Rethinking how we communicate with people

I hold a monthly (or as often as I can) slot in our company’s canteen where people can come along and hear from guest speakers from both within the organisation and the outside world.  It’s a great way to get people at the company to hear about parts of the business with which they’re unfamiliar and to get an insight into the workings of where they work.

We’ve had famous people talking about their chosen specialised subject and senior leaders in the business giving an update on what they’re doing and why people should be interested.  The feedback is always really positive.

If I know enough about the subject matter, I chair the event, interviewing the guest speaker and controlling the Q&A session at the end.  It raises the profile not only of the speaker, but also of Internal Communications, as I send out all of the invites and post the event onto the company intranet and brand it as an Internal Comms event.

I don’t know if any of you do the same thing, but it’s a really easy way to get business messages across to colleagues around the company – if you can influence senior leaders to do it.

And that’s the real crunch.

The preparation time for getting this to happen is minimal and the costs are very low – the PA and the cameraman come to around £600 per event.  Getting people to come along isn’t difficult if the guest speaker is famous (like Boris Johnson, the mayor of London) and attendance for internal speakers is also quite straight forward as long as you talk to the right people.

But getting someone from the business to speak about their area of expertise can be tricky.  Getting some of our senior leaders to do ANYTHING is difficult!  Thankfully, I have a pretty good network of senior leaders and can influence them to give updates on the business.

If you don’t do this sort of thing at the moment, give it a try – getting someone senior, who is usually hidden away on an Executive/C-suite floor, to talk to the troops about what’s going on in the organisation and fielding questions from the assembled masses can have a really positive effect.  We all know that being involved and getting closer to the decision-making circle of a company can make people fell more valued, more motivated and, that horrible word, “engaged.”

Let me know how you get on.