Engaging Internal Comms Series 3: Recent Episodes
The Big Picture People
Our guest has more than 18 years of experience in internal communications and is going to share with us the experience of building their career within internal comms from starting off just as themselves, through to now having a team of seven people serving 6000 employees across the globe. During that journey, we're going to find out some of the tips of how they've built up a team, some of the challenges along the way and some of the key lessons from that journey.
In this episode, we will be exploring the connection between internal and external brand, and also some of the common misconceptions that organisations have about brand and what brand is. It's not just the logo, it's not just the font, it's not just the colours that we use, it's much deeper than that and how we get our employees to connect to that brand and embody what is really important.
How are internal communications teams working with learning and development teams? What are some of the shared objectives that they have? What sort of partnership opportunities exist? And also what sort of role does employee engagement and internal communications play within the organisation in terms of supporting capability, development and transformational change?
Whether you work in employee engagement or internal communications, it is likely that you are trying to create an engaging and motivating workplace where your employees want to be. However, current research has shown that about one-in-four employees are currently considering leaving their work and this has a massive impact on the type of culture and performance that we find within our organisation. In this episode, we're going to look at how we can create a highly motivating and engaging workplace and walk through ten different factors that contribute towards that.
A lot of focus for internal communicators can be around the tools and channels and techniques that we have available to us to help us to get our messages out to our audience. It's also important to understand the psychology of the audience as well and what's going on when it comes to the messages that we are relaying to them and how we need to tailor those messages in order to fit the psychology of their brains.
We all want to work in an organisation where we feel a sense of belonging, where we can bring our whole self to work. And the relevance of diversity and inclusion in our organisations is higher now that ever before. In this episode, we explore how we can help to build inclusive cultures within our organisations with social entrepreneur and LGBTQ+ and neurodiversity advocate, Arthur Woods.
Internal Comms in a crisis - At some point, all organisations will have a crisis. The role of Internal Comms in a crisis is vital. What we're going to look at in this interview is actually our primary focus should be our internal communications. Whilst obviously we need to deal with the crisis and we need to mitigate it and we need to stop the crisis getting any worse, what we need to do is let our employees know what is happening as soon as possible.
Many organisations refer to storytelling. They talk about their narrative when they are communicating, either externally or internally, and they talk about how they are using stories to bring things to life. It's integral to the work that we do at The Big Picture people when it comes to telling visual stories and linking that to a conversational process that organisations can use to really explore what their values are, what their strategies are, what their purpose are with their employees in a way that unlocks conversations that traditional approaches don't normally deliver.
Aligning leadership and action is vital for effective achievement of organisational strategy and goals. Alignment has multiple meanings. It's a term that gets misused, it gets misunderstood, and that we find that leaders sometimes think alignment is one thing, it's everybody pointing in the same direction, which is certainly a part of alignment, but it's much deeper than that. It goes down to an individual level with how aligned I am to the organisation.
Since the beginning of 2020, for most of us, we have experienced a huge transition in the way that we work. We are now more of us are more working from home. We're working hybrid, we're working in ways that we would never have been able to probably contemplate before the pandemic and before the needs of the pandemic and the isolation that follow. How can we build a digital culture where we communicate effectively, where we listen, where we share, but also where we create ways of working that are conducive to our mental health, to good mental health?
It's very easy to think that all of the change that we've experienced over the last couple of years has been related to the pandemic and the aftermath of the pandemic. But, as we probably all know, there's been a lot of business as usual change going on with organisations as well and there's also been a significant amount of merger and acquisition activity. Our guest, Stephanie Briggs, talks about her about her experience of going through a significant merger and acquisition process, whilst also experiencing a significant personal change in her life, a major relocation.
My guest. Lesley Allman, has developed the ABCDE of internal communications and in the interview we work through those together. Just to explain, A is audience, B is behaviours, C is content, D is delivery, and E is evaluation. We think it's a really nice, compact model which helps us to think about our campaigns, about our work and behind each of those 'letters' is a much more detailed set of thinking and ideas, which we explore together in this episode.
