A year in and I'm grateful to have
worked with such a brilliant team

Please excuse the cheesy blog title but last Thursday I celebrated my 'Year at Kier'! For me this is a particularly significant milestone in any new job. This is because it means you have seen through all of the key milestones (i.e. preliminary results, roadshows and conferences) and as a result are less likely to be surprised by any out of the blue tasks. It also means that I can now be confident in planning the use of my time even more effectively.

Whilst at Kier I've been particularly thankful for the opportunity to launch some very sizeable projects and see them through to completion (Kier Album, our first external marketing campaign in #KierHeroes, an entire social strategy and training programme, the Marketing Hub etc.) and last week saw the launch of another large piece of work in our new online office map.

This all started following some initial website analysis where I identified office locations as one of the top three things searched for on our site. The other two are the investor relations/share price sections, (for which I have already updated a clear workflow and content schedule) and the careers section which was updated in December following the integration of a new back-end management tool.

Whilst serviceable, our old map was not built in a way which was scalable when bearing in mind the growth rate of the business. It was a pain to update and now we have so many offices (including those of Mouchel Consulting) the resulting map became a sea of red dots with nothing to distinguish them which could only be viewed at one scale. With this in mind, I Created the following brief for our new map:

• Search functionality and list view
• Filterable by country, region, business unit, what we do
• Photos of all offices
• Responsive when added to a new template
• Different map pin icons for Kier, Mouchel and Head Office
• Easy to update by the central team should locations change/be added

As always the hardest part was ensuring that all of the information was correct and owned by the respective offices. Fortunately I was able to tag this data collection on the back of the offline brand audits. All office locations were visited just before Christmas to update the external signage etc. and at the same time I created a briefing document to be completed at each location on a mobile device and immediately saved online so we could feedback if we required more information. They even took photos of all of the offices and where there were gaps I filled them in with my regular 'Kier Offices' photo series on Twitter! Being completely digital has made this a smooth process with the only drawback being I wasn't required to travel to Australia to complete an audit myself!

From the analytics it's also clear that this is a tool which is regularly used internally so once the team had done a great job of inputting every location I ensured a decent testing period to get feedback from colleagues. Interestingly, all of the comments which came back related to the data and not the functionality which meant any changes were very easy.

Stay tuned!

Carrying on the geographical theme I've also been called in to action this week to run our latest online campaign '#KierInTheNorth'. This began with an event in Manchester and I have put together a long list of social/website activities to really capitalise on the government's Northern Powerhouse agenda. I'll also be taking a trip to Manchester myself later this year as I have been asked to present on 'Digital Integration' at the Digital Engagement conference in September. Although, being from Southampton originally, everywhere north of the Thames is 'North' to me!

So there you have it, we now have an online map which easily allows us to continue to represent the increasing scale of our business. Let's hope that at this year's staff summer party there's a quiz round on 'Kier office locations. If so, my team are going to completely ace it  - especially the 'longitude and latitude' round.

Every day I continue to learn something new, and in early January this was to be what it was like to be externally audited as a department! With my wife being a teacher I am used to hearing about the prospect of the dreaded Ofsted coming in to pass judgement on working practices and thought that working in marketing would mean I would escape this level of scrutiny.

However, this was not to be as we were chosen as one of the departments whom the British Standards Institute (BSI) would visit in relation to us earning an ISO 9001 Quality Management accreditation. Essentially, this is to ensure that our practices adhere to an international set of standards and are focussed on delivering customer satisfaction in some key areas:

• Customer focus
• Leadership
• Involvement of people
• Process driven approach
• Systematic approach to management
• Continual improvement
• Factual approach to decision making
• Mutually beneficial supplier relationships

Failure to pass would mean we were responsible for the business  not gaining this certification and would also mean how we work would need a major overhaul. We take great pride in what we do as a department and already had a strong set of processes in place for all of the services we offer. This means mapping everything from the process of compiling a marketing plan, to how to request, set up and manage social media channels and how to make a request for graphic design work.

