do you work/have you worked for a big company

[squirmyworm]

can I pick your brains?

I'm doing a project on internal communications and need to know if anyone has seen any great ideas in practice. I work for a big organisation and we have lots of information to get to our staff - some is company wide, some is department specific and some is purely local. We have regular staff meetings and provide a written (emailed and noticeboard) briefing each month but messages don't seem to get through that effectively. anyone recommend anything that has worked?

Our new intranet is working quite well...the organisation I work for is really big but very firmly divided up into departments and locations, so the intranet is a vital link for us.

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Contact me offline adn I can give you loads of ideas.... I was doint Internal Comms for a very large company in a previous life

I worked for large MC org at one stage and they had a great voicemail culture - insisting that people check it three times a day - saves a lot of e-mail traffic too. It was also used for announcements etc - which of course have to be short and to the point to hold attention. It is easy to set up groups so that you don't have to send broadcast messages or bore those that it is not relevant to. You can always tell them where to find more info if it is too much for VM e.g., we have a new expense policy! Now you can claim some new items! go to our intranet for more info. I recommend the person leaving the recording is as Senior as possible and that they have rehearsed the written down message before recording.

At another similar organisation we had monthly meetings on a Friday afternoon with drinks and nibblies afterwards and attendance was tracked by who didn't pick up their name label. V popular.

Intranet is of course unavoidable, but like e-mail there is no guarantee that people will read it.

Good Luck

We had an on-line phone directory - which had pictures of the person you wanted to talk to - in a big organisation this helps as you might need a favour fromXXX who jhust happened to be the bloke in the food queue yesterday (IYSWIM)