5th Annual Strategic Internal Communications

In this comprehensive and hands-on workshop, you will leave with tools to help you:

• Apply the basics of the audience-centric communication planning methodology
• Integrate thinking models from change management, learning, and communications design
• Discover new ways to identify and meet the needs and preferences of your audiences and stakeholders
• Select and integrate new technology into your organization’s culture, based on specific learning styles and audience concerns
• Build multi-dimensional campaigns that sustain mindshare and momentum, and change attitudes and behavior to meet business objectives

It’s hard to connect our work with our organization’s desired results unless we plan our communication strategies from the beginning to help deliver those results. This workshop will give you an easy-to-follow, step-by-step process to connect communication to business goals—and then prove the value of the communication.

Specifically in this session, you will learn the difference between communicating about an organizational strategy and communicating in a way that actually fulfills the strategy—sometimes without even mentioning the strategy itself.

You will also be provided with a step-by-step process for engaging your executive management in communication planning in a way that feels like other, logical business processes they are comfortable with, including:

• Determining which stakeholder groups are most important in helping to achieve a particular goal
• Identifying the ideal behaviors for each stakeholder group to reach the goal
• Discovering through informal research which knowledge and attitude messages are contributing to the current (incorrect) behaviors and which messages would better motivate the ideal behaviors
• Choosing the best channels for the ideal knowledge and attitude messages
• Setting measurable objectives for the messages and channels
• Developing measures that will connect your communications with achievement of the ideal behaviors and organizational goals

Angela Sinickas, CEO

 Sinickas Communications, Inc.

• Take those tired, old stories and flip them upside down — so that people pay attention to them
• Make the important interesting
• Start using the new tools available to communicators — including social media and multimedia channels
• Find and tell the kinds of stories that will cut through the information clutter that is so rampant in your organization
• Develop the right research strategy so you know what works and what doesn’t work.
• Understand the basics of ‘Guerilla Research’ so that you constantly have a read on your audiences’ needs

After the E.Coli outbreak and food safety crisis of 2015, Chipotle needed a way to ensure the most important communication was getting to front line employees. Since less than 25% of the 65,000 employees have access to company email accounts, email messaging was just not getting the job done. So, they went mobile and invested in an app dedicated to internal communications. This has helped them to not only get essential information to their crew and managers more effectively, but it has also allowed them to build engagement and help all employees feel inspired by and connected to Chipotle’s purpose.

In this session, you’ll get an inside look at the content Chipotle uses to target different employees within the organization. See firsthand how Chipotle uses podcasts, video, memes and surveys to build messages specifically designed to speak to its target audience and drive the highest level of engagement, including how to:

• Gain buy-in from C-Suite for mobile communications
• Share the right information with the right people in the right way to increase engagement
• Change the way your C-Suite communicates with your varied audiences for maximum effectiveness
• Implement mobile communications to open the door for more storytelling and move communication from task based to engagement focused

Amy Jenkins, Manager, Internal Communications,

Chipotle Mexican Grill

Madison Suarez, Internal Communications Consultant  

Chipotle Mexican Grill 

Heath Shatouhy, Chief Revenue Officer

theEMPLOYEEapp

Just because you’ve built an enterprise social network, there is no guarantee that all employees – C-suite to frontline -- will use it. Your intranet’s usage must be tied into, or augment, existing business processes. At Petco, they have discovered that personalized and individual training on social tools for executives is a necessary evil.  

Return to your office with these practical tips proven to work by Petco and use them as a launching pad for your own organization, including how to:

• Actively encourage your leaders to be engaged, and excited, about using internal social media
• Implement best practices for dispersed employee recognition & engagement
• Discover background information that will set you up for success

Change is difficult – even for the most agile organizations. Creating and communicating your vision for change is a critical step in any successful transformation. Delivering the right messages early and often makes all the difference in how your team members feel and how they champion the changes your organization is undergoing. 

Developing a strategic partnership between Internal Communications and Employee Relations is key to ensuring this happens and to keeping your team members engaged in creating a more productive workplace.  Moreover, in today’s marketplace, organizations are constantly in a state of change, quickly responding to demands in order to remain competitive.  A strong partnership between Internal Communications and Employee Relations can better will give your organization a leg up on your competition in weathering business transformations.

