Keynote Speaker

When a company enjoys the accolade of being included in BRW Best Places to Work list, the one thing you can expect to find is an impressive level of trust in the workplace. So, what are the internal communication practices that help build these high trust work cultures? Are there some defining traits that other organisations can learn from?

During this keynote session, Zrinka Lovrencic, Great Place to Work Institute Australia will identify some of the key communication traits of the organisations from the 2009 Best Places to Work list, and explore the practices that propel an organisation towards award-winning levels of trust.

This inspiring session will explore:

• Five measures of high trust work cultures
• How the communication function can directly influence an organisation's trust level
• Statistics and interesting insights from 2009 study

Convincing busy executives to spend time on their personal communication efforts can sometimes seem to be a Herculean task.

And drawing tangible links between effective leader communications and achieving their business goals is the internal communicator's holy grail.

From experience in the financial services and energy industries, Anthea brings some ideas on how to:

• Embed engagement into your firm's business agenda;
• Build the will and skill with your leadership team;
• Find practical ways to maintain momentum; and
• Avoid pitfalls along the way!

Anthia Cudworth
Head of Internal Communication
KPMG

Morning Tea

At Inchcape Australia, we began a strategic change journey a little over two years with the development of our vision 'to be the world's most customer centric automotive retail group'. Right from the beginning, it was clear that for our organisation to be successful in achieving this vision, it was critical for us to fully engage every one of our employees with the new direction and to create a culture of truly living Customer 1st, every day, every time and every where.

By listening to what our people told us and working closely with our management teams, we have managed in a relatively short period of time to increase performance on employee, customer and financial metrics, despite one of the most challenging years in recent times for the automotive industry.

We will discuss:

• The importance of a clearly defined strategy
• How to bring the strategy to life for your people
• Engaging a multi brand, geographically dispersed team
• Measuring the success of your HR practices in terms of strategic goals

Communication audits are consistently revealing the same thing - communication is critical particularly during major change and yet organisations consistently fail to deliver. What's the reason and what do you do about it? The answer according to Gerard Castles is simple - engage your employees. Doing that involves ensuring leaders lead, listening hard, telling the truth, telling it early and telling it often and involving people in change. The hard part is getting often nervous managers to the starting line and then executing with military precision.

This highly interactive session will examine:

• Creating a "burning platform" under managers who know the answer but fail to communicate effectively
• Practical communication strategies practitioners can adopt to communicate major change in their organisations with examples from experience in mergers, performance turnarounds and restructuring

Gerard Castles,
Director
Gerard Castles & Associates

Lunch

REA Group operates Australia's leading property portal realestate.com.au and has over 500 staff in Australia and overseas. With a new company structure and strategy, there was a need for greater innovation, collaboration and the leveraging of knowledge across teams and countries. Hear and see how a new 'Enterprise 2.0' intranet, using the best in social media, became a key tool for the business.

Learn more about:

• How enterprise 2.0 can support your business and communication strategy
• Improving productivity and engagement using internal social media
• Wiki, forums, blogs and groups for staff - how they work within a company

Woolworths is Australia's second largest private employer, with the majority of our employees working in our supermarkets. In this environment, the people with the most influence on our employees are those they interact with on a daily basis, our Store Management teams.

It is these front line managers who have the best opportunity to engage our employees. So how do we equip our front line managers to engage our employees?

In this session we will cover:

• Tailoring communications to front line managers for communication to other employees
• Utilising the internal communication structure to best share information
• Using staff feedback to develop and improve the communication process
• Redeveloping communication mediums to engage employees
• Encouraging staff participation in different mediums - business communication, staff publications and internal television

David MacGregor,
Internal Communications Manager
Woolworths

Melbourne Water is a significant business, managing $9.4 billion of natural and built assets with a vision of 'working together to ensure a sustainable water future'. This vision is ambitious and will require innovative thinking to secure sufficient water resources for future generations and the environment in the context of climate change, population growth and resource scarcity.

In 2009, the organisation revised the Strategic Framework that underpins that vision, and has subsequently given people the time and space to help them better understand the Strategic Framework and their role in achieving the vision.

This session will share experiences on:

• The use of Open Space Technology and how this was adapted to suit employees needs
• How Melbourne Water is ensuring that innovative ideas are captured and explored
• Links between organisational culture and innovation
• What success will look like

Deloitte will share stories on understanding the unique talent of individuals; investing in 'tribal' communities; and creating a new way of exploring and interacting with the market. Underpinned by diversity, innovation and talent, these initiatives have helped Deloitte be recognised as one of Australia's 'great places to work',; infusing it with an energy and sense of collective purpose that six years ago they did not believe was possible.

In this presentation you'll learn about a culture:

• that asks its people to share 'its dumbest things'
• where the CEO is as comfortable on 'yammer' as an analyst
• where employees are encouraged to share stories;
• and where everyone is expected to innovate and reach for a target to secure 30% of its revenue from new offerings in 2010!