Managing and Leading Internal Comms During a Time of Upheaval
#RaganInternalComms
Keeping employees engaged has always been a major challenge for internal communicators. You need to adapt to shifting employee preferences while addressing constant industry disruption. Now, with the COVID-19 outbreak dramatically transforming the business world and your communication strategy, the pressure is on to adapt quickly.
If you don't upgrade your strategies now, you could be putting your organization's future at risk.
Ragan’s Best Practices in Internal Communications & Culture Conference has been a sold-out event for the past several years. Due to the current health crisis, we are holding this conference online, which means more of you can join us, and we can tailor the agenda to your current needs.
Join us for this can’t-miss virtual conference and learn from experts who are transforming their internal communications to meet the needs of modern employees and the challenges presented by the current public health crisis. You’ll take part in two days of inspiring keynotes, practical case studies and how-to sessions on what internal communicators need to know in the coming months and years.
Don’t miss out on learning the proven strategies you need to reach employees with the right information in the right format, maintain morale during times of crisis and help your organization thrive in the years to come.
Learn how to:
- Craft messaging that inspires trust in your organization’s leadership
- Motivate and educate a workforce that is remote, dispersed and distracted by the current health crisis
- Give managers and business leaders the tools they need to support your organization’s communications strategies
- Get creative to reach your goals even with a small team and budget
- Customize your intranet so it caters to the needs of modern employees and keeps them up to date on how your company is faring during this crisis
- Maintain morale by helping employees adapt to changes posed by the current health crisis
- Collect employee feedback that helps you continuously optimize your programs
- Break down silos and partner with HR, marketing and other divisions to improve your communications and leverage skills necessary to weather storms
- Update your internal crisis communications plan to reflect the new challenges posed by COVID-19
- Run CSR and diversity initiatives that support a purpose-driven culture
- Earn the trust and loyalty of employees by investing in their wellbeing, growth and development
- Serve as a strategic advisor to leaders during times of crisis and business transformation
Top benefits of attending the Virtual Conference:
- More than 8 hours of training at one low price without the cost of travel
- Access to the on-demand conference for 12 months to share with your team
- Access to presentations and other resources from speakers, including worksheets and reports
- Opportunity to ask speakers questions in real time
- Networking with fellow attendees via private LinkedIn group
- Ongoing discussion moderated by Ragan with attendees on private LinkedIn group
- “Burn After Reading” document with conference takeaways and notes from selected sessions
- Some proceeds from every registration go toward the CPD COVID-19 Response Fund
- Personalized Certificate of Completion
Take part in two days of virtual workshops, inspiring keynotes and information-packed sessions.
April 21-22
The current public health crisis has drastically changed the daily lives of employees. Organizations must ensure that their workforce can still work together effectively, and communicators must lead this charge to keep their businesses running. During this opening keynote, we’ll discuss the key steps all internal communicators must take to keep everyone on the same page during this unprecedented situation.
Learn how to:
- Navigate a newly remote workforce and ensure morale remains high
- Connect leaders to employees and maintain the trust of your workforce
- Create more opportunities for collaboration between employees and departments
- Continue to advance business goals while prioritizing the wellbeing of employees and the general public
Due to the economic burdens posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, many employers have been forced to reduce their workforce and announce furloughs and layoffs. Announcing these decisions to employees is never easy and could pose major challenges to your organization if not handled tactfully. Discover key practices you should follow when communicating with your workforce on these sensitive topics.
Learn how to:
- Craft clear, transparent and compassionate messaging regarding layoffs and furloughs
- Dispel rumors and backlash in response to staffing decisions
- Provide channels for employee feedback and respond in a clear and timely manner
- Protect morale and culture in the aftermath of layoffs and furloughs
While uncertainties remain around when this health crisis will pass, it's critical that organization have a plan in place to help employees adjust when the time comes to return to physical workspaces and previous routines. Join Tara Lillien, Chief Talent Officer at Peppercomm, for a discussion on what employers need to consider when creating their "re-boarding" plan.
Now more than ever, your emails are crucial to ensuring employees have the information they need to stay safe and do their jobs. Joel-Michael Martin will share quick tips for crafting better internal emails during times of crisis.
You’ll learn:
- How email contributes to maintaining morale and productivity
- Why email templates can help you improve your current employee experience
- How to get useful employee feedback on emails during a time of crisis
- Why you should take the pledge to better and more frequent communication
- How to set goals to maintain and improve culture
Engaging employees is challenging enough when they’re under one roof. With the current public health crisis turning most workforces remote, the difficulties are compounded. How do you ensure employees are still able to do their jobs effectively and remain engaged with your organization’s mission?
