Gillian Field has considerable experience in the Australian federal government, managing corporate and internal communications at the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defence and Centrelink. Before her career in communications Gillian was a journalist. She is now at contentgroup consulting for government clients, and joined David Pembroke for this podcast.
In this episode they discuss:
- reporting and writing are two different skills
- the secret to getting an audience’s attention
- why internal communication is important
- building trust with consistent communication content
- getting the story in the right sequence
- setting manageable communication goals
- testing your internal comms strategy
- getting your management on board
Listen to the podcast:
Selected links:
Gillian Field on managing a consistent workflow in internal communications:
“If you’ve got a small team, you have to look at what your small team can produce and can maintain and not introduce a channel or a product that is going to fade away after the first three months, and therefore annoy people because you’ve started something good and you’ve stopped it, or is going to end up with rubbish in it because you don’t have time to collect and to plan the right kind of content for it. I think that’s really important. I think there are times that you may build up a really reliable, nice channel framework that people rely on for their everyday business-as-usual activity and you may feed change information through that, which is fine.
On top of that, you may have to do additional work about particular change programmes or particular innovations that you bring into the organisation or new policies or whatever. You have that basis that is manageable. Because you’ve decided what’s manageable, you’ve planned what each of your team members can do. You’ve set up something that within your own technical limits will always be achievable. You can keep that reliable source of information going.”