The opening keynote from Wayne Clarke, founding partner of The Global Growth Institute, set the tone for the day as he discussed the ways comms leaders can turn strategy into action. Organisations must scale their knowledge and create impactful strategies that resonate with managers, leadership teams and CEOs.

In the first session of the day, Felicity Allen, commercial director at creative communications agency, Something Big, talked about employee engagement and how to build a successful culture and profitable business. Businesses must consider who the employees are when forming a strategy, and understand what their lifestyle means in terms of comms access.

Values are central to creating an effective employee engagement strategy. “Whatever your values are they should be hugely evident across your workforce. There has been a bit of juxtaposition between what companies are communicating about, how they’re communicating and what their values actually are,” says Allen.

Honesty and transparency are integral to achieving a high level of employee engagement. Whether that is sharing financial results, strategies or visions, organisations must ensure employees are in the loop with the reality of business. “Employee engagement has to be a genuine commitment to putting the workforce first,” adds Allen.

Internal comms must also be tailored to the workforce. Allen says, “You may have one message, but you need to deliver that message in different ways to different people to allow it to resonate.”

Looking towards the future of work in 2021, Allen says, “When productivity, sickness and absence is so inextricably linked to wellbeing, my gut is that this looming health crisis absolutely requires your attention.” The pandemic is an opportunity for businesses to press reset and realign their values to engage with employees in a more impactful way.

In the second session of the day, Ciara O’Keeffe, international digital workplace specialist, discussed the use of digital, social & collaboration tools to connect with non-desk employees. O’Keeffe kicked off with a poll, in which 67% of attendees said their businesses’ non-desk employees do not have easy access to a company email address, despite this being the organisation’s fundamental communication stream.

When deciding which comms platform to use when connecting with non-desk employees, O’Keeffe says, “For any tool, the number one most important part when launching, is easy access, because if they need to jump through three or four stages, they just wont do it." If an organisation can gather analytics data, then it can deliver segmented audience communications to better connect with non-desk employees.

O’Keeffe says businesses must think about the ‘need to haves’, before getting to the ‘nice to haves’ when it comes to internal comms. Work out what is essential for the business and how a comms platform or tool can add value to make these streams more efficient. Now is the time to consider growth and investment in this area, as O’Keeffe predicts the next few years will see significant market consolidation in employee engagement application.

John Drummond, chair of culture, communications and employee consultancy, Corporate Culture, set out to answer the question, ‘How on earth can we create more human organisations?’ This session was based on research that found organisations are at best only 50% human.

Businesses are not open enough to thinking about diversity of opinion says Drummond, including deliberately tapping into opinion that is contrary to its own. “It's time for a complete reimagining of what work is for, and my starting point from a behavioural change lens is always, what are specific behaviours that define how we work in the office?’ says Drummond.

He then talked through the specific behaviours that make office life worthwhile. Research found concentration to be the dominant behaviour defining office life, followed by conversation, collaboration, exploration and reflection. “The first part of becoming more human is to define the belief system you have for your organisation,” say Drummond. Human organisations must have a really deep understanding of its people and what they need from the office space.

Rob Archer, UK Director of psychology consultancy, Cognacity, led the last session before the discussion groups took place in the afternoon. Archer explained why creating a high performance routine can optimise productivity and counter burnout in a hybrid-working world.

Archer talked through the different stages of a productive routine, asking attendees to analyse and score their own routines against given criteria. “The whole point of preparation, even if for two or three minutes, its to narrow our focus, establish perimeters and build clarity,” says Archer.

Small rituals can make it easier for employees to thrive in a remote working environment. For businesses internally, one of the biggest changes to be made is meeting culture, moving away from the longer and less productive meetings to allow for more preparation and recovery time.

Archer praised the benefits of creating a focus routine, particularly using short bursts of productivity. He also points to the benefit of having a wind down routine, where you review and acknowledge the work that has been completed. There also comes a point in the day where you begin borrowing energy from the next, says Archer.

“We need to move beyond this idea of giving people permission to recover and start to create an expectation to recover, because only then do we enable people to go round the cycle again and get stronger through stress not weaker,” adds Archer.

Find out more about the Richmond Virtual Internal Communications Forum here