
Change: Love It, Hate It, We’ve All Got to Face It
On Tuesday morning, we hosted our Quarterly Internal Communications Advisory Board at the wonderful TOG FORA Offices at The Shard for Heads of Internal Comms and Employee Engagement. Hosted by our CEO Andrew Harvey, we welcomed a number of IC professionals from various sectors to discuss their thoughts and experiences of communicating and engaging the workforce during times of change.
Is change easier to communicate now than ever before?
With channels and capabilities of Internal Communications teams having increased, Andrew posed the idea that communicating change is perhaps easier now than in the past. In the 21st century, our employees are living in an instantaneous messaging world, an ‘infodemic’, as one participant coined it. There is a societal expectation that we are all contactable 24/7 and with such fast pace, our attention spans have decreased considerably. Given this, the general consensus seemed to highlight the cruciality of the ‘advisory’ role played by IC professionals, i.e., supporting business leaders to ensure any messaging has a clear focus and end goal, which may be provoking an action or emotion amongst the workforce. Yes, it’s great that many organisations have access to multiple channels and yes, it’s great to produce brilliant content and to know that it’s being read… but ultimately, we need employees to receive the information they need, to feel cared about and to, at the end of the day, ‘recommend [the workplace] to a friend’.
Is it change? Or is it ‘life’?
It goes without saying that Covid-19 was the calling for internal comms functions across the professional sphere – implementing working from home changes ove