I recently caught up with Sophie Moore, an internal communications professional, on her first few months at SNC-Lavalin’s Atkins, as well as her first experience in a merger and acquisition environment.

It’s also interesting to hear from someone who has chosen IC as a profession, rather than falling into it as is normally the case!

What does your role involve day-to-day?
My day-to-day role involves a huge variety: writing articles, engaging stakeholders, discussing campaign briefs, maintaining our intranet, creating content for our internal social media, analysing our readership stats, advising on webinars, creating agendas for our IC community meetings and writing even more content!

What have you learned so far?
I’ve learned that you have to be in it to win it! I find that to be able to engage employees you have to be passionate about IC. Although the subject matter can sometimes be challenging, if you’re passionate enough about engagement, you can always think of creative ways to communicate that to your audience, and that can be through your writing, your choice of channel and tailoring it perfectly to your audience.

What would you say your challenges are, both as a business and an Internal Comms team?
Experiencing a M&A is challenging because there’s uncertainty from employees (at its best) and anger and frustration (at its worst). There will inevitably be a lot of change, whether this is your financial year changing, general day-t