Chris Brennan (00:04)
Welcome to Modern Coms, the podcast series designed to help comms leaders navigate today's hyper speed demands and move forward with clarity, confidence, and impact. This podcast is brought to you by Cofenster, the creators of AI video agents built specifically for communication professionals. Our AI agents empower your teams to deliver high impact on brand video without needing any prior video experience.

So in today's episode, we're gonna be talking about the visibility playbook for internal comms. And joining me for this conversation is the Senior Director of Internal Communications at the PGA Tour, Dave Cordero. Dave, welcome to the show.

Dave Cordero (00:47)
Thanks, thanks for having me. When you sent me a note and I did some research on the show, I'm like, this is awesome. These are like my people, the internal comms. It's a small industry when you get to know enough people and inevitably you find out everyone's facing the same challenges. It's always good to connect with like-minded folks.

Chris Brennan (01:09)
Absolutely, and you're totally right. There's this recurrence of challenges that we see, and one of the most rewarding parts of this podcast is getting all these leaders' takes on it, which can be great for a consistency where you go, it looks like there's a similarity to a solution here, but then there's also those kind of new ideas that you've never really thought of. So it's always rewarding doing these kind of interviews. So to kick us off, though, ⁓ could you first tell us a little bit about your background and your current role?

Dave Cordero (01:24)
Sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Sure, so I, ⁓ you know it's funny, I was just in a meeting with some other colleagues last week and it was one of these meetings where we're kind going around and talking about where you went to college and what you majored in and it's just so funny to me that there's so many people that are doing something that they did not go to school for. You you see that so often.

⁓ I guess you would say I'm one of the ones that I am doing what I did go to school for so I majored in public relations, a school of journalism. ⁓

out in Southern California. you know, initially I'd say the first 20 or so years for me was external, you know, like media relations. And, you know, it was great. I had an opportunity to work for some sports teams. But I think what I found was I was going to learn the tools and the trade of like how to be a PR person. And I had to go work for an agency and I had to cut my teeth in that agency life and learn how to write press releases and deal with clients. And so I did that for a while.

before going in house, working for a golf company. Same thing though, working with media, which was great. In a weird way, you're like a salesperson. You're selling stories, you're not selling products. But I think that just, there's a lot there. You learn different personalities, you learn how to work with folks. ⁓ And then guess fast forward to 2019.

Chris Brennan (02:53)
Yeah.

Dave Cordero (03:07)
was in 19 I think it was 2000 no 2017 had the opportunity to work for the PGA Tour which you know I kind of tell people like if you lived in Seattle Washington and you like coffee and Starbucks calls it's like that's it this is the homeland for me you know being a golfer and loving golf and when the PGA Tour had an opportunity I'm like that's it that's that's what I want to do unfortunately it wasn't doing what I had been doing forever which was

Chris Brennan (03:22)
For sure.

Dave Cordero (03:35)
You know, like I said, the media relations, the external work, managing websites and newsletters, external newsletters and social media accounts. This was more, you're gonna run internal communications. In fact, we don't even have an internal communications person. So you're gonna be the guy and you're gonna build it from the ground up. Those are cool opportunity.

Chris Brennan (03:58)
Wow, amazing. by starting in 2017, like you're basically starting from zero. What does that actually look like in practice? Like to come into this new space and go, okay, day one, what am I doing?

Dave Cordero (04:07)
Yeah.

Yeah,

no, it was crazy. And I actually had a chance to talk to ⁓ one of our executive vice presidents here who actually hired me back then and we were joking. She goes, yeah, I don't think either of us knew what the role was. You know, I think internal communications, when you break it down, it's employee communication, right? I mean, there's an element of distilling corporate messaging, taking messaging from...

Let's say like the benefits team the financing and you're trying to package it up in a way that's that's understandable for the for the common employee the rank-and-file employees I would say and So when I first got here I did take like three months I did a listening tour which I think was super important tried to go meet with department leaders and And kind of ask them the same question Chris like what does internal communications look like to you or what are your expectations? and all along during that process

in our organization at that time, I'll say it was probably maybe half of the size it is today. We're about 1,400 employees now. And if you look at the generation of the PJ Tour, it's been about 55 years. And we started in a tiny little building where it was like, hey, Chris, I would send an all-staff email if there's like 10 of us, 20 of us, 100 of us. Hey, Chris, I got tickets to the local ballet. You want them?

our organization was still behaving in this small, like we were small, so you were getting the reply alls, you were getting emails from this person, this person, and I remember going to our IT team, I said, we gotta shut this down, this isn't, one, it's confusing, there's so many messaging, and then by the way, if...

Our CEO had something important to say and two minutes later it's followed up by a pet insurance email. It just felt very disjointed. And so one of the things that I wanted to do was let's get our arms around what I'd call like the email noise. There's a lot of noise. I feel like the first year or so I was like traffic control trying to, people would have to email me permission like, can I send out this email? And that kind of just eventually led to like, we have an editorial calendar if you will, where we

and say, okay, we know this day, this message is going, this day, this morning, this afternoon. And so it kind of allowed me to just see high level, like the communications that was going on. But still, it was still a lot of email. So there was a lot of things that we had to do to right size that. Because at the end of the day, email's great. I still think email's the number one tool. But when it's overused, you start to lose people and they don't know what's important anymore.

