If you think performance counts now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Jim Shaffer, who pioneered the results-driven approach to managing communication, will explain what others have done to become indispensable to their leaders, because they are over and over again putting money in their leaders pockets. Literally! Jim’s lively and provocative CD will reveal what companies are doing to surgically shift their priorities and focus on those parts of the organization that can drive performance results most. Using real case studies, Jim will show how companies can generate two- and three-thousand-percent returns on their internal communication investments. He’ll explore the Three Stages of Organizational Communication Maturity and explain how a department can attain increasingly higher levels of operating and financial performance.
Learn How:
- FedEx, Owens Corning and others have created significant performance improvements with returns on their investments exceeding 1,400 percent
- Honeywell cut its billing cycle by 10 days and eliminated 1.4 million process steps while improving quality
- Sara Lee reduced waste by 18 percent in five weeks at one its bakeries
Learn Why:
- Dave Brown’s CEO said: “We are absolutely convinced that there’s a competitive advantage to be gained by engaging our people through better managed communication. We’ve seen it pay off already in measurable improvements in costs and productivity.”
- Owens Corning’s senior vice president of manufacturing said, “We’ll take as many 700-percent returns as we can get.”
Discussion Topics:
- Why the communication function in every business must measurably increase the value it adds—or die
- What other companies are doing about it and how they’ve moved from an output to an outcome-generating organization
- What you can do next to take your department to the next level on the maturity curve
- What questions to ask to identify what matters most to your business
- How to set up an outcome-based project that generates huge financial returns
- How to measure your impact and your return
- How to shift your work from low value-adding to high value-adding
- How to get junk off your plate, because it doesn’t contribute to the bottom line
Who Should Purchase:
- Corporate communications
- Non-profit communications
- Media relations
- Public affairs
- Public relations
Instructor:
Jim Shaffer is one of the world’s leading thought leaders, consultants and authors, helping businesses engage their people to achieve ultra-high levels of organizational performance. His book, The Leadership Solution (McGraw-Hill), has been hailed by leading CEOs as “invaluable for someone wanting to lead an organization into the future” and a “practical common-sense look at how leaders use communication to solve business problems.”
Jim’s focus is on improving people performance: helping business leaders execute better by creating engaged people, who think and act like business owners. He blends his unique background in general management, product line management, organizational change and communication management and helps clients get at the root cause of people performance problems. His track record includes significant, quantifiable improvements in quality, service, costs, productivity and speed through a more engaged workforce.
Jim leads the Jim Shaffer Group, a consultancy devoted to creating compelling places to work—where people are actively engaged in building and sustaining winning organizations. Previously, he was a principal, senior consultant and leader of a Towers Perrin center of excellence. He was one of the architects and leading practitioners of the firm’s global change management consulting practice. Prior to that, he served as press secretary to Kansas Governor Robert B. Docking, headed public relations and advertising in two Chicago-based businesses, and served as a marketing product line manager.
Jim is a recipient of the International Association of Business Communicators’ prestigious Fellow award, and he was named “Communicator of the Year” by IABC’s Washington, D.C. chapter. Jim is a regular contributor to many business publications and a frequent speaker at leadership groups and professional associations. He has taught in the graduate schools at George Washington University and The University of St. Thomas. His clients have included IBM, The Mayo Clinic, Verizon, Toyota, FedEx and many more.
- Do your communication efforts tend to be “one-offs” that consume a lot of time and effort but don’t always generate the results you had hoped for?
- Do senior leaders’ eyes glaze over when you explain your latest “big idea”?
- Do you wish you had more time to spend learning about new things and less putting out fires?
While strategic planning is probably at the top of the list of things that most communicatorsdon’t want to do, the reality is that when done well, strategic planning can not only help to save time, and money, but can increase the odds of achieving desired communication outcomes. And, the good news is, effective planning doesn’t have to take weeks or months or result in dozens of meetings. In fact, the process can actually be quite simple and straightforward.
This webinar will offer easy-to-follow steps and provide practical tips and advice that can be used for any planning effort—from developing an internal communications plan to developing a marketing campaign—or even focusing on a single initiative.
What You Will Learn:
- How to position the plan for success by starting with the end in mind
- Why your mission statement is your friend
- How and why to align your efforts with your organization’s strategic plan
- A step-by-step process for developing a strategic plan
- Developing a process for plan updates – how to keep the plan alive
- How to build measurement into the plan
- How to make sure things get done!
Who Should Attend
- Communicators, PR and marketing professionals at all levels.
Presented by:
Linda Pophal is CEO of Strategic Communications, and a marketing and communication strategist with 20+ years experience in healthcare, education and not-for-profit marketing and communications. She has managed all aspects of corporate and marketing communication including employee communication, public relations, advertising, social media, market research, brand management and strategic planning. Pophal has developed and implemented strategic business, marketing and communication plans for healthcare and educational organizations and consultants, generating measurable results based on client goals. She has developed and delivered training programs for national and local audiences on all aspects of communication management and employee relations. She is author of The Essentials of Corporate Communications and PR and Complete Idiot’s Guide to Strategic Planning.
Tell me and I may hear. Tell me and let me add my 2-cents and now it’s our decision; I’m all in. Yes, one of the most powerful and proven catalysts to engagement is simply involving employees in generating ideas that address an organization’s most pressing challenges. By opening up these important conversations to employees, individuals feel like they’re part of the business, and not watching from the sidelines.
Attend this webinar to see how a diverse range of companies are using co-creation — also called crowd-sourcing and open innovation — to achieve significant improvements in both employee engagement and business outcomes.
Borrowing from his experience working with leading companies, Preston Lewis, co-founder and director of San Francisco’s Bonfire, will explain how to use communication co-creation and audience-centricity to effectively drive creativity, innovation and employee engagement within your company.
