Welcome to ALI's 4th Annual Aligning HR & Internal Communications Virtual Conference.

Our Conference Chair will go over a few details and kick things off.

Then you'll have a chance to say hello, share your challenges and get to know a little about your IC peers. You are encouraged to turn on your camera to join in on the fun and interaction.

A company (or, for that matter a large public or nonprofit organization) is a collection of small towns within a bigger city. It has territories (office locations), governing officials (leadership teams), Laws (processes and procedures), citizens (law and non-law-abiding employees), and businessmen (investors and shareholders).

As internal communicators, we are the glue that holds all these facets – aka hats that we all wear- within our organizations. When planning our campaigns, we need to think of which hats are we addressing at any time and what do we need them to do, know, feel as a result?

In this workshop, we will be discussing

1. Five "Hats" which employees would wear in an organization
2. What each "Hat" represents
3. What messages would resonate with each "Hat"

How does internal communications impact your employer brand? More than you may think, and it starts with communications content. Your employer brand is the sum of experiences from potential candidates all the way through to alumni, and internal engagement is key to having external stories to attract and hire the right people. Join Indeed's head of employer brand as he shares a story about how they're working with internal communications as a content hub across multiple stakeholders.

You'll learn:

• How they're sharing content planning between external and internal communications and brand marketing teams
• Where the overlaps and opportunities exist in their audience segments to take advantage of previous work
• The impact of internal communications processes and systems on their ability to attract talent

One of the closest natural partnerships in any company should be between Internal Communications and the People Organization. The common goal of creating an engaging and inspiring colleague experience requires close alignment between what a company does for its colleagues and how it tells that story.

During this session, you will learn about:

• The potential for organizational strategy to connect with colleagues’ personal values and mission
• The benefits of a ‘pulsing’ engagement strategy for listening and responding to colleague needs
• How Internal Communications and the People Organization can work together to build colleague conviction and engagement

As a communicator, you can produce more effective employee communications by developing a deeper and more emotional understanding of your audiences. In this interactive workshop, you will come away with a unique methodology to move from theory to action and build strategic communication campaigns that will engage stakeholders at all levels of your company. You will learn how to harness the collective insight of your communication and design teams by using a collaborative mapping technique and human-centric approach to strategy development. This renowned technique has resulted in successful enterprise-wide programs for companies such as Gap Inc., GE, Starbucks, Oracle, and Genentech.

In this comprehensive and hands-on workshop, you will leave with tools to help you:

• Apply the basics of a human-centric communication planning methodology
• Integrate thinking models from change management, learning, and communications design
• Discover new ways to identify and meet the needs and preferences of your audiences and stakeholders
• Select and integrate new technology into your organization’s culture, based on specific learning styles and audience preferences
• Build multi-dimensional campaigns that sustain mindshare and momentum while aligning attitudes, behaviors and business objectives

Discuss the HR and IC challenges you are facing with your peers in small breakout groups. Together, you'll draw solutions from each others' experiences and share what has worked for you.

What is Your Story for the year? As we spend days, nights, and weekends writing stories to reach our diverse workforce, we neglect creating the most critical story: our own. To continue to advance the profession and professional, we must not only advocate for ourselves and have a voice in major decisions, but we also must do something often neglected: take care of our mind and body.

Following this session you will:

• Gain insights based on survey results from peers on their experiences with health and the workplace
• Apply traditional communications and marketing planning techniques for creating fitness and wellness goals that work
• for anyone and set yourself and your teams up for success
• Create a personal fool-proof wellness accountability plan on a page

We all understand the importance of culture and what having a good or destructive culture can do to employee morale, satisfaction, and retention. But few may take the time to recognize when the workplace culture needs a little pick-me-up and the joint responsibility of HR, People Leaders, and Internal Comms to get it back on track.

During this session, you’ll learn:

• Ways to engage all teammates in strengthening workplace culture
• How to use your culture as an asset and key retention tool
• What a post-COVID workplace culture could look like and why you should start thinking about it, and planning, now

COVID-19 has changed perceptions globally about remote work and presented an opportunity to rethink how and where we do it to best engage our teams and meet organizational objectives.

In this session, you’ll get ideas about:

• How we can reconstruct how work is done and how we might redesign the workplace to support organizational priorities
• How to communicate with and engage your team in the process in a way that strengthens culture
• Attributes of a successful workplace strategy that will help get executives on board

Whether you have an established wellness program or you’re just getting started, this session walks through how a charity-driven well-being challenge went from idea to implementation.

During this session, you will learn how to:

• Pair top-down and bottom-up efforts to get the best engagement
• Use graphics and stories to keep the motivation and excitement going
• Pivot to generate social and external buzz

Increasingly, the roles and responsibilities of employee resource groups (ERGs) in organizations must transition from historically social networks to strategy partners that directly impact the business by providing partnership in recruiting and retention of human capital, and community and even client engagement.

This creates opportunity allowing the voices of employees to be heard while leveraging the power of diverse thinking and networks to influence the workplace of the future; its workforce, clients, and stakeholders through employee engagement and development, while embedding D&I into the very DNA of organizations.

During this session, you’ll learn about:

• Defining a value proposition that is strategically aligned to seeing and seizing business innovation and growth opportunities
• Leveraging ERGs for sourcing and recruiting, employee engagement (including D&I efforts), and community impact
• Activating your D&I and ERG structure and program management to develop programming, partnerships, processes, and events that are high impact and inclusive of multiple dimensions of diversity.

When working from home during the pandemic transitioned from a temporary plan to a longer-term one, Entergy Mississippi feared employees would begin to feel disconnected and morale would suffer. Our communications team approached the concern with the same fervor we would any storm, but with a more lighthearted tone. The result was a strategy infused with creativity, nostalgia and news to help employees engage, connect and maintain their sense of belonging despite being physically separated from coworkers. We got our Game On! and brought employees along for the fun.

You’ll learn how to:

• Reimagine how to use existing internal communication channels to deliver business content in fresh, appealing ways.
• Capitalize on familiar opportunities to create interactive virtual employee experiences.
• Leverage your people – from leaders to individual contributors – to spark engagement.

Additional panelists to be announced shortly.

Ask your remaining questions and create an action plan based on what you've learned over the past few days.