Chris Brennan (06:48)
Yeah, that makes total sense. And what I love is that you started by asking all the questions, because I think that's something we're learning consistently in this podcast series when we interview people. And then when I go out and I speak to our own clients and other professionals in the comm space, there is this push to give people what you think they need rather than ask them as a starting point. It's like, think they need this. It's like, why don't you just start?

by asking questions. My background comes from marketing, so I would always start by interviewing the ideal customers and really finding out their message and how they respond. I think those kind of attributes, when applied to the comms department, I think works just as well. It's just human nature. It's like, don't just panic and try to answer a question immediately. Just ask the question first, so then you can then deliver on a more ⁓ direct and targeted approach.

Dave Cordero (07:23)
Sure.

Yeah, no, it's so true. in marketing, I mean, you have the benefit of analytics and you're looking at where you want to go sell and where your product's going to work the best. And when you build up an internal comms department, you have to kind of start building those metrics on your own. And I'll never forget, we had a video that our CEO had done back in 2017, 18 and went out to the organization.

It's just so fun. wish I still had that email, but it was like a, you know, a little cover note from the CEO with a link to a Dropbox. Then you open the Dropbox and you got to get it. And it's a video message. you know, a few days later, our CEO goes to our IT team and I was part of that meeting too. He's like, can you guys tell me how many views we had on the, we were like, well, no, we can't. And so that was sort of the...

Chris Brennan (08:39)
Ha

Dave Cordero (08:42)
The moment for me when I was like, know what, we need to kind of get serious and have some big boy tools where we can track what our employees are reading and what resonates. So that was kind of that was the mark for us where we decided we had to move to start looking at some outside vendors to come in and help ⁓ start building that communications mix.

Chris Brennan (09:06)
that's great. Yeah, because in our previous correspondence, we were talking about ⁓

going from invisible to visible. I suppose you're even referring to that even with the videos going, have no idea if anybody sees it, if anybody understands it, because what's the point in sending a message if it's not actually registering? that's really, was that the first time for you in your department that you started noticing the invisibility of the comms and to make the switch?

Dave Cordero (09:17)
Yeah

Yeah, so we went to a company back in the day, was called Banana Tag, and now they're owned by Staffbase. And one of the things I loved about it, and this kind of a two-part answer here, ⁓ so all along we still have all these emails I told you about, right, the email challenges of just email overload.

I remember going to my boss at the time, said, why don't you let me create a newsletter where I can just curate all of these messages and write them in a fun tone that goes out so it's here at all. And what happened with that was I would get the person who would reach out from the employee benefits, hey, I want to send out this message that there's a Charles Schwab webcast employees. I'm like, just send it to me, I'll put it in the newsletter.

And all of a sudden the email noise went way down and now you had this appointment reading. It's a bi-weekly newsletter. We've been doing it for nine years now. It goes out every Tuesday at 2 p.m. which I thought was very important to schedule it so it's anticipated people are ready for it. So StaffBase offered a really cool attempt. had a bunch of templates where they could make it so it doesn't look like, you know, Dave Cordero just sending a Microsoft ⁓ email but it's actually coming and it has like a

has logos and banners and it just looks like a newsletter like we all follow. I'm like well that's cool, that's a better experience. But then on the back end we're able to track open rate metrics and we're able to track one of my favorite indicators is the read time buckets. Read time is described by eight seconds or more. then there's...

Chris Brennan (11:14)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Cordero (11:15)
like a skimmed and a glanced and so you're able to kind of look and see okay that works and then in the newsletter you can actually see what links are people clicking on and so that starts to tell me okay that's people want more of that whether that was a let's say a Q &A I did with you Chris you know to try to spotlight other employees from around the organization

something as simple as ⁓ our cafe menu. We have a tour cafe here. People love food. So hey, let's put the menu up there. So you just start learning and getting a feel for what people are ⁓ wanting. So I think bringing StaffBase in was the first big moment for us where we felt visible and we started having executives come to us and say, can you tell me how many people read this or how's this content doing? ⁓ So it was a huge win, huge win initially.

Chris Brennan (12:05)
And then when you're bringing in one of these large tools or these platforms, like what is like one mistake that you think or you see that organizations make and that you'd recommend to keep an eye out for? Because these are big changes when you bring them in initially.

Dave Cordero (12:18)
they're massive. you we fast forward five years from staff base and everybody's got comfortable with it. And we've trained other departments to use it and you can have multiple owners. so that's completely.

learned how to fish and they're off fishing now they don't need my help and it's great. And then five years later fast forward we bring in Workvivo which for the audience not familiar it's essentially a modern day think of it like a think of it like Facebook but for work so everything on there is employee focused but news announcements just very modern dynamic two-way conversation ability to comment

juxtapose that with our intranet that we had which was static overloaded with information not friendly and so you know we're thinking hey this would be cool to bring this in but to answer your question yeah it's these things they take time you know we rolled out work vivo two and a half three years ago and here we sit in 2026 and I feel like it's just resonating where it's part of the vernacular

know to go there to see announcements get updates have some executives on there but for me whenever you're looking and for anyone that's listening anytime you're bringing in something that's gonna cause a behavior change first of all we all need to admit that people hate change no matter who you are nobody wants change it's like we talked about the internet's going away what are you talking about the fax machines going away you know I know

Chris Brennan (13:46)
You didn't even use the internet, I know, but I don't want to

a new thing.

