How do you ensure people feel seen and heard in a big corporate?

Enter internal communications: a largely under-represented function in businesses, yet arguably one of the most influential and critical for healthy, sustainable growth – not to mention, happiness at work. 

Machine’s award-winning internal communications team has been leading this charge in SA for many years for a host of clients – including Sanlam, who it has partnered with on internal communications since 2020. “That was a challenging and fascinating time to embark on our journey with the Sanlam Group, just as the height of the pandemic precipitated,” recalls Sarah Browning-de Villiers, Machine’s chief content officer. “I’m still extremely proud at how we innovated and worked with agility in partnership with Sanlam at a time when internal communication was both critically important and extremely complicated.”

It's a partnership that has gone from strength to strength; reflecting on this partnership and shared learnings, Browning-de Villiers chatted with Sanlam Group’s Pearl Majola, head of group communications, and Inga Bosch-Cloete, senior manager of group internal communications, about why internal communications has never been more important.

Three things to embrace within internal communications

1. Move towards transparency, even when you don’t have all the answers

“It’s a fine line between managing authenticity in internal communications and the very serious responsibility we hold in representing a big corporation like Sanlam,” says Bosch-Cloete. “The most important thing is to be closely connected to our leaders: to understand the challenges they’re dealing with and to know our leaders well enough that we can drive internal communications in a way that authentically reflects each of them as individuals, while also embodying Sanlam’s values and what we stand for as a business.

“Our people value transparency and accountability, and we always consider our internal communications approach against these two values,” continues Bosch-Cloete. “We constantly sense check how effective we are being in delivering on these values through feedback loops with our people. This reflects in our internal channel usage, such as Viva Engage, whereby we have an open community that welcomes conversation and engagement, and where every individual can be seen and heard.”

“Often our most authentic internal communication moments happen in crises,” adds Majola. “In those instances, it’s impossible to script a narrative – that’s when you see how a team and leaders step into the space authentically. In those moments we have learnt to be honest with our people: to explain our challenges, or our mistakes, or perhaps the reality of something that’s out of our control, and to ask openly for understanding, or a second chance, or for input and suggestions.

"The more we embrace this kind of humility and humanity in our communications, the more we resonate with our people. It takes bravery and vulnerability to do this, but the more we do it the more we create an environment of safety internally to do so, and the more we nourish a culture of authenticity, safety and integrity across the business.”

2. It’s about choice, choice, choice

“We’re obsessed with asking our staff what they want,” laughs Bosch-Cloete. “We use everything from quick, emoji-led pulse checks to in-depth surveys to continually ask our staff what they want and how they are experiencing our internal communication channels. We also try to utilise many different channels and formats – from our internal podcast Confident Conversations, to fun gifs and polls on Viva Engage – to ensure that there is something for everyone.”

“We have to balance investment levels and pragmatism with individual choice,” says Majola, “and that is always a business tension we hold, but one thing we are good at is sharing back with our staff survey feedback and how we’re doing against various indexes and benchmarks. So we’re also closing the feedback loop and working hard to be open about how we’re doing, what we can and can’t deliver on, and why, against the preferences indicated by our people.”

3. Create a global community that allows for local individuality

“Our power – especially as a large, global employee community – is in our diversity,” says Majola. “As much as we have centralised group-wide internal communications, we work hard to allow local business units and functions to take group-wide messaging and make it their own. This takes a huge amount of collaboration and may slow our pace down at points, but it is critical to how we value the individual at Sanlam.”

“We’ve also intentionally created an ecosystem of internal communication channels that allow for various levels of individual interaction and engagement,” adds Bosch-Cloete. “Broadcast channels ensure consistent messaging at a global level, while channels like Viva Engage allow for sub-communities in a safe, internal space where everything from an individual’s birthday to a work milestone or proposed brand campaign message can be tested, and leaders can be personally interacted with by people at every level.”

Continues Majola: “We’re focused on featuring employees in our internal communications and campaigns – from their stories to their faces and who they are as people, not just as professionals. While we have ambitions to double down on this more, we are proud of how individuals are celebrated in a global organisation with over 10,000 employees of different cultures, languages and experiences.”

More about Machine

Machine is a South African creative-solutions agency, where fearless minds, lead to borderless creativity. Visit thisismachine.co.za for more information.

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