Unilever is a multi-national consumer goods company well-known globally. Among many of its famous brands are Knorr, Hellmann’s, Magnum, Wall’s, and Dove. As a company with over 149,000 employees, active in over 190 markets, how can organizational trust be fostered? How can internal communication channels best be leveraged to engage with employees all over the world?
For the past five months, I have been lucky enough to work as an intern for Unilever’s Corporate Communication and Affairs team based in Rotterdam. One of my main tasks included producing employee communication content. But before producing any content, my team and I had to decide what to communicate about. At Unilever and at any other large business, local and global news happen on a daily basis – from product launches to new campaigns, investments, leadership changes and sustainability commitments, anything could happen – any day. So, what needs to be communicated?
How can Unilever make sure that its employees are up to date with the most important company news and at the same time not be bombarded with daily mass e-mails?
In the Unilever Nutrition group, the internal social media platform Viva Engage from Microsoft and a monthly newsletter are the main channels to communicate with the 12,000 employees. But which channel actually leads to more engagement? And which topics should Unilever communicate? All companies must communicate economic topics and corporate social responsibility messages, but which messages are more interesting to employees?
To answer these questions, I conducted an online experiment with 125 Unilever employees. As part of the experiment, each employee either read an ‘internal corporate social responsibility’ message in which Unilever’s responsibility as an employer towards its employees was addressed, or an economic message about a recent factory investment. The messages were either presented in a newsletter format or as a Viva Engage post.
My first results show that employees found the mental health message to be more engaging than the investment message – a clear sign that companies must not neglect their internal corporate social responsibility communication. My second, and more surprising finding was that newsletters led to more engagement than the Viva Engage post, despite Viva Engage being a more interactive platform. This could be caused by the fact that my experimental stimulus was limited to a screenshot of the post and the employees could not actually engage with the post as they would in real life.
Based on my findings, I would advise my colleagues at Unilever to prioritize internal CSR communication. Moreover, they could explore interactive newsletter formats which combine the interactive nature of social media platforms like Viva Engage, with a classic and popular format, the newsletter.