Strategic Employee Engagement & Internal Brand Activation

In this age of 24/7, multi-media, multi-platform communications – getting your message seen – and, more importantly, remembered—is a vital step toward engaging your employees. Messages must encourage a conversation with, rather than just being a one-way monologue pushed toward them.  

Through current case study examples this interactive workshop will show you what goes into creating effective, efficient and engaging video content and proven strategies, practical approaches and useful tips to creating story-based content that engages employees and keeps the door open to ongoing interaction, including how to:

• Ask the right questions before creating an online video content strategy
• Explore best practices for developing compelling, audience-engaging content
• Address expectations regarding engaging with and sharing video content and “viral views”
• Develop cost-effective video content for multiple distribution channels: both internal and external
• Create a phased strategy for developing content, measuring success and achieving acceptance
• Apply these approaches to your specific content needs

Denise McKee, Chief Operating Officer, AboutFace Media

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. You will learn how to harness the collective insight of your communication and design teams by using an audience-centric approach which employs a collaborative mapping technique. using audience-centric approach which employs a collaborative mapping technique that harnesses the collective insight of your communication and design teams. This renowned technique 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 while , and changinge attitudes and behaviors to meet business objectives

Preston Lewis, Founder & CEO, Intactic

A successful brand comes from inside a company and permeates the organizational fabric in all directions. It’s what a company is all about—the promise it represents to consumers, the need of theirs it fills, and the actions the company takes to make good on its brand promise. Yet, internal brand alignment remains the most difficult part of the branding process.

This high-energy session will take you through “The Actionable Brand” process, a simple yet powerful tool for companies of all sizes who want to inspire and engage employees so that whether they are on the frontlines, in the back-office, or on the executive team, they know the company brand, they live it, breathe it, and can effectively and confidently communicate it.

Join us in this workshop to gain a greater understanding of “The Actionable Brand’s” 5 critical components, including:

1. Who your brand is for and why you’re for them
2. Your brand’s mental model (the commercial concept of your business), which completes the sentence, “We are in the business of . . .”
3. Your vision for your desired marketplace position and supporting objectives in the next 3 to 5 years and beyond
4. The behaviors and beliefs that form the basis for how your company and its employees need to act and what they need to believe to achieve your objectives
5. Your key message for the marketplace that every employee should be able to articulate

• Bonus: you’ll receive a free download of The Actionable Brand eBook and tool kit to take back to your office

Frank Cowell, President & Creative Director, Elevator Agency

This forward-thinking workshop will provide you with an outline of the increasing role of values in the workplace, and how you can attract and retain top talent by aligning the values of the company with your employees.

Zenzi Communications is a pioneer in the growing field of values-based marketing. Leaving this workshop you will discover how you too can use data-driven insights to help you create value-based connections with employees and clients, including how to:

• Align company and employee values and why it is is crucial in today’s ever-changing workplace

• Develop a data driven approach to help your company tap into the values of your employees

• Implement best practices in hiring and managing your employees based on values

• Learn how values influence the roles of employees within an organization

• Discover which companies understand value-based hiring, and are practicing it effectively

All attendees will receive a free download of Zenzi’s Values Marketing eBook, along with a quick guide to determining and aligning your company’s values.

Julie Lyons, President, Zenzi Communications

You’ll leave this session armed with ways to engage your employees, including how to:

• Generate communication channels to elicit transparent leadership and continuous feedback companywide
• Foster philanthropic outreach through companywide volunteer initiatives and promote accountability amongst employees
• Align engagement strategy and priorities with that of your organization and business leaders
• Create culture in the workplace to drive business results and make your company a great place for employees to work

Lisa Barbato, Director, Communications & Employee Engagement

Lionsgate

Scripps Networks Interactive is dedicated to developing creative, trendsetting, original television programming and digital content that celebrates the lifestyle categories of home, food and travel. Their goal is to build brands for life as they’ve done with flagship networks, HGTV, and the Food Network. Their determination to stay on brand is what has set them apart from the competition and is a core concept that has made them today’s leader in lifestyle media.

