It seems like it was just yesterday when the prospect of leveraging build screens as an internal communications tool was out of reach. And the reasons were plentiful:

• The technology was too expensive;
• Since big screens were the purview of the IT department, they alone designed, installed, and maintained the screens; and
• Because of the cost of big screens, they’d only be used for almost anything other than trying to engage and inspire employees.

But things have changed drastically. Now, big screens are increasingly part of the employee communications toolbox --- or, tech stack. But how do we prevent them from being as marginalized as the Health & Safety poster in the lunchroom on the bulletin board placed under the “Looking to sell my used crock pot” ad?

Well, we answer this question and unearth how employee communications professionals can actually use these screens to advance important communications goals. And, to do this, we sit down with Sean Matthews – President and CEO of Visix.

Visix is an enabler of big screen technologies that helps companies around the globe manage these hard assets and the content that gets served up on them.

During our lively discussion, we tackle the following topics:

• Myths about "big screens" in employee communications
• How to determine if you're ready to use "big screens"
• The strengths and weaknesses of "big screens" for employee communications
• The unique power of "big screens" in employee communications
• Best practices for using "big screens" in employee communications

Every Fearless Communicator has a love-hate relationship with surveys. But, let's take a step back and remind ourselves why we survey employees in the first place. Ostensibly, we're trying to "listen to employees" because doing so helps the organization and, by extension, everyone in it, be far more successful.

So, put employee surveys aside for a moment and let's re-examine the best ways we can (and should be) listening. And, to be clear, we're talking about how organizations can bake effective listening into regular activities, processes and technologies--- rather than one-on-one listening (although, to be frank, that's a discipline that also needs some attention).

That sounds like it's going to be quite the earful. So, we're not tackling this topic alone. We sit down with Mike Pounsford, Founder of Couravel. Mike is one of the minds behind the internationally-renowned initiative, The Listening Project which helps organizations understand how and when to listen to employees better. Since we've always guided Fearless Communicators to build, implement, and manage listening strategies, please forgive the lovefest.

In our discussion we address the challenges you will face when rolling out and/or refining your listening strategies. That means we answer the following questions:

• What must organization listening look like to be effective?
• What are the tangible business benefits of listening?
• How are employee surveys different from efforts to listen well?
• What are the most common barriers to organizations listen effectively?
• What can Fearless Communicators do tomorrow to ensure listening produces positive and tangible results?

You'd expect our shared passion for listening strategies to be peppered with plenty of expletives. Strangely, this wasn't the case....(this surprised us too). Of course, the good news is that this episode is certainly safe for work.

By all means, give this episode of The Swear Jar a listen and let us know what you think.

In your role as an employee communications professional, chances are you’re expected to ensure proposed changes --- like adoption of new policies, procedures, or technologies --- get effectively introduced and actually “stick”. And that’s regardless of whether you have any kind of change management skills, training, or support.

Life gets even messier for you when folks from HR, training and project management share your mandate to bring about desired behavioural change. And, then there’s O.D. (Organizational Development) which is certainly one of the more misunderstood organization functions.

With all these fingers in the pie, life for an employee communications professional isn’t just messy – it can be confusing, frustrating, dysfunctional, and sadly sometimes even hostile.

That’s why we sat down with Nicole Shokoples who provides O.D. consulting at ATB Financial by serving as their Director, Strategy/Chief of Staff - Organizational Development & Consulting. Nicole shares her insights and enthusiasm about how and when employee communicators can work best (or, at least better) with O.D. work colleagues.

Topics we cover with Nicole include:

• What O.D. professionals are measured on
• What O.D. professionals never tell their communications colleagues (but probably should)
• What Comms professionals should share with O.D. (but probably don’t)
• The importance for forging a strong relationship between Comms and O.D.
• How communicators can make nice with O.D.

If your next employee communications project aims at changing behaviour, be sure to check out this episode of The Swear Jar podcast.

The verdict is in: Every survey asking leaders which skills they consider essential to success and/or growth sees “communications skills” called out in the top five responses --- and often, within the top three.

And yet, organizations all too often neglect, minimize or worse, discredit communications skills. Contributing to this unfortunate reality is the branding of communications as “soft skills”. So, Elizabeth and I unpack the “soft skills” label and identify actions that communications professionals can take to essentially re-brand communications.

Hey, if you’re not sure if this is happening in your organization, here are three questions that can help you determine --- and demonstrate to your supervisors --- whether communications skills are getting the attention they need to meet their demand for great communicators:

· Is the request for great communications skills from job seekers relegated to the “nice to have” section in your company’s job descriptions?

· Are communications skills omitted from the performance evaluation of leaders and/or front-line managers?

· Is the budget for building communications skills limited to preparing PowerPoint presentations and/or speaking publicly?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you should listen to this episode of The Swear Jar podcast where we tackle something that is both a contributing cause, and a symptom of, communications skills being considered an organizational after-thought.

Specifically, Elizabeth and I go head-to-head to tackle the labelling, and perception, of communications as a “soft skill”. While we may not agree wholly on this topic, during our lively discussion, we provide some practical suggestions that you can take if communications is getting short-changed in your organization.

Topics we touched upon include:

• The Communications Fallacy
• The Practice of Excuse and Evasion
• Getting away from the hard vs soft discussion
• Expanding/redefining communications

Let’s face it, it’s tough introducing a new technology or a new process, into your organization. And like it or not, as the professional communicator, you’re often “on the hook” for making sure these kinds of changes are embraced. That’s why Nekolina Lau’s Gold Quill award-winning story about how ATB Financial successfully launched a large-scale technology on-boarding initiative is so very inspiring and helpful.

