Employee communications has been a part of nearly all of my communications work, whether it was part of an integrated campaign, like telling the Diversity & Inclusion story at Lenovo, or separate campaigns such as recruiting new talent to Ascom when the company was going through a major growth initiative. While we should never estimate the time, resources, and planning it takes to “keep the lights on” with consistent employee communications via townhalls (major like Lenovo with kickoffs around the world), email newsletters, employee roundtables, Intranet stories and other tactics, this page showcases some of the more interesting ways I’ve increased employee satisfaction with organizations.

Ascom Recruitment Campaign

Six month campaign focused on helping the business recruit 30% of its workforce for new hires

We ran organic and paid social media ads on LinkedIn spotlighting key position

We engaged employees by giving them editable social media cards that they could use to share their “why” in working for Ascom

We created a recruitment video showcasing Ascom’s purpose-driven mission, vision and values; it’s capabilities across the world and North America; and benefits of working at the company. Watch the video.

Motorola Acquisition

I lead the global communications (external and internal) plan for the Motorola acquistion by Lenovo. As part of the day 1 communications activities, I developed a comprehensive internal comms plan that involved alignment and coordination with communications colleagues not only from Motorola, but also from leads in other Lenovo geographies, especially in China and Latin America. Internal comms activities consisted of:

• Employee event in Chicago with Lenovo CEO, Mobile Business Group leader based in China, Liu Jun, and Head of Motorola, Rick Osterloh. This townhall style event provided a first chance for Motorola employees to see and hear from Lenovo leaders. Together with our events agency, we livestreamed the townhall to employees so anyone in the company could view the new day for Moto under Lenovo. We hosted watch parties at major Lenovo locations, including Morrisville, NC and showcased Motorola products to employees could see them up close.
• Employee event in Sunnyvale, California – a smaller, more intimate event, but similar to the goal of the Chicago event, giving employees an opportunity to meet and greet with leadership
• A series of similar events in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Beijing, China
• We facilitated a video message from the Head of Motorola as part of his email to the Motorola employees announcing the official change of ownership

Selling Solutions – through Virtual Reality

Our sales team and partners had a challenge: how to talk about our hardware-software solutions in terms of driving more efficient and effective workflows. Since showing is usually better than telling, our team found a creative way to tell the story of our smart alarming and alerting solutions. We piloted a video concept using virtual reality headsets to show a nurse and patient interaction through the eyes of the nurse on the floor. While the best experience is donning the headset yourself (which we took to some tradeshows), the video still shows up nicely in 2D, which we used on our website and social channels. Since we pilot before scaling, we learned that nurses were hesitant to put the headset on so close to the tail end of COVID (even with sanitizing and wiping down the headset after each user). So ultimately, this one didn’t hit it out of the park. But, this immersive way to experience our solutions helped our sales people have more confidence when speaking to our capabilities in this area.