During this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Use cost-effective tools that make online collaboration easy—and ensure you have the right solutions in place for your needs
- Be proactive in communicating new policies to employees
- Adapt your current channels and adopt new ones to reach employees where they are with crucial information
- Give employees the resources they need to remain productive and innovative in a new working environment
Have you ever found yourself thinking that you could do so much more with your communications strategy if you just had more time, more people, more budget? You’re certainly not alone—a lack of resources is one of the most common challenges faced by internal communicators, especially due to the economic burdens caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.
How can you continue to make strides despite those hurdles? Kelly Fitzgerald, manager of employee engagement and communication at Related Companies, has years of experience doing more with less. She’ll show you tips and tools you can use to maximize your internal communications impact even with limited means.
Learn how to:
- Think on your feet and adapt your strategies when you’re faced with a big project, a small team and a limited (or nonexistent) budget
- Use cost-effective and free tools and resources to develop and track dynamic, engaging messaging
- Harness the power of content to further your impact, so it can be where you can’t
Data that’s just “nice to know” won’t help you make informed decisions or show leaders the value of your work. To make an impact, you have to parse and present metrics that matter most to leadership in a way that swiftly tells a story it can act on. This workshop arms you with the techniques you need to quickly—and convincingly—communicate results and showcase how your work drives organizational goals and hits management’s hot buttons. See how AARP is strategically using the vast amount of data available to them in today’s tech landscape.
You’ll learn how to:
- Determine which KPIs tell you the most about employee engagement—and which ones matter most to leadership
- Draw valuable insights from the data on your digital channels and use them to optimize your programs
- Blend qualitative and quantitative analysis to tell a cohesive story
- Show the impact of internal communications on the bottom line to defend your budget in a time of economic uncertainty
With the COVID-19 outbreak dramatically impacting the day-to-day activities and livelihoods of employees, its crucial that HR professionals and communicators work closely together to keep employees informed, protected and engaged. Join Theresa Ludvigson for a discussion on how communicators can quickly break down silos and partner with their HR team during this uncertain and unprecedented time.
In the wake of an unprecedented global crisis, the old rulebook for crisis communications won’t cut it anymore. Discover how to update your plan for reaching employees—or start building one from scratch if you don’t have one.
We’ll discuss:
- The key components every modern crisis communications plan should include
- Common mistakes in crisis plans and how to avoid them
- How to prepare for the unpredictable
- The top threats posed to internal communicators by the current health crisis
As trust in media, government and other institutions erodes, people are turning in a different direction toward a place where they stand a better chance of having some influence: their relationship with their employer.
This is especially true during the public health crisis created by COVID-19, and the ensuing economic and political fallout.
Discover how the statistics found in this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer can inform internal communicators in maintaining employee trust and hear firsthand how the crisis could affect the future of corporate culture.
You’ll learn:
- Why strong leadership communication is crucial to culture—and how executives can better connect with employees
- How to earn the trust of employees during times of crisis
- Unexpected changes in what employees are looking for from employers
- How top organizations are responding to new employee sentiments
- How culture will shift in the upcoming months and years
With many employees working remotely, video has never been a more crucial tool for relaying timely information and keeping engagement steady—and you don’t need a huge budget or expensive equipment to produce them effectively. Let Marcus Drew Steele from Ragan Consulting Group show you techniques to put together engaging videos, along with case studies from brands who have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak with compelling video communications.
You’ll learn:
You’ll learn how to:
- Determine if video is the right channel for your message
- Think beyond the “talking head” with graphics, animations and more
- Trim your videos to be consumable in one sitting—especially when attention spans are waning by the day
- Choose easy-to-shoot video formats that inform and inspire your workforce when you don’t have fancy video equipment
- Use videos to forge emotional connections between leaders and employees
- Find ways to expedite the production process to get information out quickly in the current crisis
- Borrow tactics from videos created by top organizations in response to the COVID-19 outbreak
The workforce has evolved, and your employees’ expectations have changed. No longer are employees satisfied with a stale, clunky intranet that houses out-of-date content. In fact, Forrester reports that the intranet is the least-liked workplace application that seeks to help employees do their jobs. Now, with many employees working remotely in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, your intranet is a major hub for the workforce. How can you reboot your content to keep employees aligned, engaged and connected with your organization, especially during a time of crisis
Sam Keninger, VP of Marketing and Research at Simpplr, will share how to rethink your intranet content with employee experience at the center. You’ll learn intranet benchmarks from Simpplr research and the most important areas that will make your employees love your intranet.
