A full house for seven hours and plenty of discussion: on September 26, 2019, the DPRG working group on internal communication, change and leadership communication met at Bosch in Stuttgart. On the agenda: in-depth insights into internal communication at Bosch and the award-winning change campaign of the German Institute for Standardization, exciting prospects for the future of topics such as leadership communication, tool diversity and divisional campaigns.
Christian Fronek, Global Head of Internal Communications and Engagement at Bosch, and Madeleine Magne, Leadership Communication at Bosch, kicked off the event with their presentation “Internal communication as a driver of change at Bosch”. The title alone makes it clear: the role of IC in the change process at Bosch is driving, not accompanying, focusing on collaboration instead of silo thinking, on integration instead of imposition. This was also evident in the other contributions: Bettina Langer and Scarlett Schneider, communicators in the Security department, presented the change initiative “Daily heroes wanted”, subtitled: “How associates become security heroes”. The presentation by Alexander Praun, Managing Director of communication consultants in Stuttgart, who presented the integrated campaign for the German Institute for Standardization, which won the German PR Award, continued with campaign insights. Once again an example of how humor and change processes go together wonderfully.
In the afternoon, Katharina Krentz, initiator of the project, brought the “Working out Loud” format, which is currently being used with great commitment worldwide at Bosch, to life for all participants and thus provided many an aha effect. The participants were also able to try out the effect of gamification for themselves that afternoon in an escape room specially created by the Bosch Security Team. “Gamification has huge potential in internal communication, simply because it’s fun, engaging, enables team building and conveys information at the same time,” summarized Andrea Montua, who has been leading the working group together with Christian Buggisch from DATEV for three years. “I was impressed by the fact that Bosch’s Ted Talk format sometimes reaches up to 55,000 internal views and how consistently Bosch has developed the Bosch Zünder employee newspaper into a media family consisting of the MAZ, newsletter for plant workers, intranet and app,” said one of the day’s participants. And what does the future hold? Three topics emerged from the discussions that are coming more into focus: chat bots in the IC, more coaching for managers and a strengthening of the platform concept. So it remains exciting.
Next dates for the working group: October 29, 2019 in Hamburg and November 27, 2019 in Frankfurt am Main.