Learn how you can join forces with your internal counterparts to overcome change and uncertainty within your organization, including how to:

Implement a strategic internal communications plan to support a change initiative, including when and how to ensure that internal communications and employee relations have a seat at the table 

• Create a strategic plan that encourage clarity, consistency, and transparency which can dispel rumors, alleviate anxiety, and support the need for change
• Carry out a simple approach to developing a strategic change communications plan, including tools that will support a strategic change plan
•  Apply lessons learned directly from Walgreens’ experience through their implementation of a strategic internal communications plan

Stephanie Miller, Director of Labor and Employee Relations

Lowe's

Laurice Shelven, Manager, Strategic Communications

Walgreens  

Have you ever felt like internal communications is impossible to measure? Do you spend a lot of time tracking outputs but have trouble identifying real, measurable outcomes? As communicators, we want to demonstrate the value of our work – but we often find ourselves collecting quick and easy-to-measure data that doesn’t help us prioritize our projects or accomplish our goals. 

Simple but thoughtful measurement can bring meaning and validation to internal communications – and you don’t need a giant budget or fancy software. Hear how Mayo Clinic measures internal communications and uses an outcomes-based strategy to guide their team’s day-to-day work.

Following this discussion, you’ll gain an understanding on how to successfully:

• Build a measureable, outcomes-based strategy all the way down to the project level
• Use metrics to help you focus on teh projects that will best advance your goals 
• Implement creative ways to organize your results and grab attention of the leaders and stakeholders

Annie Burt, Director, Staff Engagement Communications
  Mayo Clinic  

• Measurement makes cutting the clutter out possible
• Consolidating to recurring communication is better for communications and employees alike
• Strategic experimentation on internal email design puts you on a path of steadily increasing engagement

Bananatag

Stephanie Richard, Internal Communications Advisor

Calgary Zoo 

The enculturation of a new employee doesn’t happen by glancing at a list of core values on a PowerPoint slide or by skimming through the rules in an employee handbook. The norms and values of an organization – its style and its spirt – are most effectively shared the same way people naturally share culture: through storytelling.

Hear how Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants communicates an overarching company narrative through the stories of individual employees.

Following this discussion, you will learn how to: 

• Identify and simplify your company’s narrative
• Use social networking tools like Yammer to crowdsource stories that support your narrative
• Share your culture on multiple channels through stories told by employees themselves

As a U.S. Government, science-based public health and disease prevention agency, the Division of Global HIV & TB (DGHT), within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Centers for Global Health, plays an essential role in implementing the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a multi-agency initiative of U.S. Government agencies and non-governmental partners, working with international host governments to respond, control and prevent the spread of HIV infections.

In supporting DGHT’s legislative program mandates and operating in resource challenged environments across 45 field office locations with a large number of global staff (500 headquartered in Atlanta and more than 1,500 in field offices), streamlining internal communications is vital to the strategic flow of information.

You will learn how “existing” DGHT secured content management system was revamped to foster more dynamic enterprise-wide cross communications and collaborations that acted as a catalyst to enhance processes and program activities. Discover how to streamline your internal communications strategy to foster collaboration and engagement across your workforce, including:

• Re-energizing your communication platform into a vibrant one-stop-shop informational hub (e.g. secured access for all staff) with engaging features to foster more purposeful partnerships.   
• Navigating the winds of change by transforming office culture within a myriad of regulatory requirements using limited resources to leverage emerging technology.
• Encouraging user adoption by decluttering content with meaningful-targeted messaging.
• Fostering collaborative spirit by staff participation and shared responsibilities, staying connected via newsletters, training blogs and videos, help desk portal, and continuous feedback loop.

Timothy (Tim) Etherington, Public Health Advisor - Informatics

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

1. Understanding of your Strategic Plan goals and objectives
2. Understanding of your new structure, roles, activities for staff, and spans of control, decision rights and responsibilities of leadership
3. Understanding of your strategic shift

• Communicate your vision internally and externally
• Help staff with the “How-to” of being in a new role
• Coordinate with Communications, HR and Knowledge Management
• Implement steps to help built trust with staff, helping them believe in the mission and vision and the organization

• Better receive communication as well as deliver it
• Capture the attention of your audience
• Recognize the obstacles and opportunities of work within of your employees’ psychological behavior