All organisations go through periods of change. Whether due to growth, reorganisation, repositioning or a global pandemic, how these developments and the uncertainty around them are handled can make all the difference to success.
We were approached in 2021 by a multinational financial services company of 900+ employees across UK, Europe and Asia to talk about how visuals might aid their company’s journey through change as part of the strategy for a program involving as many colleagues as possible and expertly guided by an external facilitator to find the best way through and bring everyone along on the journey to reach the best outcome.
The aim – to include as many colleagues across the business as possible, and to communicate to the whole company the vision and strategy that would emerge.
We sat in on 5 out of a series of 10 meetings, each involving around 30 colleagues from across the business. They discussed together the Starting Points, the Purpose, and how to Bring the Ideas to Life. We captured the thoughts and feelings which were shared in visual notes. It was important to portray the emotion and humour as they cropped up. We shared the images resulting from each meeting soon after they had finished, and in addition, were given the highlights and common threads from the sessions we didn’t attend to create the final piece.
This piece was an amalgamation of all the findings, which was then reproduced as an editable file that could be translated for different regions and scaled up large for print to use as a piece of wall art. Elements of the visuals were used across internal communications; on the company intranet, in presentations and distributed as screensavers.
The visual outputs served as evidence that people had been heard, their thoughts valued, and was a real-time capture of the expressed sentiments.
The company then launched into the strategy part of the journey, communicating how all the findings were going to be implemented with another internal comms project, for which we produced a set of slides with visual notes. This part took on a different visual theme springing form the kick-off meeting where a few Formula One analogies were used. This proved a useful metaphor, encompassing performance, teamwork, speed, efficiency, the customer as the crowd to be thrilled…
A further piece of work wrapped up all the achievements from the past year from different countries and divisions, a real celebration of goals hit, and projects realised. We introduced some simple animation to bring it all to life, and the final piece was presented at an end-of-year festive celebration event.
All of these assets and the visual language we’ve developed for the company have become an integral part of their internal comms, providing a counterpoint to their necessarily more corporate outward-facing communications.
Testimonial
“People are at the heart of everything we do, so it’s essential that we communicate with our colleagues around the globe in a way that engages and inspires them. Carbon Orange’s work on helping to reinvigorate our internal communications strategy and company vision has enabled us to improve understanding and adoption of our strategy throughout our international business.
“Their approach is always well considered, collaborative and responsive, which is a huge benefit to us as an organisation. We look forward to working with Carbon Orange further in 2023 and beyond and have no hesitation in recommending them to other businesses looking to find innovative and creative ways to communicate with internal and external audiences.”
Adam Park, Marketing & Communications Director
