Employee Engagement: Rallying a Global Workforce Around The Company’s Brand and Mission

THE SITUATION

A Fortune 500 technology company with a massive global workforce and multifaceted market strategy experienced changes that led to a rebrand of its company. Faced with the challenge of keeping over 15,000 employees engaged in the vision, brand, and strategy of their organization, they asked Blue Beyond for help managing an internal brand launch across 45 offices in dozens of countries.

WHAT WE DID

As our client prepared to launch a new external brand and corporate narrative to the market, Blue Beyond understood the importance of engaging employees in the evolution of the company story and galvanizing them as brand believers and ambassadors. We worked with leaders in Brand, HR and Internal Communications to develop an overarching internal launch strategy followed by a longer-term engagement plan to align company mission, vision, strategy, values and culture. Key elements of the employee engagement strategy included:

• Launching the brand with a global event. Orchestrating a single-day, multi-national, live simulcast event on launch day that introduced the company’s new brand while simultaneously uniting employees behind a clear, concise and compelling sense of the company’s purpose. In addition, we surprised thousands of employees with celebratory events held in offices around the world on launch day—complete with live music and customized giveaways.
• Equipping leaders and employees to be storytellers. We provided tools to enable everyone to tell the company story in meaningful and engaging ways to nurture and maintain a workplace culture of connectedness and shared sense of purpose. This included manager toolkits and briefing sessions, as well as a global employee “desk drop” (both physical and virtual) on launch day comprising inspirational materials and messaging to help employees see themselves in the company’s purpose and larger strategic vision.
• Bringing to life a new set of company values. (co-created by leadership and employees) through a multi-faceted storytelling and recognition campaign. The new values were further reinforced by adjustments to HR and company programs – from onboarding to development to performance – to incentivize and reward ways of working aligned to the desired values and behaviors.
• Uniting employees around a clear call to action in support of the company’s strategic goals. This included strategy “tours” and “unplugged” discussions hosted globally by the CEO and senior leaders, educational and inspirational podcasts and videos, an interactive intranet portal and special focus to reinforce messaging and actions in all company and leadership meetings.
• Aligning Corporate Social Responsibility efforts. We refreshed the philanthropic focus, message, and set of signature programs and partnerships.
• Implementing ongoing employee engagement initiatives. In order to keep the company brand and story top of mind and integrate it into the fabric of the organization long term, we initiated annual anniversary events, creative competitions, employee appreciation initiatives and customer guest speakers.

Throughout this multi-year engagement, Blue Beyond partnered closely with our clients to come up with big ideas and creative approaches. We then helped implement those ideas down to the last detail to ensure their success.