Communications and Public Affairs

Organizational Communications

If your company faces changes in leadership, organizational structure, marketplace, technology or mission, your communications challenges are greater than ever, particularly because companies come under closer scrutiny by shareholders and the media.

While you need to communicate with a range of stake-holders to maintain credibility and confidence during a transition, one audience must come first - your employees. They are the closest to the change and ultimately the ones who will execute it.

Whether alleviating concerns during a transitional period, rallying support for a new program or leader, or generating motivation and behavior that builds your brand from within, employees are the key to your company's sustainable competitive position and superior performance.

Aventa Groups's Organizational Communications specialty practice offers a wide range of services to support employee engagement and organizational alignment and has fulfilled noteworthy, differentiating work with significant clients. Our work focuses on one or more of the following change "triggers":

• New strategic directions, visions, values, or business strategies
• Brand launches and repositioning
• Crises impacting the organization and its stakeholders
• Mergers, acquisitions, or divestitures
• Leadership transitions and development
• Organizational restructuring
• Large-scale process and technology improvements
• Recruiting and retaining a high performance workforce

Our approach:

Assess

• Assessments of internal awareness, understanding, perceptions, and behaviors
• Audit/assessment of the communication function's effectiveness and of communication channels/vehicles' impact
• Communications skills assessment and core competency identification - for the communications function, for leaders across the organization
• Establishing internal communications measurement programs

Think

• Vision, mission, values, strategic direction development
• Articulation of core messaging, business case for change
• Employee alignment/ engagement strategy development
• Internal communications strategy development
• Internal communications counsel
• Leadership coaching on change/internal communications issues
• Alignment of HR and communications functions to support change programs
• Research/"white papers" on change and communications issues

Plan

• Engagement/internal communications action planning
• Communications function improvement recommendations/ action planning
• Communications channels/vehicles redesign
• Change champions/ sponsors program development
• "Thought leaders" program development
• Learning program development
• Reward and recognition program development
• Retention program development
• Internal feedback program development

Do

• Implementation and management of change/internal communications programs
• Leadership forums and development programs
• Learning sessions
• Internal editorial strategy, writing, and production
• Executive speechwriting
• Internal advertising campaigns
• Internal toolkits
• E-channels content/design - Intranets, Video E-mail Series, etc.
• Facilitation
• Event management

These offerings are strengthened by our ability to integrate thinking, planning and execution with our external communication partners, whether the client's or Aventa Group's. Our knowledge of stake-holders in both worlds leads to smarter internal communications counsel and better integrated internal/external executions.