You will learn how to:
- Position communication as a catalyst for co-creation
- Build a holistic engagement strategy, supported by multidisciplinary communications
- Use emerging crowd-sourcing technologies to drive employee engagement efforts
- Increase participation (both employee and customer) in key brand initiatives
About the Speaker:
Preston Lewis is an expert in branding, employee engagement and internal communications. A sought-after speaker, Preston is an energetic and creative leader who helps companies understand how to solve complex problems through communication and design.
Preston and his team have designed and implemented communication campaigns for some the world’s largest and most successful companies, including Starbucks, Genentech, Nortel Networks, NASDAQ, and HP.
Webinar led by Katie Paine, author of Measure What Matters
The explosion in mobile commerce and communications and the arrival of contextual computing devices such as Google Glass will change forever how we communicate — and measure our communications.
Imagine a world without “how useful do you find the newsletter?” surveys and relying on employees reluctantly filling out questionnaires about what they recall or feel. That world will be populated with communications teams who will be able to measure what is most effective in real time, and tailor delivery and content accordingly.
As these technologies are adopted in organizations, organizational silos between traditional and social media, between internal and external communications between marketing, advertising and PR will all be increasingly blurred.
The growth of sponsored content, native advertising and uses of data will simultaneously make stakeholder relationships more important and measurement more challenging. This session will present attendees with an overview of specific instructions on how to define success and measure it in this new era.
What You Will Learn:
- How this will redefining every metric you’ve ever used
- How this will affect measurement research
- How to get ready for the contextual measurement revolution
- The six steps to perfect measurement in the age of context
- How new standards for measurement will drive metrics in the future
- How to use the new contextual metrics to get the ear of the board
Who Should Attend
Communicators, PR and marketing professionals at all levels.
Presented by:
Katie Delahaye Paine has been a pioneer in the field of measurement for more than two decades. In the process she and her firms have analyzed millions of articles, conducted thousands of surveys, and read or watched countless tweets, YouTube videos and Facebook pages in order to measure the effectiveness of her client’s communications.
She has advised some of the world’s most admired companies and has been a leading promoter of standards in the PR and Social Media Measurement field, most recently as the initial organizer of the Conclave that released social media measurement standards in June.
She has founded two measurement companies, KDPaine & Partners Inc., and The Delahaye Group. Her books, Measure What Matters (Wiley, March 2011) and Measuring Public Relationships (KDPaine & Partners 2007) are considered must reading for anyone tasked with measuring public relations and social media. Her latest book, written with Beth Kanter, “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, Using Data to Change the World,” is the 2013 winner of the Terry McAdam Book Award.
The profession of corporate communications is steeped with tradition. Though there are many new channels, we tend to use them to say the same old things. Employees have a multitude of ways to express themselves after hours, but at work, they tend to have much less voice. This imbalance leaves the unstated impression that all the important communications is done by the professionals.
Heather Rim, vice president of global corporate communications at Avery Dennison, and her team continually look for ways to expand employee voice and make communications fresh and fun. Blending simple ideas with the power of communication networks, her team is shaking up old ideas about what traditional communications looks like, includes and accomplishes. In this special webinar, she will show some of the unique Avery Dennison communication programs that are winning high marks from employees and leadership – and would be worth considering for your organization.
What you will learn:
- Starting with the philosophy – corporate communications should never be boring
- Behind “The Beat,” a global employee sounding board that just keeps growing
- Just launched: an intranet built on Google
- How a CEO video blog is sparking unexpected impact
- Blending formal and informal communications – Letting employees tell their own stories
- Less is more when it comes to social media policy
Presented by:
Heather Rim is vice president of Global Corporate Communications for Avery Dennison Corporation. She was named to her current position in January 2011. Heather joined Avery Dennison in 2010 as senior director, Internal Communications.
Heather is responsible for the strategic direction and management of all aspects of corporate communications for Avery Dennison including employee communications, corporate brand management, crisis communications, social media and digital communications, corporate media relations, and corporate philanthropy.
Before joining Avery Dennison, Heather held the position of vice president, Communications for the Disney ABC Television Group, where she designed and implemented global communications strategies to inform and engage employees across Disney’s entertainment and news television properties. Previously, she progressed through Corporate Communications, Marketing and Investor Relations roles at companies including WellPoint, Countrywide and KPMG.
Heather received a master’s degree in communications management from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Azusa Pacific University. She serves on the boards of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles and the Pasadena Symphony, and is a member of the Arthur Page Society.
Kristin Wong serves as the lead for all corporate internal communications programs and channels. She drives efforts to ensure the company’s employer brand is activated throughout key employee touch points including the enterprise portal, global employee ambassador team, values and ethics programs, and corporate town halls.
Prior to joining the company, Kristin worked for The Walt Disney Company where she assisted in the development of internal communications programs for Disney’s ABC television business. She received a master’s degree in communication management from the University of Southern California and also holds a bachelor’s degree in media studies from Pomona College of the Claremont Colleges. Outside of work, Kristin is a blogger and pop culture junkie who’s passionate about the technology trends that will shape our digital future.
Are you tired of struggling to get—and keep—people’s attention and convince them to take action?
You can improve your ability to connect with and influence others by learning how our brain works and applying some simple techniques based in neuroscience.
Forget about right brain/left brain, an archaic concept. Instead, the “social brain” drives our thinking and our actions.
This session will briefly cover basic neuroscience principles geared toward non-scientists. We’ll then focus on how you can apply those principles to help yourself and others think better and perform at higher levels. By taking these actions, you can improve your influencing skills and actions.
Learn how to:
- Increase your self-awareness to improve your ability to influence
- Design the best environment for influencing
- Speak and write with intent to make better connections with others
- Make your messages more compelling and memorable
- Listen more effectively
- Slow down and quiet the brain to tap into the unconscious and speed up gaining insights and influencing
- Ask powerful thinking questions that increase focus and gain greater clarity
Your webinar leader, Liz Guthridge is an award-winning consultant, leadership coach and trainer who’s studied with Dr. David Rock of The NeuroLeadership Institute, Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and other luminaries in the fields of employee communication and organizational change. Liz has extensive experience supporting leaders improve their communication, develop new habits and adapt their organizations.
