8:00 a.m.
Continental Breakfast & Networking

8:30 a.m.
Chairperson’s Opening Of Day Two

Allan Steinmetz, Founder and CEO
INWARD STRATEGIC CONSULTING
Conference Chairperson

8:40 a.m.

Engage Or Entangle? How To Link Communications Objectives That Result In Employee Entanglement

The financial unrest in the past four years has led to later retirement. There are now four generations active in the workplace. And when all is said and done, the current workforce is the least engaged in history.

How does an organization successfully communicate with: four generations, a workforce that has Millennials as the most populous generation and women as the most populous gender? Will an economic recovery lead to high turnover in firms with disengaged workers? Why do managers like engaged workers and leaders like entangled staff?

The answers are critical for workforce/organization alignment and can be solved with effective communication tools.

Targeted for communications professionals, human resource professionals and leaders, this session will help you to:

• Clarify the damage of unengaged staff
• Define the productive and profitable difference between engaged and entangled staff
• Reveal methods of entanglement used by several award-winning employee centric organizations
• Illustrate communication instruments that speak from staff to staff

Tom Walter, CEO & Founding Partner
TASTY CATERING

9:10 a.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

9:15 a.m.

M&A Communications – Getting It Right With Your Most Important Audience – Your Employees

Companies make acquisitions and merge operations all the time. No matter the size of the deal, however, making sure that employees on both sides of the transaction – whether a dozen or tens of thousands – stay engaged and involved is a critical factor in M&A success (or failure).

In this session, you will learn from the experience of the Internal Communications team at Exelon Corporation that has spent the past 18 months leading communications throughout its merger with Constellation Energy, which closed in March 2012. Specifically, you will learn how to:

• Ensure that consistency and flexibility comfortably co-exist
• Resist the urge to recreate your entire existing communications approach
• Handle bad news, complex information, layoffs, information leaks, mistakes and other challenges
• Communicate effectively with employees during a merger

9:45 a.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

9:50 a.m.

Morning Refreshment & Networking Break

10:10 a.m.

Digest Session: Discuss And Brainstorm

Whether it’s a weekly intranet update, newsletter, or contest – every company is looking to communicate what they’re doing to the employees. Discuss and brainstorm with fellow attendees and speakers techniques you’ve had success with, or concerns you’re having, in communicating company information to your employees.

10:40 a.m.

Enabling Employees To Effectively Converse And Collaborate In The Digital Age - And Reap The Benefits For Your Organization

There’s a digital conversation going on right now. All over the globe, individuals are sharing information, expertise, making decisions, building relationships, and more, without even leaving their seats. Sentiment and knowledge are being created around topics that could have a direct impact on your business. Are you out there? Are you part of the conversation? Are your employees? Are your competitors’ employees?!

In today’s digital world, the employee and the relationships and conversations that employee has in the digital space is defining the brand. Because of this, we need to ensure that our employees have the tools they need to reach out so that they can effectively participate in it: from conversing about topics they are experts in, to relationship building, to globally collaborating on projects with other employees, partners, clients, peers, and the general public. The more digitally active your employees are both inside and outside your company, the more current, credible and responsive your company will be viewed.

Using examples from IBM, you will learn lessons on how to:

• Enable employees to build and share their expertise inside and outside the company
• Generate, aggregate and promote social conversations of interest to your company
• Create a globally collaborative employee culture both internally and externally
  

Kevin Winterfield, Social Systems and Digital Influence
IBM
@kmwinterfield

11:10 a.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

11:15 a.m.

How To Engage Employees To Deliver On Your Brand Promise: Aligning Employee Perceptions And Investment To Customer Priorities

One of the greatest challenges organizations face is the ability to establish and set priorities that will enable them to achieve their goals.  It is not uncommon for organizations, regardless of size, to spend so much time debating those priorities within the organization that the customer gets lost in the process and solutions don’t meet anticipated targets. 

George Brown College (GBC) is one of the largest colleges in Canada, consistently ranked among the highest in Ontario for reputation across the province, yet had persistently been at the bottom of the province in student satisfaction scores.  After years of employee discussion and fragmented efforts to make progress, improvements in student satisfaction eluded the College.

This session will teach you the value of using extensive research to establish priorities that will impact change.  It utilized a student communication audit, staff discovery sessions, college-wide review of existing strategies, performance analysis of GBC relative to other colleges and a literature review of best practices.

The marriage of employee insights with student research resulted in a comprehensive 10 year strategic plan to fundamentally alter their approach to create and enrich the student experience. This session will demonstrate how organizations can undertake a process that will ensure plans reflect real customer needs in a focused, efficient, affordable and actionable way.

Karen Thomson, Vice President Marketing and Strategic Enrollment Management
George Brown College

11:45 a.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

11:50 a.m.

Digest Session: Metrics

Share peer experience on the metrics associated with your employee branding efforts.

12:20 p.m.
Lunch On Your Own -- But Not Alone!

Join a group of your colleagues for a themed lunch with an informal discussion surrounding an employee brand engagement hot topic! Take this opportunity to join others in a small, interactive group setting to network and brainstorm solutions to your most pressing employee brand engagement concerns.

1:50 p.m.

Group Exercise: Brainstorm Solutions And New Ideas You Can Use

You asked for it, you got it! Interact and discuss solutions to your internal branding challenges with your fellow attendees and our experienced speakers. You will leave with new tools and hands-on experience and ideas for more successfully applying best practices to your own employee engagement initiatives.

2:20 p.m.

How To Align Global Employees With Your Organization’s Strategy And Goals

Molex Incorporated is a $3.5 billion global manufacturer with more than 35,000 employees in 16 countries. In 2007, after undergoing the most significant reorganization in 40 years, the challenge was to align employees globally with the company's strategy and goals to deliver on the company's brand and support Molex's goal of becoming a high-performance organization. After developing its Employee Value Proposition, Corporate Communications developed the key messaging for the employee brand to develop a visual identity that has become the foundation of its print and online internal communications.

This key messaging and visual identity have been deployed across the broad range of media, including a Strategy Roadmap, annual goals booklets for all employees, an Employee Annual Report, videos, blogs and molexnet (intranet).   During this session, you will learn how this approach is helping employees better understand Molex's business and align their daily work with Molex's goals, and how you can do the same in your organization.

Susan Armitage, Vice President, Corporate Communications
MOLEX INCORPORATED

Bob Zeni, President
Bob Zeni & Associates

2:50 p.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

2:55 p.m.

Afternoon Refreshment & Networking Break

3:10 p.m.

Employee Brand Engagement case study coming soon!

3:40 p.m.

Your Opportunity To Ask Questions

3:45 p.m.

Digest Session: Key Takeaways And What To Do When You Get Back To The Office

Discuss with fellow attendees and speakers what you will do when you get back to the office.

4:15 p.m.
Chairperson’s Recap: Close of General Sessions

We’ll recap the highlights of the past two days.

Allan Steinmetz, Founder and CEO
INWARD STRATEGIC CONSULTING
Conference Chairperson