American Express 2005

When the EMEA region of American Express created a new role of Director of Employee Communications, they chose a Cchange consultant to design and deliver a Pan-European employee communications strategy for 15,000 employees across Europe in eight lines of business.

The main objective of this role was to break down barriers across the businesses in order to encourage them to think as one American Express team to better serve the customer, cross-sell services and perform more profitably.

A key element of the strategy was to establish a good working relationship with all heads of business and ensure the inclusion of their key messages. It was also essential to pull together a virtual team of communicators across all business lines and locations - despite no direct reporting lines - ensure their buy-in to the strategy and their input to new materials.

This was also a time of major change for the global Customer Services function and part of the communications role was to lead a team to tailor the global programme for European audiences and legislation. We worked closely with key local Customer Services employees, HR teams and Bain Consulting and provided coaching and support to the European Head of Customer Services for his communications ranging from Europe-wide memos to town hall presentations and individual team meetings.

In four months Cchange successfully delivered:

	A communications infrastructure, creating vehicles and content to develop a dialogue between the European Executive Team and employees
	Materials to help managers communicate with their teams, effectively cascade key messages, explain regional progress and priorities, provide context for employees on how their work fits into larger strategic picture and reinforce regional priorities
	Advice on the most effective use of existing and new media capabilities
	Mechanisms for employees to respond to communications and ask questions
	A communications plan for major re-engineering across Europe while communicating the need for ongoing transformation