8:00 a.m.
Registration & Continental Breakfast

8:30 a.m.

Chairpersons’ Welcome & Presentation:
Mixing It Up: How A Strategic Mix Of New Media And Traditional Media Can Effectively Engage Your Entire Audience

Communicating with employees is challenging. Many different messages and distractions compete for your employees' attention. In addition, you find that many of your trusted communication channels are just not succeeding in engaging your employees. You know that successful communication is a strong indicator of high performance within companies, but how can this be achieved?

This session will highlight the challenges which communicators face and how a strategic mix of new media and traditional media can effectively engage your entire audience.

• How the changing communication and technology landscape affects both our communication abilities and our audience expectations
• The best way to ensure your messages connect with all your audience groups
• The techniques that leading companies use to gain high levels of employee engagement
• The secret to successful implementation and managing change within the organization

Jacqueline Taggart, Senior Consultant, Communication and Change Management
Adam Wootton, Senior Consultant
Towers Watson

9:30 a.m.

Using Comedy To Create An Engaging, Enterprise-wide Communications Rollout That Will Drive Higher Performance Across Your Organization

Most corporate communications and performance improvement methods fall short because they feel “corporate” and artificial to the employees they’re meant to reach. Second City Communications - the corporate services division of The Second City, the world’s premier comedy institution for improv-based sketch comedy - proves that you can engage your people, build their skills and communicate and collaborate more effectively, by using a very non-corporate approach involving comedy, web video, and improvisation.

This fun and interactive session features an innovative case study specific to Second City Communications’ collaboration with Scotiabank, where the two organizations collaborated to create an engaging, enterprise-wide communications rollout to support Scotiabank’s three-year strategy.

• Humor makes leaders and issues more accessible
• Dialogues beat monologues and how to utilize the convention of short web video to engage and align internal corporate audiences
• Improvisational mindsets create more agile, nimble individual performers and high-performing organizations

Jane Jhaver-Malt, Director, Strategy & Planning, Canadian Banking
Scotiabank

Steve Johnston, President
Second City Communications

10:15 a.m.

Break-Out Blitz! Network And Discuss Strategic Internal Communication Challenges With Your Fellow Conference Attendees

This session will open the conversation by connecting you with other conference participants and help you gain greater understanding into many similar issues, concerns, and challenges that your peers are also facing. Become acquainted with your fellow conference attendees in this fun and fast-paced forum!

11:15 a.m.

How To Communicate Effectively To Rescue Your Staff And Brand: Developing An Internal Crisis Communications Strategy

During disasters, communications teams must quickly determine what tools and messages work best. When threats to safety come into play, the pressure is on to protect and comfort staff and clients. This task is more difficult when information is restricted due to police investigations, lock downs and other factors outside of communicators’ control.

Last September at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, a crime turned fatal shook the Hospital and surrounding community.  During the incident and in the days that followed, a carefully orchestrated communications plan gradually restored a sense of safety internally and helped to protect the brand externally.

In this riveting case study, you will hear how a comprehensive set of internal communications tools  – from internal e-mails, text messaging, town meetings, Facebook, Twitter, grief counseling, executive rounds and many others – kept patients, staff, and visitors safe and informed and sustained Hopkins’ reputation as the United States’ best hospital. Learn valuable lessons from this incident and how you can prepare your organization and your internal crisis communications strategy before a crisis takes place, by:

• Developing and delivering consistent messages
• Having the right systems in place – testing and enabling communication equipment (pagers, electronic message boards, text messaging, social media outlets, etc.)
• Creating a checklist of safety measures and an action plan

Amy Goodwin, Director, Institutional Internal Communications
Johns Hopkins Medicine

12:00 p.m.

How To Engage Your Employees With Executive Blogging And Other Web 2.0 Tools To Foster A Collective Direction For Your Organization

Human Resources and Skills Development Canada has successfully taken steps to seize the potential of workplace blogs to provide their executives with an innovative way to engage employees by sharing ideas, inviting comments, and fostering a collective direction for their organization.

• Determine business drivers and Web 2.0 tools
• Develop and ensure critical factors for success
• Identify, assess and mitigate risks
• Manage employee expectations
• Develop appropriate processes and rules of engagement
• Drive employees to the blog site
• Leverage the online conversation for business improvement
• Understand and measure what success looks like

Giovanna Gatto, Senior Communications Officer - Internal and Corporate Communications
Human Resources and Skills Development Canada

12:45 p.m.
Lunch On Your Own -- But Not Alone!

