WHY BOTHER?
Dianne walked into a sales meeting she prepared well for confidently. But she was caught off guard when her client asked about he recent investment that her company got. That piece of sensitive information was broadcasted online allowing her client to read it before she had a chance to catch up with the news.
Bob was asked about it while dropping the kids off to school and did’nt like that despite working for the firm, he didn’t know enough to answer the common questions that the other guys knew.
While its true that they do all have access to the news, perhaps that particular story didn’t show up in their feed or they had a pretty busy morning, wither way it still left them embarrassed with a sense of disconnect from the corporate brand.
Poor internal communications result in less engagement, poor employee branding and sometimes poor interactions across departments. Strong processes on the other hand, allow for smooth, and compliant communications, boosting engagement, interaction and foster a team spirit.
STRONG PROCESSES LEAD TO SMOOTH AND COMPLIANT CoMMUNICATIONS
MY APPROACH
Here’s how I create a strong purpose driven internal communications plan.
Define Goals:
Establish the purpose of the communications, its complexity, profile the communicators, and recipents.
Identify Key People and Messages:
Understanding the needs of different leaders, their pain points, styles of working and sign off processes
Set Up Processes:
Set up the internal communications process,, with clarity on sign off authority and frequency
Create Messaging Guidelines
Document the do’s and don’ts, create templates and instructions on how when to use these, and ensure they are on brand.
Create a Content Calendar
The content calendar gives you consistency as wells as empowers senior leaders with structured tools that they can use.
Feedback and improvement
Finally we look at what’s working best and make some room for newly identified needs.
Promoting innovation trough newsletters
The Problem:
A fast-growing mid-size company wanted to foster innovation and harness the brilliance of the business process team across its 10 business functions. They noticed that a team in one location had made considerable cost savings by tweaking some processes and wanted to scale it across the company’s 4 locations.
The solution
Supporting innovation by celebrating it and encouraging ideas.
The innovation newsletter was born to highlight the work the team did and encourage questions and open dialogue to spark innovation across teams. We added a spotlight section to put the creative teams in focus, and enabled messaging and sourced ideas and nomination for features. This sparked dialogue and we received numerous entries in the weeks that followed. Its success tested the waters for HR to launch other innovation-based programs that were added to the newsletter.
Insights
Designing robust internal communications
How to build brands as Thought Leaders
Crafting business stories
Everyone’s had that embarrassing moment when you learn some new about your company from the newspaper, or a friend.
Our internal comms plan takes into consideration the sharing sensitiveinformation as well as processes and tools to make
Great thought leadership pieces have strong technical ideas which are broken down into simple language that a non-tech business people to understand.
Over the years, I’ve worked with many experts and built a system to break down unnecessary jargon, and create engaging reader friendly pieces.
Your business story brings all the elements of your vision and purpose together. It allows employees to understand and engage with the larger goal while clients and business partners get to know you and what you do.
Here’s how I go about drafting your business story.