Dave Cordero (13:50)
And I've seen some of my colleagues who've rolled out Workday since my time here, like what the undertaking that looked like and ⁓ expense things like Concur, bringing that in and people like, my gosh, how am gonna figure this out? ⁓ So when you're leading a project in the two cases I was, I think it's important to, well, this is where you do have to become a salesperson. You almost have to have like your positioning statement of like, here's why this is gonna be better for you, Chris. Just trust me on it.

And you kind of, I just had to go take a ton of meetings, invite people to lunch, buy lunch, buy coffee, let me cake, can I have a word with you? You kind of get a sense of who the high engaged and high performing employees are. You want to go find them, you want to create ambassadors, create champions, get them on board.

And it's like when you sit down with people, shoot, I was giving cookies away. I remember sitting downstairs by myself on the table. I come over, here's a cookie. Just let me get, just hear my spiel. As you start to kind of get people ⁓ on board and you see the light bulb go off like, ⁓ that's cool. Then your, you know, your presence just becomes so much better around the organization. You have to, you have to promote it. You know, we have digital signage around our campuses that I control.

And so you have to put stuff on the digital signage. You have to put things in the newsletter. You have to put things. We have a new newsletter that we do, which I think is probably one of our most successful, and it's called the People Leader Report. So we essentially took all of our managers at the...

organization all 300 or so of them and they get an email that basically gives you the high high points of Okay, Chris as you go into your team meetings this week Here are five things or three things that you need to know Would be you know need to share need to do and it's everything from back-end compliance stuff like hey There's a training make sure your team's aware of it. There's a deadline

There's gonna be a massive town hall. Make sure your team's here. So it became our way to bring our leaders in and say, help us. So again, going back to being invisible, to being visible, if you can kind of make other people internal comms, ⁓ doing your work for you a little bit, you start to spread it out so you're not just in a corner feeling like, is anyone listening? I have...

Chris Brennan (15:54)
Alright.

But yeah, that would make sense.

supposed to be, everybody should be doing internal comms. It's just there is a department and a lead in charge of it. So it makes complete sense that you have to activate all the leaders to make sure that the message is aligned. Like I actually really like that idea with the newsletter. That makes complete sense. And it's not jam-packed. It's a couple of bullet points so people can retain the instructions that they're supposed to follow too. That's a great idea.

Dave Cordero (16:36)
Well, and I think too,

Chris, if you're a manager at a multi-billion dollar organization like we are, this makes you feel validated, like, ⁓ only I'm getting this. I'm one of a percentage of the employee base getting this news ahead of time, and it's my responsibility to now cascade it down. And so then when that gives them the opportunity to talk to their teams, but then we'll also follow up with all employees with the same news and maybe a little more detail.

It's great. I will tell you an example of how not to do things. We had a new, ⁓ and I'm gonna go ahead and say this wasn't mine, but we had a wellness benefit. So you know the wellness programs where you can get points and if you get 10,000 steps, you get points and there's online mall and it's a way to kind of get employees engaged with.

you know, just keeping on their wellness. Well, we brought in a company ⁓ two years ago and we launched it way too early. It wasn't ready. We had no promotion. The website was having all these bugs. The mobile app wasn't working and we never recovered. We just ended up having to cut bait with that vendor because nobody knew about it. Everyone's like, I tried to get into that and it just didn't work. So

It happened to a colleague of mine in my department. I actually work in Human Resources, is where I sit, which could be a whole nother show in itself. Where does internal comm sit? Communications, HR. But I sort of saw how not to do it. And you learn so much kind of at the proverbial water cooler, talking to employees, being visible.

Chris Brennan (18:07)
It's a great topic.

Dave Cordero (18:20)
don't get it. It's just it's not I'll never use it and it was a massive massive disappointment and so whenever I was able to bring out Workvivo I'm like okay even if this thing's ready we're gonna we're gonna have a pilot group we're gonna test it we're gonna do X Y & we're gonna build it and we're not gonna pull that curtain back until we know

it's fully ready to go. And as part of that, we're like, we're gonna get executives on board. You know, it's one of the things I was thinking about is when you bring in something new, what's the responsibility of the executive? And I think any internal communications person would say, you gotta get executives on board. have to. ⁓

I would say it's really nice to, you don't have to, but when you're able to get at least a few of them and help them perpetuate some messages and be there for the initial launch, great. ⁓ But listen, know, internal comms.

It's not always at the forefront of the senior leader's mind. They're working on things like sales and numbers. And so then it's like, whoa, what's this internet? Or what's this Workvivo thing? What do I have to do? And so that takes a little while. So I know some of my peers in the internal comm space would disagree and say, nope, you have to get the executives on board. Certainly try and do everything you can. But with the right team and the right practices, I think you can still have a successful launch of a product.

