Engaging Internal Comms

In this episode of Engaging Internal Comms, The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to Sarah Carr about the seven myths of internal communications. Sarah is the Global Communications Insights Lead for Aviva, a financial services company with around 30,000 employees located around the world. She’s passionate about data and measuring outcomes, and finding the nuggets that help to discover how to communicate best with people.

Lauren walks you through the journey that Auto Trader UK took when implementing its collaboration platform, starting with the fanfare release of Yammer in 2015 and how people took ownership for it. She talks about the organisation’s surprise that areas of collaboration extended beyond work and developed into deeper social connections – channels that included a book club and cookery. However, use on Yammer slowly dissipated, and by 2019 only 20% of employees were active on it. The business responded by taking action to learn why this was, and what its people really wanted. What they found was that its technology employees (most of the organisation) had set up on Slack. Thus, the decision to transition to Slack across the organisation was made.

The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to Jamie Thompson about experiential learning and the benefits of in-person learning. Jamie is an expert in the subject, the Managing Director of MTa Learning and the Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business school. Jamie begins by talking about his work and discussing experiential learning, which he describes as getting people to take ownership for their own development, and making it relevant to them and their workplace by delivering a learning journey through experience-based exercises.

Having worked for a variety of large companies, including Hermes, Asda, and O2, internal communications expert Amy Holmes is building an internal communications function at Marshalls. Amy explains that neurodiversity is a non-traditional way of thinking about your workforce (and about your customers). Instead of considering diversity as an issue of race, disability, gender, and so on, neurodiversity considers the deeper issues of education and understanding.

Dr Graham Ward, Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD Business School, talks to The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith about managing personal and organisational transition. Graham discusses his own transition from life as a trader at Goldman Sachs to a new career in executive, leadership and career coaching, before describing the key tactics that organisations should take through periods of change. A particularly apt conversation recorded as the UK begins to exit lockdown and head toward the ‘new normal’.