In preparation for the visit we ensured we pulled together all of our 20+ processes into one document alongside an overview of the key objectives and responsibilities of our department, examples of all of our communications (newsletters, marketing council follow ups), analytics (for all of our internal and external channels) and live examples of our project management tools (currently in Trello).

The interview was going to last 1hr 45mins and would be attended by the Marketing Manager for Services/Infrastructure and myself. On the day we were the first of four departments to be quizzed and this took the following structure:

• Talking through our Central Marketing overview document
• Providing evidence of how we plan and work together (not in isolation) with the business
• Evidence in everything of testing and learning/evidence based decisions
• How we live monitor and measure all tasks
• An in depth Q&A

We felt the interview all went very well as many of the above are areas on which digital in particular has a massive focus. The auditor was particularly impressed with how we clearly show we look outside of the industry to evolve and we demonstrated the benefits of having a centralised team with links to the business/regions. He commented that we had a well-communicated plan of activities and timescales with the whole team understanding thier role in achieving them. One thing that also really helped me was spotting this great Tweet the day before which summed up everything in a nutshell:

If you have a written down process that no one ever follows, then you do not have a process.

— Meeting Boy (@MeetingBoy) January 6, 2016

So, how did we do? Well - we passed with flying colours! Whilst detailing that we demonstrated a clear definition of roles and responsibilities the report concluded that we showed:

"A systematic, process based approach to marketing, provided as a centralised support function - January 2016"

This was a massive achievement for us to be recognised as professionals in our field with an international award that is valid for three years. Importantly, it confirms our commitment to our colleagues. Finally, the auditor commented that he was particularly impressed as Marketing is not generally an area to demonstrate this process driven approach (e.g. in the same way as health and safety departments do) and that he usually arrives to find a few bullet points written on the back of a beer mat! Extra kudos for us then and now the fun work begins of using our 'approved' marketing skills to promote our way of working to other departments!

A thing of the past if the guidelines are
kept up to date with the user in mind

Everything that can be moved online is pretty much there already - shopping, dating, live video, newspapers - it's all there and is easier to access than ever before. Despite this, one thing I've noticed is that most companies still insist on producing PDF versions of their brand guidelines. These important documents are representative of a living entity that evolves through usage and time and one of my frustrations is how often I see PDFs being used when the content should be a web page whether it be in internal emails or downloadable brochures - what a missed opportunity to get some audience insight!

It’s obvious that a static PDF document can’t be fit for this purpose. No big brand is the same as it was a year ago and therefore these guidelines need to be able to accommodate this continual growth, evolution and refinement. If you can manage to keep them up to date and ensure that every colleague is working from the latest version then that is a very impressive feat - especially bearing in mind the multiple intranets and shared drives many large companies have! By moving these guidelines online it makes the process of keeping them current much easier and enables continual review and updates as the brand evolves.

Another issue this solves is that of allowing the business to access the latest versions of the logo, fonts and other design assets. Rather than reading about them in a PDF and then having to hunt for/request them they can just download them there and then.

Frontify is a great free tool for online
brand guidelines and style guides

Being online opens up further possibilities to enhance understanding with simple interactive tools to help users of the brand. For instance, rather than a list of logos, you can create a ‘Which logo should I use?’ tool. It can ask 2-3 multiple choice questions on usage and then provide the correct artwork for download. A blog/newsletter to showcase recent project examples is also be a great way of improving understanding amongst brand users.

In many ways brand guidelines are indicative of showing that the digital age hasn't really happened. Any guidance on digital use, the brand UI and interactions is – for the large part – absent. This makes them redundant for how most people are using them and they are not addressing the real world application of people setting up microsites and social media pages. If you're not giving the guidance then it's your fault if lots of off brand accounts are popping up across the internet!

As the brand grows there is also more to it than simply a description of the colours, fonts and logos to use. Ideally an entire brand repository should be built where brand personality can sit alongside the identity guidelines. An excellent example of this is MailChimp's Voice and Tone which articulates how the company’s voice and tone should shift across a variety of touchpoints.