Okay, here’s a question for you: How likely do you think your next technology roll out will achieve a score of 89% when it comes to your stakeholders understanding (and embracing) the key messages? Oh, and keep in mind that the new technology, coupled with new processes, will span nearly 1000 people over 175 locations. Sound impossible?

Well it can be done! That's why we’re thrilled to have Nekolina Lau, Director of Communications at ATB Financial, share with us how she exceeded all of the ambitious adoption-related targets established for rolling out a new technology and related processes.

Topics we touched upon include:

• Working with the change team
• What and when to measure adoption
• Using an agile transformation
• Concerns of end-users (and acting as tech support)
• Fitting a new adoption initiative into a wider transformation
• What happens when new technologies overlap with the existing technologies
• The three P's (Plan, Partner and Prepare to Pivot)
• The three R's (Resist, Retreat and Refuse to Drive Results)

"Intranets aren't sexy". That's the word according to Amanda Stephenson, RSA's Manager of Communications. (And, it couldn't be more true). Yet, Amanda recently won a Gold Quill Award for rolling out an upgrade of an on-premises version of SharePoint to a cloud-based version. How on earth could she have managed that --- given that this kind of project is pretty much at the bottom of the list of projects that strategic communicators want to lead??

On this episode of The Swear Jar, Amanda shares with Elizabeth and me her inspiring story while highlighting practical and actionable lessons that all communications professional can learn from. Topics we touched upon include:

• How to establish intranet project goals
• How to choose metrics that ensure continued project support
• How to deal with "change fatigue"
• How to deal with resistance to the roll-out
• How to brand the roll-out so that cuts through the clutter

Episode Index

• Project goals and KPIs 2:00
• The organization context 7:00
• The roll-out and range of stakeholders 11:00
• Sources of resistance 15:10
• Some items of interest 20:50
• Key do's and don'ts 21:44
• Results 25:50
• Summary 28:55
• The Gold Quill 30:45
• What caught our attention 33:11

ABC Resources Highlighted in this Episode

• Overcoming Resistance
• What's in Your Communications Stack? The Swear Jar Podcast
• IABC World Conference June 28-30
• Worst Company Ever: How to Respond to Online Reviews by Employees
• Employee Change Communications That Work

Employee engagement is creeping up, but guess who's not engaged? Middle managers. Those much-maligned and ignored folks are under more pressure than ever to get stuff done and keep their organizations moving.

Natalia Smalyuk of Not Business As Usual joins us for a wide-ranging look at why middle managers are struggling, how executives can re-engage them before it's too late, and how organizations need to double down on purpose, authenticity, connection and trust to get through the pandemic crisis period.

Key Topics

1:38: Why Natalia started a business in the middle of a pandemic

3:50: Why middle managers aren’t engaged

7:25: Misunderstandings and uncertainty

8:55: The coming battle for the hearts and minds of middle managers

11:00: Purpose and engagement

16:42: Why are managers struggling and what can we do?

26:20: Do middle managers have to curate their presence

30:30: Invisible, absent middle managers

35:25: Who’s getting it right?

43:20: Advice for middle managers

49:35 Summary

We all know it: Marketing always gets all the fanfare when it comes to innovation. After all, stuff that contributes to bringing revenue to our corporate overlords is generally valued more than activities that keep the lights on --- like managing employee communications! We, as Fearless Communicators get that. We’ve all seen the Marketing Department’s budgets expand for evaluating, implementing and training on the “marketing communications stack”. But flying under the radar a slew of technology tools have been developed to meet the rapidly evolving needs of employee communicators. They don’t get the attention (or budgets) that marketing communications tools get but, they are critical in helping organizations establish and sustain employee alignment, engagement and community.

And, while employee communications tools are just, well, tools and not strategy, as Fearless Communicators we all need to keep acquainted with their strengths and weaknesses because they may help achieve our employee communications goals. That’s why we sat down with ClearBox's, Suzie Robinson. Suzie is responsible for the industry research reports that ClearBox publishes on SharePoint intranets, non-SharePoint intranet products, and employee apps.

While you can only go so deep in 39 minutes, we did manage to cover a lot of ground, including:

• A proven Digital Workplace framework for employee communicators
• Fighting the urge towards to go whole hog with one technology
• The role of employee-focused apps as part of the Fearless Communicator’s toolbox
• The secret to success for your next intranet project
• What an intranet strategy looks like

Key Topics

• Welcoming our guest, Suzie Robinson from ClearBox (1:10)
• Why you can't buy a digital workplace (3:30)
• A framework for your digital workplace (4:45)
• Placing into perspective employee Apps (9:00)
• Intranets, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams (16:00)
• Summary and some more cool examples (24:45)
• What we’re liking (33:35)

ABC Resources Highlighted in this Episode

• Overcoming Resistance
• Worst Company Ever: How to Respond to Online Reviews by Employees
• Employee Change Communications That Work

Other Resources Highlighted in this Episode

Watching & Listening

· Another Door (Podcast)

Reading

· What does an intranet strategy look like

· Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed

· The Appreciative Inquiry Summit - A Practitioner's Guide for Leading Large-Group Change by Ludema, Whitney, Mohr and Griffin

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