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.