Boost your internal communication strategy the European Space Agency way

When you’re facing an imminent three-year retirement/recruitment wave that will see around 40% of the workforce renewed across the coming decade, you need your internal communication to be on clear tracks, with a solid data set to draw from and a long-term strategy in place to help you navigate a path through the myriad challenges of the great unknown.

That’s exactly what the European Space Agency (ESA) had coming their way in 2021; so in 2020 they tackled it head on with the help of an internal communication audit – the recommendations of which were implemented by their new Head of Internal Communications, Jules Grandsire. And, as you’d expect, the learnings were out of this world. He shares his Top 10…

1 New perspectives

“With the mind set of scientists and engineers, as we are here in ESA, we understand the importance of keeping an open mind while undertaking research. And that's exactly how we went into our internal communication audit, hoping to get the most honest feedback possible. And, yes, we did have a couple of surprises, but that’s kind of what you want – I think they actually help you readjust your strategy, they help you focus on new aspects, they help you push you to look at the landscape from a different perspective. Much like going into space does, it really forces you to look at problems from a different perspective.”

2 Strategic shift

“Through the audit, what we found was how much need there is for internal communication to not just be a service, but to be a management function within the agency. And that required a bit of a shift in positioning within the agency, which was great to have before drafting a new strategy for the following three years; so we used those findings really effectively. First of all we shared them with all internal stakeholders – facility management, human resources, IT, upper management... Because, while it’s important to use our IC knowledge to assess our learnings and add credibility that way, it’s much easier to discuss your vision with your business partners when you have an external eye looking at the state of the function, rather than just speculating on what you think and defending your function in a territorial way.”

3 Increased visibility

“We immediately started tackling the key areas mentioned in the audit – for example, one of these was increasing leadership visibility, because there was a lack of this when it came to the wider vision and where the agency was going. We focused on using the metrics and KPIs to drive our strategy as well, which was not so much the case before. To do this, we chose to strengthen the identity of ESA within the workforce while focusing on evolving the digital workplace as well. It was at the end of 2020, we had been in lockdown for a few months in and a lot of people had adapted to remote working but more organically than really, structurally – it was very clear that this was an area that needed development.”

4 Knowledge sharing

“Sharing knowledge was something we used to do before anyway, but it still came out as a strong wish from the workforce during the audit – so that's another of the key areas we decided to focus on in the new strategy. The ultimate goal is that we’ll be able to not only share knowledge from within our team, but to also create the conditions where knowledge can be shared by everyone. That requires tools, and that requires engagement; so we're not quite there yet – but this is where we want to go. And, right now, the first step on this journey is to actively start sharing the knowledge.”

5 Strong leadership

“The coronavirus was a crisis. And what you need in a crisis is for your leadership to be transparent, to be timely, and to be accurate. We started to focus on this at the beginning of 2021 when we had the first findings from the audit. And because we had a change of leadership in March 2021, it was a good time to start launching new products – plus, the pandemic give us a strong incentive to do so. And, by the way, we've just received the result of a Pulse survey that we did with Gallagher during the audit, and we can see that where this particular point of visibility and clarity of our vision was an area of concern in 2021, it’s now a clear strength. So in less than two years, we've really managed to turn this around.”

6 Tethering trust

“We did a lot, we focused a lot, and we’ve had a great support from the management as well to implement the things that we wanted to implement. We've now turned things around to be our strengths and we have information about how things work, which is a real plus for us – and a good result too. But what you need most of all is trust, and that’s not exactly an element you can add in later. An audit can be a great tool for building a bridge of trust with your management team and your stakeholders – I can’t say 100% that it’s always a decisive element when gaining that all-important management buy-in, but it's definitely been a key element here at ESA.”

7 Total teamwork

“After we were given the audit findings, when we went to work and started to drive the new strategy. I did this with the whole team, by the way, in a co-construction mode. It’s very important from an IC management point of view to really get every member of the team involved. I didn't just go to the drawing board and decide what would happen next, I really tried to build the strategy with the whole team. It was really amazing and it opened up a much smoother management process. I learn so much from my team, to be completely honest, because they have much more experience in internal communication that I have. We all know where we're going to go because we have decided on this together.”

8 Honest answers

“During the pandemic, we started a podcast with the Director General. It's basically a conversation between someone from my team and the Director General, and she starts with an overview of what's happening at that moment before answering all the questions we have received from colleagues via an anonymous form – it’s really about addressing what’s on the minds of our colleagues. This is scoring very high with the workforce. I think that’s because, while we’re not being aggressive, we aren’t afraid to ask the difficult questions. To make this work, though, you need a leader who is co-operative and confident when addressing sometimes difficult topics. We’re really lucky to have that here at ESA.”

9 Data mapping

“In 2020, we gathered a lot of quantitative data. What we want to know now is more about how our communication impacts our colleagues, not just how often they read it. We want to know how it helps them; how much or how little it directly impacts their day-to-day work. Gathering more qualitative data like this will really help us drive our strategy into 2023 and beyond. Right now we have a certain idea of who our colleagues are, but the mapping is very broad. So I would like to know a little bit more about who the audience is in order to target our communications. But our people are all very different. They have different interests, different needs, and that’s at the core of this – we want to do is give them what they need. To do that, we need to know who these people are because they are so diverse. And the first step here is mapping.”

10 Reflect, reset

“Because of how hard-pressed we often are by things that simply can’t be delayed at ESA – rockets have to be launched, astronauts need to be trained on time etc – there is often a tendency here for internal communicators to be pressed by day-to-day operations within the agency. There is such a fast pace of requests, incoming deadlines and fires to put out everywhere, that sometimes we tend to forget to question the fundamentals. I would absolutely encourage everyone to do that once in a while. Maybe you’ll get the same answers – and that’s fine because you’ll know that you’re on the right track; but maybe you’ll be surprised – and then that's a great reason to adapt and grow. Doing so is a great compass.”

This article was first published in the Journal of Internal Communication brought to you by Gallagher. As a world-leading internal communications agency, we are excited to share our round-up of internal communication trends and provide practical examples of how organisations communicate with their people.