Get a jump start on all things employee communications with this pre-conference workshop! You’ll join leading employee communication experts Steve and Cindy Crescenzo as they walk you through dozens of strategies and case studies.

You'll learn:

• How to shift your role from being everyone’s private publisher—a glorified company Kinkos!—to a strategic counselor to internal clients and leadership
• The most effective way to link your communications to your organization’s strategic goals, while creating targeted, compelling content
• The latest trends with executive communications and practical advice on how to get your leaders to embrace the new way of communicating
• How to take those tired, old corporate/organizational stories and flip them upside down—so that people actually pay attention to them
• How to start using the latest tools available to communicators—including O365, virtual town halls, social media and multimedia channels
• How to create a content strategy for the modern audience—including a hybrid workforce, remote employees, and front-line employees who don’t sit at a computer all day
• How to develop an effective research strategy so you know what works and what doesn’t work
• How to create a measurement dashboard that helps you see at a glance how your communication efforts are helping achieve your organization's goals
• How to create a practical, workable communication plan that will guide all your efforts and evolve with all the changes constantly coming our way

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 organization.

You will learn how to harness the collective insight of your internal 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

Stand up, stretch, and recharge as we switch over to the next workshop.

As strategic communicators, you’re on the hook for outcomes and results, not awareness. When employees turn the tables and give the organization a performance review, communicators need to flip their thinking and strategies to retain and engage their most important audience: their employees.

In fall 2021, Integral released the Employee Activation Index which examined factors related to employee readiness to support organizational goals. During the process, the team at Integral realized that they needed to make time to take their own advice. The lessons learned had internal implications for developing new rituals to reinforce their “bring your authentic self to work” culture while delivering top-line strategy and smarts to clients.

You will learn:

• • How to measure employee sentiment to find and the gaps
  • How to assess and examine the intersection of organizational and employee personal values
  • The kinds of organizational rituals that build and reinforce values, connection, and positive behaviors
  • Communications tools organizations can use to help employees take care of their good health and well-being and to reinforce that as an organizational value

This workshop will include:

• • Attendee ice breaker and introductions
  • Overview of the Integral Employee Activation Index components
    • values alignment, daily mindset and behavior, children in the household, generational differences, digital behavior, inviting in identity
  • Case study examining how Integral put their own Index into action
  • Small group exercises with report outs
  • Demonstration of a few key Comm Tech tools

With so many internal communication channels and seemingly endless ways to communicate, employees can easily be overwhelmed with messages that are indiscernible from corporate noise. At the same time, internal communicators face a barrage of communication requests from various business partners and leaders every day. With everything IC folks juggle on a given day, developing a communication game plan for all requests can become daunting.

In this engaging pre-conference workshop, you will learn a strategy that involves taking the concept of restaurant combo meals to empower business partners and leaders to choose from “pre-packaged” communication plans that match their needs. Think of it as a “Communications Combo Menu,” a tool that aims to help internal communications teams and their business partners conveniently and quickly define a communications plan based on the messaging and communications channels at their disposal. This framework can speed up processes, manage the workload more effectively, and start with a foundation of best practices.

You'll leave this session with tangible and practical tips, including:

• The value of packaging your communication solutions
• A way to identify and create your comms combo meals
• A plan for integrating those into your process and making the most of them