And another reason for my absence was our participation in this year’s Worth Working Summit, a series of virtual interviews and presentations coordinated by Jo Ann Sweeney of Sweeney Comms, and including fascinating sessions from the likes of Jane Sparrow and Katarina Auer. My session focused on how we can help leaders focus on their comms capabilities by demonstrating the bottom line benefits of engagement i.e. validating the business case for why engagement matters.
In addition to talking about the research we’ve done on this topic across the last few years and the great resources we’ve tapped into from the likes of Towers Watson and Kenexa, Jo Ann and I discussed the benefits of leading by example – walking the floors as a leader, using informal brown bag lunches to understand the key issues employees are facing, and using employee conversations to source solutions to business problems that they, on the frontline, see and want to actively fix!
I shared a few tips that we’ve picked up from our last few Strategic Communication Research Forum studies including:
From our research into effective use of video – Schneider Electric’s method of inviting employees to submit questions which the Head of IC can then use in a video interview with a senior leader; helping that leader get comfortable addressing direct employee questions in a ‘safe environment’ and enabling employees to hear direct responses to the issues that are top of mind to them
From our research on empowering employees as ambassadors – Avery Dennison’s Beat ambassador program, which enables senior executives to connect with a group of internal ambassadors from across the business who can serve almost as a ‘research council’; providing feedback on potential new messages, products or executive memos and projects which allow executives to be more confident about how their messaging will ultimately land and ensures that those ambassadors can be credible ‘sonar radars’ echoing those messages out to their peers with belief, given that they themselves were involved in shaping them
From our research into social media – how a number of companies are moving away from executive/CEO blogs and, instead, helping identify the top 5 most popular social or blog sites that those executives can participate in – commenting on existing threads or starting their own – as a much more collaborative, engaging means of getting their messages out and (perhaps more importantly) getting involved in debates and discussions about issues that are top of mind for employees
You can get hold of the recording by contacting Sweeney Comms http://www.sweeneycomms.com/ or us, or learn more about the studies by contacting me at rebecca.richmond@melcrum.com, but I hope even these 3 nuggets might provide you with some food for thought as you work with your senior leaders on the engagement challenge
