Strategic Employee Engagement & Internal Brand Activation

As a communicator, you can produce more effective employee communications just by developing a deeper understanding of your audiences. In this engaging workshop, you will come away with a unique methodology for building strategic communication campaigns. The audience-centric approach employs a collaborative mapping technique that harnesses the collective insight of your communication and design teams. It 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 the audience-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 concerns
• Build multi-dimensional campaigns that sustain mindshare and momentum, and change attitudes and behavior to meet business objectives

The true prize of employee engagement efforts is not the scores but the extraordinary results that a more engaged workforce can deliver.  Yet too many organizations invest in annual engagement surveys. Period. The result: A survey-weary workforce, frustrated managers, and wasted dollars.  The numbers won’t change on their own.

The alternative: Create a culture of engagement, where all members of the workforce understand and are equipped to fulfill the roles they need to play. A successful culture of engagement features a common and understandable definition of engagement, the commitment of line -- not just HR – leaders, clear roles and responsibilities, practical action (not action plans!) and ongoing employee-manager dialogue.

This interactive workshop provides practical ideas and tools that you can use to achieve a culture where engagement is a daily priority and shared responsibility, including:

• Constructing a clear roadmap for creating a culture of engagement
• Practicing assessing whether your organization’s leaders are fueling or blocking culture change
• Providing ideas for equipping all members of your workforce to take ownership of engagement
• Learning strategies for avoiding common pitfalls and to drive culture

Mary Ann Masarech, Lead Consultant - Employee Engagement
BlessingWhite

An internal brand helps define and deliver an employee experience that aligns with an organization’s external brand or business strategy. An effective internal brand integrates and simplifies strategy, values, competencies, and other organizational guideposts to build employee pride and inspire them to focus on what’s most important. Employees should be able to clearly understand both what they can expect and what they need to give to achieve personal and organizational success – and become advocates for the organization.

Explore the internal brand process through models and tools, case studies of best-practice companies, exercises, and stories and lessons from your peers in the session. Bring your ideas, success stories and your challenges and be ready to share and participate, as you learn how to:

• Define your internal brand in a way that engages employees and aligns with your external brand or business strategy
• Align leaders to effectively articulate, model, and deliver the brand
• Create pride and engagement around the organization’s purpose, values, and business strategy, with employees understanding that they are valued and how they can contribute
• Align internal processes, such as recruiting, onboarding, and recognition programs to support and reinforce a holistic philosophy based on the internal brand
• Set clear objectives and measure the impact of your internal brand

Chris Gay, Principal
Bridge Consulting

The approaches discussed in this session will help you create a culture in which employees are engaged and inspired around a common vision, strategy, and brand promise and will help you align the attitudes and behaviors of employees to drive growth and activate your strategy and brand promise, in addition to:

• Learning a step-by-step framework for effective internal branding (theory, messaging, tactical planning, program management & measurement processes to track results and impact)
• Developing a message architecture–process of building a comprehensive internal message that is clear and understood, relevant, personal – and drives the right behavior required to deliver on your brand promise and business strategy
• Creating a message matrix – understanding the value of communicating the right message, to the right audience, at the right time
• Communicating internal branding projects to your audience in a meaningful way by understanding the importance of tactical resonance and message relevance
• Using a codified, proven process for creating sustainable employee engagement and brand alignment
• Implementing a process for creating tactical plans that drive greater employee participation and buy-in
• Engaging employees via social media and gamification to create engagement with fun and excitement
• Aligning your internal messaging and branding with your external brand position and promise

Allan Steinmetz, CEO

Inward Strategic Consulting

Investing in your people is always a good idea. Yet, employee experience can often be seen by many in the organization as being 'light and fluffy'. The ability to demonstrate a concrete return on investment gets leaders listening, and places a strategic focus on employee experience as a driver of business results.

This session will provide you with a framework through which you can articulate how investing time and resources to ensure the employee experience is right for employees, customers – and the bottom line, including   

• Measuring the ROI of a well-articulated Employee Value Proposition
• Ensuring the employee experience lives up to the EVP
• Achieving sustainability through cross-functional partnerships
• Using social media and other platforms that resonate with your internal audiences to disseminate the employer brand message

Fathima Jaffer, Employee Value Proposition Lead

TD Bank

Learn from the leader in lifestyle media, Scripps Networks Interactive, on how to bring life to your internal branding strategy. Just like Chip and Joanna Gaines on the hit show “Fixer Upper”, Jerilyn Bliss, VP of corporate communications, has a bag of tricks and tips that will take tired, run-down communications and redesign them with style, revitalizing employee engagement and increasing the understanding of priorities.

You will learn how your internal communications team can infuse  your company’s expertise into all that it does, creating a culture that truly allows employees to live the brands, including how to:

• Refresh your internal campaigns including core values and cybersecurity
• Revitalize employee engagement
• Reinvigorate your internal communications

Impact is everything and employees are eager to directly contribute to their organization’s mission and success in new ways. The ASPCA harnessed the power of their mission, the passion of their people, and the pride in their history to activate a new subset of employee ambassadors. It has resulted in generating renewed momentum to achieve their organizational goals.