Chris Brennan (19:44)
Yeah, I can see both sides, but in general, you do need them to understand it and champion it. But maybe they're not leading the charge as such, because as you say, there's all these other priorities that they have on their day to day schedule. But I want go back to what you were saying about that newsletter, because there was something

Really nice about that too, when you activate the other leaders to cascade the message down. I think one of the other solutions that you have there is when somebody overheard something and goes to their leader and that leader isn't aware of it, that puts them in such a difficult position where they don't want to say, don't know this, or they don't want to pretend and lie to their team. So what I really like about that type of leadership driven newsletter

Dave Cordero (20:18)
Mm.

Chris Brennan (20:36)
is it keeps everybody in line and on the same page so it can actually eradicate those kind of ⁓ issues when someone's like, I heard about this, what is it, what do you know? And then the person doesn't want to reveal that they have no idea what you're talking about.

Dave Cordero (20:51)
Yeah, listen, I

think if you did this podcast 100 years from now and you and I are both gone and it's two new people, you're still going be talking about the same issue, which is communications. And, you know, we did an employee engagement survey, which I had a chance to lead and it was a really cool experience. And that was about a year and a half.

And everybody always says, you when you do an employee survey, like you have to do something with that data. You have to tell people how it went. Well, we went a step further. We actually took the themes and, thanks to AI, we were able to kind of curate what the themes were. And it really boiled down to three buckets. One of them was communications. We never know what's going on. It's hard not to feel like that's an indictment on

internal comms, but it's more so what you said. It's more of the, manager never tells me anything, or it's, hey, why did we find out on X or Instagram that this player did, you know, X, Y, Z, and why didn't we know? How come we didn't know that our commissioner was at the White House? You know, all of these things, right? So communications was the first bucket. The second bucket was career development, probably age old.

age-old conversation to people want to know how to advance in their career. And then the third bucket was belonging and inclusion. So we divided up those three buckets. I led the communications one and we opened it up to the entire organization. Sign up for one of these groups if you want to be part of the process. We had about 150 in our comms group and we sat down and we tried to come up with

8 to 10, just no regret wins. Like, what is it that we can do to improve things? And of that came this people leader communication as a way to break down those silos. And we haven't talked about the remote staff, but imagine the remote employees. Suddenly, if everybody's getting the same message, that's a manager, to your point, they're going to know what's going on. That's going to help things. that was a lot of that was the group that was probably the loudest of we never know what's happening.

So that was probably the single biggest thing we did. The next thing we did was I worked with our communications department and they put out a weekly ⁓ email and it goes out Monday afternoons and it's basically a hymnal, if you will, of here's a snapshot of everything going on externally. Here's the message points, here's our position, here's what was said in the news. And kind of the funny joke that we used to say a couple years ago is,

we'd have employees that would say, well, I'm scared to death to go to Thanksgiving dinner with my family because they're going to ask me about, you know, X, Y, Z, and I don't know. Or you had some one employee said, I have to hide from my neighbor when I'm pulling the trash cans in because they're going to ask me and I don't know. So this document that we created was, no, if you want to know what's going on, like just give this a quick skim and you're going to have exactly what you need to know. ⁓

Chris Brennan (23:40)
Right.

Dave Cordero (23:56)
And again, I think it's about creating ambassadors, right? You gotta let each employee feel like they're part of the organization. They have a role. They're an important constituent, right? It's not just about our media, our partners, but the employee itself is a very important constituent. Because if you kind of get unrest internally, it just manifests. So culture, big fan of culture. ⁓

Chris Brennan (24:23)
Yeah, and like I've always said, no matter what the company size from a startup to enterprise, you live or die on transparency and communication. And it's the both of those things because you can communicate and people don't think you're actually being transparent and that could be difficult too. So I think one of the things that I love about even what you're saying about skimming, like giving something that's skimmable, like people don't have the time to like deep dive into these topics.

But if you can give them the critical material in a skimmable way, what you're doing is you're eliminating speculation. And speculation leads to gossip and misinformation. So it really does help. There's a complete other benefit to it by just making sure that the right message got across, because all of those remote workers are even especially remote, but even the people in the offices themselves, if there's a gap in knowledge, they'll try to fill it with something. So you might as well make sure.

Dave Cordero (25:17)
absolutely.

Chris Brennan (25:19)
that you're filling it with the right information. Otherwise, you'd be amazed at the kind of nonsense that you hear back going, wait, who said that? Well, somebody said it over here. I said it over here. Like, I have no idea where you get that from.

Dave Cordero (25:29)
Yeah, and you know, I think

⁓ human behavior too is we go worst case scenario, you know, when there's an issue, ⁓ my gosh, everyone's getting fired. The house is coming down. ⁓ So when you're able to talk to people and, use the word transparent, and I stopped using that word, I feel like a couple of years ago because...

Chris Brennan (25:38)
That's true.

