For communicators, the challenges that come with constant change can seem dense and overwhelming. But even when the technology gets more complicated, the most effective strategies were still the simplest ones.

As the first snow of the season began to fall, team 106 attended Simply Expo 2024, hosted at etc. venues on Bishopsgate. It was such a joy to come together with a range of different communicators and share what we’ve learned in the past year to carve out solutions for the future. This time, we had two days of sessions, workshops, and roundtables to get into, covering everything from transformation case studies to crisis comms. After helping ourselves to a delicious breakfast spread, we were shown to the Main Stage, where hosts Emma James and Marc Wright began introduced themselves and what we had to look forward to.

Day 1

The right AI models for clear communications

Our first session was from Priya Lakhani, CEO of Century Tech, and focussed on understanding AI models to communicate clearly. As a regular commentator on AI for the BBC, this was an exciting and insightful way to kick things off. Priya took us through a comprehensive and clear-sighted look at the state of the AI sector, covering everything from Kristen Fraser deepfakes to AI-generated political avatars in Indonesia’s election.

All of these were cited to point towards where we were headed and Priya showed us that the future will be multimodal. Even with simple tasks, such as calendar scheduling or even coffee orders, the AI agents act on its own logistics and knowledge. She defined the two different types of AI for us; Narrow AI, which is built for specific tasks, and General AI that can learn and adapt to new situations.

Before any of us could get worried about dystopias on the horizon, Priya clarified that General AI does not exist today in the full scope. In fact, those conversations held us back from its practical application and Priya stressed how much your own investigation can help to remove those fears. Developing a culture of innovation, where productivity ideas can be identified within departments in a targeted and specific way, would lead to maximum impact and would naturally bring artificial intelligence into your arsenal.

New foundations for a house builder

The next session came from the Bellway Group, one of the UK’s largest house builders, and was a return to multifaceted communication transformation. Paul Lawler, Bellway’s Head of Communications, began by telling us his belief that everyone at every level is a communicator within an organisation because everyone has the capability of talking about what the company should be doing within its mission.

Before he joined there was no existing comms, which presented the crux of the transformation they undertook. They were reliant on emails as a main comms channel, but had an inefficient email design, no IT support, and limited comms specifics. The solution was in the launch of a new intranet and an in-house app that instigated two-way communication structure with feedback and analytics to alter future messaging.

Pathway, their new desktop intranet, was a great tool for on-site colleagues who didn’t have access to normal systems, with a digital signage and multiple engagement touch points. This proved to be a huge success as they saw 84% engagement rate across devices with 80% monthly active users since launching in May of this year. Fundamentally, it showed how effective product development and delivery is a long over-looked aspect of communications.

Roundtable Sessions 1

After a quick coffee and cake break, it was time for our first roundtables titled Inside out advocacy: turning your team into passionate brand ambassadors. Hosted by Peter Durkin from Blink, our discussion looked to practical levers for more alignment and sincere brand advocacy. Ultimately, the most effective rule of thumb was making sure you understand what is relevant to your people so they can communicate on their own terms within their personal brand.

The second roundtable was about Bringing dispersed teams together: Strategies for creating connections across boundaries. This was hosted by Samantha Andrews from Workvivo who’s philosophy was that there’s simply so much more we can do when we’re aligned. The trick was in unifying across remote working challenges, especially with global companies, and it was good to hear other communicators trying to nail this problem. A major tip was in habitualising comms to build them into the localised working environments.

Leaning into stakeholders for a global mining business

The next session came from Glencore’s Des Bravington and covered how to increase digital adoption. Glencore has 150,000 employees in 35 countries with 60 commodities, meaning a scaled-up operation. To handle this, they worked with The Core, their platform for all employee comms to ensure a single source of truth, which also allowed for cross-commodity comms and knowledge sharing. An interesting aspect of their strategy was their collaboration with managerial and c-suite stakeholders alongside union heads, who they saw as important stakeholders whose position couldn’t be ignored.

This scope of vision allowed them to easily embed localised need into their employee app, in some cases including bus schedule information in Peru, the main form of transportation to their mining facilities. Accessibility was the name of the game, making sure that simple, intuitive technology gives people the tools they need to innovate their day-to-days.

Building trust with leaders without getting fired

After that, Kevin Johnson, Transformation Lead at AWE, brought a presentation on how to build real trust with your executive teams. His model was based on Blanchard’s four components of trust, namely leaders’ ability, believability, connectedness, and dependability in their roles. At its core, it was about creating collaborative relationships with leaders and ensuring a two-way support system to foster more effective solution building. It was also a great exploration of what Kevin described as “Icarus moments”, where you fly too close to the sun and break trust with your employers and how to win it back.

Accessing your seven-year-old brain for data science and analytics

The penultimate talk of day one was from Nigel Williams at the HMRC on understanding people with data science and analytics. Nigel wanted us to unlock our inner seven-year-old intuition in data analysis. This was a rule of thumb that returned their operations to the most basic but effective improvements they could make leading to their methodologies such as trying to save colleagues six minutes every day.

Although simple, it came from their efforts to return focus to values over the noise of online tool usage, session data, and surveys. This pushed them to not settle for the easy answers in their data results and being willing to ask uncomfortable questions about their engagement.

Inclusive organisations in a digitised age

The final talk came from Kameka McLean from Walkers Crisps on how to be an inclusive organisation in a digitized age. Kameka started with a video on how diversity can be far more nuanced than people expect. Her talk then covered how she increased diversity at her company by 6%. Her strategy proved how much these needles are moved by ground floor analysis of existing structures. Seeing it as a systems-based problem was the most direct and strategic way to reach diversity goals that improved the overall work output of organisations.