Liz Guthridge is an award-winning leadership coach, consultant and trainer with extensive change, employee communication and organization development experience.
As the founder of the boutique firm Connect Consulting, Liz works with leaders at all levels to help them move from blue-sky thinking to greener pastures actions. With her support, Liz’s clients enhance the clarity of their ideas, plans and actions. Her clients also improve the quality of their conversations, their ability to influence and their skill in building habits.
Liz contributed the chapter “Change Through Smart-Mob Organizing: Using Peer-by-Peer Practices to Transform Organizations” to the book The Change Champion’s Field Guide (Wiley 2013).
Besides being a certified coach in brain-based coaching, she is serving as a teaching assistant for the Executive Masters in NeuroLeadership program through the NeuroLeadership Institute co-founded by Dr. David Rock. Liz also is a graduate of Dr. BJ Fogg’s Persuasion Boot Camp and is one of his Tiny Habits™ coaches.
Copyright @ 2014 Communitelligence Inc.
Ok, if we professional communicators would all come clean, we would admit we’ve been paying a lot more attention to the sexy new digital communication workplace tools than we have to that oldest but most important social medium, face-to-face communications.
Unfortunately, practice and research says ignoring manager communication is a bad idea. In the midst of so much change, workplace stress, confusion and mistrust, there is a powerful human case to be made for attending to this most basic kind of communication. Gallup research shows that “managers from hell” are creating active disengagement, costing the U.S. an estimated $450 billion to $550 billion annually.
According to ROI Communication’s annual benchmark survey:
- One in four managers is not considered a credible source of information
- Only 55% offer recognition and appreciation for a job well done
- Only 25% clearly understand their communication role (which coincides with the fact that only 27% receive communication training), and
- Only 18% are measured for communication performance in their performance reviews
Roger D’Aprix has been preaching the face-to-face communication mantra since he was a communication manager at Xerox in the late 1970s. He’s convinced today’s workers want and expects more than command and control, top-down communication. In fact, if face-to-face communication is failing, there is an excellent chance that all of the other forms of communication in the organization are also failing.
Drawing from his new book, Creating an Engaged Workforce: the Face-to-Face Communication Toolkit, Roger will arm you with the basic strategies and tools to either launch or reignite your organization’s manager communication program in ways that will prepare them to fulfill the all-important role of interpreter for their people. It’s time to fire up your face-to-face communication program.
What You Will Learn:
- Why human satisfaction with work and business success both demand a face-to-face strategy for delivering critical issues to employees
- How to build the business case and form the key team you need to seriously impact face-to-face communication in your organization
- Why too many face-to-face communication programs fail and the secret sauce of those that sing
- The key tools and processes you need to make your face-to-face communication program a winner
Presented by:
Roger D’Aprix is internationally known as a practitioner in the theory, strategy and practice of employee communication. His ground-breaking work at Xerox Corporation beginning in the 1970s qualifies him as one of the pioneers in employee engagement. As a communication consultant, lecturer and author he has assisted scores of Fortune 500 companies in developing their communication strategies and designing their communication training.
In 1998 IABC named him ‘one of the most influential thinkers in the communication profession in the last 25 years.’ He was named an IABC Fellow, that organization’s highest honor, in 1978. For 15 years he held senior positions with two of the leading human resources consulting companies. He served as vice president and global practice leader for Towers Perrin’s human resource communication practice and as principal and service developer for Mercer Human Resource Consulting.
Before that, he led employee communication for Xerox Corporation and held executive communication positions at General Electric and Bell and Howell. Presently, in addition to his own consultancy, D’Aprix & Co., he is affiliated with ROI Communication as a member of its advisory board. ROI is a global consultancy that specializes in internal communication strategy and practice. He divides his time between residences in Rochester, New York and New York City.
Learn how to conduct a communication audit that will provide the hard data you and your management need to make the right decisions.
Scrambling to meet the next deadline for the employee pub. Running e-mail copy through the approval ringer. Tying up all the logistical loose ends for next week’s town hall meeting. There’s plenty to keep you busy when you work in employee communications. But are you sure the tactics you’ve chosen are the best ones for reaching employees? And what about strategy? What do employees really need to know to do their jobs?
Before you spend scarce company resources on employee communications, you’d better know the answers to these and many other questions. And a communication audit can give you those answers.
Why a communications audit? How does it work? How can it help boost the bottom line? Where to focus? What to ask?
This session answers all these questions, plus gives you an inside look at how one company audited its employee communications program, what they learned and how they applied their learnings. Hear from the communicator who led the project and the measurement experts who helped her succeed.
In just 90 minutes, you’ll learn how to conduct a communication audit that will put your program on the right track.
Key learning topics:
- How to make the decision to conduct a communication audit — often the most difficult step in the process — and how to sell management on the idea
- How to know what communication issues to focus on
- How to write powerful questions that reveal the most useful information
- How to analyze data, so you know the most important items to act on
- How to develop and implement a plan of action — the greatest benefit of a communication audit
Plus: Robert, Katrina and Kim answer real-world questions on:
- The pros and cons of Web surveys vs. paper
- The percentage of responses should you expect in a survey and how to ensure a statistically significant number of responses
- Recommendations on alternate communication channels, such as blogs and wikis
- How to learn if your employees really want to end their employee newsletter
- The real costs behind a communication audit
About your seminar leaders:
- Robert Holland, ABC, Holland Communication Solutions, has more than 17 years of experience in organizational communications, including employee communication planning, publication management, consulting, media relations and change communication. He is co-leader of the Communitelligence Internal Communications community and a frequent contributor to several national and international professional journals, including the Journal of Employee Communication Management. His column “Communication at Work” appears on the Business Channel of Richmond.com every two weeks. He is author of Prove Your Worth: The Complete Guide to Measuring the Business Value of Communication, published by Ragan Communications. Robert earned IABC accreditation in 1992. His bachelor’s degree in mass communications is from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va.
