Telenor: Pannon becomes Telenor Hungary
Background and challenge
Pannon was founded in 1994 and is one of Hungary’s three mobile phone operators. Since 2002, it has been wholly owned by Telenor, the world’s 6th largest mobile phone company and in 2010, the company took the decision to change its name from Pannon to Telenor. This represented a major change for all stakeholders and to ensure the company engaged employees fully with the change, its rationale and the opportunity it presented, it invited Ibis Communication to develop and deliver an internal engagement programme.
Approach
The programme comprised a number of important stages:
- The initial announcement. The first intervention involved announcing the intention to rebrand via a town hall meeting which was also broadcast live via the Internet to all stores. It took place two months prior to the name change. The announcement was carefully coordinated with the external announcement and focused on the rationale for the re-branding and its importance for the future of the organisation.
- 'Brand to life' events. To engage employees with some of the key changes and opportunities presented by the re-brand, we developed and with the support of the internal events team, delivered three events over the launch period. All employees were invited to attend the 90 minute events, each of which ran 12 times and a high percentage did so. All content was delivered by managers and employees and the highlight was a Who Wants to be a Millionaire style quiz which featured many of the company’s directors.
- Local workshops. To start embedding the changes and ensure different departments were able to properly reflect the new brand in their plans, we used an existing group of champions to organise a series of local workshops we called Telenor to You. We developed a framework for the three hour workshop and then worked with the champions to ensure it properly reflected their local priorities. All workshops were hosted by line managers.
- Ideas sharing and collaboration. Once the local workshops had taken place and local actions agreed, the final stage was to share the outputs of those workshops with colleagues via a collaboration space in SharePoint so that teams could be held accountable for their commitments. Colleagues elsewhere in the business could make suggestions or ask questions and the space represented the company’s first real experience of this kind of collaborative approach.
Results
Early in the process we defined 6 success criteria against which we would measure progress. We undertook a survey between the initial announcement and the actual name change and repeated the exercise at the end of the launch period. The main headlines were:
- The percentage of staff fully supporting and accepting the new brand positioning rose from 58% to 77%;
- The percentage of staff seeing evidence of the Telenor brand being lived every day rose from 36% to 62%;
- The percentage of staff believing the majority of their colleagues are genuine brand ambassadors rose from 43% to 69%.