At WorkSafeBC, I served as the internal communications manager for a division with over 700 managers and 2,800 unionized workers. The agency had launched new strategic objectives, which brought on multiple organizational changes that impacted both management and staff at the same time. These shifts included new initiatives and major leadership updates.
To ensure employees were not overwhelmed with constant change communications, I advised on the timing for major announcements. I also developed communication plans that ensured projects rolling out simultaneously did not compete for attention.
Working with an in-house team of communications officers, writers, editors, and creative designers, we built a coordinated communication system. To achieve this, we developed a suite of new tools and tactics tailored to different audiences across the division:
For Executive Leadership: We created the Top of Mind report. This was an easy-to-read, monthly one-pager that summarized the top projects and initiatives rolling out to the organization to keep senior executives aligned.
For Directors: We established the Directors Dialogue to actively inform this tier of leadership about upcoming projects and organizational changes.
For People Managers: We created Know/Do/Say memos that outlined upcoming changes and clearly broke down what managers needed to know, what they needed to do, and what they needed to share with their teams. We also made key improvements to the existing weekly manager intranet newsletter.
For General Staff: We enhanced the existing weekly employee intranet newsletter and coordinated regular Town Halls hosted by the Executive Leadership Team. These sessions allowed all employees to learn about major initiatives firsthand.
Our new approach helped employees clearly see how all the organizational changes connected, leading to smoother project rollouts and successfully cutting down on duplicate and conflicting messages. Ultimately, executive leadership reported feeling significantly more informed, and people managers felt vastly better supported when having to implement these changes with their teams.