Early birds, grab your coffee and join PoliteMail’s HR Manager, Ashley Varney to discuss some hot topics in HR. In this session we’ll discuss:

• Keeping remote employees engaged
  • One of the biggest challenges as workforces moved to remote work throughout the pandemic and beyond has been keeping remote employees engaged. Tune in to learn what tactics we have implemented at PoliteMail to keep our remote employees engaged.

• Getting employees to read emails for must-know information during COVID-19
  • Our data has showed that during the beginning of the pandemic email volume increased by x % and has continued to play a critical role in communicating need-to-know information to employees. In a mass of email, how do you get employees to read critical email messages? Learn x quick tips we implemented during the pandemic that gets your email read.

• Email & Open Enrollment
• • It is that time of year, open enrollment! Learn how HR teams can utilize email measurement for open enrollment to segment audiences, use targeted follow-up tactics, and click-through data for benefits enrollment.

All attendees of this early bird session will receive an e-card for coffee when the session ends.

Get to Know Your Peers and Common HR & Employee Communication Challenges Faced in 2020

We are not yet through 2020 and the world of HR & internal communications has been forever changed.

Let’s kick off the event by turning on your camera to "meet" and connect with your HR and Communication peers from across the nation. You'll have this opportunity to discuss challenges and solutions with your peers and share common experiences as we all navigate dramatic change. We’ll encourage you to connect via LinkedIn to stay in touch post-training to help you manage it all successfully.

Like many organizations, Toll Brothers had an outdated intranet that lacked strong ownership and engagement. They knew they could do better. But the problem seemed overwhelming, complicated and costly. Their leaders wondered if it was even worth it.

So, they dug in and researched the business value of an intranet – and how to do it right.

Learn about Toll Brothers' findings as they take you along on the journey from building a business case to launching a successful intranet that aligns organization goals and employee experience, including:

• Lessons learned from research into the value of intranets
• What senior stakeholders need to know to confidently approve your project
• Choosing the right platform and partner
• Key people and teams to bring together to ensure engagement and success across your organization
• Why employee experience is vital to the success of any intranet
• Activities to align stakeholders across the organization
• A peek under the hood of the final product

Surveys show Internal Communications and HR practitioners have shared goals when it comes to workplace communications. With the challenges of dispersed employees and a mostly remote workforce due to the covid-19 pandemic, employee engagement now tops the list of shared concerns. How can HR and communications align to increase employee engagement? In this session you’ll learn what employees want to know and how often they need this information. Whether you’re sharing executive messages, timely updates and organizational changes, benefits information or helpful resources—email strategies based on objective data can help make your emails more engaging to your workforce.

This session will teach you:

• The elements of emails that are more likely to be opened and read—and how to include them in your next efforts
• To measure the efficacy of your campaigns
• Why you should look past “open rate” and what metrics to focus on
• Secrets of distribution and timing that can power your email engagement

It’s hard to connect our work with our organization’s desired results unless we plan our communication strategies from the beginning to help deliver those results. This workshop will give you an easy-to-follow, step-by-step process to connect communication to business goals—and then prove the value of the communication.

Specifically, in this session, you will learn the difference between communicating about an organizational strategy and communicating in a way that actually fulfills the strategy—sometimes without even mentioning the strategy itself.

You will also be provided with a step-by-step process for engaging your executive management in communication planning in a way that feels like other, logical business processes they are comfortable with, including:

• Determining which stakeholder groups are most important in helping to achieve a particular goal
• Identifying the ideal behaviors for each stakeholder group to reach the goal
• Discovering through informal research which knowledge and attitude messages are contributing to the current (incorrect) behaviors and which messages would better motivate the ideal behaviors
• Choosing the best channels for the ideal knowledge and attitude messages
• Setting measurable objectives for the messages and channels
• Developing measures that will connect your communications with achievement of the ideal behaviors and organizational goals

Take this time to turn your camera off, grab a bite to eat, and digest what you've learned.

Teams that are inspired and connected achieve greater results. Join Blair Bloomston of Game On Nation for this team building and connection session, exploring simple ways to help your workforce unite when social distancing and virtual interaction may have interrupted normal communication rhythms.

No matter how hard we try, communications can’t be everything to everyone. Inside every organization, there are groups of employees who process and react to communications differently. But how often do you find yourself developing messages for all employees?

If you’re spending a lot of time on all-employee communications, they can end up watered down and uninspired. There’s a better way—we promise. In this interactive session, Ann Melinger, CEO of Brilliant Ink, will show you how to build employee personas so that your communications have the greatest impact. Because by not speaking to a particular someone, we risk not connecting with anyone.

Here’s what you can expect:

· Techniques for learning more about your employee audiences vs. operating off assumptions.
· How to use personas to help you better understand your audiences, target your messages and ensure your communications resonate with the people who need to hear them most
· Real-world examples demonstrating how personas can improve your communications approach
· A hands-on exercise to build a persona that you can take back to your organization and re-create for other audiences

Creating and maintaining a positive work environment is now more important than ever before. Take this opportunity to hear from a panel of your peers on steps they're taking to effectively navigate this new HR & communications environment. You'll have the opportunity to ask questions as well as gain solutions for your biggest challenges.

Moderated by:  Sara Jackson, Executive Director, Internal Comms Pro

Panelists:

Jessica Schaeffer, Senior Director, LaSalle Network

Tara Davis, Director, Staff Wellbeing & Engagement, American Psychological Association

Tarek Kamil, CEO, Cerkl

Share your key takeaways from today's session.