You’ll learn:
- Key facts about the current intranet landscape, as reported by top analysts
- Top criteria of intranet content that serves employee needs
- The top reasons for intranet failure—and how to prevent them
- How your intranet can better support your organization’s goals during the COVID-19 crisis, along with examples of effective content currently being offered by top organizations
Diversity, inclusion and belonging are NOT “just an HR thing.” We are in a time that requires internal stakeholders at all levels to recognize the seriousness and impact of our words on how welcome and included our employees feel, especially during a crisis that could invite stimgas and xenophobia.
Kim Clark, experienced diversity and inclusion communications expert, will help us tackle our own unconscious biases, acknowledge areas where bias exists and help us see that we are well positioned to be more intentionally inclusive—which in turn helps our organizations lower unwanted attrition, be more innovative and increase employee engagement.
You’ll learn:
- What unconscious bias is, how it shows up and the impact it has
- How to partner with HR, employee resource groups, executives and people managers to improve the impact of company-sponsored and grassroots efforts
- How to help managers design their teams for belonging
- How to be and how to teach others to be a conscious communicator
- Why inclusion efforts must continue to be a priority even in times of crises
During this period of social distancing, keeping employees collaborative is crucial. Learn about the best practices Microsoft employs to maintain communication, co-create organizational culture, and keep employees connected in times of crisis. You’ll leave this session with tangible tips you can use within your organization to drive connection and collaboration.
A strong commitment to social responsibility and diversity is crucial for any organization hoping to keep employees inspired and proud of their workplace. Yet many organizations do only the bare minimum and may even cut back their efforts in a time of crisis. In this panel you’ll discover why it’s still crucial to establish yourself as a purpose-driven organization. You’ll hear how the U.N. Foundation and FedEx have found success by closely aligning their CSR and diversity goals with their culture and engagement goals.
You’ll learn how to:
- Make the business case for protecting diversity and CSR programs
- Identify areas of your current culture that could be hindering inclusion
- Make messages around CSR more compelling and inspiring to employees
- Develop a deeper understanding of the needs of marginalized groups
Take a thoughtful stance on the issues affecting your organization and identify the best ways to give back to the communities you interact with
Businesses are now navigating a huge transformation within their own walls and throughout society as a large. Hear how top organizations are working to keep innovation front and center in the wake of accelerated change, and helping their workforce adapt to a transformed employee experience. These experts will show you the how communicators can play a key role in helping their businesses adapt to unprecedented change in the world.
You'll learn:
- How to develop a transformation mindset that enables room for change
- Crucial steps to forging partnerships with key stakeholders and influencers
- How to be agile to maximize resources you already have
- How your organization can enable an open two-way dialogue with employees in this time
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Join us if you work in:
- Internal communications
- Public relations
- HR communications
- Corporate communications
- Employee engagement
- Diversity and inclusion
- Employer branding
- Corporate culture
- Intranets
- Corporate social responsibility
- Executive communications
| Pricing | |
|---|---|
| Registration | $999.00 |
| Ragan Insider Member Registration | $899.00 |
Phone registrations and group pricing: For group orders and nonprofit pricing, please contact our customer service team at 800-878-5331 or cservice@ragan.com
Thank you to our current sponsors
Join us as an event sponsor and meet your target audience, showcase your products, present thought leadership, generate leads and boost your brand.
Here are a few examples of opportunities we offer:
- Exhibitor booths
- Speaking sessions on our main agenda
- Lightning talks on our main agenda
- Pre-conference workshop sessions
- Bonus breakfast sessions
- Networking lunches
- Private networking dinners
- Cocktail receptions
- One-on-one meetings
- Networking passes
- Marketing collateral and on-site branding
- Ragan and PR Daily Awards sponsorship
For more information on opportunities available at this specific event, reach out to sponsorship@ragan.com.
Ragan events are educational, inspirational and fun!
Our sponsors are an important part of the success of each event.
Registration
For questions related to event registrations, please contact:
Shallon Blackburn
Customer Service & Sales Manager
ShallonB@ragan.com
Sponsorship
If you’re interested in sponsoring this event, please contact:
Hannah Lavelle
Sales & Client Relations Manager
HannahL@ragan.com
Program
For information on programming and speakers please contact:
Meghan Madhavan
Manager of Strategic Programming
MeghanM@ragan.com
- A Ragan Virtual Conference is a live stream of our conferences. Our virtual conferences are streamed over the web at the time of the event. If you are unable to attend the virtual conference during its scheduled time an archived version will be made available to all virtual conference customers 3-7 business days after the event.
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- Mac OSX 10.4 or greater
- Intel-Based Macs Only
- Windows 10
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- If you have any questions or need to register by phone, please call customer service at 800.878.5331 or 312.960.4100.
