#frontierpress

“The next evolutionary step in niche publishing is internal corporate magazines,” says Jason. “Your employee base is just as valuable as your customers. They’re your front line, the people making your product or service viable and available in the first place. Tapping into their loyalty and engagement is just as crucial as connecting with your customers.”

COMPETING FOR ATTENTION Until recently, internal corporation communications strategies have been (almost too literally) an inside joke, he says. There might be a clunky intranet that serves as more of an HR tool than anything else. Or a printed newsletter that’s crammed with photos from a recent golf fundraiser, bad fonts, and silly Clip Art.

If you’re not elevating your internal communications, you’re missing a huge opportunity, says Jason. “Many of the companies that Frontier works with have employees in the thousands. That’s an awful lot of people they could be connecting with in a meaningful way.”

Organizations do a lot of things well, he offers, but one of the worst things they do is force employees to subsume their identities to the organization.

“We assume that people become someone different when they step into the workplace, that they walk through a magic veil that automatically transforms them into an employee as they enter the corporate campus every morning,” Jason says. “Then at the end of the day, they pass through the veil once more, become human, go home, and have lives.”

This assumption leads us to believe people consume content—jokes, books, TV shows, internet videos—differently at work than they do at home, and that’s just not true. Their tastes don’t change.

“You can’t forget that you as an employer are also competing for the attention of our employees. If they’re drawn to People or US Weekly in their personal lives, why would they be drawn to your lackluster office publication on a Thursday afternoon?”

If we remember that the end users of our corporate magazines are real people, we’ll start building better platforms—ones that are playful, authentic, and alive.

WHERE THERE ARE PEOPLE, THERE ARE GREAT STORIES “I think the reason so many companies don’t seriously publish for themselves is because they don’t think they have interesting stories to tell. That’s a deep fallacy,” Jason says. “They assume because they work in, say, an industrial commodities business or an EPC company, their work isn’t sexy. They don’t think about their teams, whether it’s procurement or compliance, as interesting.”

But every company is made up of people, and people are drawn to stories about other people. So when you start telling the stories of your people, you’re showing employees that you see them and recognize they are important. That demonstrates something powerful: trust, respect, and, most importantly, care. When employees feel valued, they are more loyal to their company.

Besides fomenting employee loyalty, there’s another major perk to launching an internal company magazine: it sets the stage for more authentic engagement.

“I hear leaders wonder aloud why their entire employee base isn’t excited about their company’s new direction, initiative, or product,” Jason says. “But the truth is, your employees have no idea what initiatives are taking place unless you tell them. Most companies don’t.”

The native stories that companies would think are interesting, he says, tend to percolate near the top of the chain at the leadership or director level, usually in the worlds of research and development or innovation. But that’s maybe 10% of the entire company. The rest of the company is in the dark. By providing your employees with relevant information that will inform their work, says Jason, you’re welcoming your team into your vision and showing them the way forward, which naturally leads to an employee base that is more loyal to your company’s overall purpose.  

This is what publishing, especially internal publishing, can solve, and that’s what we do at Frontier Press. We borrow the best practices from the publishing world and put them to use inside organizations just like yours. We seek out interesting stories—of individuals and teams, passion projects and company-wide initiatives, projects and best practices—collate them in beautiful packages, then share them with your people.

The end product is a surprising, elegant, state-of-the art publication, but what we create isn’t revolutionary. Those best practices already exist. What we do is mobilize our team’s collective expertise around your company, and then transfer our know-how to your team.

“Our mission is to transform corporations into publishers,” Jason says. “At first, that does look like us becoming your guerilla publishing unit. But in the long term, we’ll help you develop the internal ability to do this on your own.”

In the coming year, the Press team will produce two internal corporate magazines for two very different companies. Each magazine has a different intention, but the basics are the same: talk to employees, learn their stories, then share them far and wide. See how we’re making it happen here.

***

If you’re ready to start a conversation about how an internal magazine can work for you, here’s what you need to know now:

The answer, it turns out, is to start with a big, unexpected move—one we’re exploring in an in-depth case study that breaks down our partner-first process of bringing the most relevant tools and strategies to bear when clients need it most. It’s a case study in one company’s journey to organizational transformation. But it’s also a case study in how, as a portfolio, The Frontier Project makes it happen.

To make our client’s vision a reality, we pulled from across our team, starting with custom workshops and learning programs from Frontier Academy to train and engage. The rest supported what Frontier Academy started: keynotes from Frontier Live to inspire, videos and animation from Frontier Media to share the message of change far and wide, and specially-produced guidebooks from Frontier Press to support new behaviors learned.

And the transformation our client experienced? It speaks for itself. 

If you’re looking for similar transformation and change, start first by diving into the case study here. Then, reach out. We’d love to start a conversation around your organization’s potential.

This is what we mean. Leveraging recent research on employee engagement and building atop decades of studies devoted to narrative identity, Press instituted a story-driven approach to training, integration and empowerment. All of it in reply to the kinds of questions all companies ask:

Why does it take so long to get new hires performing up to the capabilities their resumes trumpet?

Why is it so hard to get new teams working together quickly?

Why is it so difficult to retain talent?

The answer is almost never linked to what you think it is. Why don’t new hires perform quickly? It’s not because they don’t understand the systems and processes and software. Why don’t new teams gel right off the bat? It’s not because of poor leadership or lack of role definition. Why does talent walk? It’s not because of compensation or benefits.

The answer to these questions is almost always linked to the idea of narrative identity—the idea that we define ourselves, find our purpose, and perform at our highest level when we have a strong set of stories to tell ourselves and each other. We need stories about who we are, why we’re here, and what we’re here for.

So: If want your new hires to integrate faster, perform to their promise, and contribute meaningfully, you have one task: Help them find their stories faster. Here’s how we did it:

Expand the onboarding horizon. Onboarding starts long before an employee shows up at headquarters to get their badge; it starts when they first contract with the company. That’s when their story and the company’s story begin to intersect. So own it. Construct a narrative around their integration that stimulates them from the moment they except the offer by showing them the steps in their journey. Further, full integration doesn’t happen when an employee submits her or his first time sheet; it occurs when they first engage with their team to collaborate to solve a problem. By making that collaboration a plot point in their fledgling story, it can motivate early collective engagement.

Make the first day memorable. Press designed an orientation training that surpasses standard explanation of health benefits and security protocols. Instead, it included a visit from the CEO — during which he told his own story of departing an old job to join this particular company. It invited participants to analyze and share their own backstories — where they came from and why they joined. And it included exercises that required unexpected collaborations among participants (including an unforgettable gamification we’d love for you to ask us about!). By they time new hires left the half-day orientation, they had formed memories with cohorts, they had a game plan for engagement and interaction -- and they had stories to link them to others.

Create a mash-up. When a company hires talent, a very simple transaction has occurred: an individual has chosen to intersect their personal story with a company’s narrative. The company’s job is to acknowledge the independence of the individual’s story, while welcoming it to contribute to the organization’s larger narrative. How do you do this? By modeling: highlighting examples of others who have integrated well. By sharing: welcoming the honest storytelling of new hires who share their integration narratives. And by commissioning: sending new hires on missions to meet various people, capture certain conversations, and engage disparate units. The faster new hires collect evidence that they are part of a larger whole, the sooner they’ll find their place and contribute meaningfully.

We’re months from this effort, and the results are indisputable. New hire feedback has endorsed the approach. Team performance has increased. And manager feedback suggests new employees are slipping into a groove faster than ever.