Q&A: Richard Gerrard

It’s good to talk…

Internal communication processes at European law firm SJ Berwin have undergone a marked transformation in the past 18 months. Richard Gerrard, the firm’s head of marketing and communication, offers insight into the changes implemented and reveals why having effective internal communication channels in place is key to success during a downturn. Interview by Lucy McNulty.

How and why have SJ Berwin’s internal communications processes changed?
When I joined SJ Berwin in November 2007, the firm was celebrating its 25th anniversary. This milestone prompted reflection across the firm as to what elements had led to our success and what the firm’s aspirations should be going forward. It was this reflection that, after an extensive firm-wide partner-led consultation process, led to the establishment of a value statement summarising the collective opinions of the firm. For such a statement to have an impact, it needed to be understood, and for that reason it needed to be effectively communicated across the firm. The decision was therefore made to launch the year-long ‘twelve words’ campaign – a programme that would utilise a multi-channel approach to focus on one key word from the statement a month, from a selection of 12. It would also tie the explanation of these words with the launch of related initiatives – such as a mentoring scheme launched under the value word ‘inspiration’, which saw the firm’s young solicitors supporting law students during their academic training and inspiring them to develop a career at the firm – to ensure full understanding of both the meaning and importance of each value word.
But for such a campaign to be truly successful, we needed a communications platform in place that both engaged staff and enabled greater collaboration across the firm. And so the ball was set in motion to transform internal communication procedures at the firm. And the result? Completely overhauled in-house communications processes, focusing more predominantly on the use of multimedia channels and the creation of a firm-wide platform for communication by transforming the firm’s intranet from a tool used predominantly for knowledge management to a medium that now plays a central role in internal communication.

How have these changes affected the firm?
The changes have encouraged development of a more engaged and connected working environment within the firm. This has been thanks, in part, to the decision to utilise video to illustrate elements of the twelve words campaign, such as specific value words or initiatives launched. By streaming video messages from senior people within the firm on the firms intranet, and uploading a series of short ‘vox pop’ videos in which people across the firm – from partners to post room and maintenance staff from all our offices in Europe – discussed what these values meant to them, we were not only able to reinforce the values that the firm stands for, and demonstrate that these were not just randomly selected ideas, but we were also able to achieve greater integration in the firm. What’s more, by giving our staff the opportunity to see and listen to friends and colleagues from other SJ Berwin offices and familiarise themselves with functions around the firm that they were perhaps not too familiar with, we were able to ensure communication across the firm became a very open and transparent process. A development reinforced by the ongoing ‘team of the week’ initiative, which launched in June 2008 under the value word ‘teamwork’ and sees different teams, departments or sub-divisions across the firm highlighted each week through publication of a ‘day in the life’-type questionnaire to the firm’s intranet. Utilising an online platform to communicate regularly with staff about other staff is an approach to internal communications that has enabled people from all over the firm to get to know the true shape of the firm, creating a more connected working environment. But perhaps most importantly, the changes to internal communication have helped to reinforce the view that we are not a UK firm with satellite offices in continental Europe, but a fully-unified pan European law firm.

What obstacles did you face when implementing the changes?
It was a daunting task. Although on paper the twelve words campaign seemed a blissfully simple idea, getting this idea to fruition was a very complex project to undertake. Being a predominantly multimedia-led campaign, and one in which video would be used to a sophistication we had not attempted before, it involved the co-ordination of many different aspects across departments and offices, from training and human resources to intranet-development and events organisation. We also needed to ensure that every element of the campaign would be meaningful to all the firms’ offices and that momentum for the campaign was maintained throughout the year.
Additionally, we needed to attain buy-in from firm staff and tackle any scepticism that we encountered for the project. We were able to accomplish this, surprisingly quickly however, through the efforts of a talented in-house design team who, grasping the genuinely informal and relaxed tone of the campaign, drafted a series of cartoons to introduce the twelve words campaign and publicise the video involvement that would form such a central theme of internal communications procedures going forward. Such publicity won the campaign much support by enabling every body to realise that what we were doing was something that had real meaning.

What effect do you think having internal communication processes in place has on external communication?
They have a very important impact. Your primary means of communication in a large people business is your people. If they are well informed and have a collegiate spirit then this will be communicated externally. Alignment of internal and external communication streams is key. That doesn’t mean that external and internal communication processes should be identical, however, they are of course different aspect of the same challenge. But if you don’t have the effective internal communication procedures in place then eventually it will impact on external perceptions of your business.

How important do you think effective internal communication processes are in the current climate?
I think it’s absolutely essential. One of the greatest challenges that every organisation faces is how to communicate most effectively with all of its stakeholders.
But if an organisation doesn’t understand that its own staff are primary stakeholders than it is not going to get very far. Fail to invest in proper communication channels in the workplace and you risk dissatisfaction and eventually disengagement among staff.
What staff want and have a right to expect of their organisation, during both an upward and downward economy, is that they are frank and open about the circumstances in which they are doing business.
Lots of organisations are unable to predict what the full effect of the current economic crisis is going to be on them and indeed nobody really knows how things are going to develop. As a result, ensuring that there is openness and that people can expect to be told frankly where they are, becomes very important.

What’s next?
One of the unique selling points of the legal marketing profession is that it is still not an 100 per cent mature market, which means that there remains a lot of opportunity to shape thinking more generally within the profession as to how professional communications can be developed to the benefit of solicitors and their clients. It is still an exciting time to be in the profession. And in light of that, although we have succeeded in creating a huge platform for communication that could be utilised in a whole number of different ways, the challenge is now, I think, about how to develop an intranet as a modern communications mechanism and how to connect internal communication through a variety of different channels. Internal communications is not just about one channel, it’s about a range of media. But that is only one of my focuses going forward. As to what else I wish to accomplish, I would say it’s a case of ‘watch this space’.

Richard Gerrard is head of marketing and communications at European law firm SJ Berwin. He can be contacted at richard.gerrard@sjberwin.com