Engaging with EMC

Background

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service.

In the UK and Ireland, they employ around 1,400 people across 17 offices, and in 2012 they were recognised as 13^th in the Great Places to Work listing (large companies) in the UK. Their particular areas of strength are around their employee's engagement with the company's vision, their ability to execute and deliver leadership, and employee learning and development.

The business communicates a lot to their employees on business performance, products and what is happening in the market. Most of this communication is done via email in over whelming volume. Very little of their communication takes the 'employee' angle. As a result they wanted to develop an employee focused communication tool.

Solution

With EMC being a technology company it was assumed the solution would a technology based idea with a strong social emphasis, but looking into the feedback in the employee survey there was a feeling there was too much electronic communication. The solution needed to be unique and not get lost within the general corporate communication.

After a competitive pitch CA3 were appointed to develop a solution for their need. Taking into account the feedback from the employee survey it was decided that we would develop and design a printed Magazine that would have a Consumer Magazine style to it, rather than a traditional staff newsletter.

We spent a great deal of time with the EMC team developing the magazine content structure, to make sure it would be the right mix for EMC employees and, of course, hard to put down.

The name Employee Matters and Chatters (picked by the EMC editorial team) lended itself well the nature of magazine and the company name, staff renamed EMcers for the Magazine were asked to volunteer to contribute content which they did in their masses with stories both heartwarming and hilarious.

CA3 also created an Editors guide to aid in the creation of content and design of the magazine. This guide had suggestions on writing techniques, guides on templates (and which to pick for what content), as well as checklists to ensure every page had everything it needed to go to press.

The Magazine was distributed to all EMC offices in the UK and Ireland and people who worked from home.

Results

The Magazine was available to all EMC staff from the second week of January 2013 and whilst it is too early to measure its impact everyone involved was pleased with not only the final product but also the large number of people who wanted to get involved in contributing to the Magazine. This bodes well for future editions as it is planned the Magazine will be quarterly.