Employer Branding / Anglo American

One Anglo roll out

The challenge

Shortly into her new role, Anglo American’s Chief Executive Cynthia Carrol outlined a fresh direction for the group. Integration and connectivity became a strategic priority and the business committed to become the world’s leading mining company. At the heart of the change process was a framework called the ‘One Anglo Model’, which set out the drivers behind the programme and its key guiding values. Our brief was to lead, design and develop events that could communicate, involve and engage over 6000 top managers in the business ambition. We had to help them understand what it would mean to them and their business areas. The aim was to give them the knowledge, the tools and the inspiration to spread the word across the organisation. Naturally, there are huge logistical and cost challenges to planning events across the world, but these weren’t the only obstacles we had to overcome. The events had to involve people from different disciplines. Plus some business units had already established their own values, so our proposals needed to complement rather than undermine existing frameworks. Perhaps most importantly, we needed to ensure that the leaders and managers would be actively involved in the change. The events’ title, “One Anglo – Share the Ambition”, captured this sentiment.

Our solution

Our solution had three main elements:

• A strategic engagement and communication plan. Our planned approach embraced every stage of delivery, including stakeholder management. By involving stakeholders in the development and not just the implementation of events, we ensured buy in at the crucial local level. Our ambitious four month roll out plan covered training for 100 top managers in the delivery of over 60 cross-business unit events to more than 6000 managers in 3 different languages. The events would be delivered in English, Spanish and Portuguese in key Anglo American locations across the globe; including Southern Africa, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Australia, Canada, UK and China.
• Event design. Each event lasted a full day and was designed to be highly participative. The focus was on round-table discussions and exercises, with a limited number of one-way presentations. This format supported networking opportunities and made the events more culturally applicable, catering for different learning styles. The events took attendees on a journey. They led them from understanding the need for change through exploring what that meant to them and their businesses, to discussing what they personally, and the business as a whole, needed to do differently to enable the change. Attendees were then encouraged to return to their business units and “Share the Ambition”. Crucially, we provided them with a comprehensive engagement pack to recreate the event within their teams. Partnering with a sister company within the Omnicom Group, we oversaw every aspect of the events, including the production of materials, facilitation and feedback.
• Internal communication campaigns and toolkits. Two communication campaigns were delivered to kick off the launch of the ambition and values to the wider employee group. The first was an awareness campaign for the ‘One Anglo – Share the Ambition’ roll out. The second was a campaign to communicate the values throughout the business. Toolkits were developed for both campaigns to allow local businesses to order campaign materials directly.

The results

Comprehensive feedback was collected from every event. Modules within the event were designed to provide insight in their own right and a feedback form was offered to all participants. This attracted an unusually high 85% response rate. Scores on understanding the rationale for the One Anglo model and the guiding values element were particularly encouraging – 4.5 and 4.6 out of 5 as an average. Similarly, the events themselves received an excellent overall rating of 4.4. We’ll leave the last word to the client:

“The Hodes team brought invaluable strategic thinking and employee engagement experience to the programme and provided beneficial structure and insight to the communication approach that we followed. The combination of their innovative ideas and best practice knowledge made for an outstanding result and we have received consistent positive feedback throughout the roll out.”

Anik Michaud, Group Head of Corporate Communications and Branding