Dave Cordero (25:54)
You know, you have a CEO that gets on stage for a town hall, for instance. Sometimes transparent, you can't be fully transparent, but what I have replaced the word with is candid. You can be candid. You can be upfront, you can be honest, but you're never gonna completely be transparent. We really break down the word transparent. You're not gonna know everything. And I think you need to talk to employees like they're adults, right? But at the same time, they need to know...

there are some things that are going to exist over in the corner office and that's okay but we'll keep you posted on the process and you'll be the first to know and I think that is appreciated.

Chris Brennan (26:31)
That's very true. I'm going to remember that, candid instead of transparent. You mentioned town halls. ⁓ What was your strategy or what was your approach to town halls and if you revamped them? If so, what was wrong with the old formula or the old format itself?

Dave Cordero (26:47)
So I'm in my ninth year. I've seen a variety of town halls. I've been part of planning. We have a great ⁓ global meeting and corporate events team and I've locked arms with them and you know definitely you don't have to do these things by yourself. You got to find your people like at any organization. The people that help with the logistics and the moving the chairs and the the audio and you you kind of create your teams. ⁓

I've seen it all. used to do pretty large scale production town halls that had walk up music and big slides and videos and, then our company just got big. And so the room that we used to do and an older building, we couldn't do that anymore. So now we have a beautiful 180,000 square foot headquarters that we built in 2020, which was bad timing with COVID. So we had a few false starts getting in there.

but it's this really big, beautiful space ⁓ that allows for kind of this arena-like feel where you have an open floor, you have a second and third level, you can have employees hanging off each level, you have some soft seating downstairs, so when you're up there on stage, it looks like this arena and it's really cool. But I think the secret to good town halls is they have to be... ⁓

what I would say like they have to be culture moments. They can't just be a one way conversation of here's Chris on stage talking about financials and here's Dave talking about something we did. Like what are the opportunities to engage employees? You know we had a program where employees could actually text. There was a number you could text your questions and we'd be in the back and we'd be able to like populate the popular ones because there'd be some nonsense things like why aren't we all getting raises? Okay that one's not

Chris Brennan (28:37)
Hahaha

Dave Cordero (28:38)
But you'd get

ones that like, that's a great question. And you'd throw it up there all anonymous. So we've done that. We've just had, as of recently, we just do microphones. I mean, what is a town hall? Town hall is where a town comes together, gets information, shares, asks questions. And I think something for us that we've done lately is our senior leaders aren't afraid to tackle the hard questions. I'll never forget. It was about a year ago. And we were in the

process of curating questions because we were still kind of figuring out, we want employees going to a mic? And just who knows what they're going to say? Let's curate the questions. So we'd send a note to department heads like, if your team has questions. So we had a list of about 40, 45 questions and we went into our commissioner's office and I think we were a little like, okay, here's some good ones that are probably on script and these are some hard ones. And he said, give me the hard ones. Those are the ones I want. And it was like a, whoa,

said that in the town hall he goes hey thanks for the questions there was some uncomfortable ones we're gonna go after those you would never believe the feedback that we got following that town hall like ⁓ my goodness it was so good to hear the truth and and to feel like I was brought you know behind the curtain to understand what why decisions are being made or where we're going as a business so again going back to being candid it really does help and when you know when we write the

shows and the talking points you must have to like put yourself put your your butt in the seat of every other employee like what do want to hear like I mentioned

What am I hearing? What are the things that we need to get ahead of, address, let people understand? And I'm not saying the entire town hall is that, but if you can mix that in with, of course, the messages that you're trying to cascade down from a top level perspective. And then have some fun. We do breakfast. We'll do coffee and donuts before the start of our show. Sometimes it's lunch on the company. We do our town halls quarterly. went.

Chris Brennan (30:42)
Right.

Dave Cordero (30:46)
where we try to do them once a month last year and it's it's a big lift not to mention I think you get to a point you're like okay what do we have what do we have to talk about ⁓ but for us now doing it quarterly we have moved to more of like a production feel big stage chairs bringing in others not just the senior leaders but let's bring in some employees to talk and share you know department updates and I think that's what's really

Chris Brennan (30:52)
Okay.

Dave Cordero (31:14)
driven the success of our meetings is they're meetings that you don't want to miss. We stream them live, which is a whole other thing because other remote employees will stream them. So there's opportunities for them to follow along and be engaged.

If you can tell yourself that I pledge these meetings to be culture moments and to try to have a mix of celebratory, if there's something to be celebrated, let's celebrate. ⁓ If there's some hard news, let's give the hard news. But at the end of it, you leave feeling like, okay, I know what's going on. I think that's success.

Chris Brennan (31:48)
And I think it's really important as well to give people the opportunity to ask, to have their questions kind of curated in advance because not everybody is going to have the question live in the moment. And there's lots of introverts or shy people who don't feel comfortable taking a mic. They still have questions that haven't been answered, but a lot of people don't have that, like that.

I'll grab the mic. There's even a lot of times people just don't want to be the first one to ask a question. I know in my webinars, I'll plant some questions. Why? Because I want to make sure that people are like, look, it's okay, everybody, you're all welcome. Look.

Dave Cordero (32:19)
yeah.

