But I'll give it a go… I work for CooperVision as their Internal Communications Specialist. We are a contact lens manufacturer based in Hampshire. We have around 1,800 employees and operate 24/7 shifts. It's a very fast-paced organisation which can make communicating quite tricky as things can change so quickly!
Today is Thursday – which is my Friday – because I only work Tuesday-Thursday and look after our 2-year old on Mondays and Fridays. Going back to work part-time was quite a big decision for me after having our first, and whilst it's not been without its challenges, I don't regret it for a second.
6:05am
You don't need an alarm clock in our house, as our kids think sleeping past 6:15am is abhorrent. So, after a little bit of kids' TV in bed (whilst we try to come to terms with the day beginning already), we get up and get everyone ready for the day.
8:00am
My husband takes our 2-year old to nursery whilst I stick our 4-year old in front of CBeebies and have a quick check through my emails and calendar so I can plan my order of events for the day. We're an American company with sites in California, Rochester, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica, so we often wake up to emails sent overnight.
8:30am
Break off from work to finish getting our daughter ready for school and take her there. She loves school, so it's always a pleasure.
9:10am
Back from the school run and time to crack on with work. My first task is writing up the minutes from the Staff Forum meeting which took place in the last week. I enjoy sitting in on the Staff Forum meetings because it gives me a really good temperature gauge for how the workforce is feeling, the challenges they are having and what they want help with. I don't love writing-up minutes, however, so have to force myself to do it!
10:30am
Once I've sent the minutes off to our HR Director for approval, I reply to a couple of emails and then finalise the Local Brief document before it gets reviewed at the Operations Meeting at 1pm. The content is usually pretty standard, but there's often a fair amount of chasing up to do, and a certain amount of rewriting to ensure the messages are clear and consistent.
11:15am
Whilst trying to keep my mind off my hungry tummy, I try to tick one more thing off my list before I break for lunch, so I plan the content for our channels for the next week. We are currently running a pilot scheme of some digital display boards in one of our buildings, so I am constantly on the look-out for new company videos that will be engaging for our employees. I send an email to someone in our marketing team to see if they might have something new for me. Then I catch up on a few more emails that have come in during the morning.
12:00pm
I cannot wait any longer and have to have my lunch. I'm on a bit of a health kick at the moment, so it's generally something healthy(ish).
12:30pm
Day jobs relatively up to date, I decide to concentrate on some project work. The first one I tackle is a quickie. We are currently looking into the feasibility of introducing an employee app for our manufacturing employees who do not have access to company email. The decision is sat with our Senior Management Team at present, so I send a little chaser email to my boss (HR Director) and then email the app developers just to touch base so that they don't think the project has gone quiet.
12:45pm
I move on to my other big project, which is preparing a communications plan with visuals for sharing our UK Manufacturing VMOST to all employees. I've been working on this for a few weeks now, and we're very nearly at a place where we can roll this out. Working on projects like this can be challenging at times as I don't have a Comms team (there's only me!), so not having anyone to run your ideas by before I share them with the SMT can be a little isolating. Today I'm focussing on some tweaks to the design and wording that have been requested and detailing some ideas for next steps of rolling this out.
2:40pm
I reach a natural break with the VMOST work and send it as it is to two of the Directors for review at their weekly meeting on Friday morning. I eagerly await their feedback…
2:45pm
Head up to school to collect our daughter and hear about her day.
3:10pm
The rest of the afternoon can generally vary day-to-day depending on who has calls or urgent work to do, but I either then get back on with work and carry-on working until 5:30pm or enjoy some time with my daughter and then work on in the evening. This afternoon my husband spends time with our daughter and I carry on working as I have to work on some monthly operations updates which we have just launched this year. In line with our VMOST, we are trying to give more visibility to the key projects going on around the business so that all our teams understand where we are heading with different products and processes. The updates have been really well received so far, and this month we are trying to send out our first one for the Support Functions in the business, so I spend some time fine-tuning the format and answering questions to some of our functional heads about the sort of content to include.
5:00pm
I'm starting to flag now. My husband goes to get our son from nursery whilst I finish replying to a few emails as I'm not technically back in work until Tuesday. The phone is always on, however, and there's always plenty going on in the world of Comms – which is why I love it.
5:30pm
Shut down and spend some time together as a family before bath and bed.