This weekend I travelled down to London and attended the Big Yak. Now there are only two reasons I would ever get up at an ungodly hour on a Saturday – if I was going on holiday or the Big Yak. If you’ve never heard of the Big Yak (where have you been!!) it’s a FREE Internal Communications Unconference set up by the IC crowd which is managed by three wonderful ladies, Jenni Field, Rachel Miller and Dana Leeson.
This is my second time attending the Big Yak so I kinda knew what to expect – or so I thought! This year it completely exceeded my already high expectations.
The day was filled with amazing conversations with fabulous people who had the same interests as me (this in itself was worth the early morning alarm).
If you’ve never been to an unconference it’s basically a conference where delegates set their own agenda and facilitate their own sessions. There were more than 30 sessions throughout the day and I managed to hot foot it across to four of them. Below are some my quick takeaways from the day:
1. We’re not Internal communicators we are Time Travellers! We need to take people to the future to what leaders care about, keep them informed of the present, what their managers care about and remind them of the past, what they care about.
2. Storytelling only works properly if it comes from the heart. Don’t force a story and expect people to fall in love with it. Our job as Internal communicators is to make sure we share, amplify and support when necessary. Stories to be meaningful need to be created by the people for the people.
3. Measurement seems to be one area that we all seem to struggle with. It was acknowledged by the group that it can be difficult to put measures on some of the things we do, but there was general agreement that we do need to look more at outcomes rather than outputs. A few people mentioned the government’s measurement framework: https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/GCS_GCS-Evaluation-framework_A4-_191115.pdf
4. I heard the best acronym of the day in the ‘how to get buy in from cynics’ session: CAVE people (Constantly Against Virtually Everything).
5. It’s important to get our front line colleagues on board by going back to basics and understanding what their concerns are. Allow them to gain trust in you (and your leaders) by giving them an avenue to feedback and get honest answers on questions raised.
6. We need to work with leaders and managers to understand how communication skills can help them in their role. Holding 30 min lunch time sessions is a quick way to share some knowledge and skills that could help them.
7. Don’t underestimate on how much you are worth. Try undertaking a cross charging activity to show how much value you’re bringing to an organisation compared to external resources.
8. Digital and ESNs were the big ticket items two years ago. Now it’s more on how we can engage our colleagues without getting too dazed with ‘comms bling’
9. Talking of comms bling I did love the idea of Pecha Kucha, where people do 20 slides and talk over each slide for 20 seconds, creating a 6 min video. Great for introducing new people to your organisation http://www.pechakucha.org/
10. What more can we do as a profession to be taken seriously at Board Level? We help others share their successes, shouldn’t we be doing the same for ourselves?
That’s a really quick whistle stop tour of the things I picked up. You can follow the hashtag #thebigyak for more information and you can read the following blogs from fellow attendees from the day. It truly was a fantastic day with some wonderful people. I can not wait to see what next year will bring!
@allthingsic: http://www.allthingsic.com/tby2016/
@southendscribe: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/little-help-from-my-friends-simon-rutter
@how_ic_it: https://howicitblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/18/the-big-yak-generation-ic/
@tolsen: http://thomasolsende.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-big-yak.html
If you’re interested in more Internal Comms networking sessions then check out CIPR INSIDES Closing The Gap conference on 4 October: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/closing-the-gap-annual-internal-communication-conference-tickets-26587288295
