What’s your AAA Gold Standard for Internal Communications?

With the recent US AAA credit downgrade and the global recession on everyone’s minds I felt it apt to discuss how your stakeholders and you view internal communications benchmarks. While there isn’t a ‘one-size, fits all’ approach for internal communications it helps to step back and ask the following questions – 1.       How do you [...]

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Can We Have a Mascot For The Campaign? – Final Part

This post seems to have generated a lot of interest and I am impressed by the quality of comments and the passion that communicators share for and against using ‘mascots’. Thank you all for your insights. Here is a summary of what readers both in India and abroad commented: Bish pointed to a campaign in [...]

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The Curious Case of Employee Voice

The recent announcement by Infosys to set up an internal portal (similar to Facebook) to give  employees a ‘voice’ intrigued me. According to the news report, the intranet called the ‘Infy Bubble’ is supposedly a platform for disgruntled Infoscions to vent on.  Is the assumption that employees don’t have a voice? I would disagree. The [...]

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Who Own Your Engagement?

Employee engagement is a frequently discussed topic at organizational forums and like a hot potato the ownership seemed to oscillate between a reluctant group of people including human resources, communication teams and company leadership. I have also discovered new, improved designations of professionals in various capacities carrying the ‘engagement’ tag! At a recent Communicators in [...]

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The Pistachio Principle and the Art of Internal Communication Dieting

Is your internal communication clogging staff’s mailboxes? Do your stakeholders engage intently with their communication to reduce flab? Are your efforts in sharing ‘bite’ size chunks of information adding up? If you have ever been tempted to share more information so that your team ‘gets’ all they need or of passing on content without including [...]

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Internal Communications Pointers from the Chile Miners Rescue Mission

I have been following the Chile miners rescue very closely and felt there were many lessons to learn from how the entire program was executed and communicated. To begin, it was one of the world’s most successful operations to get miners out from the longest underground entrapment in history. The meticulous planning, the pace at [...]

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Are You Supporting Your Employees’ ‘Pay it Forward’ Effort?

Four unrelated events triggered this post. To begin, I had the opportunity to watch Pay It Forward, a Kevin Spacey-Helen Hunt – Haley Osment that introduces a concept that believes in the goodness of people while expecting nothing in return. A class assignment that challenged students to ‘change the world’ through an idea got Trevor [...]

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Tackling ‘Payback Time’ With Effective Internal Communication

“It is payback time!” said one comment and “never treat professionals as commodities” voiced another as a reaction to the recent independently administered Regus survey which covered 15,000 business respondents from their global contacts database between February and March 2010. Dearth of promotions, lack of communication and involvement in decision making and little or no [...]

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Policy Rollouts and Adoption – Role of Internal Communicators

All of us must be familiar with policies and guidelines such as ethics, gifting, dress code, behavior and office infrastructure among others that are foundations for any organization’s success – either as recipients of these policies or the creators.  However how, when and what needs to be communicated will determine how your employees perceive your company in [...]

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Engaged Workplaces = Trust + Consistency + Leadership

On Friday, July 23 I attended the Great Place To Work Conference at Bangalore and I wanted to share my key take-aways and recommendations that you can take forward within your organizations, irrespective of the industry and size. To begin, best workplaces had nothing to do with size or number of employees. The theme of [...]

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