The rotating communication co-ordinator

One of the most successful internal communication operations in which I have been involved was at French Group Alstom - thankfully well before they nose-dived off the financial cliffs . There, internal communications did report to HR, who had inherited it along with a ragbag of other ˜lost' departments in the course of a frantic three years of acquisitions. All the internal communications people reported directly to a plant manager as well, so there was conflict of loyalty. Worse still, in some of the acquisitions, strong-willed managers maintained a barrier against too much communication, hoping that the headquarters and its battalions of French cadres would eventually go away.

Of course they had no plans to do that. But, the first issue that had to be faced was communicating with the communicators . And there wasn't - as is so usual when it comes to corporate communications - much of a budget to effect change either. Anyway, working with the director of HR, I and several colleagues created a totally ˜new-look' communications department. Key to our brief was getting everyone in the department thinking in the same way and sharing the same information and ideas.

First we carried out an audit on the people. We quickly discovered that while some had professional communications skills, others had just been saddled with the job, because no one else wanted it. However, through the audit we were able to establish who had what skills and how best they could be applied across the group.

Then - by collecting as much hardcopy evidence as we could from subsidiaries around the globe - we began to establish what sort of messages and signals were being sent to employees . To our shock , we discovered that these - until now - highly autonomous little communication units were pushing out all sorts of materials, very little of which had any connection with the corporate line being voiced from Paris.

We then unveiled our masterstroke. We established a group coordinator of internal communications at the Paris headquarters, but we made it a rotating job. And - thanks to the power of technology - also made it possible to do the job from virtually any location. So we picked, by universal acclaim, the first three people, who would each do the job for a six-month period. This worked extremely well and people became both very enthusiastic and began to share ideas with each other. The role of the co-ordinator was to help senior management develop the messages and then - using the skills inherent in the network - to get messages to employees. The additional bonus was that these coordinators quickly gained a true feel for the overall business, which they were able to take back to their units when their tour of duty expired . In addition, we created champions for the individual issues or technical aspects we were dealing with, allowing for an increase in pooled publishing and the like.

Each time the co-ordinator changed we had a group meeting to discuss and update each other face-to-face, hand out special assignments and form teams from different locations to work on specific issues.