- Katrina Gill is president and founder of Gill Research LLC, a full-service research and consulting firm specializing in communication metrics, audits and employee/organizational research. Katrina has more than 14 years of diverse research experience, from the planning and development of projects through the presentation of results and recommendations for action. Katrina is formally educated in research methodology and has completed post-graduate study on a doctoral track in clinical psychology at the University of Missouri. A frequent speaker, workshop leader and author on strategic research and measurement, Katrina has taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses. She is a member of the American Marketing Association and the International Association of Business Communicators.
- Kim Hall is a communications consultant with Wells Fargo & Company, supporting internal communications for a division of 5,500 employees. She partners with managers in business units, human resources, marketing and public relations to develop integrated communication strategies that help the organization meet its goals. With 10 years in communications in the corporate and nonprofit sectors, Kim has worked on fundraising campaigns, grant writing, newsletter production, change communications and communications measurement. She has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English and is a member of the International Association of Business Communicators.
Communicators have been using PR to deliver value for decades. What’s new is that a handful of leading professionals are now scientifically proving how they are generating measurable benefits from the public relations activities. The progress that this change represents is significant: rather than relying on subjective perceptions of what represents value, they are applying the concept of “return on investment” (ROI) and objectively measuring the economic benefits of public relations activity against its associated costs. In this perspective-packed web conference, Mark Weiner offers a research-based model for creating and implementing public relations programs that will generate meaningful results and improve an organization’s ROI. You will also learn how to speak to senior executives in a way that will improve communications and ultimately help strengthen PR performance and results.
What You Will Learn:
- The Difference between “proving value” and “delivering a return-on-investment.”
- The three elements of PR-ROI
- What some of the world’s greatest organizations are doing to prove and improve their PR-ROI (and how they do it)…including branded case studies
- How you can take your PR programs to the next level in clearly demonstrating ROI
- What’s required to go beyond “ROI
Real-world questions that will be answered:
- How do I prove the value of my PR?
- What is the difference between “proving value” and “delivering ROI?”
- How do I connect our PR to meaningful business outcomes and Return-on-Investment?
- What are the three forms of PR-ROI?
- What are companies doing now to deliver and improve their ROI?
- How do I get started?
Presented by:
Mark Weiner is the author of “Unleashing the Power of PR: A Contrarian’s Guide to Marketing and Communication,” published by John Wiley & Sons. Throughout his career, Mark has focused on providing research-based consulting to help clients improve their PR-ROI. Most recently, Mark was the SVP/Global Director of Research at Ketchum after having been president and CEO of Delahaye, the preeminent provider of research solutions for public relations and corporate communications professionals. Mark is a frequent speaker at conferences including those produced by The Conference Board, The American Marketing Association, The PRSA, The IABC and Bulldog Reporter, and he frequently contributes to publications such as Communication World, PR Week and The Daily ‘Dog and has appeared on PBS and CNBC. He is on the editorial advisory boards of PR News and PRSA’s The Strategist, and is an active member of the Institute for Public Relations, for whom he chaired the Measurement Commission in 2004.
Study after study confirms the link between good manager communication and engaged employees. Listen to this webinar and learn what managers can do to become better communicators – and stronger leaders. You’ll learn how managers can change employee attitudes and behaviors, the type of information employees demand, and which communication resources leading organizations provide managers. You’ll leave the session with practical tips, tools and frameworks that managers can apply immediately and insights into what separates outstanding managers from the rest.
What You Will Learn:
- Communication competencies every manager needs
- How to keep managers and employees informed and engaged
- Winning managers’ support for communication
- The best way to alienate managers
- How to convey information, field challenges and brainstorm solutions – in under 15 minutes
Questions that are answered:
- What are leading organizations doing to enhance manager communication?
- What feedback should communicators solicit from managers?
- What do employees want most from their managers?
- What can communicators do to help managers succeed?
Who Should Attend:
- Communications professionals who want to enhance their partnership and value to the business
- First line supervisors and managers who want to take their staff communications to the next level
Instructor:
Andy Szpekman provides human resource management and communication research, strategies and tools to improve business performance. His clients include Bank of America, BC Hydro, Cardinal Health, McKinsey & Co., Microsoft, News Corporation, Scholastic and Wachovia.
Earlier in his career, he led HR communication at Bank of America, served as communications manager for a global division of Warner-Lambert, and was a senior HR and communications consultant with Brecker & Merryman, Inc.
Andy is active in the Council of Communication Management and a former Officer of the Metropolitan New York Association of Applied Psychology. His work has been featured in national news and business publications and leading trade journals. He holds a B.A. in psychology from William Paterson University and an M.A. in organizational psychology from Columbia University.
At Cisco, they’ve changed the way they use words. It’s saving them money and helping them work together better. It’s connecting the internal culture to the business in deeper, more meaningful ways. And that’s helping them serve customers better and sell more.
In this session, Mark Buchanan, program lead for Cisco’s brand language initiative, paints a picture of how Cisco is changing the way 75,000 employees are using words across a $130 Billion business. He’ll walk you through how the brand language team set the plan in motion and made lasting changes. He’ll include practical tips and share insights, successes, and challenges. And he’ll give you his thoughts about how the lessons from Cisco can make a difference for your business.