But there is often a price to pay when corporations experience rapid growth and a stronger identity within their core brands. That price is a fractionalized and siloed workforce that inhibits the free flow of shared communication, ideas and innovation across company lines. To address the issue, Scripps Networks devised a strategy to educate and bring the enterprise brand to the forefront of company initiatives with a multi-faceted plan to change perception and close the gap.

In this session, you will learn in detail how you too can foster employee engagement to create brand ambassadors across your enterprise, including how to:

• Create alignment
• Break down silos
• Improve new hire experiences
• Increase retention
• Generate more valuable employee survey feedback
• Strengthen company culture and inspire employees

Millennials come into the workforce expecting to be highly informed and involved. If you are not engaging them, they could begin searching for new jobs on your dime. So, in order to fully engage them and keep valuable talent, you need to learn the motivation and driving forces behind their work ethics and general expectations.

This session explores how Red Hat is using lessons learned from open source software development communities to engage, not just Millennials, but all associates in business decisions and daily communications. Discover how you too can implement Red Hat’s tried-and-true engagement strategies, including how to:

• Effectively use open source principles to drive associate collaboration and engagement in corporate activities that will have a broad impact
• Engage associates in meaningful discussions that connect them with company strategy and culture
• Gain executives’ trust in taking a more open approach to communication

Heather Marks, Director, Strategic Internal Communications, Red Hat

Find out how ConocoPhillips, the world’s largest exploration and production company, has delivered a consistent arc of internal communications via multiple print and digital channels. You will be provided with insight into how a multi-faceted, multi-media approach to internal communications has the power to drives engagement across demographic and global audiences.

Learn the detailed accounts behind ConocoPhillips success and how to integrate them into your existing internal communication strategy, including how to:

• Achieve engagement by delivering all five elements of the communications arc: information, education, recognition, inspiration and entertainment 
• Deliver both necessary company information and tell personal stories that employees can relate to
• Embrace digital methods without abandoning print
• Tell everyone’s story - from senior management to contract workers, all with equal frequency and enthusiasm

Ray Scippa, Director, Internal Communications, ConocoPhillips

Whether your team is local or global, learn how to make culturally diverse teams flourish. As different as we may perceive cultures around the world or even within our community, the employee engagement fundamentals are the same; our similarities outweigh our differences.

This session will help you to understand and adapt to other cultures, then use that knowledge to connect with your employees, and help them connect with each other. This session will also include:

• Turning the cultural differences into strengths
• Focusing on the human element first so your employees can take care of the bottom line 
• Engaging employees across cultures locally, or globally, with less control and more trust

This interactive, dynamic session will focus on a common, real-world situation of trying to find solutions to engage off-site employees. You will get an inside look into the problem-solving tactics leaders employ to enhance their remote team’s feelings of engagement and inclusion.

Xcel Energy is fully committed to increasing the intensity of off-site employees’ connection to the company in an environment that supports growth, goals, and personal well-being. This session will provide you with solutions to integrate into your own company in order to engage your off-site employees, including:

• Advocating for your team’s success by pushing empowerment which leads to involvement
• Generating creative problem-solving solutions to help your team feel truly connected to the larger organization   
• Executing decision-making power to strengthen your team’s performance and your company’s bottom line

Courtney Green, Inclusion & Engagement Analyst, Xcel Energy

Hear how rag & bone brought employees along a company journey as the organization quickly evolved from a small start-up to one of the fastest growing retail brands. This session will showcase how a creative, simple, and engaging approach to employee development can bring discipline without losing the entrepreneurial culture and spirit that has made the brand so successful.

Following this discussion, you’ll understand how to successfully:

• Assess what makes your employer brand and culture unique
• Identify challenges inherent to change during fast growth and how to preempt some of them
• Create an HR/Employee Engagement road map that will enable all your employees to support the development and performance of your brand, while staying true to your culture

Sarah Smoller, VP – Managing Consultant, Ketchum Change

Traci Wilk, VP Human Resources, rag & bone

Bring the story of your company to life; take your audience to the heart of the action and build an esprit de corps amongst your target audiences! This is what Teach For America has aimed to do with its regularly scheduled internal video programming.

