COVID-19: Communicating company changes
COVID-19 has impacted many business across all levels of the organisation. Since May 2020, we have given advice and crafted communications for:
Health and lifestyle brand: POPCOM assisted to develop a plan to move this service based business to an online platform. The organisation faced significant cash-flow crisis due to the social distancing recommendations by the Australian Government, as such needed to reduce the number of employees and contract workers. We assisted in drafting a script for the CEO to deceiver the news to casual employees and scenario planned likely responses. We also developed messaging for members and other internal stakeholder outlining the changes to the organisation and instigated a PR campaign to re-introduce the updated business model to the broader community.
Professional Services firm:
Stage 1 We worked with a SME professional services firm, communicating upcoming changes in employment conditions. Through this communications campaign we continuously monitored the media and also used social listening to scenario plan likely responses from employees. It was a three phase project to sympathetically ease employees into the news of significant changes to renumeration. We were able to advise and draw from the experience other firm’s who are announcing similar packages. We also managed the media enquiry and continually monitor the internal and external response.
Stage 2 Through the work from home period we actively looked for opportunities for our client to feature in the media and ‘own’ part of the conversation on work place relations and employment law issues. We created a topic “what if my employees don’t want to return to work?” and set to hijack the news cycle. This headline resulted in a reach of over 7.10m, 24 articles, 4.5k media shares and 12 interviews. Our client featured on Channel 7’s Sunrise, SMH, The Australian, SmartCompany, The Daily telegraph, MMM radio to name a few.
Stage 3 Through COVID-19 we have not lost sight of the internal audience. Regular pulse surveys and communications updating employees on state and federal guidelines, frequent staff news have been sent to include and engage employees. Now it is time to return to work and we have been able to arm the firms HR and management with information about employee perception and attitude about flexible workplace policy - which will determine future initiatives.
Stage 4 WATCH THIS SPACE!
