Cardinal Health: Using Delegates to Reach Your Field Force
By Vicki Wray, Author, Communicating Social Impact
Communicating to a decentralized workforce is no easy task, but Cardinal Health is committed to engaging and supporting employees across the enterprise—10 countries and 90+ facilities. One key communication method is carried out by facility-level site leaders, who act as extensions of the community relations team.
Quarterly online conference calls encourage sharing of best practices and keep the site leaders up to date. These leaders also have access to a community relations page on an internal site, described as functioning like a cross between LinkedIn and Facebook, where they can find additional information on specific community relations activities. Site managers play a role through use of “huddle scripts” that include social impact messaging, when appropriate, provided by corporate communications for their weekly site meetings.
The salesforce receives similar messaging in its weekly communications. Social media also play a role in communicating with these hard-to-reach employees, who use the company’s CSR Facebook page to talk about their community involvement on their own time.
The community relations department is always looking to improve, and it sought out an internal leadership development program to survey employees. Two key learnings emerged: First, with so much competing “noise,” make sure the message is something people will want or need to hear using storytelling to “humanize” the message. Second, elevate the site leader role and link success in this position to individual professional development plans.
“We are happy with our progress in reaching this part of our employee population, but our quest for improvement never ends,” states Dianne Radigan, vice president, community relations. “Communications channels are constantly changing, and we continue to retool so we can best communicate with all of our employees. It is critically important that they have full view of how the company supports and encourages community efforts. It’s good for our employees and the community, and it adds value to the business.”
About Communicating Social Impact
This case study is taken from Communicating Social Impact, the report of a 12-company research working group convened by The Conference Board that examined how leading organizations have effectively integrated promising communications practices into their corporate social responsibility and social impact work. Available free, the report is one of a range of publications on social impact measurement that The Conference Board has published in the past 12 months. The other publications, including Framing Social Impact Measurement, are available to members here.
About the author:
Vicki Wray
Author
Communicating Social Impact
Vicki Wray is a communications consultant, helping leaders at all levels of an organization engage employees and drive change in support of business goals. She brings over 20 years of employee communications experience to bear on such challenges as executive communications, strategic organizational communications, crisis communications, CSR communications, and large-scale change initiatives, including mergers, acquisitions, and restructurings, in addition to annual reports. You can contact Vicki at [email protected].
