Challenge: A senior executive at Cisco needed to unify his expanded division that had merged with several other teams from other areas of the company under a reorganization. Not only were these new teams unknown to the existing group but they were located in offices across the globe. These groups needed to be unified into one team in order for division business goals to be met.
Action: Develop a PR campaign to educate the team members on what each group does, how what they do relates to the other groups in the division and what the expectations of the now unified group are to help the executive to meet the divisional goals. As part of this broad campaign, a series of blogs and video blogs were written to help the team members understand these issues. Topics were designed so that any member of this expanded team could explain what the different groups within the larger team did, how they worked together, and what the broader goal for their division was and their role in it. Clarity and explaining in easy to understand terms was key in helping this large group with varying backgrounds and knowledge to understand the big picture.
Results: Employee surveys showed that thanks to the PR campaign, the majority of division members understood the changes and the goals they needed to meet. Specifically, employees pointed to the blog and video blog series as being helpful in understanding the original changes resulting from the reorganization, continuing changes, accomplishments, and milestones met as they moved forward.