Revamping your town halls for relevance, consistency and creativity

During Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville last month, Cisco Networking Internal Communications Lead Raquel Cool shared how she’s led internal comms for the company in the three years since she joined—and made innovating town halls a focus.

Among the nearly 100 employee-facing events that Cool has produced, she’s found common threads to communicate relevant information. They are:

Cool then outlined her focus areas for ensuring these things happen.:

Here’s how she put this focus into action.

Reinforcing relevance

Cool says that communicators who ignore data do so at their peril.

“We all know that the hard sell isn’t the importance of data,” she said. “The hard sell is how many minutes we have in a day. The hard sell is how many resources we have to allocate to understand data, and the hard sell is really our time.”

One colleague likened constantly moving from one deliverable to the next  to sipping from a firehose. This makes it hard to pause, measure and reflect.