PR executives at Wellpoint had been hearing about it for years: employees who wanted to share their experiences in the good-deeds department. There was just one problem. They
had no place to tell those stories.
"Our associates had really expressed a desire to be involved in the community, to deliver on Wellpoint's commitment to social responsibility," says Heather Rim, director of
corporate and investor communications at Wellpoint. "We were receiving a number of news items from associates talking about their activities, but we really didn't have a place to
put them in a timely manner."
Neither the quarterly print publication The Source nor the quarterly video magazine Coast to Coast would fit the bill, so the PR team turned to the intranet that it had
launched in mid-2000 with the hope of making Wellpoint employees a more cohesive unit. In September 2002 the intranet boasted a new feature: "Living the Values," wherein employees
would be invited to share stories showing how they and their colleagues had acted upon Wellpoint's corporate promise of giving back to the community.
Wellpoint has incorporated "Living the Values" into its larger external campaigns aimed at publicizing the company's overall commitment to social responsibility and corporate
citizenship. Its CSR includes such efforts as "Bring Your Child to Work Day" and involvement with United Way.
One of the nation's largest publicly-traded health care companies, Wellpoint serves more than 50 million members. Thanks to a series of acquisitions in recent years, the firm
has grown considerably, and now employs some 17,000 employees in 88 offices nationwide compared with half that number of employees a few years back.
With the long-range goal of creating a sense of corporate unity among its workers, Rim saw the "Living the Values" project as a way not just to publicize tales of generosity,
but also to bring employees closer together. "We wanted to prominently display associates in action, but we also want all of our associates to feel like they are part of one
company with one common culture," she says. With practically100% utilization among employees, the intranet seemed like the best place to start.
To generate a steady stream of stories, the PR team began by soliciting input via The Source, and then went on to develop an online form for submission of ideas. New
submissions go simultaneously to Rim, intranet Editor Jessica Silver-Hill and Corporate Communications Manager Linda Lalande. Silver-Hill typically will draft the article, with
input from Rim and Lalande, but they all will try to do as little tweaking as possible.
Some examples of the good deeds profiled in "Living the Values" include: 1) Office mates got together to give blood; 2) co-workers organized a dinner at a home for seniors; 3)
employees created gift baskets for orphans; 4) employees sponsored the training of a seeing-eye dog. "We try to keep the employee who submitted it really involved, so that they
can really feel a sense of ownership of it. I don't want them to feel like I wrote it: I want them to feel like this is something that is really theirs," Silver-Hill says.
To get the system running smoothly, the PR practitioners have had to overcome several hurdles. In the first place, they needed to define to themselves and others just what kind
of stories the "Values" feature would highlight.
"A lot of times when people think about company values, they think about how they can make the business run better," Rim says. "They don't necessarily think about how their
volunteering in the community also has a positive impact on the company."
Likewise, the stories may sometimes err on the side of being too personal. "Occasionally we will receive a story that is based on more of a family activity," Rim adds. "With
the war, for example, we received a number of stories from employees whose brothers or sisters were going [to Iraq], and whose families had rallied together in support of that
individual."
It took some effort upfront in terms of selling the idea to employees, but now it is pretty much self-sustaining and only a small part of what they do. The PR department is in
the process of building an online poll to more precisely measure the impact of this program on employees.
The features themselves have helped to sort out the confusion, with each new weekly article helping to make clear the kinds of stories that were wanted. Most depict WellPoint
employees coming together as a team to engage in some community-service project.
The clarity has come in part through the PR team's own efforts to manage the feature with a little more forethought. With the online submission form, for instance, "we
constantly tweak the form," Rim says. "As stories surface, we realize that there might be another angle that we have not quite captured." Subsequently, they have added to the form
a question about how the proposed story impacts all employees and have included a section that asks which of the company's values the story most closely reflects.
As an end-user of the system, Earlene Ackey says the intranet feature has indeed helped her to feel more like a part of a team. A senior administrative assistant in Atlanta,
Georgia, Ackey participated in her department's efforts to raise money on behalf of the Foundation for Medically Fragile Children, which supports sick children. When her story
appeared on the intranet, "we were all very excited. There was a real sense of pride in knowing that this was out there in front of thousands of employees all across the country,"
she says. In general, the intranet feature is "a great opportunity for people to share their stories, to keep one another informed across the company."
Since September 2002 more than 30 stories have appeared on the site (many coming from senior management), with the PR staff regularly receiving two to three submissions every
week. Early this spring the PR team had five stories ready to roll and another 20 stories in progress. "So far, we are getting a really strong response, and in fact it is getting
stronger as time goes on," Silver-Hill says.