Where to start?

Usually the issue with internal communications is too much noise – a busy environment with too many messages going out.

Put designers on it

A design team could resolve how the interdependencies of social, environmental and financial performance are presented. It could determine how the calculations behind performance figures are laid out.

Reporting remuneration

With Ed Milliband and David Cameron both scoring political points on the issue of executive remuneration right now, it will be interesting to see whether remuneration reports in the next batch of annual reports will take on a different shape, or at least in some way react to prominent public debate about executive pay.

Untangling interdependencies

“…brings together material information about an organization’s strategy, governance, performance and prospects in a way that reflects the commercial, social and environmental context within which it operates.”

Award winning Changing Lives – Zephyr deliver internal comms ‘Bang for bucks’

We were pleased as punch to join NOMS (National Offender Management Service) in collecting top prize at last week’s CorpComms Awards for Best Live Event created for internal audiences.

The NOMS winning event was a two-part awards ceremony (held over…

Motion and meaning

We’ve commented a few times previously on the challenges of integrated reporting. In particular the need for companies to show the links they see between financial and non-financial performance and the long-term sustainability of their business.

If a company believes…

The promise of the FRC Reporting Lab

The Reporting Lab, launched on the 14th October, by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) definitely has promise.

Conscious of the endless stream of white papers and exposure drafts addressing the effectiveness and future of narrative reporting, the Lab instead is…

Visualisation has its catches

We’ve written a few times now about the benefits of visualisation as a process of summarising complexity and even defining a brief. Indeed, we’re big proponents of using images and icons to capture thinking rather than endless words – a…

Erotic capital and why that’s not branding

Heard of the concept ‘erotic capital’? It’s taken from the book ‘Honey Money – The Power of Erotic Capital’ by Catherine Hakim, which puts forward a thesis that erotic capital is an over-looked asset which combines beauty, sex appeal, social…

The perfect visual brief

A number of conversations we’ve had with clients over recent weeks continue to highlight how team Zephyr’s visualisation skillset can usefully be applied to a whole number of different scenarios. They all work under the basic premise that visualisation done…

Design thinking

A recent post on the Fast Company Design site has got us worried.

www.fastcodesign.com/can-innovation-really-be-reduced-to-a-process

Have we missed the debate on the application of Design Thinking to business or was it a US concept that didn’t travel over here until…

Use me…surprise me…use me…surprise me

So I’m sat in the blue corner, sipping my coffee on Monday morning, eyeing my Twirl and perusing my ‘inspiration’ sites for cool stuff. Stuff that says ‘different’, stuff that says “we think in a new way – come have…

Surprise me…use me…surprise me…use me

Now you may be surprised to hear that we do at times have divergent opinions within team Zephyr. Never more so, it seems, than when we get into the debate of convention versus invention.
In the blue corner, convention,…

Story telling in business

A recently published interview on Simply-Communicate.com with Howard Krais, Head of Communications at Ernst & Young Global Services, has attracted some lengthy comments from two people not entirely convinced at what they’re being told. (You have to register with Simply-Communicate…

Can I change your mind?

There’s a writing event going on that we’re sure is intended not only for writers but for anyone who uses words in business. Oh, so an incredibly large proportion of us then, and if we don’t use words in business…

Sense making visuals

Back in April we did a bit of research into communications produced for the alternative vote referendum in the UK. We saw the referendum as a once in a generation opportunity for voters to change the voting system which should…

Delighted customers delighted shareholders

If we read one more Management Today profile of a European CEO of a UK PLC eschewing a focus on shareholders above consumers, then we’ve officially got a trend on our hands.

First it was the Dutchman, Polman, CEO of…

Appealing to the personal with internal communications

We’ve read a couple of articles recently that have brought into focus the important role demographics play in understanding the findings of surveys.

Surveys, how they’re structured, how you motivate participation and how you analyse the findings, are of particular…

Trust in magazines

Following our blog on Monday about the source employees favour most for information (http://www.wearezephyr.com/blog/2011/06/14/trusty-channels/), we were really interested to see this blog by Matt Hutton, a client of ours at Zephyr. It describes the benefits magazines can offer, in contrast…

Trusty channels

A really informative discussion thread took place on LinkedIn last week with internal communication practitioners sharing research on how employees like to be communicated with. Under challenge was research conducted in the 1980s by Towers Perrin that concluded supervisors are…

Brand spend on top

A snippet of research we got sent by The Marketing Forum got us talking this morning. To entice us along to sell our wares at their annual clients and suppliers jamboree they shared their findings on the top product and…

Cutting the clutter – governance reporting

Since our first blog on Cutting the Clutter, the report produced by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and Accounting Standards Board (ASB), to help companies de-stuff their annual reports, we’ve returned to look at one of their de-cluttering aids: Disclosure…

One Word Brief – not as simple as it sounds

One of our team (on Twitter as @WiseCreative) is part of the collective called One Word Brief putting on an exhibition of the same name at The Rag Factory’s Apricot Gallery from 10-12^th June, 2011.

