Awarded best agency 9 years running
Our Product Development Coordinator Luke reveals why innovation is our lifeblood as an internal comms agency – and how we’re enhancing the IC industry by transforming the way people communicate and connect around the globe.
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Here at H&H we’re continuously evolving, thinking ahead and looking to the future.
The opportunity to innovate and create excites us and fuels our passion to bring new, exciting and revolutionary ideas and products to the world of internal comms.
Every day, we’re driven by our ambition to improve the workplace for people all across the planet, and to help us achieve this aim we think imaginatively, challenge everything, and never stop asking, ‘Why do we do things that way? How can we do it better?’
Here’s why innovation underpins everything we do as an internal comms agency…
Our mission is to transform the way people communicate, interact and connect in workplaces across the globe
At H&H we’re all about making workplaces better places to be, and without innovation and creativity we’d struggle to create anything new or improved to enrich the employee experience.
To fulfil our ambitious mission, we’re always looking to find new ways of doing things in internal comms. Often, it is cultural or environmental change, or breakthroughs in new technology, that drive us to these innovations.
The world of IC is always shifting and adapting to new comms technologies, evolving employee behaviours, and the changing landscape of business communication in general.
By keeping abreast of these changes, and applying new ideas and solutions to fix common problems and meet changing communication needs, we can advance the industry and improve the lives of employees everywhere.
Read more: The top 7 internal communications challenges you need to focus on in 2018
To achieve our mission we constantly try to innovate and disrupt the status-quo. It’s a case of constantly asking why. Why do we do it this way? What if we did it this way? The bottom line is that without innovation, we could not transform.
We’re always looking to create new value for our clients
Of course, this goes without saying. We have an amazing team of animators, illustrators, designers, consultants and IC strategists… the list goes on. Without them we wouldn’t deliver exceptional results every day, week in week out.
However, in order to stay ahead of the game we need to keep excelling ourselves, and set the bar higher each time. Expectations continually grow and we constantly strive to exceed them.
The world around us is in constant flux, and all the constant change means that every business needs to respond and adapt to these changes – be it culturally, technologically or environmentally – in order to expand their potential and provide improved, relevant services.
At H&H, one vital way we do this is by challenging old ideas and looking for new ways to apply tried-and-tested theories in practice, as well as developing new, staple products to continually better our services and enhance the industry as a whole.
Complacency is the enemy of progress
As a thriving agency, it’s easy to become complacent and settle with the current best practice. The consequence of this of course is that you’ll end up falling behind the latest trends and thinking, meaning you can’t progress with your mission. Things become stale, people lose motivation and passion, and you stagnate.
Internal comms is at an interesting point right now, where senior leaders are eclipsing line managers in importance when it comes to providing a great employee experience. This is just one example of the industry changes we can can examine in depth to find inspiration for innovation.
If we allowed ourselves to become complacent, it would mean the cultural change would pass us by and we wouldn’t innovate anything new or valuable to make adapting to the change easier for internal comms professionals (or employees for that matter). The quality of our output wouldn’t develop, and as a result, we plateau and diminish our potential.
By accepting what exists around us and not reacting to it, we become stuck in a rut and fall behind.
But if we’re energetic, curious, and incessantly inventive, we can break moulds, transform outdated ideas, and challenge conventional thinking and understanding. Making a whole world of new ideas possible.
It fuels our natural curiosity
As creatives, designers, and internal comms strategists – people who spend a great deal of time generating new and creative thoughts and ideas – we’re naturally inquisitive about most things. We have an ingrained reflex to question things and challenge the status quo. They say curiosity killed the cat, but it only makes us more passionate and ambitious to discover new ways to engage employees through stellar internal communications.
To keep our inspiration flowing and stimulate our creativity, we have processes in place to allow our ideas to grow and develop.
An example would be our monthly ‘Innovation Hour’ sessions, where each H&Her shares a compelling, intriguing, or just plain off-the-wall idea or concept which they think could add value to the IC industry.
We then record these suggestions for future reference or store them in our ‘ideas box’ to use as a springboard for new product ideas. Check out some of the weird and wonderful ideas my fellow H&Hers have contributed so far over on our Now That’s Innovation! website.
These sorts of projects are stimulating and keep us excited about our day-to-day activities, and even more so about how we can contribute to building the workplace of the future. After all, without innovation, you’d still be using a typewriter instead of your laptop.
Fundamentally, innovation is fundamental to our growth as an internal comms agency, and as an industry as a whole.
It’s inextricably linked to our mission – which underpins everything we do here – and the results we achieve. Without it, we’d fall behind, and our capacity to bring revolutionary products to the industry and the people who work with us would be stunted.
So, keep questioning why things are being done the way they are, and who knows, one day you may find that spark of innovation inspiration for yourself!
Meet the author
Our Luke – Product Development Coordinator
I coordinate the development of all of H&H’s new products. I love digging out new, innovative ideas and solutions to provide tangible, real-life answers to the common issues and questions that keep internal comms professionals up at night. And seeing the positive impact our products are having on our clients’ work (and the industry as a whole) keeps me inspired to go one better every time.
Get to know me better over on our team page or connect with me on LinkedIn!
Want to learn more about our innovative culture?
See what keeps us all launching towards achieving our ambitious mission in our ‘Our Culture’ animation!