We create games for organisations that are learning games, communication games that we provide to our clients to help them to facilitate conversations around lots of different topics. These conversations could be around health and safety, company values, vision, strategy, all of those different types of areas. My guest reached out to me because he's someone who is interested in board games, it's his passion. When I got into a conversation with him I found out that not only was he interested in playing board games, he was actually bringing them into the workplace to create culture change, but he didn't call it that.
An area we've not covered on the show before is about internal communications within charities. Charities are really interesting organisations in that a lot of people who work in charities are employees, but there are also a significant number of volunteers. I was really interested to find out what it's like to be an internal communications manager or leader within an organisation that is a charity, and what challenges that brings in terms of communicating with people who already have a very deep sense of purpose, which is often why they work with the charity or volunteer for the charity.
It's long been known that the use of emotion in communication is a very powerful device. It's not always been used to the best ends and we have a history of people who have used emotion to manipulate people. But actually what we need to recognise is that emotion in communications is a really powerful way of getting our messages across and used appropriately can be highly effective. Now, what's happening when people are using emotion is that we're using something called neuroscience. I'm sure you've probably heard of neuroscience. It's the science of the brain and the activity within the brain. But how can internal communicators use neuroscience principles to make their communications more effective.
How do we build a brand as an internal communicator and as a professional internal communicator and employee engager, and how do we represent that brand? To find out how to do that, I'm going to be talking to someone who, although they are working within an organisation, has a really strong professional brand that I think is very worthy of recognition and also someone we can learn from. So this interview is all about how we develop personal branding as internal communicators and develop trusted advisor status.
Menopause is not just a gender or age issue. It impacts colleagues both directly or indirectly and should therefore be considered as an organisational issue. All managers and employees need to know about it and understand how they can support their colleagues. In this interview, Craig is joined by Carolyn Hobdey and Dave Algeo. Together, they will be exploring the impact of organisations and managers ignoring the menopause and mid-life issues their employees are experiencing.
Connecting employees to the big picture - How do we connect our employees at a local level to the corporate bigger pictures of corporate values and corporate messages whilst recognising their local needs and their local requirements? This is what we're going to be looking at in today's interview and we hope you'll find this a really interesting conversation.
What are some of the things that you need to be really mindful of when you're growing an internal communications team now? In particular, when you're working in a global organisation with thousands of employees, that's even more challenging where you've got multiple channels, multiple audiences, multiple requirements in your stakeholders.
So in this interview, we explore that dilemma, how do we communicate change effectively to our employees using technology or using the modern tools that we have at our disposal? It's also important to remember that there are some fundamental things that we need to be aware of as communicators, we need to be acting as trusted advisers, experts within our organisation.
Hope is a powerful motivator and something that many organisations have been starved of since the pandemic began. Richard Nugent, Founder of TwentyOne Leadership, explains to the Engaging Internal Comms Podcast why communicators need to start bringing hope back and how they can go about doing this.
A lack of leadership buy-in is an issue that often hinders organisational change but is one that Dean Batson, an educator of communications in colleges across Arizona, knows can be overcome. He explains to the Engaging Internal Comms Podcast the effects of authentic leadership and why it is crucial they are connected to any large-scale change effort.
Understanding the psychology behind the most effective ways to communicate with employees can make the difference in any change effort. Founder of The MindTime Foundation, John Furey, is an expert in this area and he tells the Engaging Internal Comms Podcast the benefits of understanding employee thinking and how to tailor your communications around this.
As Global Head of Employee & Community Engagement at Life Sciences business Merck, Melissa Hackmeier is responsible for the development of volunteer programmes in all parts of the world. She tells Craig Smith the importance of these programmes, how they demonstrate the organisation’s purpose to employees and other stakeholders.
Employee experience is something which has often been overlooked by organisations and leaders, despite the crucial role it plays in both productivity and revenue. Award-winning communicator and author Nicholas Wardle is working to change perceptions on this and speaks to Craig Smith about the key role communicators have to play in shaping employee experience.
Series 3 of the Engaging Internal Comms Podcast will be based around the key questions that communicators need to be able to answer when dealing with change. This is a constant for many organisations and Craig Smith explains why it is so vital in this short trailer episode.