Described as a not-for-profit LOVE…

Shareholder value vs stakeholder value

We’ve posted a couple of blogs recently about the purpose and content of annual reports.

The first reflected on the report produced by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and the Accounting Standards Board (ASB) about why so much stuff goes…

There’s more to employee engagement in CSR

It’s a lovely stat provided by Leap CR:

A 1% increase in productivity in the services sector would result in the UK GDP growing by £17bn.

The potential source of this increase in productivity? Employee engagement via corporate…

What’s the purpose of annual reports?

I’ve just been re-reading the IR Society’s letter to the Financial Reporting Council about ‘Effective Company Stewardship – Enhancing Corporate Reporting and Audit’.

In summary, the letter addresses the role of the annual report, the complexity of the reporting task…

CEOs of character

When it comes to leadership shots in corporate reports we’ve seen it all: Pink backgrounds, holding props, back to the shop floor, in meaningful conversation and, of course, straight to camera with various portions of head, shoulders, knees and toes,…

Cutting the clutter

One of the annual reports we’ve been most impressed with over the years is a 12 page, 50 x 60mm leaflet, stuck to the side of an Innocent smoothie bottle, probably about six years ago now.

The report had one…

Who wants integrated reporting?

The principle of integrated reporting is absolutely right – that is if you’re motivated by understanding the combination of factors that determine the long term sustainability of a company. But not everyone is interested, most notably a lot of [short…

Bob at McDonald’s blogs

I always really like the tone of Bob at McDonald’s blog posts. He’s the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility at the company. In his piece today he answers questions on the minds of business students at Washington University:

http://www.openfordiscussion.iupload-stage.com/default.asp?item=3047257

His…

Beautiful Information

This is a favourite. It has been around since October 2010 but – and TEDtalks do this so well – it really breathes life into the subject.

Whilst ‪David McCandless‬ (Information is Beautiful) is a confident and charming orator,…

Participation = reputation

We attended a really good conference this morning on the merging of search, social and PR. Speakers from agencies and client-side alike communicated the message that people should get on with delivering great outcomes together rather than fussing over what…

Offender jouney infographic

Back in 2010 we asked by the Ministry of Justice’s National Offender Management Service (NOMS) to create a clear and concise visual platform for communication that would span the entire breadth of NOMS – one of the nation’s biggest Government…

Designing for business

In The Cox Review of 2005 design was described as linking creativity with innovation, as the process of shaping ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers.
Zephyr’s design process always combines consideration of both the…

Invest in your ROI?

We’re sorry to have to break the silence on this one but we don’t know many organisations that actively measure the impact of their communications. But particularly now economic times are tough, even greater emphasis is being placed on demonstrating…

Simple works best

We think annual reports need to start communicating again. Following ten years of corporate scandals, changes in regulation, a financial crisis then recession, and the dominance of so called ‘best practice’, annual reports have become bulky manuals that obscure their…

Problem solving

Problem solving is a big part of job satisfaction for the Zephyr team, so it’s fortunate that each new project we work on brings its own particular challenges.
A brief can sometimes prescribe a solution but often we find…

Starting conversations

The McCleod Review 2009, commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, established a direct correlation between employee engagement and organisational success and made recommendations for how effective engagement is sustained.
One of these recommendations signposted the ongoing…

Shop floor experience

Decathlon get my vote for their staff induction model.
I was chatting to a neighbour of mine who’d just left his job with a London Council as Buildings manager which he’d been doing for some years.
He had started…

2011 – a tricky year for staff retention in a climate of change

In the current climate of corporate restructures and M&As there are no big surprises in
The Employee Engagement Report 2011 from BlessingWhite Research.

Some key findings:
• 31% are Engaged, and 17% are Disengaged.
• More…

Integrated reports have to provide the links

Novo Nordisk, a world leading integrated reporter of social, environmental and financial performance tweeted recently about The Economist’s white paper discussing “how executives’ approach to sustainability is evolving, how companies are managing and measuring sustainability, and how sustainability dovetails with…

Not so perfect

Whilst the film Black Swan had me in equal parts turning away, cringeing, closing my eyes completely and marvelling, it also made me scribble something down in my note book.

The character played by Natalie Portman was being criticised for…

Centrica is totally hot on Twitter

If you work in corporate communications and have been trying for ages to get your client or your boss switched on to the merits of PLCs doing social media then showing them Centrica plc on Twitter may help your cause.…

Keep it brief

I’m not so bothered whether a brief is written down or not.  Ideally it is but I can work without a bit of paper in my hand as long as an effective conversation has been had. That is, a conversation…