The session includes:
- Evaluating the opportunity
- Aligning your voice with your business
- Connecting with your audience
- Scaling the program
- Making it stick
Presented by:
Mark Buchanan is the program lead for brand language at Cisco. He’s helping the company use language that is simpler and more distinctive. And he’s helping bring empathy back to a technology company that has always cared about people, but has found those values challenged by rapid growth and increasingly complex technology. He’s worked with Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Services and Corporate Communications and has seen impressive results across every function. Together, Mark and the people at Cisco are changing the culture of language and communications, around the world for 75,000 employees, 50,000 contractors and vendors, across a $130 billion business.
Executives say they want more strategic communication support. Yet they and others still have high expectations for tactics. Plus, communication team members also are often more comfortable delivering on the tactics.
So should you change your game? And can you change your game? And will you still be around to share your success stories? Yes, yes, and yes.
In this insightful webinar, Sreejit Mohan, Director, Public Policy and Communications of Bayer HealthCare, and Liz Guthridge of Connect Consulting will share tips from their playbook on how to move from player to player/coach and become an indispensible partner to the business. They’ll also share the five questions you must ask yourself.
Already a member? View Replay
The Challenge:
The challenges the Bayer HealthCare communication team faced are common to other corporate communication departments today. The Bayer HealthCare team had noticed a divergence in what they were doing day-to-day and what the workforce, including the executives, wanted in communication support. In consultation with executives, they realized they needed to provide more opportunities for:
- Executives and employees to engage in direct dialogue to build greater trust
- Employees to learn more about the business challenges facing the company
- Executives to improve their informal and formal communication skills.
You’ll learn:
- How to know when it’s time to make major changes
- The three key makeover phases (redefining purpose, streamlining processes to free up time and resources, and developing a leader communication effectiveness program) that Bayer used
- How to keep delivering on commitments while making changes as well as develop your staff to prepare for the new work and challenges they face
- How to adopt the mindset of a coach/teacher/leader
- Effective ways to build and capitalize on relationships with leaders.
Sreejit Mohan, Director, Public Policy and Communications, joined Bayer HealthCare in 2006 from Fleishman Hillard where he was a Vice President. In 2007, Sreejit was one of PRWeek’s “40 under 40” PR professionals—those younger than age 40 doing outstanding work.
Liz Guthridge is is a consultant, author, and trainer specializing in strategic change leadership and communications. Department leaders of Fortune 1000 companies hire Liz and her firm Connect Consulting Group LLC when they need their people to adopt new initiatives and change the way they work. Before she founded Connect in 2004, Liz was a principal with several global change and HR consulting firms.
Want a single tool in your communications arsenal that will help you plan your strategies, prioritize activities and evaluate results?
Measurement can do all this and more. In this seminar you will learn to think of measurement as a helpful tool to guide your communication programs and as an evaluative process to help you shine in your organization.
If you are not yet getting the full potential out of your measurement program, discover what you’re missing in this content-packed presentation by award-winning communication and measurement experts, Kami Huyse, APR, and Alice Brink, ABC, APR.
What You Will Learn:
- A framework for setting up your measurement program
- About common-sense tools for measuring both traditional and social media
- Case studies where measurement was used to show success and justify budgets
Presented by:
Alice H. Brink, ABC, APR, president of A Brink & Co., is an award-winning public relations professional with more than 25 years of corporate and consulting experience. She spent the first half of her career in major corporations including AT&T, The Coca-Cola Company, and Conoco Inc. She has been a consultant since 1997, first with a regional public relations agency, and now with an independent practice (www.abrinkandco.com) focused on energy and finance communications. Alice has received local, regional and national recognition for communications strategy, writing, and measurement work. She received the Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award in 2008 from the Institute of Public Relations and was one of the first to be designated a “Measurement Maven” by Katie Paine in The Measurement Standard.
Kami Watson Huyse, APR, partner and co-founder of Zoetica. She is the author of the blog Communication Overtones, where she writes on the topic of public relations and social media strategy. She is considered a national leader in the use of social media for public relations. She has spoken on the topic for the Social Media Club, the New Communications Forum, SxSW Interactive, the International Association of Business Communicators, the Arthur Page Foundation, the Public Relations Society of America, and many others. A 17-year-veteran of public relations, her work in social media has earned her the SNCR’s 2008 Reputation Management award and IABC’s 2009 Gold Quill of Excellence Award and the 2010 SNCR Excellence in New Communications Award. She was recognized for a Social Media award by the Austin-American Statesman and was named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter by Twitter Grader. Additionally, she was named the Public Relations Professional of the Year by the Public Relations Association of America San Antonio. She also wrote a chapter on social media measurement in Geoff Livingston’s, “Welcome to the Fifth Estate: How to Create and Sustain a Winning Social Media Strategy.”
The data is in!
- Diversity is a source of competitive advantage
- Diverse teams arrive at better, more innovative solutions than monolithic teams
- Diversity is not the same as affirmative action or any other government mandated equality program – it’s better
- Diversity makes common, moral and good business sense
You are a believer. Great.
But while your energy and enthusiasm on the topic of diversity are required, they are not sufficient. You need a rock solid communication plan and the know-how to execute it in order for diversity to take root and stay rooted in the fabric of how the company you work for does business.
What You Will Learn:
1. Explaining the business case
2. Reinforcing the values and visions of the diversity effort
3. Identifying the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) for employees
4. Defining diversity
5. Communicating expectations
6. Demonstrating ongoing commitment
Instructor:
Jacqueline M. Welch is Vice President, Employee and Organizational Effectiveness for Rock-Tenn Company, a $2.2 billion Norcross, Georgia headquartered manufacturer of packaging products, merchandising displays and recycled paperboard. Rock-Tenn Company operates more than 90 facilities throughout the United States, Argentina, Canada, Mexico and Chile.
As Vice President of Employee and Organizational Effectiveness, Jacqui is responsible for talent acquisition, performance management, career development, learning and development, succession planning, organization development, employee relations, compliance, union relationships, corporate communications, and workplace practices such as corporate citizenship and diversity for a workforce of 10,000 employees. Jacqui reports directly to the CEO and is an officer of the company.
