Employee Communications

CEO email to employees #1

Biweekly message from CEO to all employees. Typically used to deliver important company news such as key new business wins, important milestones achieved toward our annual goals, changes in executive leadership.

With so many of these messages devoted to the topic of COVID-19 and its impact on our operations, we needed a change of pace. In recent months, employee pulse surveys had begun revealing the presence of a small but vocal cohort that was not pleased with the company's recent focus on its DEI initiatives. With Hispanic Heritage Month about to begin, I suggested this month of recognition as our topic.

In this message, I sought to accomplish several goals:

To give proper acknowledgment to the month,
To make the topic relevant to all employees, and
To help guide understanding as to why spotlighting cultural days/weeks/months of recognition is valuable to us as a company, and meaningful to each one of us personally.

We don't usually include graphics in this email aside from the occasional graph or table, but I felt this piece required something visual. I created a collage of photos across the bottom of the email, all of which come from the AZ Memory Project site that is mentioned in the email. I chose photos that I felt would resonate with the largest possible number of employees. The collage includes:

An old family photo, like one we all probably have in our own family albums or have seen on a grandparent's wall
Two photos of small business owners--one clearly featuring a logo that identifies it as an Arizona business, and another featuring a father and his two boys that represents the nostalgic notion of "the American Dream." Both photos help underscore the message that these are the people who helped to build our state.
A photo of a young boxer, chosen because I saw something earnest in his face, and I thought even the most anti-DEI

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person would be intrigued and want to know more about him, and
might be drawn to visit the AZ Memory Project site to learn more.

Finally, taking center stage, a photo of a young girl dressed up as lady liberty and holding the American flag--to me, the perfect encapsulation of what Hispanic Heritage Month celebrates, and a reminder that we are all on the same side.

Kudos

When the email went out, I received a wonderful response from our Chief Human Resources Officer: "You did an incredible job with this communication and many, many, many others you create, The ending of this one was particularly elegant, and I knew exactly what you were doing. Masterful and so lucky to have you supporting our amazing CEO and her communications. It doesn't go unnoticed."

See my redesign of the email's masthead.

CEO email to employees #2

After two years spent working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the road ahead was clear for BCBSAZ employees to begin returning to the office. Our executive team wanted to proceed with caution, as we'd had plans before to return only to see them canceled due to the emergence of another strain of COVID.

They were also acutely aware that many employees were not eager to return to working onsite. Still, others were longing to get back to the office and see their coworkers again.

I saw the opportunity to build excitement around the concept of creating a new way of merging work and life; this was our chance to dump the definition of "work" we'd inherited from past generations, and define it for ourselves, and for the future. The theme: It's not about us going back to the way things were, but about moving forward in a new direction.

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Perceptyx® employee survey results show communications regarding company strategy are effective: 86.3% overall favorable, 23.4 percentage points above Perceptyx benchmark.

Direct internal survey feedback supports these results:

"Love the open and fluid communication-- Pam's Tuesday Touch Base is some of the best prose I've ever seen from a C-Level exec. When someone asks where I think we're going as a company, or what decisions will affect us, I point to a 'TTB' letter."

"I genuinely appreciate Pam's candidness in her touch base regarding the current state of the pandemic and how that impacts BCBS and everyone. This pandemic continues to be really difficult with new challenges every day."

"The company has been absolutely fantastic with communicating with the staff as a whole about the company's decisions regarding back to work policies. So in all, I believe that communication has been the number one greatest thing so far at BCBSAZ."

Internal post-event employee communication

The first annual Client Council event was a huge undertaking for Hawk Incentives. Communications surrounding the event had been planned well in advance and executed according to a strict schedule.

During a meeting to discuss content ideas for a follow-up communication to attendees, I pitched the idea of writing and sending this internal email from the GM. I had attended the event, and was amazed to see how genuinely enthusiastic the response was from our clients in attendance. It was something that made me feel great about working for Hawk Incentives, and I felt it was a rare opportunity to build employee engagement that shouldn't be missed. I was beyond thrilled to have the idea approved, and the communication sent exactly as drafted.

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View the post-council client email from the general manager

Internal announcement of new employee engagement program

Letter from company president announcing the launch of a new employee recognition program.

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See additional content created for this employee engagement program

Internal notice regarding an operations change

Internal communication to the staff of a SaaS company to let them know a change was coming that would affect how clients interact with the software.

Congratulatory email from a BeautiControl executive

At the company's annual convention, one sales consultant was recognized for her charitable work. I was asked to write an article about her that would appear on the website and in the company e-newsletter. The following is the email I wrote to the consultant from a company executive, thanking her and asking for the information needed to complete the article.

Email to security system installers and service techs

Email informed a specific employee group of a new procedure being added to their job responsibilities.

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See the MyADT.com Leave Behind.

Email to call center managers

Notice to call center managers about the upcoming launch of ADT's new customer IVR, and an accompanying training program. The email alerted managers that they would need to attend the training prior to system launch. I wrote this internal communication as part of a suite of change management communications surrounding a multi-year initiative to streamline internal operations and merge customer databases.

Internal all-staff email on responsibilities with regard to client brand

As Communications & Brand Manager for AppointmentPlus, I sent out periodic emails to all staff about the brand and copy guidelines I was charged with developing. In this email, I turned the focus toward the brands of our subscribers. The company was just beginning to win large accounts, and I knew this was new territory for everyone involved.

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Customer Experience team intranet site

When I joined ADT's Customer Experience team, the team was brand new, so there was much we wanted and needed to communicated to the rest of the organization about our initiatives. I built and managed the Customer Experience section of ADT's SharePoint-based intranet site to achieve this goal.

At the time, the limitations of SharePoint meant every department's section of the site looked identical. There were no options to add color, for example. So, for the Customer Experience section, I created copy blocks, headers, photo captions and banner ads in Photoshop and imported them to give it a distinctly different look from the rest of the site, and to make it more engaging.

When I later moved to the Marketing team, I took on the responsibility of updating that section of the intranet as well. By the time I left the company, I had been handling three different multi-page sections of our intranet.

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See more pages I created for ADT's intranet site
Additional page 1
Additional page 2

Internal communication to executive leadership regarding
a planned system outage

IVR launch internal announcement

Another internal email regarding the new IVR, this one was sent out companywide on the launch date to let all employees know about the new customer self-service feature.

Self-service week internal announcement

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Internal email regarding trademark use

In order to maintain your right to hold a registered trademark, you must use it properly. The history of trademark law is loaded with examples of companies that lost rights to their own trademarks simply because they did not use them correctly. On July 6, 2011, Apple lost rights to the trademarked term "App Store" because Steve Jobs incorrectly used the term on an earnings call with shareholders. This is serious stuff.

Jobs' mistake was the same simple error made by many other employees who ultimately lost trademarks for their companies: He used his trademark in a generic sense, using the term "App Store" as a noun.

A trademark can never be used as a noun, either in print or in speech. A trademark must ALWAYS be used as an adjective describing a generic noun. Will you find brands using their own trademarks improperly? Sure. Does that mean you can do it too? Absolutely not!

If everyone else in the world decided to jump off a bridge, would you follow them?

Below is a reminder email I sent to the employees of AppointmentPlus reinforcing the proper use of the trademarked name. I've written something similar at just about every company I've worked for.