Employee Communications & Culture Conference

• Agent vs. GPT: How to know the difference, and how to decide when a prompt-driven tool is enough or you need an autonomous agent.
• Build and Link: Steps to create and connect agents for drafting, approval and posting while keeping data and ethics in check.
• Flow and Personalization: How to automate drafting, QA and multichannel release while letting agents tailor tone, timing and channel for each employee segment.
• Content-Strategy Agent (Demo): How to quickly create an AI agent that maps personas, surfaces themes and drafts a quarterly newsletter calendar—live in under 25 minutes.
• Next Steps: How to plan and produce other internal comms agents—Town-Hall Q&As, Speechwriters and Onboarding Coaches—so you can prioritize future workflows and build your agentic AI roadmap.

• Culture Building: How to tell the story of your company’s culture, including manager quality and leadership transparency, even as roles consolidate and hybrid work strains connection.
• Showing the Benefits: Step beyond traditional perks; showcase flexibility, learning stipends and AI-upskilling opportunities that speak directly to the anxieties and ambitions of today’s workforce.
• Demonstrating the Worth: How to position your company’s mission, values and reputation as stabilizing forces in uncertain times, including a focus on the executive team and organizational culture.
• Leaning Into Employees: How to demonstrate to employees that their roles remain meaningful by emphasizing career growth, skills, the company’s mission and opportunities to innovate alongside technology.
• Metrics for 2026: How to tie employer branding to retention, offer acceptance rates and organizational performance.

Employee influencers aren’t just posting on LinkedIn or perfecting their TikTok dances. Inside organizations, they’re already shaping how messages land, spread and actually stick — often without a title or a plan. In Workshop’s 2026 Internal Comms Trends Report, 41% of communicators say employee influencers are a focus area. In this practical session, Jamie Bell shares how internal comms teams can support those voices on purpose, without launching a big program or adding more work, by using the moments they already manage every day.

You’ll learn how to:

• Spot employee influencers without defaulting to org charts or job titles.

• Support real, human voices without losing clarity, accuracy or trust.

• Turn everyday comms moments into natural influence multipliers (no cringe required).

• What’s In It For Me? It’s the question every employee asks—quickly followed by “what’s next.” Here’s how to predict those questions and how to route the answers through the right mix: manager huddles, all-hands, targeted emails, and intranets.
• The Single Source of Truth: Strategies for microsites and hubs, and how to push every channel back to the master source of information.
• Live Moments That Matter: How to effectively use Town Halls, AMAs, office hours, and roadshows for maximum effectiveness. Plus: strategies to loop in clips for shift workers and global teams.
• Initiating Dialogue and Feedback Loops: How to engage employees and leadership in meaningful, authentic discussions that allow both sides to be heard.
• Visible Corrective Actions: How to own an error when one occurs, correct fast, and close the loop with updates tied to measurable commitments.
• Measurement Strategies: The KPIs you need to track to determine the message has been received. Plus: how to track reach by segment, manager cascade completion, and how to adjust the mix if it’s not working.

• Fixing the Channel Mismatch: How to identify the channels deskless employees actually use—from mobile apps and digital signage to intranets—and audit legacy tools to ensure engagement.
• Format Meets Function: How to distill messages into quick-hit talking points, scripts and visual cues that workers can absorb in seconds, not minutes.
• Avoiding the “Racecar” Trap: How comms can partner early with IT and HR during platform selection and intranet builds—so the result is a “minivan” that employees actually use, not a “racecar” full of flashy-under-the-hood tech that isn't easy for the frontline to drive.
• Activating the Manager Cascade: How to equip frontline managers with FAQs, toolkits and quick briefings so they can reinforce messages where work actually happens.
• Measurement Matters: How to move beyond email opens with leader-friendly metrics that matter and reveal whether messages truly landed—or better yet, moved the needle on organizational goals.

• One Story, Two Audiences: Techniques to develop an inside-first narrative (purpose and priorities) that can publish internally at 9 a.m. and externally at noon—without heavy rewrites.
• Platforming the Leader: Strategies to map the right exec or thought leader to the right arena: AMAs, town halls, LinkedIn posts, podcasts; all come with unique sets of challenges.
• Voice Kits: How to build an AI Agent that is the repository of information—lexicon, cadence, metaphor bank, approved anecdotes, third-rail topics—that will allow you to maintain an authentic voice for your subject.
• Memo to Media: Strategies to convert existing internal assets (FAQs, AMA clips) into external-ready pieces. Plus: what to redact, what to expand, and how to keep context and your external partners in the loop.
• Interactive Workshop: In small groups, you’ll work with a fictional leader persona. At the end of the exercise, you’ll take home templates, checklists, and a reuse-ready workflow.

• Recruiting Partners: How to work with internal managers so you have a better idea of what they and their teams are facing and how they can buy into your mission as a communicator.
• Toolkits that Work: How to build manager toolkits that simplify message delivery including templated briefs, FAQs, and suggested cadence.
• Cascades: How to craft clear, consistent message cascades that resonate from the C-suite to the front line.
• Two-Way Communication Strategies: How to measure impact through every survey, and the proper way to run a feedback loop.
• Let’s Play: How to gamify the process so managers are incented to perform as communicators, including employee evaluations of them versus their management peers.
• Interactivity: In small groups, you’ll draft a one-page manager brief FAQ, outline a three-step cascade, and roleplay the consultative meeting.

