Organisations who know where they want to go and are driven by staff who are pointing in the same direction are simply unstoppable. We have worked with companies who have lost their mojo and helped them to find a new passion for their work.

Company strategy is transformed into personal quests. Values on the page become heroic behaviours that live in the bloodstream.

Engagement is not 100% alignment – that’s a cult. Engagement is getting more of your people finding their own dreams in a shared goal.

Social media has transformed the communication landscape. Now the same is happening inside the firewall.

It’s disruptive, it’s messy and it’s hard to control. But Employee Social Networks are the biggest thing that is happening to internal communications.

That’s why we run simplySMILE – regular free events for communicators to bring the best case studies, war stories, ideas and successes.

And it’s why large companies come to us first for advice and help on setting up and growing their internal online communities.

We have trained thousands of communicators to make them more effective.

Whether it is the Communication Maze – a highly impactful tool to help communicators build their strategies and communication plans.

Or our bespoke courses to help you become a better writer for print or the web. Our trainers are the top names in the internal communication business: Jim Ylisela and Steve Crescenzo on writing skills; Silvia Cambié for social media and Marc Wright for strategy and planning.

For a major producer of vaccines we:

• Planned the first 100 days for their new CEO
• Communicated a new vision and a set of strategic objectives
• Co-created messages and stories to drive buy-in to new ways of working
• Developed and produced a senior management change conference
• Trained up communication champions
• Delivered events for 12,000 staff in just 30 days

The world’s favourite airline had suffered its first cabin crew strike. As management reduced crippling costs some staff reacted by dropping their legendary customer care. Quality and sales were in a nose dive. Our task was to help BA put the heart back into the airline.

Over 30 months we ran Putting People First Again – the largest and most successful engagement programme in Europe.

36,000 staff went through a one day experience to restore pride in the airline’s past, engage passionately with the issues of the present and build faith in the future of the company.

By 2001 BA had recovered its reputation for premium service and the surveys, sales and profits all reflected a leaner operation with a reinvigorated workforce ready to take on the lower cost competition.

UniCredit is Italy’s largest bank following a series of mergers and acquisitions. In the heat of the financial crisis they were early adopters of internal social media through their partnership with Microsoft, where they exploited mysites and communities.

We helped assess the development of their platform OneNet and helped the team publicise its benefits internally and externally.

The Communication Maze is ideal for that awayday with your team to discover just how big an impact better communication can have.

Communicators have to negotiate their colleagues from one end of the maze to the other against the clock. But the maze is a minefield and no one is allowed to talk.

The exercise help teams to improve their scores in a step change that provides learnings for life. It also provides the perfect framework for developing your communication strategy and plans.

When LloydsTSB and HBoS were merged in the banking crisis of 2008/9 we were brought in to communicate the new harmonised terms and conditions to 130,000 staff and to create Manager’s Briefing Packs, HR Brochures and hundreds of pages of intranet to get the new proposals to staff during a period of high concern

But our true added value was the monitoring unit we set up to collect thousands of comments each day from a ‘Have Your Say’ site and distil the true mood of staff during the lengthy consultation process

We were able to feed back key insights to the negotiating team so the enlarged Group could meet the real issues with appropriate proposals.

In the event 85% of staff voted for the new deal, helping the merged bank recover and rebuild its balance sheet.

The global packaging company had expanded successfully around the world. But as emerging markets grew the Swedish company needed to engage with cultures and staff who were very far from its Swedish roots.

We were hired to create and deliver LiVE Tetra Pak! - a global engagement programme for 21,000 staff. We devised a six hour event of communication and interactivity through an emotional journey that we tailored across 5 continents.

We shot videos, captured stories, developed games and trained up facilitators to deliver the programme in under a year. The result - growth in the company continued in double digits as engagement levels soared.

The global FMCG company are early adopters of online communications with a best in class intranet and internal news service.

So when it came to internal social media they wanted to manage these new tools with the same focus. We were engaged to audit the use of social media internally and externally in their operations around the world.

We analysed what was happening and developed social media guidelines to help foster collaboration and communication within a framework amenable to staff and management.

We have the best writing tutors on the planet.

Jim Ylisela is a Professor of Journalism who has dedicated himself to improving corporate communications on the written page and online.

Steve Crescenzo is regularly voted the top trainer in the US by the International Association of Business Communicators.We run public courses, webinars and in-house training throughout Europe and the Middle East.