Day 2

Finding a common goal with Cisco

Day Two started bright and early with a session from Britt Hall from Cisco, discussing a cultural transformation they undertook to drive their 85,000 employees towards a common goal. This story began with a transformational deficit, showing that across industries the effort to change was up whilst the desire to change for companies was down. Cisco wasn’t immune to the influence of the markets, with consistent employee reduction targets year-on-year. They wanted to take a step back and figure out how to embed clearer employee paths to promotion and improvement to refocus their workforce on their own journeys.

This led to a hyper-focus on a more reactive comms model, with clear talent outcomes put in place, including:

• Business-driven movement offerings
• Leaders and talent magnets and movers
• Proactive internal recruitment and movement
• Better employee experience, and
• Feedback loops to continuously monitor and improve

With a decentred comms structure, there were challenges in reaching all their people and learned to navigate this complex ecosystem of stakeholders. This gave them the ability to work better with the existing strata and give more aligned reasoning for the why of each person’s progression. This gave them a good state of mind to work with stakeholders and understand the longevity of their business plan rather than rely on short-term gains. In the process, they brought attentiveness to their existing workforce and reframed what working for Cisco meant.

Moto Hospitality’s actionable insight and implementation

The next session, Emma James pulled double duty in showing us how to promote 6000 voices at Moto Hospitality. Storytelling was at the heart of her strategy, which proved to work given how employee satisfaction had steadily increased over the last five years. This was thanks to a concerted effort to stay up to date with their frontline staffs’ day-to-day with local action planning, including wellbeing, R&R, work environments, site focus, and key demographic group sessions.

Their surveys contained more qualitative data than their polling system, allowing them to really understand the people who worked for them and centre them in their storytelling. From this, they developed a colleague life cycle to know where the opportunities were to make a difference in their working days. It was a straightforward, no-nonsense approach that showed how valuable the reality of your organisation should be for effective comms and branding.

Roundtable Sessions 2

Day two’s roundtable was about overcoming change fatigue, led by Gemma O’Hara and Sharn Kleiss from Gallagher. In our discussion, the differentiation between change management and change communications was important to make to ensure clarity in where the company is headed. With change messaging, we broke it down into three core components: what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what details individuals need to know. Despite how fatigued we may all be, understanding that there’s opportunity in every change is the first step to crafting a more tactile and flexible workforce, creating a more robust attitude to face the future of your business.

Five ways to leverage AI today to help accelerate engagement

After lunch, Ben Elder of Simpplr took us through five different ways to leverage AI to accelerate engagement. Ben made sure to stress how integral intent was in the use of this technology, specifically with the amount on the market that’s built to improve the recruitment process. The five ways were:

• Chatbots
• Insights for people managers
• Recommendations
• Content creation
• Search capabilities

The execution of these strategies was where the most insight came, specifically in evaluating business priorities to more effectively utilise these techniques. Interestingly, this served as a good tool to navigate climate concerns as the “see a need, fill a need” attitude saved you from wasteful habits with your resources.

Crisis communications exercise

Before our final panel, Drew McMillan from Deloitte took us through the most empathic and intriguing session of the two days with his breakdown of crisis communications. As someone who had worked for a variety of businesses that regularly handled nuanced and difficult communications, he reframed how comms should operate when it really matters.

Drew took us through an exercise where hypothetically a terrorist attack happened in the city where we were working and we needed to handle the communication to all our people. This included different levels of escalation, including finding out that some of our people had been injured and how best to work with HR to keep the wider workforce looped in.

It was a complete dissection of best practice and finding where we could bring unity and clarity to reduce panic and fear. Consistently, a reliance on the core facts was what the comms hinged on to nip any conjecture or doubt in the bud. Ultimately, it was about ensuring trust in corporate strategy and governance and recognising how to show your duty of care to your people in extreme circumstances.

Final panel: Preparing the change for AI transformation

For the final session of the day, Patrick Hulbert chaired a panel featuring Ian Ragsdale (Visa), Dana Poole (Shell), Matthew Hayward (DPRG), and Ben Warren (Gallagher) about how we can prepare for the onslaught of changes that AI is bringing in in the next few years. It was a real thrill to see so many affecting and intelligent speakers come together on this topic and seemed invigorated by the prospect of futuristic internal comms.

The first question was about how to get people to use these technologies, and Ben felt strongly that education and comprehension was above all else to instigate the change companies wanted to see. Matthew added that demystifying AI, especially because it’s such a hotly debated technology, brings a lot to allay people’s fears, specifically in how companies will work with regulators.

The next question was about where AI had improved insights for clients. In response, Dana stressed a hard and honest look at what these technologies will be doing to many workplaces and not muddying the waters. To this point, Ian, who said himself he was new to AI, pointed to simple communications in step-by-step guidance with clients to ensure the value of what you can offer. Both Visa and Gallagher were practicing with safe space for experimentation with AI before moving them across the business when good praxis was developed.

Ultimately, it was a positive look at how workforces can build on their existing AI utilisation to reinvent their working habits for greater efficiency. Giving your people the freedom to experiment and fail would generate new opportunities to further your company output in previously unseen ways.

Final thoughts

Communication challenges will always rise as the landscape is set to change so frequently. Over the last few days, we’ve seen how adapting to complex new structures doesn’t undo the impact of direct, concise strategy and operating habits. When these rhythms are utilised effectively, we can get closer to every day habits serve the company mission to its fullest potential.