This session will provide you with insights into how the ASPCA cultivated employee commitment to transform staffers into authentic and influential brand advocates.

Take this opportunity to learn how to successfully utilize employee ambassadors to drive your strategy and campaigns forward, with a limited budget and a small team, including how to:  

• ŸCreate an employee engagement program aligned with your strategy and culture to drive staff participation and storytelling
• ŸIntegrate internal and external tools and technologies to create compelling communications and a strong sense of community
• ŸMotivate employees by harnessing organizational pride, generating buzz, and sharing clear calls to action
• ŸDrive brand awareness by encouraging employees to express personal passion connected to organizational objectives

Lindsey Callahan, Sr. Director, Internal Communications

ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)

How do you engage an employee base of nearly 100,000 colleagues, in five different geographic regions, with on consistent and enagaging corporate narrative? The newsroom concept has changed Mondelēz International’s approach to global internal communications - adopting a content-first mentality with greater connectivity across a global organization.

Achieve a greater understanding about the newsroom approach and how to implement it into your existing internal communications, including learning how to:

• Structure your internal communications agenda to tell a global narrative supported by local proof points
• Develop engaging and creative communications materials by adopting a “content-first” approach
• Leverage your employees to tell stories and generate rich content

Angela Shepherd, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications 

Mondelez International

Through the discussion of Millenials, culture, and leadership learn how technology is changing the way the workforce interacts with culture and brands and how your EVP will be the next generation of thinking, including how to:

• Recognize why HR needs to lead with marketing
• Create and use an EVP with specific tactics needed
• Communicate your culture effectively through an EVP model
• Create the business case for connecting your business strategy around culture
• Equip millennial leaders with the information they need to to succeed and deliver value for your organization

Having great employee benefits and programs is one thing. Getting employees to use them is an entirely different endeavor.

This was the case five years ago, when BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, undertook research to better understand how the company’s compelling total offer compared to the market, how well employees understood those offerings, and which ones they preferred most. The results highlighted that while BASF’s total offer was on par—and often better—than its competitors, employee perception wasn’t always aligned with this truth. And because employees didn’t always understand or appreciate the full value of what was offered, many were not fully engaged in their benefits and other programs.

Armed with this information, BASF set out to shift employees’ perceptions of its total offer and to empower employees to engage with the benefits and programs available to them.

During this session you will learn how to:

• Develop an internal brand that’s aligned with your culture in order to communicate consistently and strengthen the relationship with your employees.
• Successfully market to employees as consumers across multiple channels.
• Empower employees to engage with their total offer and take action.

Continually sustaining internal excitement around your corporate brand can be a daily challenge; however, it is possible with the “Four Brand Wow Factors.”

Participate in this interactive workshop and obtain multiple tools that you can use to ignite passion around your brand and incentivize your employee base to take the corporate brand out into their communities.  Discover how to turn employees into corporate ambassadors and transform community members into brand advocates via these techniques.

Walk away with the tools needed to improve brand awareness among employees, including how to:

• Improve morale at your organization by making employees feel more informed
• Create brand champions at your company and in the community
• Establish a culture of collaboration across numerous business segments at your company
• Improve your company’s public face in the community

Internal branding has become the new “in thing” to do for companies and organizations.  We like to say what our brand is, but many of us really have no idea what that really means.  Most times if employees or stakeholders are asked what the brand is it is not surprising to find that it is inconsistent across the organization.

Following this discussion, you will gain a better understanding on how to strategize and execute your internal branding efforts to ensure that the message is consistent, including how to:   

• Increase communication and evolving your organization to become more transparent
• Create a culture where employees begin to live the company’s values
• Establish brand loyalty

Petula Burks, Public Affairs Director

City of Miami Gardens

With more workplaces becoming global, teams are increasingly dispersed and remote, yet the sucess of a brand requires them to be tightly connected and working as one. It's integral for these team leaders to develop and communicate their brand values in a way that establishes brand consistency, fosters engagement, and creates unity across borders.

Uncover techniques and strategies that you can easily implement to unify your globally dispersed workforce, including how to:

• Re-assess your brand values and how to communicate them
• Use social tools to establish a community feeling amongst partners, foster a supportive environment, and encourage engagement
• Identify suitable mediums for brand communications
• Celebrate and reward exemplary behaviors within the community
• Leverage increased internal engagement to enhance external marketing projects and prompt further internal engagement

Lindsay Young, Food Tourism Developer,

Ontario Culinary Tourism Alliance 

This session will provide you with insight on aligning personal and company values to drive connections and ultimately revenue. We will review simple and tangible methods to activate values and drive high energy engagements, including how to:

• Utilize new methods to get your company vision and values off of a poster and into action
• Determine your company EVP – Give your Communications team something to say
• Design, align, and assess you company culture

Siobhan O’Leary, VP Human Capital

Convene Conference Centers

• How Bananatag gives Novant to ability to measure internal email engagement by department and device type
• How Novant fine-tunes and delivers relevant content to its distinct internal audiences
• Tips for creating a culture of high-performing branded internal content across your comms department.

Jen Hall, Internal Communication Manager

Novant Health

Chris Wagner, Co-Founder

Bananatag