Internal Branding & Employee Engagement

The corporate intranet and internal social media have become the defacto hub of the typical knowledge worker, making work life simpler and more engaging for employees. When done correctly, the intranet, and the associated enterprise social media, is the hub of all work — the nexus of work. But the intranet has to deliver value and must have:

• Active executive sponsorship
• Thorough and rigorous governance
• Adequate funding
• Engaged employees

This interactive workshop will examine modern intranets and the latest employee social media, as well as employee engagement, communications, and employee ambassador programs, at length. Among other things, the workshop will detail how engagement is defined and measured, and how ambassador programs drive engagement. Many, world-leading intranet examples will be used to reinforce the recommended approach. Leave this session with a plan to update your own intranet to drive better engagement and delivery of your brand promise.

Toby Ward | CEO,  Prescient Digital Media & Social Business Interactive

Every department in a company is unique and every employee is different. So how do you scale employee engagement effectively and repeatedly? How do you create an environment where employees feel empowered, collaborative, motivated, and satisfied? Using the latest behavioral science and game design techniques, that’s how. Join gamification veteran Zachary Bodnar of industry-leader Badgeville, discussing the theory and practice of driving employee engagement.

Be prepared for practical approaches and real world examples. This session is definitely one to put on your calendar.

Zachary Bodnar | Senior Behavior Architect, Badgeville

The intranet was supposed to engage everyone and keep us informed. Instead it’s boring, ignored, or a source of complaints. So we resort to email, possibly the worst form of collaboration ever.

Are there lessons to be learned from social media that can be applied inside the corporation? Absolutely! Think of social media as the largest organic social experiment in content consumption and collaboration the world has ever seen. There are plenty of successful examples to draw from, and much to be learned about content preferences and consumption. Best of all, we can measure it all!

In this informative workshop you will learn:

•  How to assess and define your organization’s content and collaboration needs

• How to develop an internal communications strategy that respects the audience, your coworkers
• How to develop content that kills and avoid mind deadening corporate-speak
• What tools might be useful, and whether open source can save the day and the budget
• What about the cloud? Should we skip IT altogether?
• Security and privacy concerns
• Measures of success

Doug Lacombe | President, Communicatto Inc.

Sometimes the best content in the world isn’t enough – if you can’t get their attention in the first place, understanding and behavior change won’t happen. We’ll work through real life examples and current projects provided by participants.

This interactive, creative workshop focuses on the ‘how’ and will provide you with:

• The 5 key elements to consider if you want your messages to cut through the clutter
• A framework for analyzing available channels and selecting the best ones for your project
• Strategies for optimizing broadcast communications and weeding out ‘internal spam’
• When to push and when not to- when is broadcast appropriate and necessary?
• Guidebook with over 100 ways to communicate with employees
• Actionable ideas and tactics to apply when you get back to work

This session will be interactive, hands-on, and built around your real life challenges.

Get to know your fellow attendees and their employee engagement, internal branding and communications challenges. This fast-paced forum will ask everyone to share their goals for the conference and what’s keeping them awake at night!

Doug Lacombe | President, Communicatto Inc.

Conference Chairperson

Companies have a culture, whether they want one or not. A culture can define behavior, create a common purpose or tear a company apart. Words and actions matter. Hear the critical success factors behind the successful transformation of this healthcare organization, including:

• The DaVita culture which helped move a bankrupt company into a Fortune 500 Enterprise in just seven years
• The importance of symbols and traditions
• Word choice
• Creating a community

Blaise Tracy | Director, Wisdom, DaVita Healthcare Partners

Connecting employees to business priorities in a focused and personal way drives organizational and individual success. Transparent and targeted communications are necessary to engage the workforce, foster trust and motivate employees to take action toward achieving company goals. Unfortunately, crafting and communicating in a straightforward, open and meaningful way is not as easy as it sounds. Providing clear priorities and consistent messaging from the C-Suite and leadership levels throughout the workforce can have a dramatic impact on how employees perceive their roles within the organization and ultimately their job satisfaction and commitment.

