This episode is about the resource ‘How to better live your values’ and is designed to be a team exercise. The exercise is about getting people to identify the areas within your organisation where you’re excelling and finding examples of where you could utilise those strengths. It’s also about identifying where you have the biggest gaps at the moment and what you need to do in order to plug those gaps.

Our interviewee is Kristina Vaneva who is Director of Employee Engagement & Internal Communications at Atlantis Resorts in Dubai. Kristina describes the Atlantis Dubai as one of the largest integrated resorts in the world. There are 2200 employees from 87 different countries leading to a very diverse workforce operating 24/7 which is an accurate reflection of what Dubai itself is about – a melting pot of people and diversity. Employee engagement in a 24-hour operation is always something Kristina is driving for.

Craig Smith brings you the fourth of our free communication tools and resources called "Using stories to illustrate values". It the is first in our series of resources designed to be used as a team and is especially good for large groups. Values need to come to life and help people understand how they fit within the organisation. Sharing stories is a great way to help people understand how people have embodied your values.

Internal communicators have a wide range of tools at their disposal but this also means that there are potentially too many to choose from and this can cause confusion. Internal comms teams need to know which channel to choose to have the most impact with their messages. Integration over the past few years has been key to improving the use of the intranet, it can pull all the other different platforms in use together in one place.

Understanding how well your current organisational values fit with your organisational priorities and strategy is an important first step in deciding whether you need to revisit them. The resource we’re sharing with you today is called ‘Assessing your values’ and it asks you to write down your organisational values and think about how well they act as a guideline for behaviour. Are people generally proud of the values, do they mean something to people, and do they drive their motivation?

In this episode of Engaging Internal Comms we are talking with Tanya Pakhuta about adapting internal comms to changing situations. Tanya is Senior Global Internal Communications Manager at LeasePlan. For an internal comms professional this has been a very challenging time. From one day to another Tanya and her team have had to rethink how they were going to operate. They had to keep adapting internal comms to the changing situation.

Today we will be sharing a personal reflection exercise with you (which could also be used with your team if you wish) and it’s all about determining your values. A lot of clients that we work with will already have established values within their organisation. They will probably have spent quite a lot of time designing them and pulling them together. If you haven’t got values or haven’t spent time articulating the values you have, then this exercise is a good starting point. Even if you do have values this is a good opportunity to reflect and check that the values you have as your espoused values are the ones that the organisation actually use.

Craig Smith talks to Shira Tabachnikoff. Shira is a Stakeholder Relations and Internal Communications Manager at ITER, an intergovernmental organisation established in 2006. In large organisations in which cultures and languages differ so greatly, and so broadly across vast variations of roles and seniority, internal comms becomes a gigantic challenge. Communication and interpretation of an organisation’s values is a challenge even for internal comms leading an English-speaking audience. So how can internal comms of multicultural employees best tackle communicating values and ensure the audience has interpreted it as intended?

This week’s episode of Engaging Internal Comms is a short interim episode between our normal interviews. In it we would like to share some ideas with you that we think are useful and valuable. The Big Picture People are already using these ideas with our clients so we know how helpful they can be. In these short episodes we’re going to share resources with you that are free to download from our website (www.thebigpicturepeople.co.uk/resources) These resources are a mixture of personal reflection exercises, which are things that you can do on your own, and team exercises. The first resource we want to introduce you to stemmed from work we are doing with clients where they are starting to look at how people’s expectations of their work changed during the pandemic and how this affects what people want from their work.

Cai Kjaer, Co-founder and CEO at SWOOP Analytics, tells us about the importance of measuring online collaboration. SWOOP is a leading enterprise social network analytics platform that uses data from Microsoft Teams, Yammer and Workplace by Facebook to help organisations and their people to become better collaborators. Cai stresses the objective is to have a two-way conversation rather than a one-way broadcast and to establish an authentic line of engagement between the CEO and the frontline.