Case: inclusive and social internal communications at a big bank

Our client, one of the big banks in The Netherlands, strives to be more personal, inclusive and digital. Applying this strategy to internal communications, the bank recently launched Yammer. Shortly afterwards, it asked OrangeTrail to inspire, educate, and support the communications professionals within the bank in shifting to more inclusive and social internal communications on the platform.

Social internal communications

As a start, we organised a series of workshops open to all communications professionals within the bank. Many of them joined and participated actively in the interactive online sessions. We educated the participants on how to make Yammer successful, inspiring them with examples and case studies from our practice.

We explained how Yammer can be a powerful channel to engage employees with big topics, which we call strategic narratives. Together, we explored which strategic narratives they were involved in themselves. We also introduced a set of tools for engaging people on Yammer and applied these to their narratives.

Leadership support

In a follow-on session with the communications business partners of senior leadership, we looked at supporting leaders in driving strategic narratives using Yammer. This can boost general knowledge and understanding of the strategy, as well as engagement between leadership and staff.

We introduced a narrative canvas to streamline conversations with leaders and help select effective interventions such as JAM sessions.

Diversity & inclusion JAM session

The first JAM session we helped organise was about Diversity & Inclusion, hosted by the bank's Chief Human Resources Offices. Three OrangeTrail consultants worked closely with a team of communications professionals at the bank to minutely plan and execute this hour-long session on Yammer.

This nicely validated our earlier recommendation to use JAMs on Yammer for achieving great reach and generating lots of energy around a strategic narrative. At one point during the session, over 10 000 employees were participating at the same time!