Your PR Architect

I didn't know you could buy surplus animatronic figures from Disney parks. Let alone install one from the Hall of Presidents as a company CEO. Animatronic at Disney Hall of Progress By SteamFan (own work (Nikon D80)) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) via Wikimedia Commons You'll read countless New Year's resolutions in the coming week. Some will be preposterous or hard to keep. But if you're a CEO or executive director of an organization, and you don't wish to be mistaken for an animatronic historical figure, there's an easy resolution to keep -- one that will help your internal communications far more than any newsletter or video message. It's simple: Be authentic. Be human.  Not every CEO is a "people person." The leader I'm describing -- call him Gerry -- was a good strategist and a charismatic sales leader. But he was never at ease talking...

Eric Friedman makes a number of good points about employee communications in this blog: 10 Steps to Keeping Employees Engaged and Motivated -- but he skims past an important step: listening to employees, face-to-face. His communications advice: " Communicate well and often.  Training sessions, memos, newsletters, FAQs, and regular meetings can all be used to present your vision to your employees. Make sure to ask questions, and if they are confused, redesign the way the information reaches them." "Trim for ansatte hos NVE" by Henrik Svedahl/Norges vassdrags- og  energidirektorat - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ nve/4174242876/. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share  Alike 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Trim_for_ansatte_hos_NVE.jpg# mediaviewer/ File:Trim_for_ansatte_hos_NVE.jpg This advice feels at once both intelligent and dated, because Eric's cited source is about 10 years old. Memos and newsletter...

I love employee recognition. I despise 90 percent of the photos taken to recognize great employees. HR leaders love to talk about employee engagement. If they wish to do more than talk, they'll advocate for a communications person to strengthen internal communications.  One strategy: beef up employee recognition programs. Some organizations do employee recognition well. Hospitals and health care providers do a good job of honoring their employees. Colleges and corporations, less so.  Often, someone will line up a group of employees for a  recognition  photo that's destined for a local newspaper, company newsletter, or website. The photo itself? It's often rushed, unposed, and you wonder if the organization is recognizing people, or lining them up for a firing squad. Look at these actual employee recognition photos, and consider the following suggestions: 1. The Line-Up: a non-motion perp walk featuring a casual, backlit gaggle of employees...