How InMobi created 360degree campaign for culture emersion as employees return to office

After more than two years of working from home, most organisations are back to work from office mode, while some are opting for a hybrid work mode. Two-way communication is essential in today’s fast-paced corporate world. Cultivating a two-way interaction with the work force has become essential for organisations for a successful internal communication strategy.

InMobi recently implemented a return-to-work plan to raise enthusiasm about returning to the office among teams through a guerrilla marketing campaign within the company. The campaign was a big success, thanks to the HR staff's collaboration with their content marketing team. Employees were enthusiastic participants and supporters and mirrored the InMobi work culture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Sahil Mathur, CHRO, InMobi Group, speaks at length about how the company geared up to welcome back its employees to office in an innovative way.  

What encouraged you to come up this campaign?

InMobi’s Back 2 Office (B2O) campaign was created to welcome team members back to the office and to help them transition in an exciting way. We wanted to make it celebratory, fun, and festive. Most importantly, it was designed in such a way that it could give employees a glimpse of what InMobi culture is. This was an opportunity to have everyone establish and experience real connections with their colleagues. This is where the beliefs and values become tangible and, therefore, culture comes to life. This campaign was important as more than 50 per cent of the workforce had joined during the pandemic and had never met their colleagues and/ or had never been to any of the vibrant InMobi Group company offices before. It was important for us to understand the nuances of how to get people back into offices with ease, comfort, sensitivity, compassion, and fun.

How do you plan to be different through your new campaign?

We wanted to create a campaign that would make coming back to office less stressful and would also ease many of the concerns that employees would have about this transition, in a fun way. We decided to leverage the skills of our content marketing team to create internal buzz around “The back to office program”, instead of just sending out boring emails.

The team came up with the idea of a series of emailers from unique IDs. These emails were sent across the organisation as a guerrilla campaign – not even the leadership knew these were going out! To begin with, everyone at Glance received a mailer from yourofficeclothes@glance.com, which had old office clothes reach out to people asking to reconnect after a two-year separation! These sparked an intense debate among employees as to who was sending these emails. Senior leaders even sent messages to IT and HR asking if they could investigate and find out if these emails might be part of some external phishing attempt. Never once did we reveal these emails were seeded and employees started talking about it in different Team groups. Eventually, they realised this was a B2O campaign, but by then a lot of buzz and engagement was created for the campaign. It was immensely appreciated by employees, who even wrote back to these email IDs with some hilarious responses.

What is the objective of this campaign and who are you targeting with this campaign? Could you elaborate on the profile of this audience?

This campaign was done specifically at Bengaluru, India. The objective was to give employees an immersive experience of our culture and assist them to make a smooth transition from working remote to working in office, for a few days in a week. The employee demographic and attributes are varied – new to tenured, junior to senior, and across all types of roles.

What is the importance of flexibility in the workplace, and how can organisations leverage it to the best?

At the InMobi Group, team members have always had the flexibility to work in a manner that brings out the best in them. Our core culture and values are based on trust. Trust your employees to deliver their best and they will trust you in return and deliver beyond your expectations. They are empowered in multiple ways to meet the goals of the organisation and their personal goals too. Team members have flexibility to decide how they wish to use their time. We provide freedom and flexibility and expect our people to be responsible. Also, with the pandemic, the social ecosystem and the familial environment have changed. And we need to allow people to mesh the professional and the personal so that they find the right harmony. Decisions have been made by employees with respect to their surroundings and families that are now key factors. We need to let our employees be natural in these and, therefore, have them give their best.

What are the key takeaways from the exercise, and some insights for HR leaders?

There are several learnings from an exercise such as this. The exercise was hugely successful, but there were some challenges as well. One thing which was clear was that the social interactions and collaborations in the same physical space and not on a screen have their advantages. People need to get comfortable with both and derive maximum value by optimising the two. On a related note, etiquettes of ensuring the virtual and physical collaboration in meetings so that it is equally inclusive for people in the room and virtual, is key. Employees have changed city locations, set up workspaces and environments in certain ways, have merged professional and personal responsibilities through the day and due to these and as with any change, adoption and adaptation take time. The key is to have an employee-centric approach while planning any such change. As leaders, it is important to be empathetic, be flexible, give time to adapt and most importantly show the way. Overall well-being of the employees must be in focus.

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