At J.P. Morgan, reaching far-flung employees begins with increasing access

When a J.P. Morgan executive hosts a global town hall, he does it twice. He conducts it once in the morning and again at 9 p.m. Chicago time so employees overseas can join live. But that choice confused some employees at first.

During Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington, last month, Diana Sweis, director of internal and executive communications at J.P. Morgan, told the audience that an executive committee member emailed after a morning session to ask if the evening one would really be live.

“I was shocked,” Sweis said. “Either we were extremely polished, or we’d failed to make the effort visible.”

After hearing this, Sweis had the leader open the next town hall edition with a nod to “Saturday Night Live.” He told viewers he was coming to them live from Chicago and to have their questions ready.

“One sentence clarified that the session was live,” she said. “It invited participation and made the scheduling choice visible.”

The later schedule appealed not only to employees in the Asia-Pacific region and the west coast of the U.S., it also proved popular with workers on different shifts and doing work away from a computer.