Cohesion Highlights: Employee Feedback, Building Culture, a Seat at the Table, Advice, and ROI
This episode features highlights of past guests as they open up their playbooks and give advice on employee feedback, building culture through technology, getting a seat at the table, and measuring ROI.
In this episode, you’ll hear from the following internal communications leaders:
- Parag Kulkarni, CTO at Simpplr
- Natalie Ridsdale, Director of Internal Communications at Levi Strauss & Co
- Michelle Press, Director of Corporate Communications at Envoy Solutions
- Rajamma Krishnamurthy, Senior Director of HR Technology at Microsoft
- Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO at Nutanix
- Chase Warrington, Head of Remote at Doist
- Kristin Hancock, VP of Community & Engagement at ICology
- Beth Collier, Founder of Beth Collier Consulting
- Victoria Dew, CEO of Dewpoint Communications
- Tina Hawkins, Senior Director of Internal Communications at NBA
- Paralee Johnson, Senior Manager of Community & Content at Simpplr
- Debbie Gunning, VP of People at Human Interest
- Ben Matthews, Senior Director of Internal Communications at NVIDIA
- Mary Poppen, Chief Strategy & Customer Officer at involve.ai
- Jason Anthoine, Managing Founder at Audacity
- Pinaki Kathiari, CEO & Owner of Local Wisdom
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“I like actually asking people, ‘What did you think? How could we have done better?’ I want that feedback because your playbook can be your playbook, but it needs to be somewhat flexible to understand what is hitting and what is missing in terms of the communications. I think getting that feedback is important as a communicator.” – Michelle Press
“You're going to see a continued move towards more distribution, more flexibility in the workspace, more control over how you control your workday. Not just where you work, but when you work. As you embrace more asynchronous communication and a focus on outputs and documentation and things like this, sort of the core principles of remote work, you find that it's very easy to make the next leap, which is to something called the non-linear workday. Where you're basically able to choose when you work, not just where you work. And as long as you're delivering, then you're accepted as having done your work well.” – Chase Warrington
“For a long time, we've talked about having a seat at the table. And sometimes I think, especially for communications, it's just like, be the table. You be the table. And then you have people come to your table. Stop waiting to get a seat at other people's table. You form the strategic imperative and have people come work in that way with you.” – Victoria Dew
“The best piece of advice that I can give somebody just starting out in their career is remembering grace for yourself. I think it's really, really important. To what we spoke about earlier, about beating ourselves up and that pressure to get it right every time. If you can learn to give yourself grace and move on and learn from that, you will find yourself a whole lot happier in this field and able to contribute the awesomeness that you bring and the skillsets and the important value that's needed.” – Paralee Johnson
“I think what's important about ROI is that comms does need to take accountability for making business changes. And in order to take accountability for it, we just need to know what that is. [...] I think the key metrics will always net out to, ‘Did we produce the outcome that we wanted? What are we going after? Are we trying to reduce turnover? Are we trying to increase productivity? Are we trying to reduce injury in the workplace? Are we trying to increase employee satisfaction?’ Things like that, we want to really hook ourselves onto. And we really need to understand if we do do this, how do we know that we're making a difference? It's important to be able to know that. And it's important to be able to decide how many of these things we're going to tackle within a given period of time. So, the outcome should always be measurable.” – Pinaki Kathiari
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:16): Parag, Natalie, and Michelle discuss using surveys to collect employee feedback
*(02:30): Rajamma, Wendy, and Chase discuss building culture through technology
*(05:20): Kristin, Beth, Victoria, and Tina discuss getting a seat at the table
*(08:08): Paralee and Debbie share internal communications career advice
*(09:19): Ben, Mary, Jason, and Pinkai discuss measuring ROI
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