Last week I gave a presentation on Connection Cultures at Communitelligence’s Employee Engagement Conference in Chicago. While attended the conference I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the speakers who were for the most part responsible for internal communications at some of America’s leading companies. 

Thank you John Gerstner, Communitelligence’s president, Rick Sauter, vice president for partnerships and community development, and Shelia Williams-Gerstner, vice president, for inviting me to speak and for orchestrating such a productive conference. I found your conference was especially valuable because the agenda included breakout sessions for participants to meet and learn from each other.  This format was more stimulating than the traditional speakers-all-day format. I learned more about what other organizations were doing and met more people.  It was a format that encouraging connection.

In the coming days, I’ll be posting fascinating insights shared by conference presenters. Here are a few tidbits of what I learned:

• Al Comeaux, SVP of Corporate Communications at Sabre Holdings, presented an overview of the social network tools developed by Sabre and branded “Sabre Town.”  One employee who worked from home wrote about Sabre Town that “it has lessened my sense of isolation. I feel more connected.”
• Fred Stokes, head of Employee Relations at Lowes, spoke about “Voice Teams” in Lowes’ stores and their positive impact on the organization that came from allowing Lowes’ frontline employees to share their opinions and ideas with decision makers
• Brian Fitzpatrick, head of Google’s 400 person office in Chicago, talked about how he created an office environment that was so appealing that Google employees preferred spending time there rather that working from home (which they have the option to do).

I’ll cover much more in upcoming posts so stay tuned.

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