• Less, but Better: Prioritization frameworks for maximizing output without burning out—including how to make sure all shipped work ties to business priorities.
• Automating the Busywork: How AI can deliver smart, repeatable results with use of Agentic Agents for tasks like translation, maintaining time for humans to keep strategy, nuance and approvals in their purview.
• Governing without Gridlock: Elastic governance to stay flexible and adaptive to your organization’s real-time needs, including clear intake forms, pre-approved guardrails and fast lanes for urgent work.
• Recruiting Your Pit Crew: How internal champions from other departments can help carry the load or become unofficial ambassadors.
• Field-tested Wins: Real life examples of small teams that punched above their weight, plus stealable templates, briefs and checklists.

• The IC Capability Framework: Five pillars you can assess your L&D program against before you design any training. Plus, how to balance the three essentials: AI tool fluency, trust/reputation management and executive presence/soft skills.
• Program Design: Practical steps for structuring AI academies or L&D tracks, including a discussion on micro-learning, peer-to-peer learning and internal GPT-style platforms.
• Leadership and Faculty: Who should own the training (comms, HR, L&D, IT) and how to recruit leaders or external experts to model behaviors and mentor.
• Org Rollout: Best practices for sharing training across the org or your team—including embedding modules in onboarding, newsletters, portals and leadership comms.
• Proof of Impact: Simple ways to measure adoption, skill applications and business outcomes (retention, trust scores, readiness) so leaders invest in sustaining your L&D.

Getting employees to absorb and retain communications, participate in trainings and show up motivated is harder than ever. Gamification changes the equation. This lightning talk unpacks the strategy behind making communications and trainings feel fun and stick: why gamification works psychologically, what it looks like in practice and how communicators can bring these same techniques into onboarding, change management and other initiatives to keep employees engaged and productive.

You'll learn:

• The psychology behind gamification and why it's effective.

• How to connect gamification outcomes to business results.

• Practical first steps for designing and piloting gamification in your organization, even with limited budget or resources.

• ROI Mindshift: How to move past hours saved and efficiency metrics and instead quantify your AI wins in growth, retention and risk terms.
• Adoption Funnel: Best practices for selling internal communicators as the owners of the technology rollout process, including examples of how one company moved their employees from awareness to advocacy by defining stages of adoption, weekly habits, and 90-day goals.
• Metric Matrix: Key steps to pair hard KPIs (cost avoided, margin lift, time-to-proficiency, etc.) with soft ones (engagement, culture score, etc.) in one framework.
• Connecting the Dots: Ways to link AI-powered employee comms—personalized onboarding, training scores, etc.—to retention (HRIS), productivity (work-management tools) and revenue influence (CRM).
• Innovation Index: How to capture new revenue and risk-avoidance gains (e.g., faster rollouts, compliance wins, etc.) and express them in CFO-ready language.
• AI-for-Proof: Techniques for letting GenAI pull the numbers, draft monthly ROI briefs and auto-update a one-slide ROI dashboard—so you use AI to prove AI.

• One Year Success Story: Twelve ambassadors across four offices helped raise awareness on major initiatives, plus the metrics Bergmeyer tracked on their annual survey.
• The Right Ambassador: The three-stage interview process for selection of an ambassador, how manager nominations were weighted, and the final criteria for selection.
• Toolkits, Brand Kits and Social Media marketing: How messaging and talking points made it easier for ambassadors to weave EVP messaging into internal meetings and peer-to-peer conversations, as well as external platforms like LinkedIn.
• Two-Way Conversations: The ambassador office hours, listening tours, and feedback loops into comms/HR that helped with issue resolutions.
• Leadership Buy-In: The metrics that sold the program to leadership, including the simple ROI model tied to business KPIs like hiring and retention, quality of hire, and referral rates.

• Agenda Architecture that Moved People: How a topic-first design created clarity, reduced noise, and helped leaders focus on the conversations employees cared about most.
• A Financial Dashboard that Spotlighted What Mattered: How surfacing a concise set of business-critical metrics improved transparency, grounded updates in performance, and helped employees see how their work contributed to results.
• Survey Design that Measured Impact, Not Just Opinion: How targeted, well-structured pulse questions captured comprehension, confidence, and behavior changes, and how asking the same core questions across the full year created a longitudinal view of the town hall’s effect on employees.
• A Special Session to End the Year Strong: How a redesigned fourth quarter town hall gave colleagues clear line of sight to the most critical Q4 deliverables and used rapid, focused segments to drive alignment.

• Navigated late entry: How a stakeholder map of executives, contractors, and partners, plus a cadence of weekly updates and briefing calls, repositioned comms as the hub of project information rather than an afterthought.
• Reached deskless and affiliated workers: Techniques for a tiered system of communications, including SMS blasts for urgent alerts, QR-code posters in high-traffic areas, safety briefings pushed through supervisors, and FAQs to comms leads in parallel roles.
• Coordinated across employers: How a cross-entity council with representatives built the narrative, including weekly “one-voice” message packets and pre-approved talking points ensuring consistency.
• Levered AI for scale: How translation tools enabled instant turnaround of safety alerts, sentiment analysis dashboards flagged “hot spots” of resistance, and how comms used content generators to deploy targeted toolkits.
• Tracked and proved impact: The KPI dashboard that focused on compliance rates, and how it tied comms directly to project safety performance and workforce stability.