Learn how successful leaders instill trust and confidence amongst their employees by engaging them directly in achieving business priorities. Learn how to use key techniques and methods to develop and implement effective and compelling communications, including how to:

• Work across functions to create a clear, concise business strategy with organizational goals employees can understand and apply to their daily jobs
• Build powerful partnerships between strategy, HR and communications provide real results in driving a dedicated workforce that generates increased productivity, outstanding customer service and is perfectly aligned to organizational goals
• Create a successful leadership communication program that provides the workforce with a stronger connection throughout the organization
• Follow the critical steps internal communications’ leaders must take to instill confidence in the workforce by getting buy-in, visible endorsement and active support from the C-suite
• Drive leaders to gain trust and offer transparency while protecting the company’s proprietary information
• Leverage key drivers of employee connectivity through organizational messaging

Kelly Butler | Director, Internal Communications, Conifer Health Solutions

Dana Meyer | Founder & President, Dana Meyer Consulting

Employee Engagement Challenges & Solutions: Benchmark with your Peers

Take advantage of the knowledge in the room and share your most pressing concerns or challenges to find solutions to common problems. Based on your reasons to attend this conference, the group will be divided into small groups to focus on the topic most relevant to you. Leave this group discussion with new ideas to reinvigorate your own initiatives.

Everyone loves a great brand story. It entertains. It inspires. It motivates. It is often what separates the good from the great. But where do compelling brand stories come from and how can they effectively engage employees?

You’ll leave this energizing session will ideas, proven strategies and advice to help you:

• Identify and create your own unique brand story
• Effectively communicate your story internally
• Inspire employees to move from passive listeners to engaged storytellers

Tina Powell | President & Chief Storyteller, National Bestselling Author, Powell Squared Inc.

For all marketers – both internal & external the question of how you deliver your message is always at top of mind. What is the right strategy, what should you be saying and how are you delivering the message is something that always needs to be re-examined, particularly as technology continues to evolve.

This session will give you answers to some common challenges in delivering messages to your employees:

•  What is the best and most interesting manner to communicate those “dry” internal corporate messages?
• How do you keep employees informed without maximizing their day?
• What is the best manner of prioritizing and filtering messages for the right balance of relevancy, frequency and timing?
• Which sources of media are the most relevant for different messages in order to maximize staff engagement?

Julie Dickson Olmstead | Stakeholder Engagement Strategist, Overwaitea Food Group

Join a group for lunch with an informal discussion around an employee engagement hot topic. (Lunch cost is on your own.) Take this opportunity to network and brainstorm solutions to common challenges while getting to know others in your field.

As a large organization with many strong external brands that belong to one organization, the perceptions about internal branding is very important as the healthcare sector in BC transitions with new expectations and responsibilities from the BC Government.

This session will take a look at how internal brand perceptions can effect an organization’s integration strategy. You’ll also hear the strategies behind this government organization’s journey to drive change and better employee engagement in the process.

The social business phenomenon has gathered significant momentum in recent years; many organizations are using social media inside, and out. More than 80 percent of medium-to-large organizations have implemented, or are testing, at least one intranet social media tool. However, investment and execution of internal social media lags far behind external social media efforts.

Don’t miss this session on the latest developments in internal social media – ideas and practical advice showcasing exactly what organizations are using, and how, and some of the Best-in-the-World examples. Leave this session with inspiration and practical strategies for your own internal social media projects.

Toby Ward | CEO, Prescient Digital Media & Social Business Interactive

•  Understand which organizations in Canada have achieved the highest degree of employee engagement
• Understand the drivers and dimensions behind that engagement and how they have been successfully managed
• Understand best practices of top employers with regard to employee engagement
• Understand how Top Employers work with highly engaged employees to create “brand ambassadors”

• Through experiential learning (an interactive exercise) learn how to implement these techniques in their own organization to improve engagement.

Don’t miss this chance to get your final questions answered in this lively discussion. Several of today’s speakers will share tips, tricks and last bits of advice to help you with your own employee engagement initiatives.

Doug Lacombe | President, Communicatto Inc.

Conference Chairperson

We invite you to join us for complimentary drinks in the hotel lobby bar as you relax with fellow attendees and speakers. Don’t miss this networking opportunity and chance to benchmark new ideas over complimentary drinks!

Sign up during the afternoon or during the networking reception for dinner with a group. Dinner cost is on your own. Take advantage of Vancouver’s fine dining while you continue to network with your colleagues.

An organization’s two greatest assets can be an admired brand and a workforce of brand ambassadors. The reasons to align employees around your brand are straightforward and difficult to dispute.

