The past year saw “The Great Return” with several high profile media stories of employers and employees at loggerheads as bosses sought to transition back to office-based working arrangements. This led to many workplaces dealing with “the flexibility dilemma”: Recognition that flexible work has benefits for employees and employers alike, but also sensing that less face-to-face time may be detrimental to forging relationships and strong company cultures.

This contribution shares some of the speaker’s original PhD research on belonging in remote and hybrid teams, with an emphasis on immersive technology for social connection in the workplace. The audience will be taken on a journey from “the cave” to “the spatial internet” in order to share a deeper understanding of what belonging means from an evolutionary perspective, and how Internal Communicators can help recreate this human need in an age of virtual teams.

How can employee communication teams make the biggest impact with limited resources? How can you use data to demonstrate the science behind your art, securing a seat at all the right tables for employee comms?

We all instinctively know the impact visible leadership has on how colleagues in our organisations think, feel, and act. The right leadership behaviours, in the right voice and tone, can make the difference between an unmotivated collection of employees lacking in direction, and a unified team who feel valued to drive towards a common goal and who advocate for your organisation.

In a world where every stakeholder wants their message to be the most important one, how do we demonstrate credibly and with impact that we know what leadership behaviours, what tone and what messages will make the biggest difference for them? To reach consensus on where to focus your team’s resource and what topics and activity to prioritise that will influence the right outcomes, you need to cut through those sometimes conflicting priorities with guidance backed by statistical evidence that really works.

In Barclays, monthly iterative colleague surveying is enabling us to test hypotheses into which leadership behaviours matter most to colleagues. It’s allowing us to look at different aspects of tone of voice, identify what resonates most with different audiences, and it is helping us to identify which themes of content are more likely to make colleagues want to stay and thrive within Barclays.

Find out how Barclays is using data and insight to shape their communications approach, as partners and trusted counsel for senior leadership on how to use their influence to build trust and advocacy with colleagues.

Three takeaways from the session:

Data led prioritisation’ is the new ‘do more, with less’
Examples of real life use cases of sentiment analysis informing comms strategy rather than just tracking performance
The level of improvement in colleague advocacy leaders can make through knowing what makes the biggest difference

Aimed at the following practitioner levels:

Head of
Manager
Junior

Transforming the impact of leadership communications through data and insight

Speakers

Lynsey Hutchison