Internal Communications Hits The Mark For Quit Group Charity

The group has been growing rapidly since it was started as a small regional pilot with only five advisers. It now has 80 staff and capacity to handle up to 46,000 registered clients each year.

Due to its rapid growth, The Quit Group needed to continue to scale their services in a cost-effective efficient manner. However, their internal communications systems were lagging behind the pace of change.

Communications staff were aware that they put significant effort into engaging with external audiences through mass media advertising and external public relations. It was important to put a similar level of effort into communicating with their internal audiences as well. The challenge was to do this in a simple and inexpensive way.

The Quit Group faced the additional problem of tight budgets and staffing when implementing a solution.

In 2006 a staff satisfaction survey was conducted which revealed a number of problems with internal communications. Very few call center staff were reading emails; there was limited communications channels upwards to give staff a voice; information cascade from managers to teams was inconsistent; and ad-hoc communications had become excessive.

As well as addressing these issues, The Quit Group also had to consider culturally appropriate communications for their high percentage of Maori and Pacific Island staff, communicating effectively with part-time staff, and measuring the effectiveness of their communications initiatives.

Staff surveys are employed to measure communications effectiveness, benchmark attitudes and gather important feedback. Staff are now able to ‘communicate upwards’ on a regular basis, and The Quit Group can now easily measure communications effectiveness.

The call center identified the tickets as a useful way to rapidly alert staff of any unexpected outages or breaking news within the anti-smoking sector.