Writing style is also essential now that digital has made it much easier for everyone to publish themselves so a great way to maintain a consistent writing style for an organisation with many voices is by publishing a writing style guide. Providing writing for the web guidelines is extremely important when championing a digital first mentality.

I'd also argue that the added benefit of having online, searchable guidelines is the ability to utilise the analytics to see what your colleagues care about and how deep into your brand they delve. That way it can help you concentrate on what to develop in the future. That's more than any PDF will ever tell you!

To enable effective brand governance, a living, up to date set of guidelines is the way forward. This means moving them online not as an afterthought, as budget might allow, but as a priority.  Without this, as the brand gets used by an expanding range of colleagues and agencies, across different regions, the best you can hope for is small inconsistencies to crop up. More likely you’ll face a never ending wave of brand mutilation and mutation that will become impossible to control.

'When are we getting fibre optic?!'

Every year the capability of technology is growing faster and so are our expectations of it. The gap between what we know to be possible and what we experience is only widening. Our children are growing up in a world where all screens are interactive and every service is cloud-connected, where any song or movie ever made is at their fingertips, yet our disappointment only grows. My children are always surprised when a surface isn't touch screen or when I can't quote the exact time that Mummy will be home!

Why is changing this hotel booking taking me two hours on a clunky website interface? Why is this film not available for streaming? Why am I using a printed ticket? How can this website be down? Surely this town should have 4G by now?

What can make this disillusionment even worse is the plethora of systems we are expected to use at work and at play. Some new, some old but all them with their own eccentricities. I have found in every place I have ever worked that the lack of integrated software systems can be very frustrating. Often I am met with companies owning many systems which either have very similar functionality (one place I used to work had 5 CRMs!), are so new that no-one is using them to their potential, or are so old that they require an 11 year old browser in order to run!

With this in mind Kier have been putting a lot of effort into a programme called 'BOOST' where we consolidate all systems into one supplier to help with software integration, less intensive training requirements, and ultimately, a reduced cost.

In our team we have also been working to bring all of our Marketing solutions for the business together in one place. For example, we have a digital asset library, a corporate presentation and various branded templates but simply listing them all on our intranet is not enough. This is because sometimes such assets need to be accessed by external design agencies or third party suppliers.

One essential feature of our new 'Marketing Hub'  is a homepage which is frequently updated with the latest videos, photos, brochures etc. we have produced with links to where the business can find them. This communication is key if the work we are doing is utilised fully in either winning work or attracting the best new staff. It goes without saying that we will carefully monitor the analytics of this interaction.

This internally integrated Marketing communication allows all new starters to familiarise themselves with the brand and our positioning. It also gives them ready access to all of the assets they may need in their day job.

Importantly, an online briefing form allows them to log any requests for new microsites, posters, banners etc. By only accepting briefs in this way it ensures that the end agency has all they need to complete the work and we can monitor all requests and intervene if required. We then have a 360 degree view of all submitted requests and can flag up any duplicate work or causes for concern with the originator. Most importantly it allows us to have oversight of the type of collateral the business requires and then write this into our future plans.

This Hub will become the primary channel for keeping the brand alive alongside our regular webinars, site visits, working groups and email updates. With 24,000 staff on the books having one go to place for all marketing related matters is essential.

Living the dream!

Of course, my main challenge is avoiding any user frustration with the interface and to make it work on all browsers and devices. Otherwise the aforementioned digital disappointment will kick in and users will become like those people with instant hot water taps in their kitchen who now get frustrated waiting for a kettle to boil!

Not bad for an old man!

The beginning of a new year is a time when people start afresh and make promises to themselves to finally improve on things which they have previously been putting off. These are commonly around fitness goals and I am bracing myself for my weekly kickboxing class to see the annual influx of new, younger and fitter recruits when I return on Wednesday. I fully intend to see out another year despite being the second oldest in the class but how many newbies will still be there come the year end?

