Greetings fellow PR interns,
Finally, after going through a greatly holiday-delayed approving process, I am able to present to you my first blog entry. Please consider this post published on 28 August.
I have just started the second week of my placement at Shell Malaysia Exploration and Production (SMEP) headquarters in Miri, Sarawak, and decided that it is time to reflect on my first impressions.
Let’s start with a bit of background information. SMEP has a local corporate communications department in Miri, employing five staff and headed by one manager. The staff fill the positions of government/media relations, internal communications, social investment and events, graphic design and administration, all of which have overlapping responsibilities. In reality that means everybody including me is helping each other when needed.
Work in the internal communications department encompasses communications with Shell staff in the Lutong office and some instances the other branches in Malaysia. They organize internal events, write internal news for the internal communication network and handle employee communications. The external communications department is concerned with the media and government relations on one hand and with the organizing social investment programmes and events on the other hand.
I am working four days per week full time, due to ongoing classes, and so far my duties have been focussed on internal relations. We currently have our hands full with putting together a staff engagement project to facilitate a change in the SMEP’s organizational culture. The project, titled ‘Our Business, Our Future’, is a large undertaking involving several hundred employees who will be gently introduced to the new SMEP through several waves of face to face sessions with the company’s leaders.
Our corporate communications department is making a huge effort to promote the project and get everyone to engage with it. On my first day, I was asked to jump right into the middle of the preparations by giving ideas on how to engage employees best through an internal website for the project. In the following days, I analyzed feedback from a survey to find out via which channel employees want to be kept up to date on the changes and to formulate a FAQ for the website. I found that face to face interaction, whether personal or in large town hall meetings are highly favored for complex internal communications.
Another challenge in developing the ‘Our Business, Our Future’ website was given to me in the form of writing short and rather informal profiles of the senior managers that are going to host the staff engagement sessions. It took me quite a while to formulate the brief interview style profiles in an engaging and personalized manner, using only the little information provided by short questionnaires. I noticed though that once I got some practice my writing started to flow quite smoothly. Eight down and two more to go.
Aside from my work on the staff engagement project, I was given some simple administrative tasks to fill my time. I spend one morning scanning news clippings from local Mandarin newspapers, which, I was told, are going to be catalogued, translated and put online. I also created a set of new letterhead templates following the detailed design guidelines provided by Shell that govern everything from colors, fonts and logo placements on letters, packaging, work wear and even merchandise. I was quite impressed to which extent theses guidelines ensure a coherent visual identity for all Shell related materials around the world.
My overall impression of my first week interning was that I was thrown in head on into operations, which was good for me to learn the ropes and for my supervisors to gauge my skills and talents. The latter were incorporated right away, when I was asked to make use of my media production experience to develop ways to engage the staff through videos and posters.
So far, I have made as much use of the skills learned in the PR 220 unit as I have of my intuition, common sense and creativity. Theory wise, the effort put into engaging the staff here at Shell supports the notions that employees are the most important stakeholders for most businesses. I’m looking forward to see what I’ll learn in the following weeks when I work in other areas.
How are your experiences with PR techniques and theories learned at university when it comes to applying them on the job?
Regards,
Martin Tengeler
14196744
Sarawak Campus
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