JSC SB Alfa-Bank
Maria Mun - Managing Director of Marketing and Customer Experience
Aigul Sapralieva - Director of Brand and Communications Department
Maria Shcherbinina - Project Leader, Head of Corporate Communications Department
AlfaPeople is a territory of open-minded, active and ambitious Alfa employees, who are constantly aspiring for success and reaching new heights. The story of radical change in corporate communications strategy in Alfa bank and creation of AlfaPeople community, engaging hundred percent of our employees across Kazakhstan, started in 2020 in a period of world pandemic and a transition to teleworking of more than 70% of our employees.
The unstable situation in our country and in the whole world, transition to a completely new form of work influenced the productivity, emotional state and engagement of our employees. It has also affected their understanding of what is going on in the company and weakened their connection to each other.
For information:
Staff of Alfa-Bank consists of approximately 2900 employees from more than 14 cities of Kazakhstan. Average age of our employee is 30 years; we are young, active, modern people, who actively use social media for interaction (according to our internal study approximately 70 percent of our employees use Instagram as a primal social network)
Our goals:
• Adapt our corporate communication style and bring it to a new level;
• Create interactions that would interest every employee;
• Raise employee engagement, loyalty and awareness;
• Widen our communication channels;
• Unite our initiatives in one community.
Idea:
People, who have their own interests and hobbies, who communicate, grow and develop in different areas of their life, represent our bank. We understand that their life does not consist only of work routine, and we are interested to find out more about our employees, we are ready to grow and evolve with every Alfa person in new realities of our world. For those reasons, we have created AlfaPeopleKz community, communication from people to people. We have transformed our communication into a friendly open manner, now everyone can express himself or herself and fulfill their potential!
Solution:
We have chosen different directions of development for our community:
• We launched an open Instagram society @alfapeoplekz with an intent to engage our employees in content creation, and we succeeded. On our page, we share stories of our employees, photo and video materials from our events, advice and recommendations from Alfa experts. We announce important events, launch interactive challenges and marathons, host contests and polls; we share hobbies of our colleagues and even broadcast online sport activities.
• Online format of events has inspired us to create new types of activities for our employees, adapt our corporate events and engage all of our employees across the country. Since migrating to a new style of events we have hosted an interactive New Year’s party with homework to do before the event and online engagement, several conferences dedicated to amazing client service with participation of invited speakers. Most importantly, we have launched live streams with our CEO, where every employee can ask questions, share his or hers concern and suggest their ideas openly and anonymously.
• Our offline events are still hosted, but in a smaller scale and in consideration with Covid-19 restrictions. Recently, we started organizing offline training sessions in office with our trainer partners, in order to keep up a healthy lifestyle spirit among our workers. Apart from sport activities, we strive to support our talented employees and organize art events, where they can display their abilities, like photo exhibitions of our employees, and presentations of Alfa-Bank’s marketing campaigns, that they worked on.
• Last year we have launched Green Office initiative on the Eve of Nauryz, what symbolized the emerge of new culture among Alfa people, the culture of Eco-mindfulness and careful use of resources. Since then, we host regular Eco-education classes, where we talk about ecological alternatives in our everyday lives this has led to creation of an Eco-activists club in Alfa. Even our merch products became ecological; we produce reusable masks, shoppers, thermoses for coffee and water bottles, our pens are made from recycled materials. Another important step was the placement of recycling bins in our offices.
• In our bank, we have also created Ambassadors Club, where most initiative and loyal employees were invited. Their mission is to promote our bank, our products and services on digital platforms, in their corporate life and through personal projects, like podcasts etc.
• Another project that was popular among our employees was – “Become an Alfa star”, where our employees across Kazakhstan took part in a casting to become faces of our marketing campaigns on social media.
• Even our corporate emails changed to become more comprehensible, open and friendly. Every Friday, our employees receive a weekly digest of internal news, which consists of a shortened version and a full presentation for their comfort. We want our employees to feel like they are drinking coffee with a friend and talking about everything that happened to them during a week when they receive our digest.
Results:
Bank’s employees created the whole project, without the help of any outsource companies. All of our ideas are emerging inside of our team. The social media marketing is created in-house. Most of our internal events are also created by our teams.
What do we have now?
• 70 % of @alfapeoplekz audience are Alfa employees.
• Our employees are 100 % engaged in the project, employees themselves create all of our content. We always have something to talk about; we are talked about and even copied.
• This is how SETTERS agency has rated our Instagram profile: “Clean, unamplified audience and live content from real employees gives Engagement Rate of 10, 39% during the year. We have noticed a super positive atmosphere and a lot of employees who are advocates for the brand.” Our employees have become our best advertisement.
• 67% of our employees confirmed that after we launched @alfapeoplekz it has become their main source of corporate information.
• The eNPS index of employee loyalty for 2020 is +34,4%
We have not only resolved the tasks we have set before ourselves, but also started actively improving the image of employer by sharing our ideas. We are not afraid that our initiatives will be copied or that our employees will be hunted by other organizations. We have also developed another recruitment channel through posting vacancies on our Instagram page, shifting focus from a corporation image to a future team by creating warm relationships with potential candidates when they have just seen our vacancy.