CONNECTING PEOPLE AND BUSINESS AT ROLLS-ROYCE

Creating unity within the communication team is the first step to more consistency

PROFILE : LISA LANGE

Turbine engine manufacturer, Rolls-Royce North America, consists of 60 different sites across the US and Canada. As director of internal communications, Lisa Lange has the task of bringing

Describe your role and responsibilities at Rolls-Royce.

Currently, I'm the director of internal communications for Rolls-Royce North America. In sum, my job is to connect the business to employees, and employees to the business. That means a lot of research, strategic planning, program delivery and measurement. I'm also a communication consultant to our businesses and operational functions. I get to work on a great mix of corporate communications and one-off business, functional and change management projects.

What projects are you currently working on?

Right now we're in the process of disseminating results from our second global employee engagement survey. Improving employee engagement is a major focus at Rolls-Royce, and we have several programs underway that are really beginning to show measurable results. We're also conducting our first global internal communications audit. Both will provide valuable information about our progress as a function and help us build our roadmap forward. I'm also heading up the scheme to implement a work-life balance program in North America - a recognized need that should also help with our engagement efforts.

What's the biggest communication challenge you face at the moment?

Rolls-Royce North America is spread out across the US and Canada, which means we have to nearly 8,000 employees, at over 60 sites. One of our challenges is making sure information is reaching our workforce - a workforce that includes a large number of shop-floor employees who don't have access to e-mail. We've recently conducted a number of focus groups on internal communication and feedback shows that employees don't have the information to understand how our sites and businesses work together. So, another challenge is to educate our employees about the co -dependencies of our businesses and sites, and to help them to develop the tools to share that information.

What are you doing to overcome this?

Our internal communication team is spread out across the region, with some dedicated, full-time communication practitioners, and some with only a parttime responsibility, usually with a full-time role elsewhere. About six months ago I started a bi-weekly regional internal communication meeting conducted via conference call. The call brings us together as a team to discuss on-going communication challenges, current and future initiatives, and gives us a forum to brainstorm ideas together. This is bringing us closer together as a team and helping to ensure that information is consistently reaching employees.

What are your most effective communication vehicles or channels to reach employees?

Six months ago we launched a bi-weekly e-newsletter, The Hub. We found that while our quarterly newsletter is well received by employees and great for longer, feature stories, we needed a formal tool to get more timely news out on a regular basis, something besides the intranet, which can't be accessed by all employees. A link to The Hub, including one-paragraph summaries, is sent to all employees via e-mail on the first and third Wednesday of the month and there's a printed version for our hourly employees. The Hub has been very well received and is proving to be a great tool for getting out corporate and business news to employees.

Additionally, our newly redesigned intranet is very intuitive, and information is easy to find and access for employees.

What achievement in your current role are you most proud of?

I'm extremely proud to have been part of an employee engagement initiative called "Winning Workplace" which we launched in early 2006 at our site in Oakland, California. It's a purely employee-led program used to tackle identified issues and challenges - from trust in leadership to lack of business knowledge.

Communication was and is a huge part of this effort and I'm proud of the work that's been done - we've seen real measurable improvements over this past year. Winning Workplace is now a part of the site's culture and it's an amazing accomplishment for the employee team and the site.

I'm also proud of the redesign of our award-winning regional newsletter. I've changed it from an HR-focused newsletter to one that's now strategically focused on connecting employees to the business.

Lisa Lange is director of internal communications at Rolls-Royce North America. She has worked in internal communication for over 10 years, mostly for Fortune 500 companies.