This forward-thinking session will cover different storytelling methods and go behind-the-scenes to see how it all comes together and how it can be applied to your internal communications strategy, including:

• How powerful video events are in shaping staff culture and internal branding
• The internal change process of abandoning a monthly newsletter
• How to weave the information, celebration, and connection into one program 
• Behind the scenes conversations about strategy and content for the show
• The nitty gritty of putting on an amateur and low-budget but high-impact production

Learn how the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region and the Metropolitan Group spearheaded a unique internal grassroots engagement model that increased interest and commitment.

The session will explore the pitfalls and identify high points of a grassroots approach, with emphasis on lessons learned and hindsight knowledge observations, so that you’re able to successfully duplicate the efforts within your organization, including how to:

• Establish a platform for a social purpose brand by discovering your 3V’s:  Values, Value, and Voice
• Understand the role of behavior in identity and explore behavior models that help advance a stronger connection to missions
• Investigate how sensing surveys can be used to establish a baseline and drive impact
• Probe the potential for deploying brand ambassadors
• Engage employees, refine and evolve your brand identity, and enhance morale within your organization

 Laura K. Lee Dellinger, Principal/President

Metropolitan Group

Learn how to build a community and engage employees on LinkedIn, who can in turn, become your most vocal brand ambassadors. Individuals and organizations are using robust Profiles and Pages to enhance their brand reputation and thought leadership.

During this session you will learn how to promote your brand by optimizing your LinkedIn Profile, create compelling content to engage your connections and followers, and craft a detailed Company Page. You’ll also learn how to:

• Leverage LinkedIn as part of your communications strategy
• Create a strong and valuable presence on LinkedIn
• Build your content strategy on LinkedIn
• Use LinkedIn internally to cultivate culture in your organization

Jill Jones, Manager, Corporate Communications, LinkedIn

In this session we will explore emerging workplace diversity trends and offer a practical plan to build a culture of inclusion that will give your company an edge to compete effectively in the future.  When employees don’t feel included, it leads to disengagement, low-work productivity, and has a snowball effect on many other areas affecting not only the individual and their teams, but the entire company.

To help you end this downward spiral, this session will provide you with inclusion techniques that will help you attract, retain, and even improve your entire company culture, including:

• Identifying the benefits and challenges of building a workforce of inclusion
• Recognizing the economic advantages that come from having a diverse workforce
• Building a foundation of inclusion at your organization
• Giving your company an edge against competitors by changing and improving internal factors

Sometimes the shortest distance between antiquated “employee programs” and Millennial-attracting “engagement initiatives” is a rapid and unexpected change event like an acquisition, new process implementation, or corporate reorganization. These are the moments when both leadership and their teams are willing to try slick new programs to ease the pain of change and give associates a sense of belonging, the crucial first step to engagement.

From this discussion you’ll gain an understanding of how to successfully connect your workforce, including how to:

• Understand how change creates fear and fear creates and sustains change aversion
• Discover what your team wants and needs to move from a state of fear to belonging and engagement
• Select and launch affordable social media-based platforms to drive integrated engagement efforts
• Use volunteer engagement groups to make your small team act and feel like a village

Alice Melott, Director, Culture & Communications, YP

This session will show you how to align, inform, and inspire your employees around company strategy and culture through a variety of meetings. You’ll learn techniques and tricks to help you engage employees by creating an open environment to foster dialogue and provide them with information to help them feel more connected to your company, including:

• Communicating your company’s strategy and culture to align, inform, and inspire employees
• Leading a variety of meetings to build trust and increase transparency
• Engaging employees and allow them to speak their mind and hear important messages from leaders
• Planning and organizing fun and cost-effective ideas for interactive and meaningful meetings

  Golda Akhgarnia, Internal Brand Communications Manager, Jack in the Box

The greatest challenge organizations face during times of change is the ability to unlearn habits, work styles, and other behavioral norms that become artifacts of culture. This session will offer insights into the connection between unlearning, culture change and the influence they have over employee engagement, including how you can:  

• Identify behaviors that need to be unlearned in order for change to stick
• Engage employees at the human level
• Understand the depth of behavior norms and the important roles they play
• Implement tactics to manage culture change and other transitions

Melinda McAuliff, Sr. Manager, Organizational Change Management and Internal Communications, EarthLink