Jacqui’s expertise is in developing, implementing and institutionalizing people programs, practices and policies that support business objectives and optimize organizational culture. This includes developing customer-focused business strategy for the human resource function and building line capacity to manage the people asset.
Who should register:
- Communications, HR, public relations and managers and supervisors who want to help take their organization’s diversity program to the next level
In today’s dynamic marketplace, businesses simply cannot afford to leave strategy execution to chance. Organizations that succeed will be the ones that can effectively mobilize and engage their employees in implementing new business strategies to produce immediate value for customers. Making a solid case for the new business realities to employees is critical for any organization to survive and thrive. Employees who have seen change initiatives fail in the past are likely to avoid risks associated with change. They become roadblocks when communicating the new business realities to employees. Employees must buy into any business’ priorities to succeed.
What You Will Learn:
- The three biggest mistake companies make when communicating bad news
- Establishing and communicating performance expectations and accountability.
- Building trust with employee involvement.
- Establishing team norms for how work gets done.
- Modeling effective virtual behavior across boundaries with all stakeholders.
Who Should Attend
Individuals responsible for corporate communications, public relations, corporate affairs, human resources, employee communications, media relations, and issues management.
Presented by:
Dr. TJ Larkin and his business partner, Sandar, began Larkin Communication Consulting in 1985. The Larkins help large companies communicate major change to employees. Clients include: ABB, AT&T, Bank of America, Bankers Trust, Bell Labs, BHP Billiton, Boeing, BP, Caltex, DaimlerChrysler, ExxonMobil, GM, ICI, NASA, National Australia Bank, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. TJ and Sandar wrote the book, Communicating Change, now a McGraw-Hill Bookstore bestseller. Their paper, “Reaching and Changing Frontline Employees,” published in the Harvard Business Review has sold more than 40,000 reprints. The most recent papers by the Larkins can be downloaded, at no charge, from their Web site (Publications Page). TJ has a Ph.D. in communication from Michigan State University, and a B.Phil. in sociology from the University of Oxford.
Mary Lou Dlugolenski, with nearly 20 years of experience, has established herself as a solid communications professional in roles spanning employee communication, public relations, marketing communication, change communication, and crisis management. She has worked in a number of industries including healthcare, manufacturing, engineering, advertising and financial services. Mary Lou has been with MassMutual for 18 months and serves as the company’s vice president of strategic enterprise communication. Recognizing employee communication as a critical business driver, Mary Lou and her team lead a strategy of employee engagement and culture change that creates dialogue between executives and employees
through well-orchestrated communication tactics. Prior to joining MassMutual, Mary Lou managed internal and external communication at various public companies, domestic and international, including Philips, GE, ADVO and
Alstom. Mary Lou lives in North Granby, Conn., with her husband and two children.
Times have changed. In today’s world, communication moves at the speed of light. People want information, and they want it now. On top of that, they want it in more creative formats than before, thanks to the social media tools taking the world by storm. And your employees are no different.
In this webinar, you will hear from two internationally recognized companies – Monsanto and Sprint – that have taken major steps recently to meet employee expectations with major initiatives to improve their employee communication strategies, tactics and tools.
Katie Sauer from Monsanto will talk about the evolution during the past two years since they launched a complete overhaul of the company’s employee communications. Specifically, she will describe Monsanto’s online news publication and why it is now regarded as a best practice in the profession.
She will explore a number of provocative questions.
- Are your employee news publication and intranet meeting their needs?
- Are you giving them honest facts or corporate-speak?
- Are you sending them weekly or monthly publications, or are you giving them up-to-the minute information?
- Are you communicating things your way or their way?
Jennifer Sniderman from Sprint will talk about how the company decided to seize unprecedented opportunity to build on their efforts to revolutionize the customer experience and use the same approach to facilitate conversations among employees and help surface the “why” behind key decisions. By blurring the lines between Sprint Space (internal social media platform) and i-Connect (the company-wide intranet) Sprint continues to drive authenticity and engage key employee influencers.
In this presentation you will learn how Sprint’s News 2.0 strategy is:
- Activating our brand from the inside out, by making employees active participants in revolutionizing the customer experience; tapping collective wisdom, acting on what we learn
- Spreading optimism at new speeds
- Driving confidence in leadership at all levels
- Decreasing communications clutter and reaching employees in ways they’ve embraced outside of work
Both of these remarkable case studies underscore the need for a plan that allows you to communicate with your employees—and vice versa—in the honest, simple and fast way they expect. At this webinar, you will learn how to create an online communication mechanism that will become an integral part or your employees’ lives.
What You Will Learn:
- How to write and produce stuff your employees will want to read—and trust
- How to integrate social media tools into your employee communication strategy
- How to get legal and management backing you
- How to use your intranet publication to change your company’s culture
Presented by:
Katie Sauer is a communications manager for Monsanto, where she is responsible for writing content for both the company’s employee news site and corporate Web site. She has worked for Monsanto since earning her bachelor’s in communication from Truman State University in Missouri. She worked in sales and marketing for Monsanto before moving to public affairs in 2006.
Jennifer Sniderman oversees employee communications channels and editorial including Sprint’s corporate Intranet and Sprint’s social media platform. She is responsible for developing the news strategy and messaging architecture for enterprise employee communications.Jennifer leads the team responsible for Sprint’s IABC Gold Quill award-winning leadership communications program and is the managing editor of i-Lead, Sprint’s bi-weekly online newsletter. Jennifer is also the executive producer/writer of a recurring talk-show broadcast to the desktop of Sprint managers nationwide. In her role at Sprint, Jennifer has developed numerous multimedia campaigns and interactive communications solutions. She is currently working on Sprint’s social media strategy for employee communications and enhancements to Sprint’s integrated online leadership community.