Chris Brennan (32:25)
Jeff has a question. There was no Jeff. I just needed to get people invited into the activity. So I think it's absolutely amazing to give people that chance to ask in advance. And that's where actually what it sounds like really good questions came out of it because people took the time to consider what it is they want to ask rather than in the moment there's a mic and they're like, how long will that mic be there? the mic's gone. Okay, nevermind. And the moment's gone.

Dave Cordero (32:53)
Yeah,

no, it's true and definitely, definitely always have people planted just in case, just in case. But no, to your point though, once, once that snowball gets going, you see so many people flip through their hands. I'm like, okay, it is safe to ask a question. ⁓

Chris Brennan (33:01)
For sure. For sure.

Yeah,

we did a webinar in November and I had a couple of plant questions. I asked one and I didn't use the rest. We did 45 minutes of post-webinar questions. It was unbelievable. It was like a second webinar. And I was like, just needed to get that little momentum going, you know? And then they took over from there.

Dave Cordero (33:31)
Yeah, no, that's so cool.

You know, you think about, know, internal comms does get visibility, you know, I would say across the industry with senior leaders. There's a lot of employees that don't. And so that quarterly moment when you have senior leaders on stage, they're the new and shiny toy people want to hear. They want to know, like, what are they into? You know, and that kind of leads into something we're trying to roll out this year. We'll be doing our first one. ⁓

later this month was we're going to launch an employee podcast. And it's, really based on what I just mentioned is there's so many great stories to tell about our employees, especially our senior leaders. Like for instance, our CEO plays guitar and he loves rock and roll music. Like who would know that? So these are some of the stories that would be fun to draw out and really humanize our executives. And so this is, you know, I,

my philosophy in internal comms, you know, every year I'm like, how can we be better? How can we raise the bar? And for us podcasting, it just, it's the writings on the wall. I mean, that's where you get content. I get content. You're on a jog. You listen, you're doing yard work. You listen. I mean, it's just, I'm always listening to something as I'm sure you and a lot of your, listeners are. So it's like, a great opportunity to bring into another vehicle for employees to absorb information, you know,

It's not just assume that everybody's the same and just going to read email from nine to five. I mean, there's other opportunities to reach people. So we're excited to get that rolling. And you know what I love about it, Chris, too, is some of these concepts, they don't cost any money. You know, it's free. have a studio building that's 135,000 square feet just next to our campus here. And they have the full capability to video, do podcasting. So there's no charge for us.

So those are the ideas I like. risks, take the risks when there's not a lot of money involved. Because if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Chris Brennan (35:22)
Right.

But you're also, you're matching the habits that we've developed out of office.

podcast, like the cadence of how I listen to a podcast, absolutely. Like I would easily probably prefer to engage with that kind of content internally rather than the intranet page that was AI generated and is way too much information. And I'll just go, I don't know. I might just dump it in a chat and ask it to summarize it for me. But now

Dave Cordero (35:51)
Sure.

Chris Brennan (35:59)
the internal comms leadership has lost their message because now it's a summary of a summary. Whereas I love the idea of taking these modern approaches to how we consume content and engage in the staff that way. It's something that we're seeing more and more.

Dave Cordero (36:14)
And you said you said something

you said something that's interesting and it's it's so true You know even an email that comes up from the CEO to all staff. Let's say if and he sent an email right now to all staff There's a handful of cynics like did he say that did he write that is that really his words? I think when you're hearing someone on a podcast. It's like that's Chris. That's that's Chris Brennan, and he's giving me ⁓

I'm hearing from him and by the way he's got some cool stories and I think that helps build trust and again helps humanize ⁓ the executive.

Chris Brennan (36:48)
Absolutely.

It does for sure. And what we're seeing, because we...

provide AI video agents for internal comms teams. So there's a variety of different ones. So there's text to video, which could be used for digital signage. We're seeing a lot of frontline workers being connected with by creating these videos that can go onto displays around warehouses, factories, canteens, stuff like that. But there's also the authentic AI video agent called Ella we have. And one of the benefits of that is you can actually send, you can have AI help you with a prompt to then send

a link to say leadership and go, can you make this video? Here's the prompt is a teleprompter if you want, but on the screen you can actually get the bullet points so you can kind of curate the message. And what we're seeing, which is really cool is for the first time, a lot of internal comms are becoming like they're getting, they're getting to play with video in a way they haven't. So what we're seeing coming back to us is ideas we've never even thought of before. Or I'm like, oh wow, that's, that's really cool that you did that. I was like,

Dave Cordero (37:45)
Yeah.

Chris Brennan (37:54)
We tell other clients about that idea and everything seems to be pushing towards how can I make this content closer to how people engage off, out of office and offline. And I love that. It's just, it's so rewarding to see that.

Dave Cordero (38:09)
That's

a really cool case study of how AI can help internal ⁓ communicators. I can't believe how fast that space has grown. It feels like it was like three years ago. It's like, you heard of chat GPT? And that was like, that's that AI thing, right? And it's like...

