How comms can collaborate better with HR

During Ragan’s Employee Experience and Wellness Conference in Denver this past August, former DISH Network EVP and Chief Human Resource Officer David Scott shared his strategies for harmonizing HR and internal comms.

Here’s what we learned:

Scott began by looking at the moments of shared challenges between functions as an opportunity to invest in collaborative solutions.

The top challenges:

Scott shared how all these challenges played out for him during his time at a major big-box retailer where he worked for 20 years. “There was an event where it was all about pay rate, it was all about locking associates in buildings at night,” he explained. “It was all about having the world’s largest gender class-action lawsuit that was playing through, and labor was involved…”

He also shared an anecdote about a recent employer who had a huge opportunity to repair trust, which taught him some hard lessons.

“Trust is a big factor out there today in the workplace, and whether an employee can trust their management team, and the company can do the right thing,” he said. “And can the company trust the team member to do the right thing?”