Les Landes is President of Landes & Associates. His firm provides services in the areas of planning, marketing, public relations, organizational communications, team development, and quality improvement systems. Prior to starting his own firm, Les worked with Pet Incorporated where he served for 10 years as the company’s Director of Communications with responsibilities for corporate advertising, employee communication, public and media relations, consumer affairs, and creative services. He also played a major role in developing and implementing Pet’s quality management system.
“This is exactly the kind of specific, here’s how we did it, replicable information (that is often difficult to find) that we were looking for. Really great stuff. We got a lot of ideas and also confirmed that in many ways, we are on the right track as well.”
“Real-life examples of the inner workings of two companies’ intranets. Informative speakers. Good tips.”
The problem is how to get your organization’s top executives out in front of as many employees as possible and provide a genuine communication exchange. The solution, for the past 100 years or so, is what we now call the “town hall” meeting, even though companies are not towns, and hardly ever do they occur in halls.
For employees and top executives, town hall meetings can be the best of times, or the worst of times, depending on how they’re handled. This webinar will surface some tried and true ways to create a mass employee meeting that allows a genuine exchange of ideas, issues, concerns and opportunities. You’ll also get a good list of what you absolutely should not do when you plan and produce your next town hall meeting.
What You Will Learn:
- Checklist on planning an effective series of town hall meetings
- Best practices on prepping your executives
- Techniques to break the ice and make the meetings fun and anything but boring
- Planning for tough questions and awkward moments
- Crucial tasks after the event
- Tips and techniques on using the newest technology to simultaneous global town-hall meetings
Presented by:
Les Landes is President of Landes & Associates. His firm provides services in the areas of planning, marketing, public relations, organizational communications, team development, and quality improvement systems. Prior to starting his own firm, Les worked with Pet Incorporated where he served for 10 years as the company’s Director of Communications with responsibilities for corporate advertising, employee communication, public and media relations, consumer affairs, and creative services. He also played a major role in developing and implementing Pet’s quality management system.
Veronica Apostolico is Director, Internal Communication, Global Operations, for Smith & Nephew. Veronica has 18-plus years in the communications field and has worked across all communications disciplines, internal and external, but has focused mainly on internal (change management, leadership coaching, crisis comms, employee comms). She has held communications positions with Warner-Lambert (now Pfizer), Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis – part of the team that led communications during the merger), Knoll Pharma (now Abbott) and RTI International. Veronica has also had her own communications consultancy for 5 years with clients including Aventis, Merck and J&J.
How to grow the leadership capacity of your team to meet changing corporate demands
Learn how to cultivate the leadership potential of your staff and in the process become a better leader yourself.
So much to do, so little time. It’s a common complaint of communication managers everywhere. Demands increase while resources dwindle, and we find our value compromised by perpetual busyness.
How to solve this dilemma? The answer lies in leveraging the power of the people who work with you everyday. By developing the leadership abilities of your staff, you bring greater meaning and satisfaction to the work they do and increase the performance of your team and yourself exponentially.
In this seminar, you’ll learn how traditional management approaches limit the effectiveness of your staff and your potential as a leader. Elise discusses current research on the forces of change that make leadership a job for everyone and how you can appeal to the leadership potential of your employees, regardless of their particular areas of strength.
She also looks at some tools and processes you can start using immediately to create an environment of learning and leadership within your team, including your own personal leadership assessment and learning plan for change.
Learning topics:
- How the complexity of today’s business environment requires a new leadership approach by communicators
- The core competencies required for leadership in the practice of communication
- Discovering what motivates staff to excel
- Creating a learning organization within your own team
- Mapping out a learning plan to increase your team’s leadership capacity
- Making the transition from “doing” to “leading”
How-to Handouts in This CD:
- DOING MORE WITH MORE – 17 slides
- Leadership Interviews Exercise
- Core Competencies for Communication Leadership – Personal Checklist
- Core Competencies for Communication Leadership – Personal Learning Plan
Elise answers real-world questions on:
- How to choose the right leadership competencies for developing your staff
- How to balance the disciplines of managing and leading
- How to find the time to develop you staff when you have so many other things to do
- How to make leaders of staff who would rather be followers
- The best tools and channels to communicate with your team about leadership visions, competencies
- Five areas of leadership ability
- Why communicators tend to be too shy about stepping up to the plate as leaders – and how to over come this
- Recommendations on courses or training to advance your communication leadership skills
- Why communicators may be looked over or taken for granted by the executive leadership of organizations
- Common traits of leadership “heroes”
Who should purchase:
- Business leaders
- Corporate Communications
- Marketing
- Advertising
- Internal Communications
- Public Affairs
- Public Relations
- Organizational Development
- Human Resources
- Corporate Strategy and Development
- Senior Management
- College/university libraries and bookstores
Instructor:
Elise Roaf, MBA, ABC, MC, CHRPhas more than 20 years of experience as a communications professional and consultant in the private and public sector and with nonprofit organizations. Her areas of expertise include strategic communication, change management and organizational development. She has developed curricula, taught courses and facilitated workshops in university and corporate settings and is currently a sessional instructor in organizational communications at Kwantlen University College.
Elise holds a Master of Business Administration specializing in Human Resources Management from Royal Roads University, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Western Ontario, and a Certificate in Public Relations from the University of Regina.
Her professional designations include an Accredited Business Communicator and a Certified Human Resources Professional. She has received numerous awards for excellence in business communication. Among them are the Master Communicator Award, the highest honor awarded to a Canadian member of the International Association of Business Communicators, and the IABC Chairman’s Award for contributions to the association and the profession as a whole.
Reduce waste, cut costs and reduce environmental impact, increase employee engagement and retention, bolster your brand … what’s not to like about infusing green and sustainability into your organization?
And so it is no wonder that companies, large and small across all industries, are launching and supporting employee green teams to add arms and legs to green and responsibility goals. But, as this webinar underscores, green teams and social innovation do not just sprout and blossom without coordination, recognition, communications and a basket full of other good practices.
