Audience
Anyone involved in:
- Internal communication
- External communication / Marketing
- Corporate affairs / Corporate communication
- Public affairs / Public relations
- Human resources
- Investor relations
Skills Gained
- Make the lines of communication reflect that employees are individuals
- Align HR practices and business processes
- Use goals and targets to underpin behaviour
- Make your company's vision and values live for your staff and learn how this can contribute to overall success
- Engage employees in the corporate branding process, and how it can be key to bringing brand values to life
Course Outline
Voicing corporate vision
- How to develop a vision of what an organisation wants to create and become
- How to "scan" the future to see what it might bring towards an organisation, whether it likes it or not!
- Creating engagement and dialogue within the organisation to communicate the vision, the core values and culture
Specifically:
- demonstrating corporate vision and values through stories
- finding / creating examples of leaders embodying these in their actions and communicating them to employees
- conveying how the company works through myths, real-life examples rather than regulations
- creating dialogue with employees to get feedback on how they experience culture and values in practice
Charlene Collison, Director, Oracy
Knowing your audience: when the same message has to go to your employees, your customers and your shareholders
- To understand the needs and perceptions of all stakeholders in the business is the essential first step to developing an effective communication programme. Looking at formal and informal research techniques and at ways of linking communications activity with the strategic needs of the business.
- Understanding your audiences and how to deal with each
- Making the message have meaning to each group
- Using the right distribution channel to reach your target audience
Karen Kimberley, Communications Consultant
How to ensure employees understand the business's vision and strategy Vision and strategy tend to live in the rarefied atmosphere of the boardroom, often only venturing out in the odd CEO video or roadshow. But the vision and strategy need real bite in an organisation if the brand promise and brand experience are to be consistent.
This session will consider:
- How the vision and strategy can be made intelligible
- How they can be made relevant to every individual
- How can they be actioned by a united organisation
Covering some well-tested communication and engagement principles, the session will also offer practical ideas and examples of how to ensure every individual in an organisation works towards a common purpose.
Colin Hatfield, Senior Partner, The Company Agency
Case study - creating lasting vision and values
- Asking the right questions and listening to all the answers
- Using the right protagonists; keeping HR below the waterline
- Having a few great leaders - then aiming to create many more
- Accelerating, sustaining and measuring change: cost effectively, with confidence...and without consultants!
How to make the company's vision and values live for the staff
Employees are any organisation's most important advocates - they are the voice of authenticity. The company's vision and values provide the opportunity to create alignment, inspiration and, crucially, a framework within which to behave and make decisions. This presentation will demonstrate:
- The importance of collaboration in developing the values and demonstrating how they impact on decision-making and behaviour
- The changing nature of influence and the implications for employee communications
- The value of continuous dialogue with employees to enable 'light touch' management of the vision and values
- Identification of the social influencers within the workforce and effective ways for engaging them as advocates and ambassadors
- Ways of energising, motivating and enthusing staff to consistently 'go the extra mile'
Viki Cooke, Joint Chief Executive, Opinion Leader Research
Leveraging the brand as a vehicle for communicating vision and values
In an ever-commoditising and converging marketplace, differentiating through experiences not just communications is paramount.This doesn't make 'traditional' branding redundant, but does mean that brand owners must spend time and money delivering brand through people, not just collateral. Crucially, it is possible to prove that this investment has a demonstrable effect on the bottom line.
- People are not cattle: living the brand means more than reciting the vision and wearing the livery
- Making the connection between the brand promise 'the way we work around here'
- How on-brand behaviour results in greater customer commitment and greater profit
- Great communications is not enough - there are company-wide implications
- Brand engagement is a must-have not a nice-tohave: your people deliver (or break) your promises
Jan Kewley, Brand Engagement Consultant, Landor Associates
Communicating corporate vision in an international organisation
In these days of uncertainty, global re-organisations and cost containment, how do we motivate people across large global organisations to be positive about the company and the future? The key to achieving this is employee engagement strategies, which are both pragmatic and creative. How do you take the same corporate message to different business units and countries in a way that is relevant to each? What is the role of leaders? In this interactive session we will work creatively to explore key outcomes of engagement - raising employee understanding and commitment to achieve business goals through improving customer experience; and developing leaders through delivery of employee engagement activities.!
- The link between employee engagement and commitment and the delivery of business goals
- A framework to engage employees globally with vision, strategy and brand
- Creative and dialogue techniques to apply in your organisation
- Assessing how likely a corporate initiative is to succeed in business or operating units
Colin Jarvis
Case studies
The Highways Agency and Hewden plc - generating and managing corporate reputation in an ever-changing world
- Identifying your stakeholders and developing relationships
- The CEO: championing the business within and without
- Your employees: ambassadors or assassins?
- Effective use of all the communications disciplines
Sara Render, Chief Executive, Kinross and Render
