Engaging Internal Comms

In this episode we explore the importance of civility and politeness in organisational communications. A recent article in Psychology Today discussed how, in America, people routinely engage and witness aggressive or mean spirited behaviour towards each other. How we can air differences in a way that is civil and not allow hostility and incivility to become a problem within our organisations?

Whether we are working in an organisation that has a lot of trust or one that is inherently distrustful, the impact that can have on the way our messages land and how receptive people are to them can be significant. So in this episode, we're going to look at trust, we're going to dig into it in a lot more detail and understand what it is.

According to some surveys, 85% of employees are reporting to be disengaged. A key part of that is the inclusivity and sense of belonging that we have in our workplaces. It's often the case that our workplaces have evolved over time and there's not really been a lot of conscious thought gone into them. In this episode we explore how can create a conscious workplace, particularly in the context of m...

In this episode, we explore the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communication and the ways that we can improve the way we use these approaches. In particular, we look at them in the context of supporting our workers who are working remotely.

What are some of the lessons that we can learn from a communications, from an engagement, and from an alignment perspective when it comes to lessons from Formula One, a highly competitive, highly visual, very glamorous industry. How can we use some of those lessons that Formula One deploys week in, week out, successfully year after year?

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 chal...

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...

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 o...

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 ou...

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...

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 de...

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 communi...

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...

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 thi...

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 h...

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 charit...

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 hap...

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 in...

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 manag...

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.