At a recent communications gathering in Bangalore last week, I had an opportunity to meet up with Mike Green, who leads employee communications for Intel. A veteran at Intel, he took time off from his short visit to India to talk to communication professionals and share insights from his experience.
Mike stressed on the need for communicators to understand their role as strategists and mentors for employees and leaders. He is credited for bringing significant changes within Intel through transformation in communication, engaging employees and helping leaders do their jobs better. Mike explained how challenges like information overload and decreased engagement were forcing communicators to think differently.
He fielded a host of questions from the audience ranging from print vs social media influence, global communication and culture, outsourcing and implications for communications, leadership blogs, consistency in messaging and dealing with the press.
I was drawn by the significance of the questions posted by the audience – most of them were tactical, probably a reflection of the work internal communicators in India handle. On the contrary, Mike extolled participants to focus their sights on the core mission and values which keep their respective organizations in business.
In my interactions with the participating professionals, I could gauge a sense of urgency to shore up internal communication efforts within their organizations due to the constantly evolving dynamics and business expectations.
Overall, an interesting knowledge sharing session. Kudos to Vijay Shankar and team for organizing the event and to Arun for engaging participants for an interactive evening.
Participants, do feel free to share your views here…
You are right Aniisu, there is a need rather urgency to talk about various practices. And who better to do it with than our own fellow commitians.
I extend a big thank you to Vijay and Arun as well – I had met them some 3 years back and it was nice to catch up again!
It was interesting to interact with Mike. Whether you are a large company or small, clever management can use internal communications as a tool to inspire loyalty and better performance. The trick is how best to get your message across without appearing to be motivated or biased.
In too many cases internal communications’ aim seems to be simply to utilize allocated budgets, with not a thought for how effective it is.
As a result internal communications is frequently uninspired and boring.
I hope the interaction with Mike made a difference to some of the people who attended.
Thanks to Vijay for the opportunity.
Deviah