A former boss of mine once told me that four ingredients were required for work: Love, Humour, Perspiration and Courage. “If you add those ingredients”, he said, “it’ll be easier to turn every challenge into a success story”.
That is the recipe we follow when preparing our internal communication in the Iberdrola Group. In the last five years, Iberdrola has gone through radical changes as a result of our strong growth and international expansion. Each instance of growth has added a new challenge to our internal communication. When we merged with ScottishPower in 2007, English became one of the official languages used by the company. In 2008, our new colleagues from Iberdrola USA (then Energy East) added American English and contributed through their presence in various states to widen the Group´s time zones.
And since 2012, the arrival of Elektro has made us trilingual: Portuguese is now one of the company’s official languages, together with English and Spanish. That’s without mentioning our operations in Mexico and dozens of other countries. What’s the outcome? A company with 30,744 employees, with different cultures, who speak several different languages and cover almost all the 24 time zones that exist. 
The challenge has been laid down. Internal communication is a fundamental vehicle for integration, but how can we put across streamlined messages that reflect the diversity of the Group, in an optimised, immediate and simultaneous way in all of the countries where we operate?
The first thing we did was to create streamlined tools that could be shared by all: a shared corporate magazine, an employees’ portal and a single trilingual Intranet website for the entire Group, as well as the “Programa Comparte” or “Share Programme”, a classic at Iberdrola that is now offered at global level. Parallel to this, we designed an internal communication plan in which multimedia messages became essential in guaranteeing streamlined information on an immediate basis. To this end, nothing could be more effective than to have our own television studio and audiovisual production department at the same facilities as the rest of our employees at Iberdrola’s corporate headquarters building in Madrid. A dream for the majority of companies, a reality for Iberdrola.
For example, this strategy enabled us to follow the inauguration of the Iberdrola Tower building in Bilbao by the King and Queen of Spain or to produce the employee meeting with the Group`s Chairman, a genuinely multimedia meeting, via satellite and in real time. All of this is possible with a single click of the mouse on our employees’ portal.
This multimedia-focused strategy is now of the essence of our internal communication in all of the countries where we operate. We inform and educate in an entertaining and optimised manner, by recording and distributing health campaigns, courses on the prevention of industrial risks or “experience workshops”, recordings that are screened on the employees’ portal and which give us an insight into the experiences of other colleagues in particular areas, thereby promoting the pooling of knowledge.
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In short, our internal communication is prepared with love, humour, perspiration and courage and just as my former boss had said, the challenges have been changed into rewarding success stories. We were recently acknowledged by the prestigious Observatory on Internal Communication and Corporate Identity as one of the companies with the best Internal Communications practices. To be more specific, our company was commended in the ‘Online platform and support for effective management of Internal Communication’ category. That’s a success story that belongs to all of us and from which we all benefit.
