In your role as an employee communications professional, chances are you’re expected to ensure proposed changes — like adoption of new policies, procedures, or technologies — get effectively introduced and actually “stick”. And that’s regardless of whether you have any kind of change management skills, training, or support.

Life gets even messier for you when folks from HR, training and project management share your mandate to bring about desired behavioural change. And, then there’s O.D. (Organizational Development) which is certainly one of the more misunderstood organization functions.

With all these fingers in the pie, life for an employee communications professional isn’t just messy – it can be confusing, frustrating, dysfunctional, and sadly sometimes even hostile.

That’s why we sat down with Nicole Shokoples who provides O.D. consulting at ATB Financial. Nicole shares her insights and enthusiasm about how and when employee communicators can work best (or, at least better) with O.D. work colleagues.

Episode Index

  • What O.D. professionals are measured on (3:00)
  • What O.D. professionals never tell their communications colleagues (but probably should) (13:00)
  • What employee communications professionals should share with O.D. (but probably don’t) (14:45)
  • A quick summary (18:00)
  • The benefits of employee communicators and O.D. working together (19:00)
  • Items of interest (21:10)
  • How employee communicators can make nice with O.D. (22:10)
  • A second summary (25:50)
  • What’s caught our attention (27:59)
  • Outro (31:37)

If your next employee communications project aims at changing behaviour, be sure to check out this episode of The Swear Jar podcast.

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