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Sharpening Internal Communication – Innovation for 2015 and Beyond

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Sharpening Internal Communication – Innovation for 2015 and Beyond

What happens when you cross innovation with excellence?
Winning performances explode!

The combination of creative brilliance shared at the IoIC Central Region’s annual seminar and the inspirational excellence displayed by organisations at the awards dinner that followed made for an unforgettable experience for attendees. Read about all the winners and enjoy our Book of the Night – click here to download it.

The IoIC’s eighth annual seminar took place on Friday 27th February in Leicester and was attended by over 100 IC pros.

Attendees at the seminar heard from some of the country’s leading communication experts and practitioners on:

  • Transforming internal communication
  • Developing the powers that create engagement
  • Using humour, happiness and laughter to enhance communication
  • Embracing social media and applying new techniques
  • Helping leaders to build and repair trust among UK employees

Scarlet Design captured the themes throughout the day, creating giant visuals and featuring highly on the agenda were creative ninjas, green balloons, rocks of gratitude and Albert Einstein’s famous quote…

‘Insanity is defined as doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different response.’


The event was kicked off by Lesley Allman (@Allmancoms), MD of Allman Communication, Director of IoIC and judge of national and regional IC awards. Lesley encouraged attendees to record and share their thoughts and ideas throughout the day on the 3 Cs: –

  • Innovative Content– the latest thinking around stories, conversations and messages
  • Innovative Channels– fresh ways to reach your audiences – and to listen to and involve them
  • Innovative Capability– the skills and powers today’s IC professionals need to succeed

The scene was set by Richard Donovan (@RichardADonovan), Head of Internal Communications, UK&I who talked about transforming internal communication and how Experian’s award winning team has achieved success.

Experian’s UK&I Internal Communications Team was selected as IoIC’s 2014 ‘Best In-House Team of the Year’. Among that talented team is Cathy Power (@cathypower2003), Internal Communications Manager, Global Technology Services and IoIC committee member who helped to organise this years seminar and awards event. Cathy put together a fab storify of all the tweets from the seminar.

Richard spoke about the value of ‘empowering your team to play and be creative’ and the positive effect this has on engagement scores. He shared Experian’s use of design to create more engaging comms and their love of visuals -infographics rock for simplifying financial results – enabling people to understand and digest complex data.

Richard shared some powerful words from Jay-Z…

‘People are so preoccupied…
When you get their attention you need to make it count.’


Command the attention of your audience – ‘focus on telling stories. They work so much better than global straplines.’

Following the seminar, Richard shared a very personal and poignant post about his experience of addressing the crowd. I’d highly recommend you take a look.

Only 1 in 5 people are fully engaged at work

‘Direct line managers have the biggest impact on how we feel about work. As leaders yourselves, find your team’s sweet spot.’

Stuart Baldwin (@Stuart_Baldwin) from The Positive Company explored the science behind engagement and demonstrated the six practical leadership skills to create performance, empowerment and happiness:

Focus, Creativity, Purpose, Questions, Optimism, Impact.

Engagement is an emotion – what you focus on you get.

Ability, integrity and benevolence – the key drivers of leadership trust

Nick Terry from Top Banana (@WeAreTopBanana) and Katalin Illes and Martin Mathews, both from the University of Westminster talked about The UK Trust Crisis. Nick shared some of the findings from their new report, highlighting the critical role of 21st century leadership communication in repairing the broken trust of UK employees.

‘Laughter is a social lubricant’ helping people to connect

Stephanie Davies, the very natural and accomplished CEO from Laughology (@Laughology) demonstrated how to use humour, happiness & laughter to enhance communication. Stephanie discussed the concept that if you are happy, you are more productive, and happy teams = happy customers and a happy bottom line.

The latest trends in social media

Drew Benvie (@Drewb) from Batenhall shared his experiences of how social media looks now, how it will evolve in 2015 and what brands should plan for.

Workshop time

In addition to the top line-up of speakers, attendees were able to participate in three highly interactive and entertaining workshops.

Don’t Just Write Stories – Design & Play Them

Ezri Carlebach (@ezriel) shared an eclectic mix of arts and design practices to shed new light on the ancient craft of storytelling. He shared with us his storytelling template:

  • Act 1 – What’s the issue and why does it matter?
  • Act 2 – What happens next?
  • Act 3 – What’s the result?

Kick Start Your IC Career

Liam Fitzpatrick (@LiamFitz), IC Adviser and co-author of Internal Communications: A Manual for Practitioners, explored the options for developing IC careers further.

He asked the audience to consider their core competencies and to rate themselves against a number of skills from building effective relationships, consulting and coaching others to how they approach innovation and creativity and how they make things happen.

Become an Organisation of Creative Ninjas!

Tim Grice from Purple Tiger offered valuable insight into what stops organisations being more innovative and shared some practical tools to help generate more creative solutions.

Tim held an improvised brainstorm session with 6 attendees to plan an imaginary team night out. He asked the audience to burst balloons when they heard a ‘bad idea’ or one they didn’t like, demonstrating the damaging effect of negativity.

Congratulations to the IoIC for a fun, engaging and informative seminar, and to all those who went on to win awards at the event that followed.

What next from IoIC?

IoIC Live 2015 

The theme for this year’s IoIC Live will be ‘Agile IC’, as investing in your skills as a professional
communicator has never been so important.

The need for skilled, learned and agile IC professionals is growing as the IC function takes on more responsibility for driving and facilitating communication – as well as delivering it. IoIC Live 2015 will be staged at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, kicking off with an evening session on Thursday 30 April before a full day of debate, discussion, case studies and presentations by thought leaders on Friday 1 May. The event is also a great place to network, of course!

 

To find out more or book your place, email brenda@ioic.org.uk

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Alexander Mills, Communications Manager — South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue

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DR ELENI ATHANASAKOS, Lead Paediatric Clinical Scientist — NHS Barts Health

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Kath Evans — Director of Children’s Nursing at Barts Health

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Lianne Springer — Communications and Engagement Lead

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Louise Burnard, Head of Marketing and Communications UK — Be | Shaping the Future

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Dr Anna Batho — Clinical Psychologist – Critical Care, UCLH

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Georgia Beech — Internal Communications Specialist, Ocado Group

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Sarah Wright, Head of Communications and Campaigns — NEA

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Alana Khaytin, Communications Specialist — Braskem America

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Sara Langston, Patient Engagement & Marketing Manager — italk

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Steph Tranter, Hybrid Exec Coach & Psychologist — StephTranter.com

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Emma Wright — South Yorkshire & Rescue

“We worked with the team at Alive to create our staff recognition video.
At a time like this, its never been more important to share the amazing work that our staff have done and continue to do on a daily basis under very difficult circumstances. We wanted to shout about this and recognise that when the time came, South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue stepped up to the plate. We didn’t want an ordinary thank you post on social media or a basic email sent out internally, we wanted something special. Enter Alive. ”

Emma Wright — South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue

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Keren McCarron, Head of Corporate Affairs & Communications — KP Snacks

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Thank you so much. Incredible work done at incredible speed by incredible people.
Outstanding work as ever and what a turnaround. As for the concepts – wow. These are that good it would be an insult to describe them as just good. It’s a joke, quite frankly. This is exactly the Alive effect I was after. Right now I feel like I am living in an Alive With Ideas wonderland. Thank you!”

Jack Grasby, Campaigns Manager — SYFR

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Amy Lilja, IC Manager — Hennepin Healthcare

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Julie Odams, Assistant Director of Communications & Customers — Derbyshire County Council

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