Internal Communication: The Comms Superpower for the AI Age

Schedule

Module 1: Internal Communication in Shifting Times
Thursday, March 5; 1–2:30 p.m. ET

In order to understand the future, it’s important to get a grounding on the current state of play in internal communication, the different roles internal communication is expected to play and the different levels of maturity that exist in organizations worldwide.

We’ll focus on introducing:

• Employee communication (overall messaging, benefit comms).
• Change communication (technology change, M&A, restructuring).
• Emphasis on communication (improving performance versus sentiment management).
• The culture of internal communication in practice (reactive or proactive, top-down or interactive).

Module 2: Why Research Is the Key to Impact
Thursday, March 12; 1–2:30 p.m. ET

In order to have genuine business impact, research is the core activity that makes the difference. Without intentional research, it’s impossible to understand what drives your business, how it makes money, why your organization is moving in a particular direction and what your employees know, feel and say about that direction and about their own roles in getting it there.

We’ll focus on:

• Basic business literacy — how does your organization make money.
• Understanding your employee population.
• Collecting and analyzing business data.
• “The Two Question Survey.”
• Challenging the relationship between internal communication and “employee engagement” survey results.

Module 3: The Power of Prioritization and Process
Thursday, March 19; 1–2:30 p.m. ET

The primary role of an internal communication professional is to help their organization achieve its priorities. A lot of that starts with understanding what the priorities are — which is often a challenge when there are gaps between stated priorities and what’s actually driving the demands from leaders, managers and other stakeholders. 

Understanding the priorities is not only important in driving and framing your messaging, but also in making your planning process logical, impactful and replicable.

We’ll focus on:

• Getting clarity on business priorities.
• Understanding your boss’ agenda and priorities (particularly “KPIs”).
• Engaging leaders and identifying allies and advocates.
• Building the Communication Calendar.
• Setting out your processes.

Module 4: Channels, Platforms, Budgets and Business Cases
Thursday, March 26; 1–2:30 p.m. ET

IC professionals have a range of channels and platforms to use to connect their organizations with the priorities, principles and practices of the business — and support its rhythm, momentum and agility. We’ll discuss the range of common channels and platforms, and also how to make the case for aligning the right priorities with the right tools, intensity and resources to ensure they’re understood and acted upon.

We’ll focus on:

• Platforms (email, intranets, internal social).
• Channels (events, forums, newsletters).
• Networks (informal, formal and intentional — and how to explore them).
• Budgets and business cases — how to get the right resources for the right outcomes.

Module 5: Measurement: Demonstrating Your Power
Thursday, April 16; 1–2:30 p.m. ET

At any level of maturity, being able to demonstrate your impact comes down to your ability to link your work to business outcomes, track and trace their impact on those outcomes over time and present your findings to your stakeholders in clear and compelling ways.

 We’ll focus on:

• Conducting quantitative and qualitative research.
• Measuring message recall: the most critical and overlooked communication metric.
• Tracking impact on specific business outcomes.
• Reinforcing the research fundamentals.

Module 6: How AI Is Changing the Future — and Nature — of Work
Thursday, April 23; 1–2:30 p.m. ET

Before getting into the nuts and bolts of planning and implementation, this module will explore how the adoption of AI is reshaping the pace and nature of work, and how the changes AI is driving in the dynamics and demographics of the workforce will shift the focus of internal communication.

We’ll focus on:

• The Big Shift: the convergence of technology, demographics and cultural change that’s currently underway.
• How the delayering of business is shifting the focus of internal communication from “engagement” to “effectiveness.”
• Why communication will move toward a higher level of importance and influence.
• How you can prepare for this shift, even if it may be slow to come in your organization.