Chris Brennan (38:23)
⁓ Yeah. It's

true. But we also have to make sure that we kind of maintain it because there's also ⁓ avatar so you can create a synthetic version of yourself. There is places where that does benefit, but I think you have to be very cautious about how you handle that. Again, I would rather listen to an authentic.

an interview with the leader that have an AI generated version of him talking to me. But that can work elsewhere for like safety regulations to have somebody generated. It's just you have to understand the context behind it. I think that's why it's beneficial to have a variety of different types of agents to provide that, whatever that need is in particular. But it's really cool. And you were talking about digital signage yourself. Like what are the kind of things that you would put on signs

Dave Cordero (38:54)
Totally.

Chris Brennan (39:15)
digitally to engage and reach your employees.

Dave Cordero (39:19)
Yeah, you know the digital signage was like a new toy for us when we moved into this new building. To kind of some context there before we moved into this beautiful building in 2020 we were spread across 17 different buildings. So you can imagine, know, funny story when I first moved in here.

Chris Brennan (39:36)
Wow.

Dave Cordero (39:42)
six years ago I remember heading into a meeting and introduced myself to someone and another person's like they've been here for 20 years I'm like how would I know if they're in one of the other buildings but that's a problem right that's a problem and so that kind of the buzzword in 2020 collaboration we're moving

Chris Brennan (39:56)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Dave Cordero (40:05)
is true.

You know, so much of the work that gets done are those impromptu conversations when you run into people downstairs and you have those meetings and you get stuff done. ⁓ But before we moved into the new building, I had a chance to go around with a small team to some other corporations throughout the United States and kind of talk to their internal people, not just comms, but their facilities and just understanding kind of more the change management of how.

behave moving into a new space like our space now is open concept which people were used to their big cubes and not being bothered and this is you know you can see everybody at all times and so I think you know we had to message around that and tell people why that was better but anyway and doing those those tours I did see some companies that had the digital signage and I thought you know that's pretty cool

but some of them were so copy heavy and they would switch in like two, three seconds. I'm like, can someone go back? I want to see what they had to say. So I kind of knew what I knew what I didn't want to do. And so we worked with our creative team to have like universal messaging, you know, our newsletters look the same as the digital signage, the posts that we do on work people, they all look the same. So it builds that trust of, okay, I know this is from internal comms.

And what I tell people is you have to imagine, you know, here in Florida, the big place to go is Disney Disney World. When you're driving down I-4, you see billboards and you're driving 90 miles per hour. You need to get the message and that drive that you're making, you know, that quick glance. And I think the same is true with digital signage. It needs to be big, bold, and you need to be able to communicate the message. And if somebody wants more information, they know they can always go get in and work Vivo or we can.

in our newsletters but it's more just reminders just touch points and I think when we simplified the boards in that manner and not try

Employees love it. In fact, we'll get a lot of requests. Hey, can you put this on the boards? Hey, we have this volunteer opportunity. We have this going on. And so it's part of our mix for sure. Employees know they can rely on that information.

Chris Brennan (42:18)
That is so true. And that's exactly what we say for when people use our text to video agent, Theo for digital signage. It's like, you can't cram everything in there. Like it has to be like the need to knows couple of words per slide. it's, it's like even the call to action can be go on the app to learn more or go to this page, but like you're not getting it all in there. People won't pay attention to it. but it does really work. Like we're finding out that people are even using some, some of these.

companies, they have a screen on the coffee machine. So they're actually putting it onto the coffee machine. At the moment, it's just a video of coffee beans falling, cascading down. And it's like, no, no, just replace that with an important message that they're like, oh, in a factory, there's new holiday hours open in December. Go on your employee app and book the new hours. And I was like, where's a place that you know for a fact all of these employees will be a couple of times a day at the coffee machine? So instead of advertising

Dave Cordero (42:56)
Yeah.

you're kidding me. That's cool.

Chris Brennan (43:17)
coffee to them, why don't you actually get a critical message across that helps them, informs them, and helps the company too. It's fantastic.

Dave Cordero (43:24)
You know, we

joke around when back in our old buildings when I first started, we had bathroom signage that was actually controlled by our HR team. So, you know, if you go into the toilet and close the door, there's signage. If you go to the urinal, there's signage and it's everything from it's, know, this day is Chinese lunar new year, or this is this holiday or.

forget open enrollment. So I'll tell you what though, the bathroom messages, you know, we definitely don't do that now, but it was effective, you know, because to your point, you're hitting people where they're going a couple of times a day.

Chris Brennan (43:56)
Okay.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Just like those billboards you talk about. People know they're in their car, they're driving, it's gonna be seen. But regarding the actual messages on the signage, do you have a good concept of what messages work best on a signage or some that you should absolutely not message on that kind of channel?

Dave Cordero (44:01)
Yeah.

Yeah, just try not to over complicate it. Like you said, the call to action could be, you know, go to the app to get more information. But, you know, I like to use things that are, you know, kind of deadline driven dates. Don't forget, you know, this Friday, this is happening or, you know, we do use some photos. I think they can help grab your attention if it's like a volunteer.

Like hey Beach clean up. There's a picture of employees Interacting together with bags of trash and sign up and this is fun. What just keeping it simple, you know, like you said you can't and I started when I first started doing it. I would send it to the I would send the message to

Chris Brennan (44:51)
Okay.