This session will look at how financial services organization USAA has landed at the top of customer service award lists, most admired companies rankings and Fortune’s Best Places to Work, among many other accolades.

Learn how USAA:

• Provides a tangible reason for employees to believe in its mission, which keeps them motivated and energized

• Creates a sense of “oneness” between employees and members

• Helps each employee see how he or she fits into the grand scheme of delivering the brand promise to its members and the effect of theseefforts on business goals

• Develops a level of pride tied to fulfilling the brand’s promise

Dore Redfern | Director, Internal Communications, USAA

How are you mobilizing talent in your organization today – todays “knowledge economy?”

Few leaders see their organization as a complete system. Instead they try to carry out partial running repairs, leaving a fundamentally outdated structure in place. A great majority of businesses are underperforming precisely because their most important intangible assets – the ideas and creativity of their knowledge workers – are unwittingly suppressed by the way in which these businesses are set up to operate. Trying to run a Company in the 21st century with an organising model designed for the 20th century places limits on how well a Company performs. The plagues of the modern Company are hard-to-manage workforce structures, thick silo walls, confusing matrix structures, e-mail overload and ‘undoable jobs’.

Hear strategies used by many companies of all shapes and sizes, locally and internationally, to mobilize talent in today’s environment.

Laurie Schultz, President & CEO, ACL Services Ltd

Get 16,000-plus directors, managers and frontline employees enthusiastic about strategic goals in two months, with no additional budget. This was the challenge put to Vancouver Coastal Health’s Communications Department in July 2012.

It resulted in an employee engagement and communication campaign, which has yielded unprecedented success within this publicly-funded, highly unionized health care organization.

The environment at the time of campaign launch was one many communication and marketing professionals can relate to: Rapid change, dwindling resources, and an ever-growing list of corporate priorities yielding middle manager burnout and zero capacity for meaningful conversations about intangible “True North” goals.

And yet, six months post-launch, more than 90% of VCH’s directors, managers and frontline employees surveyed reported that they could see a connection between these goals – these pivotal strategic priorities that span financial management to direct patient care – and their day-to-day work.

Come hear how VCH’s communications team pulled off the seemingly impossible; what they learned along the way can help you transform employee and leader culture in your own organization.

Laurie Dawkins | Director, Corporate Communications, Vancouver Coastal Health

Employee Engagement Challenges & Solutions: Benchmark with your Peers

Take advantage of the knowledge in the room and share your most pressing concerns or challenges to find solutions to common problems. Based on your reasons to attend this conference, the group will be divided into small groups to focus on the topic most relevant to you. Leave this group discussion with new ideas to reinvigorate your own initiatives.

In this session, you’ll learn how the ConAgra Foods Internal Communication team stripped out time and cost-depleting work to focus on helping the company connect employees directly to the financial and operating strategies of the business. With the emergence of new social workplace technology, now is the time to transform your internal communication strategy to be relevant, business focused and employee driven.

During this innovative session, you will learn how the new Internal Communication Function can:

• Adapt communication practices to align with how employees get information every day in their personal lives—customized and in real time
• Create broad news ownership, eliminating the funnel approach and shifting the role of the Communication team from storyteller to curator
• Reduce the number of communication channels by migrating to an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) and social portal
• Create trust by leveraging authentic executive visibility through blogs, online chats and real-time recognition
• Use mood sentiment analytics to better understand the pulse of the employee population

Erin Grotts | Director, Communications & External Relations, ConAgra Foods

Join a group for lunch with an informal discussion around an employee engagement hot topic. (Lunch cost is on your own.) Take this opportunity to network and brainstorm solutions to common challenges while getting to know others in your field.

This session will examine how qualitative AND quantitative methods can help companies understand what their workforce really thinks about the company’s brand. Are surveys or personal interviews right for you? Do you have the tools and vocabulary to discover actionable insights that align employees to the brand promise and ultimately to customers and partners?

This session will examine how you can:

•  Understand the way work experiences of employees can ultimately improve customer and partner experience

• Use narrative inquiry to reveal deep insights into employee emotions and provide real color commentary to the qualitative analysis of surveys
• Socialize journey mapping and pulse survey insights to stimulate deeper engagement across the organization, address improving experiences and solve real problems

Mike Sanchez | Senior Manager, Brand Experience Design, Cisco

Bill Roberts, Director North American Communications, Groupon