Some words about Communication...

I have already reached the last day of blogging. Time flies as usual...

I thought I mention a bit about communication today. Very often I am involved in activities related to our internal communication. Today I made an appointment with a colleague working in a building a bit further away where we will hold our Townhall and Open House that will be part of our Quarterly Review week 23. I wrote a little bit about that earlier this week. Firstly, I have no idea if Townhall is a commonly used word. I had never heard it before I started working where I am now. But it is the term we use for a large meeting where our managers gives their employees a business update and a chance to have a dialogue. Our aim is for my manager to have two Townhalls on each site per year. We try to combine that with my manager´s travels but sometimes we find other solutions, video or a normal conference call.

But back to week 23 and the organization around the communication activities we will have. I coordinated an Open House activity earlier this year in Lyon for our around 100 Q&CS colleagues there and now we are going to repeat the concept in Gothenburg for around the same amount of people. The aim is to get to know our own organization and what the different departments are doing, and of course to get to know each other.

We will have stations representing the different areas of our Quality organization. The stations will be spread out in a large building where we handle Technical Material Analysis (meaning investigating bad parts to find the faults). The atmosphere is a bit different there than where most our employees are sitting (in normal office landscapes). Whenever we have had our Townhalls in the TMA area the ambiance has been more relaxed than when held in an auditorium.

In each station two or three persons will talk about their departments and challenges and have a dialogue with the groups that will pass by. Each group will be mixed with colleagues from different functions and they will stay 15 minutes each per station. I will need to meet my TMA colleague to figure out the route we will have and discuss practicalities to arrange for that and also for the Townhall.

Next week another internal communication activity will take place that I wrote about day 1 this week. We will have a global chat, or actually two considering the time zones. I will be moderator in both together with my colleague from Communications. In the chat our around 400 global employees will be able to anonymously ask questions around our new organizational set up. It has been an appreciated communication channel when we have tried it earlier.

I want to also mention briefly another way of communication that my manager works actively with. He has a monthly video blog which is prerecorded in our studio in Gothenburg and then available for all our employees to view. The focus has varied from having guests from our own management team that has spoken about different focuses, to guests from other Volvo Group companies to talk about the cooperation between them. Right now my manager use his video blog to update his organization on the progress of our re-organization.

I feel very lucky to be so involved in the different communication initiatives that we have. It has really given me many new insights of what a difficult but extremely important task internal communication is. With that said it is time for me to stop and round of before I will need to catch the train to Stockholm. It has been a busy week but I have my "to do" list sorted and a plan how to manage. I hope you have enjoyed getting som insight to my work, I have for sure enjoyed to share my thoughts in this blog.

I wish you all a relaxing, and hopefully a bit sunny, weekend! I will not be blogging Saturday & Sunday, since I need to think about my WLB (worklife balance). :-)