In your role as an employee communications professional, chances are you’re expected to ensure proposed changes --- like adoption of new policies, procedures, or technologies --- get effectively introduced and actually “stick”. And that’s regardless of whether you have any kind of change management skills, training, or support.

Life gets even messier for you when folks from HR, training and project management share your mandate to bring about desired behavioural change. And, then there’s O.D. (Organizational Development) which is certainly one of the more misunderstood organization functions.

With all these fingers in the pie, life for an employee communications professional isn’t just messy – it can be confusing, frustrating, dysfunctional, and sadly sometimes even hostile.

That’s why we sat down with Nicole Shokoples who provides O.D. consulting at ATB Financial by serving as their Director, Strategy/Chief of Staff - Organizational Development & Consulting. Nicole shares her insights and enthusiasm about how and when employee communicators can work best (or, at least better) with O.D. work colleagues.

Topics we cover with Nicole include:

• What O.D. professionals are measured on
• What O.D. professionals never tell their communications colleagues (but probably should)
• What Comms professionals should share with O.D. (but probably don’t)
• The importance for forging a strong relationship between Comms and O.D.
• How communicators can make nice with O.D.

If your next employee communications project aims at changing behaviour, be sure to check out this episode of The Swear Jar podcast.