Engaging Internal Comms

This episode is about the resource ‘How to better live your values’ and is designed to be a team exercise. The exercise is about getting people to identify the areas within your organisation where you’re excelling and finding examples of where you could utilise those strengths. It’s also about identifying where you have the biggest gaps at the moment and what you need to do in order to plug those...

Our interviewee is Kristina Vaneva who is Director of Employee Engagement & Internal Communications at Atlantis Resorts in Dubai. Kristina describes the Atlantis Dubai as one of the largest integrated resorts in the world. There are 2200 employees from 87 different countries leading to a very diverse workforce operating 24/7 which is an accurate reflection of what Dubai itself is about – a melting...

Craig Smith brings you the fourth of our free communication tools and resources called "Using stories to illustrate values". It the is first in our series of resources designed to be used as a team and is especially good for large groups. Values need to come to life and help people understand how they fit within the organisation. Sharing stories is a great way to help people understand how people...

Internal communicators have a wide range of tools at their disposal but this also means that there are potentially too many to choose from and this can cause confusion. Internal comms teams need to know which channel to choose to have the most impact with their messages. Integration over the past few years has been key to improving the use of the intranet, it can pull all the other different platf...

Understanding how well your current organisational values fit with your organisational priorities and strategy is an important first step in deciding whether you need to revisit them. The resource we’re sharing with you today is called ‘Assessing your values’ and it asks you to write down your organisational values and think about how well they act as a guideline for behaviour. Are people generall...

In this episode of Engaging Internal Comms we are talking with Tanya Pakhuta about adapting internal comms to changing situations. Tanya is Senior Global Internal Communications Manager at LeasePlan. For an internal comms professional this has been a very challenging time. From one day to another Tanya and her team have had to rethink how they were going to operate. They had to keep adapting inter...

Today we will be sharing a personal reflection exercise with you (which could also be used with your team if you wish) and it’s all about determining your values. A lot of clients that we work with will already have established values within their organisation. They will probably have spent quite a lot of time designing them and pulling them together. If you haven’t got values or haven’t spent tim...

Craig Smith talks to Shira Tabachnikoff. Shira is a Stakeholder Relations and Internal Communications Manager at ITER, an intergovernmental organisation established in 2006. In large organisations in which cultures and languages differ so greatly, and so broadly across vast variations of roles and seniority, internal comms becomes a gigantic challenge. Communication and interpretation of an organi...

This week’s episode of Engaging Internal Comms is a short interim episode between our normal interviews. In it we would like to share some ideas with you that we think are useful and valuable. The Big Picture People are already using these ideas with our clients so we know how helpful they can be. In these short episodes we’re going to share resources with you that are free to download from our we...

Cai Kjaer, Co-founder and CEO at SWOOP Analytics, tells us about the importance of measuring online collaboration. SWOOP is a leading enterprise social network analytics platform that uses data from Microsoft Teams, Yammer and Workplace by Facebook to help organisations and their people to become better collaborators. Cai stresses the objective is to have a two-way conversation rather than a one-w...

Craig Smith talks to Imogen Hitchcock, the owner of Beaumont – a company whose mission is to change the way companies tell their story. The role of internal comms has evolved in line with how people expect to receive, locate, and trust information. Employee ambassadors play a vital role in delivery of this information. The creation of an employee ambassador happens organically within an organisati...

Elizabeth Isaacs-Sodeye has been Internal Communications Manager at LexisNexis UK since September 2019. The company employs around 10,000 people globally and provides information and analytics to professional and business customers. Elizabeth describes the function of her team of internal comms people at LexisNexis as the cultural engine of the organisation, bringing people together in interesting...

In this first episode of the second series of the Engaging Internal Comms, The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to Linda McCormack, who is Head of Internal Communications at Anglian Water. Anglian Water has around 5,000 core employees and thousands more partner employees who bring required skillsets to enhance the company as a business and a service. Successful organisations rely on a good r...

In this final episode of Series 1 of the Engaging Internal Comms podcast, host Craig Smith looks back at some of the highlights of the first series and also explains what to expect in Series 2 of the show which will begin in the first week of 2021. So, we’ve come to the end of Series 1 of the Engaging Internal Comms Podcast, and what a first series it’s been. We started the podcast in April, durin...

In this Christmas 2020 special episode of Engaging Internal Comms, The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to Jennifer Sproul, Chief Executive of the Institute of Internal Communications since 2016. Jen explains that, for some time, internal communications has been used as a broadcasting function, acting as an executive megaphone to transmit messages. Today, internal communication means much mo...

The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith explores the topic of Employee Alignment with Lindsay Uittenbogaard. Employee alignment is often viewed as a consequence of employee engagement. In reality, alignment is a precursor to engagement. Alignment is crucial to employee engagement. Lindsay explains that without alignment and a clear view of the strategy on how to collaborate and implement it, employee...

Craig Smith talks to Victoria Bond about measuring organisational culture. Victoria is passionate about helping organisations to better measure and understand what their employees are thinking and feeling, thus finding ways to help their leaders to respond to that feedback in real time. Victoria points out how management often focuses too heavily on profits and sales, when it’s the engagement of i...

The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to Costanza Tobino about using humour in internal comms. Costanza’s work experience ranges from marketing to internal communications and employee engagement. Costanza has led numerous communication projects involving change integration, mergers, acquisitions, executive leadership, product launches, corporate social responsibility, learning and development...

Craig Smith talks with Executive Vice President at 2Logical, David Naylor, about the subject of Motivational Intelligence. The original concept of intelligence was quantified in the form of an IQ back in the 1600s. This is still used to measure mental ability. Additionally to IQ, David explains how emotional intelligence (EQ) is essentially the human being’s understanding of emotions and how these...

Craig Smith talks to Dureen Anwer, who is the senior Corporate Communications Manager at NHS organisation NEL, a role that involves both employee engagement and external corporate communications. Dureen has followed a phenomenally successful career path. After moving to the UK from Pakistan, she moved up from the role of communications officer to a senior IC role within five years. Dureen has work...

Craig Smith talks to Hillary U, who is Executive Internal Communications Leader for the Salesforce security team. Hillary is currently based in Washington, Seattle. Good internal communication is imperative within a company to ensure that changes, messages, and transformations are effectively and accurately communicated throughout an organisation. The source of the communication begins in the C-Su...

In this podcast, Craig talks to Chris Coburn of XE about the overlooked topic of the comms role of a line manager. They discuss the importance of line managers, and the relationships they must build to create internal communications of engagement within an organisation. Chris talks about how one business will have quite a different communication strategy to another, yet they all need line managers...

The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to Leader of the Volunteers Hub for Engage for Success, Vlad Levitsky. We learn about the positive impact that volunteering can have on employees, and why it can be a great strategy to boost employee engagement. Volunteering creates a rich culture within an organisation. Vlad explains how giving them the freedom to act in favour of what they believe in or...

The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to the FT's Megan Dold about the challenges of communicating within an organisation, and how to overcome them by using empathy. Communicating effectively across a business internally requires empathy in a sense that internal comms people are understanding of the importance of employees’ roles, and are adaptable in their approach to ensuring a message, tha...

While the world has adjusted to communicating remotely, there are still a lot of challenges to overcome. Where previously ideas could be discussed ‘on the fly’ and teams could create ideas and solutions together in a working environment, conferences must now be scheduled, taking distractions and home life into consideration. In this episode of Engaging Internal Comms, The Big Picture People’s Crai...