I’ve run employee communications in roles supporting business groups at Lenovo (WW Commercial BU and CIoT) and in my regional Ascom Americas role. I’ve also activated employee comms as part of a campaign, such as telling Lenovo’s Diversity & Inclusion story and recruiting new talent to Ascom. While we should never estimate the time, resources, and planning it takes to “keep the lights on” with consistent employee communications via townhalls (major like Lenovo with kickoffs around the world), email newsletters, employee roundtables, Intranet stories and other tactics, this page highlights more campaign oriented work.
Ascom Recruitment Campaign
Situation: Ascom was going through a major hiring spree and needed to attract qualified candidates in North America.
Action: I created a six month integrated campaign across channels to demonstrate the benefits of working for Ascom and the role of purpose in creating the technology behind the tagline – when outcomes matter.
Task: I scripted and produced a recruitment video showcasing Ascom’s mission, vision and values and capabilities across the world and the region. I promoted it on social media and through employee advocates while spotlighting key positions. An enhanced careers page enhanced the candidate experience, and a Welcome Kit enabled employees to promote Ascom from Day 1 when they joined.
Result: Helped HR recruit and onboard additional 30 employees in an eight month timespan.
Watch the video.
Motorola Acquisition
Situation: Lenovo acquired Motorola in a historic announcement and strategic investment in its business portfolio. Given previous ownership by Google, Motorola employees were skeptical of Lenovo’s intentions for the Motorola brand, employee retention and focus on product excellence.
Task: I lead the global communications (external and internal) plan for the Motorola acquistion. As part of the Day 1 communications activities, I developed a comprehensive internal comms plan that involved alignment and coordination with communications colleagues not only from Motorola, but also from leads in other Lenovo geographies, especially in China and Latin America. I also coordinate with Google’s PR teams through a regulated review process.
Action: Specifically for internal comms, I managed:
- Employee event in Chicago with Lenovo CEO, Mobile Business Group leader based in China, Liu Jun, and Head of Motorola, Rick Osterloh. This townhall style event provided a first chance for Motorola employees to see and hear from Lenovo leaders. Together with our events agency, we livestreamed the townhall to employees so anyone in the company could view the new day for Moto under Lenovo. We hosted watch parties at major Lenovo locations, including Morrisville, NC and showcased Motorola products to employees could see them up close.
- Employee event in Sunnyvale, California – a smaller, more intimate event, but similar to the goal of the Chicago event, giving employees an opportunity to meet and greet with leadership
- A series of similar events in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Beijing, China
- We facilitated a video message from the Head of Motorola as part of his email to the Motorola employees announcing the official change of ownership
Result: Employee survey results indicated satisfaction with the transition and an average to high degree of trust in the organization and confidence in its future.
Selling Solutions – through Virtual Reality
Situation: With highly technical, customizable solutions, Ascom sales team and partners are challenged in showing how nurse call, software, and mobiilty solutions drive better workflows.
Task: Since showing is usually better than telling, I enterprised a creative way to show customers how smart alarming and alerting solutions work through a nurse’s day through virtual reality.
Action: I worked with a local video production company to make a VR video. While the best experience is donning the headset yourself (which we took to some tradeshows), the video still shows up nicely in 2D, which we used on our website and social channels.
Result: In the pilot we learned that nurses in 2021 didn’t want to wear the headset because of COVID concerns, so we canceled further episodes.