One sure fire way to ensure that all intended goals are met both at home and professionally is to be fully accountable for the outcome. For me, one of the main motivators for going kickboxing every Wednesday is that I have paid a month in advance and as I only have one chance to go a week I know that I cannot put it off in the way I would a gym (i.e. 'I'm tired tonight and I'll go tomorrow'). I also have an 'accountability partner' meaning that if I don't go I'm letting him down and restricting his chances of development. Finally, I know from experience that I have never yet regretted a class or felt worse as a result - it really is a great remedy to work off those daily life stresses.

Being accountable and ensuring that workplace tasks are accomplished is also essential for both small and large businesses to flourish. The larger the business the more the employees become the face and reputation meaning that success relies on them. Therefore, the ultimate goals for the company as communicated by the senior management rely on a much more cascaded model in order to succeed (rather than just one person to be motivated to do something for themselves).

The first step in this is to ensure employees have responsibilities for which they are solely accountable. This is not so that there is someone to blame if things go wrong but is essential for projects to be completed and allows a sense of worth and achievement for the project owner to feel they have achieved something on completion. Without accountability businesses really struggle with issues such as who to go to in order to get tasks done (i.e. if no-one knows who owns the website how is it ever going to get updated?)

'Can someone please show me the
way to Meeting Room 1?!'

I always say that the person who you want to staff your social media accounts is the person who approaches lost looking visitors in reception and asks how they can help. By doing this they have taken personal responsibility for that person's welfare and as a result show that your company values the customer experience. Someone who ignores that person and leaves it to others to resolve is not someone who is happy taking accountability and this behaviour leads to a self-centred, confusing workplace where teamwork is non-existent.

When people begin their new year resolutions they have an end goal in mind and the work involved is a means to an end. It is about the outcome and not the task and communicating this to employees is essential. You want the person who adds the annual report to the website to take ownership for the website being up to date, not for the activity of updating it. If they find a better way to ensure the site is up to date – and do so in a way that improves engagement and client satisfaction – that’s the real prize. You want people to stop paying attention to the amount of time they spend doing things, and pay attention to the ultimate outcome desired.

When people are accountable, they stop watching the clock; they seek ways to make improvements and take initiative to change what doesn’t work. They ask for opportunities to do and learn more so they can be successful at fulfilling their purpose, which in the end gives a boost to yours.

Festive fun at CMA15

At this week's Annual Kier Marcomms conference I was asked to give an update on what we've been up to in the digital team. I believe that if you really want people to remember your presentation then you need to tell some stories. So, given the time of year, what better story to frame my presentation around than Dicken's Christmas Carol? With this is mind, I thought I'd do the very same with this blog post!

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Our big external campaign this year was #KierHeroes which comprised 22 individual minute long videos interviewing key personnel throughout the business. As I have mentioned before, this is something which Kier has not previously tried and we were delighted to be shortlisted at our first ever Construction Marketing awards event which took place on 9th December at the Radisson Blu in Portman Square.

The Kier Marketing Team (L to R),
Claire Savage, Me, Paul Humphrey,
Kristy Myrie

The team all headed down to London, after what had been a particularly busy week, to soak up the Christmas atmosphere, enjoy some good food and drink and network with like-minded individuals (I was particularly surprised to bump into my old boss!) Although we didn't win, we got a really good idea of how marketing in construction works as we were the only nominees who weren't with an agency. It was also a real privilege to get this far in an industry in which I am still relatively new. Roll on next year when we'll come back bigger and better!

The Ghost of Christmas Present

Our use of Trello continues apace and I have now trained the entire team which means we are up and running with it as a project management system. Even I am surprised with how well it is received and it's taken our productivity to a new level. Some of the advanced tools such as filtering (allowing us to see which of our own tasks are most urgent and real-time project progress) are really coming into their own and some team members have even started using it to plan their Christmas shopping!

Mock up of our new interactive map

We have also begun the complete rebuild of our new offices map. This is in unison with our offline brand audit and will contain dynamically updated and filterable content. The benefits of which cannot be underestimated seeing as our 105 office locations are the most searched for thing internally and externally. Watch this space for more details in the future...

