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 words 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. Many think alignment is about everybody pointing in the same direction. While this is certainly a part of alignment, but it's much deeper than that. It goes down to an individual level with how aligned our people are with 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.