FMJ.CO.UK COMMUNICATIONS FOCUS
TOP TIPS FOR
COMMUNICATING
WITH FRONTLINE STAFF
Choose a number of different
channels from digital to physical to
ensure your message is received at
the front line.
Provide opportunities for a dialogue
– communication shouldn’t be oneway.
You need to listen more than
you speak.
Ask staff what they want – surveys
are great ways to get feedback
about their experiences of your
business, but also let you know how
they want to communicate.
Make sure frontline staff receive,
and engage with, communications
both from the client organisation
and their employer.
Don’t force engagement.
DECEMBER/JANUARY 2019 29
Which is why employers in the FM sector
find it such a challenge. “It’s always amazed
me how we overlook the very people who
create impressions,” says Debra Ward,
Managing Director of venue and events
organiser Camm and Hooper, and former
MD of Mitie Client Services. “In the era of
service, it is our frontline team, in whatever
industry you are in, who can make or break
an organisation.”
It’s relatively straightforward to integrate
the primary FM vendor into client-side
systems, says Bruce Barclay, Head of
European Real Estate and Workplace at US
Bank. “Over the years I have integrated a
number of service providers into my clientside
systems at di erent organisations.
They typically have access to our network
and our communications platform, so they
understand us as a business and know
what’s going on. But getting to the next
level down – the frontline cleaning, security,
catering and reception sta – is a challenge.”
It requires the service provider to put
in place protocols to ensure that those
individuals are integrated not just with their
employer’s culture and values, but also
with those of the client organisation where
they work. “Some vendors do it really well
– they are on site and have weekly meetings
with the teams and make them feel part
of the client’s and vendor’s brands,” says
Barclay. “But it needs to be a joint e ort
between the client and vendor for it to work
successfully.”
Barclay, who wrote the IWFM guide
‘Managing FM teams across borders’, raises
another issue. “When you’re managing
teams across borders, the people in
professional roles will typically speak good
business English but the frontline teams
may have very little. That means translating
work orders and communication into
multiple languages. But it’s something that
the vendors are going to have to get right, if
they want the service delivery to be aligned
to client business need and core values. The
time I invest with my vendors getting them
into our culture and business, they need to
invest in their people.”
NO EASY ANSWER
But there’s no silver bullet when it comes
to communicating with frontline sta . It’s
a challenge for any large organisation to
reach those who do not have company
emails, phones or who work in restricted
sites, acknowledges Melanie Du ett, Brand
and Communications Director at Sodexo UK
and Ireland which has 34,000 employees in
the UK and Ireland alone. “The two main
ways we focus on communicating with
these audiences is through their manager
and a Sodexo intranet accessible from any
device. We recognise there is still a need
for traditional ways of communicating
such as noticeboards and posters, and use
these to support the messages from their
managers or our digital channels.”
Like many other service providers,
Sodexo’s intranet is a one-stop portal
for payslips, training, employee perks,
job openings and regional or global
news, together with photos celebrating
achievements at annual awards and
culinary showcases. But the company
has also seen a big increase in employees
communicating with them through
Facebook, Facebook groups, Twitter,
Instagram and LinkedIn. But Du ett is a
realist. “Ultimately, we can’t, and wouldn’t
want to, force people to sign up to the
employee website or join a Facebook
group, and we recognise that some people
simply do not want to use their personal
time or devices for something relating to
their work.”
For Lisa Hamill, UK People Director at FM
service provider Atalian Servest, the key
is to treat the firm’s 25,000 employees as
consumers. “People won’t necessarily read
something just because they receive it.
We focus so much on what we want to say
that we forget to consider what we want
the person at the other end to think, feel
or do as a result.” She urges businesses to
communicate in as many di erent ways as
possible. This is particularly important for
companies like Atalian Servest that have
a diverse workforce made up of people
of di erent ages, backgrounds, beliefs
and customs. “We use loads of di erent
mediums so we have the best chance
of reaching our frontline teams in a way
which suits them,” she says. “By adopting
a consumer, multifaceted approach, we
believe we can better engage people.”
This includes messages on email
payslips, posters which are available for
managers to distribute to client sites,
Atalian World – the company’s learning
platform which every colleague can
access, social media including Twitter,
YouTube, WhatsApp and LinkedIn, and
sometimes good old-fashioned paper
letters.
But there are downsides to every
method, says Hamill. “Posters can end up
never making it to site. People move house
and can forget to let us know their new
address, so letters fail to reach them. Many
people aren’t on social.” The important
thing is not to generalise or assume you
know the best way for each person, she
notes.
One South African-based FM provider,
for example, uses a comic to communicate
company news to frontline sta who
have low levels of literacy. Meanwhile,
engineering firm GSH, which has operations
around the world, takes a di erent approach
depending on geography. “In India, we use
WhatsApp to communicate with the more
than 5,000 sta we have there,” says CEO
Mark Thomas. “Few will have access to a
laptop or company email address, but they
all have smartphones so it’s a quick and
personal way to communicate. We also
share company news on Facebook and get
high levels of interaction with sta . It’s a
very cost-driven economy and these free
tools suit the market.”