Taking tone of voice around the world
Intercontinental Hotels Group
“The First Word has been a fantastic partner for IHG helping us get our tone of voice out globally across our business. They brought incredible creativity and energy to the table and together we came up with a really engaging way of bringing the business along with us.”
The problem
When you’re communicating with hundreds of colleagues around the world, every message has a huge impact. Get it right and you help teams work efficiently and feel part of a joined-up organisation. Get it wrong and you confuse people, create inefficiency and dilute your employer brand.
IHG’s global comms team had created a set of tone of voice guidelines. But just because you’ve written guidelines doesn’t mean people will read them. To make an impact, the comms team needed to inspire their international colleagues to download the tools they’d created and use their new tone of voice. That's where we came in.
The solution
Working side-by-side with the global communications team, we created an inspiring writing workshop and delivered it to large groups of global internal communicators in the UK and the USA.
The success of these workshops led the global comms team to roll them out across Asia. We were also given a high-profile spot at IHG’s global HR conference, where we were asked to design a workshop to help launch the new tools and techniques on IHG’s Comms Hub. This high-energy session involved actors, interactive games, drawing and creative concepting. It was all captured on film so it could be shared internally.
The results
The sessions had great feedback, rated 4.5 out of 5 stars by 120 of IHG’s global communicators and HR leaders.
The teams inspired their communicators to use the internal comms tools. These have now been accessed by communicators in over 100 countries.
