FIR Interviews

UPDATE on November 22, 2016: A federal judge has granted an emergency injunction against the rule addressed in this interview.

Effective December 1, some 4 million salaried U.S. workers will be subject to time-tracking and overtime pay who were exempt from those rules before. It’s likely that reading company news or other internal communication on a smartphone will be considered “work” under these rules — that is, if employees in this group aren’t paid for the time they spend consuming internal comms content aren’t compensated for it, your company could be subject to legal action by an employee or the Department of Labor.

In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz talks with Simon Worsfold of TSheets about the new rules, who those 4 million employees are, how companies need to prepare, and what you need to consider when communicating the issue. Additional information is available from this document on the TSheets website: How to Address Your Employees’ Top Fears About the New FLSA Rules.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by ThornleyFallis Communications / 76 Design.

About our conversation partner

Simon Worsfold is a copywriter and business analyst at TSheets, a time tracking software company based in Boise, Idaho. Originally from the UK, he emigrated to the U.S. in 2015 after a five-year stint in sports marketing and communication, raising money for British Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls. Before that he was a travel writer, writing a travel tips book and regular features about destinations in Britain, Australia, Africa, and South East Asia. Outside of the office, you’ll find him running trails in the foothills above Boise.

The post FIR Interview: Simon Worsfold on Risk of Communicating Outside Work Hours appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

This interview is the first in a series produced during a full-day workshop on podcasting for organizational communicators. The FIR Podcast Network’s Shel Holtz leads these workshops, part of which includes the recording, editing, and production of a podcast on-site. In this first session, held at the Gleacher Center in Chicago on October 28, 2016, Ryan Alford of Interprose (based in Chicago) volunteered to conduct the interview while Amy Bickers of Northern Trust Corporation (also in Chicago) offered to take Ryan’s questions on transformation communication, a subject in which she has expertise. The questions were generic and not related directly to her work with her employer.

To record the interview, Ryan used a Marantz PMD-620 portable digital recorder (no longer available; the new model is the PMD561) with inputs via the recorder’s built-in microphones. Adobe Audition was used for editing. Music was obtained from the Free Music Archive.

For information on upcoming podcasting workshops, visit Ragan Communications.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis Communications.

The post FIR Interview: Amy Bickers on Transformation Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Members of the Arthur W. Page Society — the professional association for senior PR and corporate communication executives — have been busy. Following the 2007 release of “The Authentic Enterprise,” the society introduced a new model that “describes the distinctly valuable enterprise leadership role that communications plays” within the radical transformations taking place throughout the worlds of business, including digital transformation, increased transparency expectations, and unstoppable globalization. This introduction of this new model (at right) was followed by the release of a white paper on “The New CCO: Transforming Enterprises in a Changing World.” With the white paper under their belt, the Society is undertaking a new long-term study into “Corporate Character: How Leading Companies are Defining, Activating & Aligning Values.”

Page Society President Roger Bolton joins host Shel Holtz to discuss these three endeavors — the new model, the CCO report, and the corporate character study — and what communicators can learn from them.

Connect with Roger on Twitter at @RogerBolton. The Society is on Twitter at @awpagesociety.

Also, the FIR Podcast Network welcomes Thornley Fallis Communications as the sponsor of FIR Interviews.

About our conversation partner:

Roger Bolton is the president of the Arthur W. Page Society, the premier professional association for senior corporate communications executives.  He is a trustee and a past chairman of the Page Society.

Previously, Bolton served as senior vice president of communications at Aetna, a $60 billion provider of health care benefits, with responsibility for all internal and external communications, advertising, brand management and corporate public involvement. Before Aetna, Bolton was IBM’s director of corporate media relations and director of communications for the IBM server and software groups.

Prior to his business career, Bolton served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for public affairs under President George H.W. Bush, special assistant to President Reagan in the White House, and assistant U.S. trade representative for public affairs in the Executive Office of the President under President Reagan. He is a recipient of the U.S. Treasury Distinguished Service Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award as a Thought Leader in Trustworthy Business Behavior from Trust Across the World. He was also named one of the 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics by Ethisphere Institute.

In addition to Page, Bolton serves on the boards of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, the Elon University School of Communications, the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication at Penn State University, the Baruch College MA in Corporate Communication Program and the Ethisphere Institute.

The post FIR Interview: Arthur W. Page Society President Roger Bolton appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Gartner analysts are warning businesses to prepare for the post-app era. According to a report in Computer Weekly, “Although users would continue to use mobile apps, the overall importance of apps in terms of delivering services would begin to diminish in the next few years, and bots and virtual personal assistants (VPAs) will begin to replace some app functionality.”

Chris McGrath, co-founder of intranet company ThoughtFarmer, saw the change coming and recognized the potential for chatbots in the enterprise. He is readying the launch of TangoWork, a platform for creating and deploying chatbots for employee communication.

In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz talks with McGrath about the rise of chatbots, how they will enhance internal communication, the categories of chatbots, how Artifical Intelligence and Natural Language Processing enhance chatbots’ usability, and a variety of other topics.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Connect with Chris on Twitter at @tangowork.

About our conversation partner:

Chris McGrath is a veteran digital workplace consultant with extensive experience designing delightful enterprise software — like Tangowork, which he founded, and ThoughtFarmer, which he co-founded. Chris is also an avid kitesurfer and espresso aficionado.

The post FIR Interview: Chris McGrath on TangoWork and Chatbots for Internal Comms appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Alabama News Center looks like a well-executed news site. It should; the staff at Alabama Power works hard to make sure the site delivers “the news and information that matter most to Alabama power customers,” according to the site, which “also tells the stories of the people and businesses powering our state, striving to make Alabama a wonderful place to live and work.”

The center is not exactly a traditional content marketing effort, since Alabama Power is not front and center. A typical home page features stories on the University of Alabama-Birmingham to fight cancer, an increase in home sales in one Alabama community, the success of a local food company, the effectiveness of Alabama consultants, and a study into how to create new jobs in coal country. The site is not the first content portal in which the brand isn’t prominent — there are plenty of those — but it is among the few that tackles the idea of delivering news and features based on geography rather than industry.

In this FIR Interview, Alabama Power Communications Strategist Ike Pigott explains the goals for the site, how it evolved, what it takes to maintain it, and the success it has achieved (which includes other organizations emulating it).

About our conversation partner

After more than 16 years in television news, Emmy-winner Ike Pigott left to feed his passion for crisis communication. While building his consultancy, he started working with the American Red Cross – first as a local communicator in Alabama, and finally as the Director of Communications and Government Relations for a five-state region. It was during his time at the Red Cross that he pioneered the use of social media, developed the first disaster-response blogs, as well as the non-profit’s Twitter account all the way back in 2007. For the last seven years, Ike has worked as a communication strategist and spokesman for Alabama Power, an electric utility that serves more than 1.4-million customers. He helped shape the Social Media Guidelines for Alabama Power’s parent, Southern Company, and serves on the system-wide Social Media Advisory Council. In addition to media relations duties and serving as editor of the corporate NewsCenter site, Ike works across the company to help individuals and departments get the most out of social media tools. Ike has been a featured speaker at dozens of communication conferences in the United States and Europe, and is considered a thought leader in the integration of social media in utilities and other regulated industries.

Connect with Ike on Twitter at @ikepigott.

The post FIR Interview: Ike Pigott on Alabama News Center appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.