Case Study: Champions for Effective Communication

As one of the world’s leading consumer packaged foods companies, General Mills is aware that a key to its ongoing success is keeping employees in the know. However, with more than 28,000 employees in more than 100 locations scattered around the globe, good communication has meant relying on innovation, found in its streaming media portal—Champions TV. The portal’s name gives a nod to the food company’s well-known slogan—"Breakfast of Champions"—created for its Wheaties cereal. First implemented in 1999, the Champions TV portal uses Microsoft Windows Media to efficiently deliver corporate content 24 hours a day to desktop PCs and manufacturing plant kiosks in both live and repeat broadcasts.

Champions TV means the company can broadcast live events simultaneously in the U.S. and in other countries along with rebroadcast events. General Mills’ employees can access a wide range of information including quarterly and annual company meetings, departmental meetings, product demonstrations, and training materials. The daily content is scheduled in eight-hour time blocks and then rebroadcast, so employees on different shifts and in different time zones can view it.

While the portal was successful from the start, there were obstacles. "One of the biggest problems we had was that not everybody could access it," says Tom Forsythe, Director of Corporate Communications. "And so we had to decide whether to build for the future, or build for today." An important tool from the outset, the portal was limited to General Mills’ facilities with strong infrastructures and networks. "It was important not to over-rely on it early, but also to continue to leverage it where possible," he says.

Getting all of General Mills’ operations up to speed to accommodate the portal also proved to be cost-effective. "We have consistently piggy-backed on other network expenditures, and Champions TV, by itself, did not drive any network investment," says Forsythe. As General Mills was an early adopter of SAP enterprise resource planning software, it was necessary to have a robust network with sufficient bandwidth to support it. "When those infrastructure investments were made, we just tucked right behind them and then provided this tool as well."

To watch Champions TV, corporate employees simply click on the Windows Media Player embedded in the home page on their PC desktops. However, Champions TV is not for just office workers; blue collar employees working in General Mills’ manufacturing plants can take a break, walk up to kiosks located right on the plant floors, and access not only Champions TV, but the entire corporate intranet. They can also access performance measures for each plant to see how they compare to their peers in other plants. Additionally, the company uses Windows Media to stream on-demand video to its advertising and marketing employees. Videos are of General Mills’ product commercials that date back to the early days of TV, and workers can search and request commercials from an online video library.

The General Mills portal has improved communication while cutting down on travel costs and employee downtime, as people don’t have to travel for meetings or training events. During a live event, employees are able to submit questions to a special email box and have their questions answered and can also choose to submit questions anonymously. This means that if the company chairman makes a presentation to all employees, he can also take and answer questions from workers in a variety of locations.

This type of sophisticated, immediate Q&A allows each employee to have access to the information they need to truly understand General Mills’ overall performance and their own personal contribution to the company. This two-way communication also boosts company morale. "There’s a huge difference between two-way communication and one-way communication," Forsythe says. A two-way dialog illustrates that it’s not just a packaged event, featuring company spin. "There’s a difference in the trust level," he says.