COMMSKIT CASE STUDY: IFS
Facilities management internal communications across eight African countries
ABOUT
IFS (International Facilities Services, formerly International Site Services) provides facilities management services to oil, gas, mining & construction sectors across sub-Saharan Africa.
Its teams work on remote sites operated by international mining companies including Kenmare, Glencore, Vale, Sibanye-Stillwater, Fluor and Kamoa. The business was acquired by a private equity investor in 2012.
SECTOR
Mining & resources
Facilities management
Industrial catering
Industrial cleaning
WORKFORCE
3,500+
LOCATION
South Africa
Zimbabwe
Zambia
Namibia
Botswana
Mozambique
Malawi
DRC
TLDR
IFS needed facilities management internal communications for that worked for a 3,500-person workforce – servicing sites of up to 8,000 people – spread across eight African countries and six languages.
We built the messaging, the campaign system and the asset hub behind it, then handed the running of it to their own team. The partnership ran for eight years, from 2012 to 2020.
What happens when facilities management internal communications do not exist yet?
The health and safety signage on IFS site walls had been printed by the people who needed it. Supervisors and safety managers, with no material of their own to work from, went looking – borrowing from others in the industry, finding what they could online, printing it and putting it up. Some of it was misspelt. None of it matched. None of it had been written for the sites it was hanging on.
That was 2012. A private equity investor had just acquired the business and brought us in – then Halo Media, now CommsKit – to rebrand it: International Site Services became IFS, International Facilities Services. Facilities management is a people business, though, and the investment team wanted the brand built from the inside out. In practice that meant building facilities management internal communications where none existed, starting with what was on the wall.
8 countries
6 languages
8,000+ workforce
8+ years
The challenge, defined
"Communications drift" is what happens when an organisation has no communications system of its own: individual sites, supervisors and managers source, adapt or invent their own material, and accuracy, consistency and safety messaging fragment site by site. Nothing at IFS had broken down. But nothing had been built in the first place.
Four constraints shaped everything that followed.
- Reach beyond the payroll. IFS employed 3,500 people, but its teams worked on sites carrying populations of 3,000 to 8,000+. Communications had to serve the workforce and the wider site.
- Sites were remote, several with difficult access points. Extreme weather could cut a site off for weeks. Printed material often went in on a small private aircraft, so anything printed had to earn its place and serve more than one purpose.
- Six languages – English, Portuguese in Mozambican dialect, French, Swahili, Zulu and Afrikaans. Portuguese and French run longer than English, so hundreds of pages of design had to be laid out with room for the text to expand before a word was translated.
- Two brands on for on-site assets. IFS material sat on sites operated by international mining companies, so it had to meet IFS standards and the operator brand guidelines at the same time.
What we did
Brand foundations
The rebrand gave IFS an identity that had to reproduce well at every size, from a web banner to an aircraft fuselage. We applied it across signage, uniforms, vehicles, stationery, tenders and presentations – the touchpoints an employee or a client encounters on a site. Our brand work didn't stop at their visual identity, it carried through to their website, marketing collateral, internal and external communications.
A campaign system for safety and engagement
We replaced borrowed signage with health and safety campaigns and awareness campaigns built for IFS sites, in the languages spoken on them, supported by training videos. Campaigns were produced as reusable sets, so a site could take a whole campaign rather than a single poster, and multi-lingual internal communications assets could be distributed across multiple sites.
The Employee Comms Hub and Brand Shop
We built a cloud-based hub (the forerunner for CONNECT employee communications hub). This held the logo and brand guidelines, stationery, presentations and brochures, an image and asset library, campaign libraries for health, safety and culture, an event calendar for known dates such as Mining Indaba. The Brand Shop was a hit, allowing designated users the ability to order uniforms, collateral and to maximise access to a vast library of campaigns and assets.
It carried an accountability log recording who requested what and when, for audit purposes.
Handover
Templates and systems were set up so the IFS team could run brand and communications management themselves. Usability underpinned all the work from the start, so even items like daily menus in the canteen were created in PowerPoint to allow the users to update and edit. This made handover seamless.
What changed over eight years
- One identity reproduced consistently across eight countries, from stationery through to aircraft branding
- Health and safety material drawn from a single campaign library in six languages, rather than found and printed site by site
- Brand and communications assets held in one hub, with an ordering system and an accountability log recording every request
- Every asset cross-checked against two sets of brand guidelines, IFS and the operating mine, by a second reviewer before release
- Templates and systems handed to the IFS internal team, who continued brand management afterwards
- An eight-year partnership, from 2012 to 2020, spanning the company growth across the region
Influential to our success
The energy, drive, creativity and positivity brought to the table by CommsKit*, turned our company image from barely recognisable to one of the standout brands in our industry in under 12 months.
Reaching across continents, cultures and skill levels, CommsKit has been excellent in identifying the needs relating to each segment and, through innovative ideas, have been influential in bringing these projects to life.
Not only does CommsKit's thorough preparation and execution continue to impress, but their ability to work across different languages and culture has been a godsend.
– Marc Rosenberg, Marketing & Communications Director
*Formerly Halo Media
Scope delivered
Over the course of the relationship, through a planned approach (now formalised as CommsKit), the evolution of the IFS brand was managed across a wide range of interconnected communication and brand activities. These are now delivered as part of a coordinated system, not isolated projects.
- Awareness and engagement campaigns, health and safety campaigns, newsletter content and design
(this is achieved with our ENGAGE Employee Engagement solution) - Employee Comms Hub and Brand Shop, with ordering, asset library and accountability logging
(this is achieved with our CONNECT Employee Communications Hub) - Induction packs, new joiner experience and training videos
(this is achieved with our ONBOARD Employee onboarding experience) - Tender design and collation, exhibition stands and roadshows, research and infographics, video production, interactive presentation design
(this is achieved with our BOOST add-on options) - Corporate identity, brand guidelines, signage, uniform, vehicle and aircraft branding, franchise brand development, websites
(this is achieved with our KITS for brand identity and design toolkits)
How this work maps to CommsKit today
The IFS work predates the CommsKit brand, but the shape of it is what the suite now formalises.
ENGAGE is the managed monthly communications programme – the campaigns, newsletters and messaging that ran continuously for eight years.
CONNECT is the branded communications hub, which at IFS was the Employee Comms Hub and Brand Shop.
ONBOARD covers the Day 0 to 90 new joiner experience, delivered here as induction packs and training videos.
KITS handled the foundational brand correction at the start, and BOOST absorbed the work that sat outside the core programme, such as tenders, exhibition stands and roadshows, without disturbing it.
LOOP, the employee Q&A and insight module, did not exist at the time and was not part of this engagement.
Managing facilities management internal communications? See how CommsKit can help you achieve a safer and more productive workforce.