Engaging Internal Comms Series 3

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 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?