The Corporate Lasso

Happy week 5 everyone!

Okay so this blog is about how in-love I am! With my HBF placement of course ha! Over the duration of my internship, after getting my article published in the paper (yay again), I dove into a new line of work in PR – Internal Communications.

I worked with Jodie Leishman learning all there is to know about internal communications. Working in the not-for-profit sector, stories produced were welcoming and stimulated a sense of community amongst staff.  Thankfully they are also a lot less demanding and rigorous than outbound media releases and so much more fun to write, on the basis that I produced 15 article during my 20 days at HBF.  I love the idea of internal communications! There is something so enriching about creating a unified body of knowledge around an organisation of over 900 staff members and developing a piece that invites all staff to envision the same goals and work toward them as a team.

Those 15 intranet article were a large facet of what I produced during my internal communications experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the idea of knowing that my article will have the power to encourage over 900 HBF staff to take part in many of the wellness initiatives put in to play by HBF around the workplace. Of those internal articles published on HBF’s intranet system ‘The Pulse’, favourite article is posted below:

The Global Corporate Challenge an exciting ongoing event for the corporate world to reach their quota of 10,000 steps necessary each day for a healthy lifestyle. I produced this article from an energetic and playful perspective (one of the perk of internal communications is that you personality and style can shine through in your articles) in hopes that my energy and my love of fitness would radiate through my article and impact each HBF employee positively. Being in an already health conscious industry a lot of employees were already taking steps to change their lifestyle, a rule of thumb created was that all employees have to take the stairs instead of the lift (I did not abide by this rule, as most days I had already completed an hour of cardio or weights before 7am hit haha – my HBF team were very forgiving thankfully!). This article remains my favourite as it aligns perfectly with my beliefs and the results from this story were fantastic with employees packing healthy lunches and only healthy treats and muffins were to be allowed into meetings. A truly inspiring work place to be a part of!

Just before developing this blog contribution, I stumbled upon Holly Hazels “Don’t dread the red pen” blog entry raising the topic of constructive criticism on personally written pieces. I felt immediately connected to Holly’s blog as it related to my intranet articles. My first intranet article had a lot of edits to ensure that the language and tone matched that of HBF, however with each article the edits became minimalistic. It felt wonderful to eventually adapt to HBF’s style of writing.

Hope all is well, and that everyone is thoroughly enjoying their internships! I am currently in the process of seeking out my second work placement. Wish me luck!

Kiara Natasha xx