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

As a central team one of our main responsibilities is to provide the business with tools to assist them to win work and to communicate the brand. Therefore, our first task for 2016 will be to build a central online 'hub' where all of our services can easily be accessed in one place. We have just begun the mapping stage and this will comprise of services which we manage such as graphic design, promotional goods and film and photography.

The two main interactive elements will be a briefing form whereby colleagues can request one of the above services for it to be piped through to the relevant supplier. The benefits of this being that we can automate the tracking of requests and ensure that when briefs are submitted they contain all of the required detail.

I have also been looking into digital solutions to assist with communicating our brand and have found an excellent service called Frontify. With this we can upload all of brand guidelines and allow them to be searchable, shareable and downloadable in all required formats.

As 2015 draws to a close I can truly say that it has been, professionally, one of the most exciting years yet. I still feel like I am always learning and I've really welcomed the many social events of this festive season to help reassure me that we have a fun and creative bunch of people working in our team. However, a combination of late nights out, a young family, and a busy job, definitely means I'm more than ready for the Christmas break to recharge my batteries for what is yet to come...

Our stand at Highways UK

'Tis the season to be busy! These last few weeks have seen a number of diverse activities being undertaken by the Kier Central Marketing team. In order for us to support a business of over 24,000 employees there is a constant need to not only oversee group-wide initiatives but also to ensure that the business is joined up, becomes manageable and is not operating in silos.

Nowhere can this be more evidenced than in our recent involvement in supporting events. These have included attendance at Highways UK, Scotland Build 2015 and our annual drinks reception at Lincolns Inn. With pre-event event communications, AV requirements, promotional goods and  marketing collateral all overseen by us we have been putting in a lot of overtime!

Tote bags from the North!

My main responsibility was overseeing the stand for the first ever Scotland Build 2015 conference at the SECC in Glasgow and to kill two birds with one stone I also used the opportunity to deliver some social media training to our Scottish colleagues. The ease of jumping on a plane from Luton airport meant I was door to door in less than two hours and satiated my desire for an airport visit (duty free is a great place for Christmas shopping!)

The Expo itself was extremely well attended with over 250 visitors to our stand on day one. This served to further highlight how well regarded Kier are in the industry with the large majority desperate to get onto our supply chain. I'm glad I'd managed to tuck away a full Scottish breakfast to sustain my energy levels throughout the day!

The Great Hall at Lincolns Inn

Another big event we've been involved in was the annual reception at Lincolns Inn in Holborn. This is a truly breathtaking building where Kier kick off the Christmas season by inviting clients past and present for drinks and an address from our Chief Executive. My team were tasked with ensuring our latest videos were on show and it was all hands on deck to hand out name badges, greet guests and network with our high profile guests. I lost count of how many times I was asked to take photos of people on the red carpet!

By managing all of these events centrally it really helps to add continuity to the experience of those who engage with Kier. All of our messaging can be made consistent and we especially gain comparable analytics from our pre/post event communications. By building in a robust model and program in our email sends at the beginning the data we collect is then key to following up any leads and providing a professional and customer focussed experience for all attendees.

As well as the importance of getting out and about, meeting colleagues, and getting an understanding of the different challenges of the regional businesses, I've been developing workflows to help us manage our channels more effectively. These focus on shared goals across the business and I feel that this is where digital can really add value to coordinate and monitor the great work being done nationwide. The whole ethos of digital is to test and learn and by creating an environment where employees are not blamed for failure we can improve with each activity.

Hello Trello!

There are some great tools available to marketers to draw content out from the business (such as Gather Content) and I have spoken before  about the benefits of Trello to manage projects and content flow. It is with this in mind that I have setup a group content strategy calendar that all of the regional businesses can add to. By having assigned people in each area this flags up who has accountability for adding content and where the gaps exist. I've also used Trello's labelling to colour code each region so that at a glance I can see in the calendar that all areas are represented with a full spectrum of assigned colours.

All of this work is essential to curb the silo mentality before it begins. By planning far in advance the danger of no lead time, time for collaboration, and mistrust is avoided. Trust is the most important part of any relationship and by having everything out in the open a healthy form of competition emerges with a greater transparency about the goals and motivations that drive each team.