We committed to providing value, offering competitions, promotions and gamified content, and allowing Telkom staff to nominate their colleagues for recognition. This kept mutual engagement front and centre.

These learnings align perfectly with recent insights from HR experts, that gamification not only enhances internal comms, it can boost performance and productivity, as even daily tasks are incentivised by elements like leaderboards, badges and point systems.

Tailored content

Telkom Executive: Group Communication Mooketsi Mocumi

As a diversified group, comprising several multidisciplinary business units and HR approaches, Telkom needed to communicate to various stakeholders in a way that would accommodate all of them equally.

While some staff might be working from laptops in an office, others are travelling to locations, only connected via their smartphones, and with limited time to engage.

We therefore streamed and repurposed content to suit every staff member’s needs. In-depth, feature-style content was made available on Telkom Times, while concise, lock-screen notices didn’t even require staff to open them in order to be informed.

We made it clear that Telkom people were collaborating with us to build OneTelkom, in a spirit of unity and shared values.

In this vein, the Telkom Monate Champions awards allowed staff to nominate colleagues who they felt exemplified the Monate values of teamwork, fairness, consistency and commitment. They then got to vote for nominees and attend a glittering awards show at the end of it. Everyone was invested, and helped to shape the promotion itself.

This level of engagement proved invaluable when Telkom had to navigate a restructuring process. Thanks to an invested audience of colleagues, we were able to transparently articulate the reasons for the possible restructuring, and enlist contributions from the staff to manage the impact.

Staff were highly engaged participants in this process. An unexpected outcome was a renewed flow of staff innovation ideas.

A pipeline of ideas

This led to the establishment of the Telkom Innovation Hub, dedicated to building a constant pipeline of innovative ideas and suggestions from those closest to operations – the Telkom people.

In the vanguard of this culture of innovation was Lion’s Den, aka the Telkom Group Innovation Challenge – an exciting, group-wide employee engagement programme dedicated to unleashing innovation from within.

The Challenge saw 60+ submissions from Telkom Group employees, ideas that they believed would propel the Group toward a more innovative future.

The 10 finalists were then invited to present their ideas to the Telkom Group Innovation Challenge Lions – group chief human resources officer Melody Lekota; Openserve CEO Althon Beukes; BCX CEO Jonas Bogoshi; Telkom consumer and small business CEO Lunga Siyo; and Lloyd Chego, Gyro Executive for IT Technology Solutions.

The Lions evaluated these ground-breaking concepts, and ultimately determined the winners of the Challenge. Up to a million rand in prizes were shared between them in recognition of their commitment to innovation.

Campaigns like this have captured everyone’s imagination, and led to a powerful alignment between people, management, HR and comms, in service of the Telkom mission to seamlessly connect South Africans to a better life.

From Group CEO Serame Taukobong, through to each of our operational teams, we are all on the same side, thanks to open, two-way communications that keep people pulling together, for the betterment of everyone – at Telkom and across South Africa.