Join a group of your colleagues for lunch with an informal discussion facilitated by one of our expert speakers. Take this opportunity to join others in a small, interactive group setting to network and brainstorm solutions to your most pressing internal communications concerns.

2:15 p.m.

Thinking Strategically…. A Consultative Approach To Communications

Today, many communications professionals and communications functions find themselves at a crossroads. They’re asked by management to do more with less while being expected to handle a myriad of demands being placed on the business. Such expectations require a more comprehensive understanding of the business and at the same time, critical constituencies – employees, customers – who are savvier, more demanding consumers of information and more cynical than ever before.

The reality – and expectation – is that communications should evolve beyond its historic (stereotypical) role of a tactical function that comes into play after the important strategic decisions have been made. It should instead serve as a strategic function that informs and influences the actual decision-making process based on a unique, holistic perspective that incorporates the needs of the business and its stakeholders.

Thinking strategically is the foundation for a broader and more robust involvement in the most important priorities of the organization allowing for communications to be aligned with actual business results and using communications to get smarter about the business.

• An introduction to specific tools and techniques used to establish a more consultative approach to communications planning and implementation
• A forum for discussing challenges, internal bias, and barriers
• A framework for interacting on a more consultative basis with leadership and management
• Cases and examples for exploration and knowledge building
• A process to be applied in management interactions lifting the discussion to a strategic platform

3:15 p.m.

Making Social Media Work For Your Organization: How To Harness Its Impact, Solve Its Challenges And Open Up To Its Innovation

While it's tempting to focus on technology trends and the latest implementations, most businesses are still wrestling with the overall dynamics of social media in our society and how this translates into the organization. The idea is to take a step back and understand the implications and the fundamental forces organizations are facing today with the advent of social media.

Siemens Corporation is an industry leader in electronics and electrical engineering with 450,000 employees in 190 countries. This session will address the challenge to identify and enable internal thought leaders, offer effective training, provide actionable social media rules and policies, a safe social media training environment and work with senior executives to activate social media within the leadership.

• Benefit from social media as a driver for the organization’s culture
• Adapt to social media and understand why this vehicle of communication is impossible to ignore for any organization
• Harness the power of crowdsourcing
• Understand the cost of ignoring social media and maintaining the status quo

Stefan Heeke, Director of Online Communications
Siemens Corporation

4:00 p.m.

Transforming Internal Communications: Engaging Both Online And Offline Employees, Worldwide, To Understand And Execute Your Company's Strategy

Delivering on more than 90 years of innovation, Pitney Bowes (PB) provides software, hardware and services that integrate physical and digital communications.

Like most companies, PB is challenged with communicating to those “wired” employees, as well as those that do not have online access, together totaling more than 30,000 worldwide. The transformation has left many employees uncertain of their role in the company’s strategy. Internal communications is now tasked with bringing all employees up to speed on the company’s vision and helping to articulate how they fit into the organization.

• Taking a 90-year legacy and building on the company’s brand for establishing future growth
• Connecting your company’s strategy to all employees
• Measuring the impact of transformation on your employees and understanding the gaps that internal communications needs to address
• Keeping in mind the “WIIFM’s” (What’s in it for me?) for your employees
• Targeting communications to the relevant stakeholders

Mary Coates, Manager, Internal Communications
PITNEY BOWES

4:45 p.m.

More "How To's" To Help You Get The Work Done:  An Interactive Panel Discussion With Today’s Speakers
Need to dive deeper into specific topics?  Want more details?  Here’s your chance!  Available speakers from today’s sessions will answer your questions to help you innovate your own internal communication plans.  Digest what you’ve learned and apply it to your own initiatives to get feedback and ideas for improvement.

5:15 p.m.

End of Day One

5:20 p.m.

Networking Reception: Please Join Us!

We invite you to join us for a drink as you relax with your peers. All conference attendees and speakers are welcome to join us for this special opportunity to continue networking. Don't miss this chance to benchmark new ideas over complimentary drinks!

Sign up during the day for dinner with a group. Take advantage of Toronto's fine dining while you continue to network with your colleagues.