Building an IC Team
Tasneem Shahpurwala is Internal Audiences and Channels Manager at Mott MacDonald. Prior to taking up this role in 2019, Tasneem has worked in other IC roles at Surrey County Council, the NHS and Kingston University. Tasneem has an Internal Communications Diploma from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and is based in Kingston upon Thames, England.
Many internal communication teams have seen their status rise dramatically during the pandemic and have been building an IC Team. Craig thinks all IC people would recognise that the value of internal communications employee engagement has really been critical in order to help employees to cope with the challenges of the pandemic and to support their wellbeing. It’s important to recognise that coordinating a workforce that is dispersed and working virtually is far more challenging than a workforce that is working in a more conventional way. So what Craig wanted to do in this episode is to explore how internal communications teams have been growing and how their roles have been changing. He also wanted to explore the challenges of growing any team, regardless of whether it’s internal communications or another function within an organisation, and how you can grow and build a team effectively.
What are some of the things that you need to be really mindful of when building an IC 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. It’s very difficult and very challenging to do that and then added on top of that, trying to do that during a pandemic. Craig thought that was a really interesting area to explore because many teams are going through a growth period. They’re having investment that they may have lacked over previous years and it’s great to see them growing.
But doing that brings with it challenges, it brings with it opportunities as well. So our guest in today’s interview is going to be sharing with us some of her experiences of working within a team that’s growing and joining a team that has grown considerably. We’ll also explore how that has been affected by the pandemic and how the pandemic has also given opportunities for new ways of working and obviously we’ll be looking into the future. How that new team will be operating is something that will be interesting to everyone. Not only that, but Craig thinks today’s guest and the organisation that she works for, is a fascinating organisation not only in terms of its scale, but also how it embodies its purpose as well.
So we hope you find it an interesting episode and any comments or thoughts or anything that you’d like to get us to cover in the future that is related to this then just let us know.
Useful Links:
Related podcast episodes: https://thebigpicturepeople.co.uk/blog/podcast/adapting-internal-comms-s2-e8/
Tasneem’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasneem-shahpurwala-56121a5/
Mott MacDonald’s website: https://www.mottmac.com/