Whether you are just thinking about launching an employee green team, or you would like to ratchet yours up to the next level, learn the latest strategies from our three experts with a wealth of what works, and what doesn’t.
What You Will Learn:
- Building and communicating the business case for green teams
- How to grow green teams without dampening the grass-roots passion that they started with
- Big picture overview of some best practices from other leading companies, including Bloomberg, EMC, Ingersol Rand and Genentech
- How to create unique recognition and training programs (specific to your corporate culture)
- How to connect green teams to customers and communities
- What are some pitfalls to watch out for?
- How should you measure success?
Learn how the eBay Green Team, started by a small group of employees, has grown to more than 2,400 eBay employeees in 23 countries and 225,000 eBay buyers and sellers. The program was awarded “Best Employee Engagement Strategy” by the 2010 Social Innovation Awards.
Presenters:
Krista Van Tassel: As the newest member of the Wells Fargo Environmental Affairs team, Krista supports our many Green Teams, who promote environmental innovation and educate team members about their role in supporting our sustainability efforts. Before coming to Wells Fargo, Krista earned her MBA in International Business at Georgetown University. She’s also worked in a variety of sustainability and marketing positions in both the nonprofit (Net Impact) and for-profit (Sun Microsystems) worlds, and served as the Cupertino Campus Chair for Hewlett-Packard’s 2002 Charitable Giving Campaign. In her oh-so precious free time, she enjoys running, reading and volunteering.
JD Norton has been with eBay for ten years and spent most of that time not only making it a great place to work for eBay employees, but also making sure eBay is a good corporate citizen in the communities in which they operate. He is currently heads Community Engagement for the eBay Green Team, where he leads a global employee Green Team of over 2500 employees spread out across 25+ office locations worldwide, as well as 300,000+ eBay community members who have also taken the green pledge.
Deborah Fleischer is President of Green Impact, a strategic sustainability consulting practice that helps socially responsible companies and NGOs transform a commitment to sustainability into action. She is a LEED AP with over 20-years of direct experience working with businesses, governmental agencies and non-profits on environmental and sustainability challenges. Her expertise focuses on strategy, engagement and communications. She is the author of Green Teams: Engaging Employees in Sustainability and is a regular contributor to GreenBiz.com, where she has blogged extensively on best practices for engaging employees. Her recent clients include the University of California San Francisco, Plantronics, Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI), Sonoma Open Space District and the Sonoma Land Trust. You can follow her occasional tweets at @GreenImpact, join her Facebook page or check out her blog Shades of Green.
“Good ideas for reinvigorating our team and expanding our reach internally and externally.” … Webinar testimonial
If you are like most communicators, you know that text alone is just not enough—today’s employees not only want to see their leaders on video, but want to be seen themselves. YouTube, Vimeo and FaceTime are teaching your employees how powerful video is, and learning about video in their non-work life makes them want to do more with it at work.
Creating meaningful business communications is not the same as recording cute dog tricks. Your employees need to know what works, and what doesn’t. And more importantly, you and your company need to be ready for: increased demand on your IT networks; the need to put policies and procedures in place and the importance of providing training to help them get it right.
In this series you will hear top practitioners talk about how they’ve put a new generation of digital video tools to work in their organization to inspire, lead and train employees; to cultivate employee engagement by putting the right tools in the hands of employees themselves; and to integrate external and internal communications for the kind of results one can only get with truly aligned communications. We’ve found practioners from leading companies to share specifics on what works across categories including internal communications, marketing, PR, social media and human resources.
What You Will Learn:
- How leading companies use employee created video: when, where, and how
- What the IT and regulatory issues are that you need to be most concerned about
- How leaders train and manage employees who are contributing video
- How video can be better integrated with intranets and social media
- The three most important things to AVOID with employee generated content.
- AND most importantly, what kinds of good results happen when you get it right.
Presented by:
Ronna Lichtenberg is co-founder and CEO, Videotrope. Prior to her entrepreneurial career, Ronna had a long-tenured career contributing to strategic planning and marketing initiatives at Prudential and Prudential Securities. During her tenure, she was the first woman named to Prudential Securities Operating Council. As a superior communicator and strategic consultant, Ronna’s experience incorporates wide-ranging personal experience as a communicator, including former contributing editor of “O”, the Oprah magazine and regular appearances as a workplace expert on national TV. She has published three books in ten languages (to rave reviews) and has a decade of experience as a keynote speaker with Fortune 500 companies and helping small to large businesses successfully execute business development imperatives and strategic initiatives.
Dave Williams has been working at ESPN since 2000. Prior to joining the corporate communication team he worked with ESPN’s production operations team on all of ESPN’s studio shows including SportsCenter, Sunday NFL Countdown, and Baseball Tonight. As a senior internal communication specialist, Williams brings his vast videography, digital editing, writing, and production experience to the internal communication team. He ensures that the multi-media aspects of the organization’s internal communication strategy are of the same high-quality production techniques that ESPN employees are accustomed to seeing on their external programming.
Deirdré Straughan is a Technical Content specialist for Solaris Product Management at Oracle. In this position she produces and/or manages production of technical content (video, white papers, web pages) about key Solaris technologies including storage, networking, and installation. Examples of my video work can be seen here (look for the items with my name in the description). In this position she produces and/or manages production of technical content (video, white papers, web pages) about key Solaris technologies including storage, networking, and installation. Examples of my video work can be seen here (look for the items with my name in the description). Deirdré has been communicating online since 1982. Her experience managing and communicating with online communities dates back to 1993, when she began interacting with Incat/Adaptec/Roxio customers via CompuServe, the Usenet, and listserv. She also wrote, edited and managed a stable of newsletters with 140,000 subscribers, and managed websites and online strategy for Adaptec/Roxio.