Millicom – Communicating ethics in an engaging way

Millicom – Millie

Communicating ethics in an engaging way

The challenge

Millicom offers a range of digital services to more than 63 million customers, primarily in Africa and Hispanic America. Because of their diverse range of cultural backgrounds, senior leaders identified a need for a unified code of ethical conduct for employees and developed a set of guidelines around expected behaviours (internal controls). Our challenge was to communicate these codes of conduct and position the new internal control function as ‘expert helpers’ rather than ‘secret police’.

Making it happen

The ambition was for employees to actively work with the Internal Control team, and to engage in dialogue and conversation that supported ethical behaviours.

So to make the subject and team feel more approachable, we created Millie – a fictional animated character who became the face and voice of the Internal Control function. As an ‘everyday’ character, she was someone they could identify with, making it easier for employees to come forward and interact, engage and ask questions.

Millie was introduced to employees through a two-phased roll-out. Following a business-wide launch utilising video and a range of offline materials, phase one invited employees to get in touch with Millie privately through personal messaging (Millie-nonymous).

In the second phase she had her own Yammer page, where people were encouraged to converse openly about the new guidelines. And the incentivised sign-on programme measured the reach and impact of the programme.

The Outcome

Thanks to Millie, the Internal Control team were able to successfully demonstrate that they were listening and responding to feedback from employees. People warmed to Millie and the dialogue flowed in a positive and constructive way.