Internal
communications:
Helping a global company during the COVID-19 crisis

John Laing is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is an international company employing 145 staff in 10 offices worldwide. The company is an investor and partner in essential infrastructure projects including road, rail and social programmes.

KPC was working with John Laing on a range of internal communication projects when the COVID-19 crisis struck. As lockdown started around the world, the company had to quickly scale up to keep the internal organisation connected while managing the challenges of keeping people safe and implementing the guidance issued by different countries at different times.

During the crisis, KPC was responsible for developing and implementing a communications strategy that would keep pace with coronavirus-related regulations in each of the regions that John Laing operates from, while bringing and keeping a traditional workforce unused to remote working together,. Naturally easing the apprehension associated with the virus and its implications as well as addressing technical and practical questions was also a big part of the brief.

In addition, this had to be achieved in the context of the existing CEO leaving and a new one yet to be appointed, making clear leadership difficult to convey and lines of communication vague.

The main aim was to ensure John Laing’s entire workforce felt connected and supported during the COVID-19 enforced lockdown. A traditional, largely office-based workforce, had not entirely embraced flexible working patterns and therefore, we had to quickly develop a unifying, supportive manner, while maintaining a ‘business as usual’ attitude as far as possible.

Understandably, for this largely conservative workforce, there was a lot of apprehension around the new way of working as well as the robustness of the business and job security. It was our priority to tackle this and ensure everyone felt comfortable with the changes that were being made, as well as reassured about the security of their position. A clear channel for questions and concerns, given the changes in personnel at the very top of the business was also critical.

Our approach on Yammer was to create an informative but informal information hub where employees could receive support and advice both from company leaders and from their peers. It is the perfect tool to do this, as it enables immediate feedback and conversations.

We kickstarted the approach by creating a ‘Working from Home’ Yammer group and organising communications under a series of four headings. These were:

• HR – all the important information employees needed to know about working from home.
• Business updates – reassuring messages on the health and resilience of the company.
• Stay healthy – information and tools on physical and mental health resilience.
• Working well – advice and support on the physical aspects of remote working, such as balancing childcare, and managing productivity.

To ensure employees were hearing from John Laing on a regular basis, we committed to posting under one of the categories on a daily basis.

We also used Yammer to encourage conversations between employees to keep morale high. We initiated a ‘workplace selfies’ series where employees took a photo of themselves in their working from home environment, shared their best and worst thoughts on working from home and posted it on Yammer, nominating a next colleague to do the same.

This exposed a different, more human, side to people; an at-home version of the employee rather than the office version that everyone was used to seeing. It also gave people the opportunity to share their highs and lows of working from home, stimulating helpful, advice-driven conversations as well as light-hearted conversations about haircuts and hobbies.

In fact, as a direct result of the workplace selfies and getting a glimpse inside employees’ homes and their hobbies, there have been many off shoots such as virtual group bike rides and quizzes. During the initial lockdown period, there were more than 100 selfies posted on the channel.

As well as supporting employees with equipment, and creating information hubs for informal communications, it was also important for us to establish a formal communication channel for employees to hear directly from leaders on a regular basis.

As such, we implemented a fortnightly ‘All Company’ call where employees from all offices across the world were invited to hear from the company leaders. One advantage of lockdown was more flexible working patterns, so we could ask employees to attend at non-core working times. For the first time we could get the whole company together across all time zones and we managed to engage on average 86% of the workforce together, something that had been impossible previously.

What started off as a formal and structured communication has, over time, become more relaxed as people have become more comfortable with the setting. It also gave the leadership team the perfect platform to show some vulnerability, an understanding of the pressures their teams are under and gave permission to employees that it was okay to be working differently.