Dave Cordero (45:02)
this look and like you forgot to mention blob and like we there's no time we you can't you know you can't do that so to your point keep it simple

Chris Brennan (45:05)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, in marketing, and I'll say this whenever I work with stakeholders, I'm like, there's a difference between preference and quality. And it's like, I'm asking for quality input, not preference. Because a lot of people will go, if I were doing it, I would say this. It's like, I understand, but.

Dave Cordero (45:17)
Yeah.

Chris Brennan (45:28)
I'm overseeing this, I just want to make sure that there's accurate and it connects. So like, yes, there's lots of different messages I can put in, but if we put it all in, no message gets across. So yeah, I completely can relate to it. so much, like the more internal comms evolves, the closer it becomes to marketing, I always notice.

Dave Cordero (45:32)
Yeah, exactly.

that's so true.

You know, you talk about podcasting, you talk about digital signage and newsletters and, you know, the cynical employee be like, well, why do we have so many channels? Like, can we just have one? And I think from my standpoint, any internal communicator is going to know that.

When you have multiple generations of employees, I have an employee that might be later in their life, they're not going to go on a nap. They're just not. That older employee wants an email.

The younger generation, like we don't read emails. We want it in Teams or Slack or in the app. So you, and again, the podcast is just another net that we're throwing out. Like how can we make sure we're capturing, you know, five diverse generations of employees here and where we are in Florida, it's beautiful, but barely anybody's from here. Everybody's from all over the place. So get this melting pot of personalities and work styles and ages.

Chris Brennan (46:31)
Yeah.

Okay.

Dave Cordero (46:47)
work experience and so to me more the merrier more tools to use the better

Chris Brennan (46:55)
Yeah, we say that too, when we speak to our clients who are, especially somebody who wants the books of demo with us and they see us and they're like, I'm afraid to replace our current comms with video. It's like, we do not suggest you replace anything with video. It's just an addition. know, like, ⁓ your older generation worker will probably still want to read through something in their own pace. Whereas the new generation will be like, just give me the 20 second video. So it's like, you can combine it all into one.

Dave Cordero (47:08)
Exactly.

Totally.

Chris Brennan (47:25)
with the video at the top and then the context underneath. Like it's all, the more channels you have and the more diverse ways you communicate gives you that touch point. Like five generations is quite amazing actually. So you really have to make sure that you're communicating in a way that all five generations are comfortable with.

Dave Cordero (47:47)
And

I think it's okay to skew towards the younger because think about, you know, 20 years ago, how many newspapers were on desks, right? We still like to consume the newspaper. ⁓ So I think that generation is shifting away. And now it's give me a mobile friendly where I can skim the news. You know, one thing I tell,

Chris Brennan (47:57)
Yeah.

Dave Cordero (48:09)
to do is find at least five different newsletters and subscribe to them because I think it puts you in the mind of the end user, of the reader, and you kind of pick up on what you like. I really think the New York Times, they do a daily digest at the end.

The day and I just love the format of it and it's here are the things that here's the things that happen I love Axios you can subscribe to different markets in Axios here the United States if it's San Diego or North Carolina Tampa Bay I just love getting the ideas and who would have known you know 20 years ago when I was going to school or whatever it was that I would be like I love newsletters It's it's you get excited and it's like oh, I'm gonna steal that idea

Chris Brennan (48:34)
Okay.

Hahaha

Dave Cordero (48:59)
So in our newsletters, we do like a little culture. We start doing trivia and where on campus is this? It can be a photo of something and we'd randomize it, give away prizes. Don't underestimate the power of prizes and giving things away drives readers. Well, no, I think what I was saying is it's OK to skew your communication and lean one way. And I think we have

Chris Brennan (48:59)
for sure.

Dave Cordero (49:27)
quick quick approaches I it's funny how half of my job it feels like is proofreading emails for people and I'm like this email is just too long like you wouldn't read this like how do we create white space how do we bullet point how do we do the inverted pyramid how do we you know it's just you have like three seconds to grab someone's attention and this is just too long single spaced and all

Chris Brennan (49:53)
Yeah, it's also, think you have to train people on how to use AI as well, because so many people are going directly to it. And there's an issue we have where if you're not trained enough to use AI, then you can't lead the dance. It'll start leading you. And that's what I see when somebody sends me something to review. I'm like, I know you generated it. It's fine. like,

you're not even in this at all. Like you completely gave all the curation and all the decision making to this. I mean, I can tell because it starts with in the landscape of, because it always does. There's m dashes all over. They use the phrase, it's not something, it's actually this like 50 times. I'm like, where are you? Like simplify this, cut this like.

Dave Cordero (50:20)
Yeah.

Chris Brennan (50:36)
in half and then cut some more, but like just get to the real meat of the item and you can use AI for that, but you can never let it lead the dance. That's always something I see time and time again.

Dave Cordero (50:48)
That's a great

point and I actually encourage ⁓ the use of AI and you know so for like my newsletter I'm having stakeholders send me content all the time and I think now

stuff they're sending me at least is a better starting point when he's the 774 but personally I love AI for after I've built my newsletter and you know being a party of one in internal comms I do have someone that she kind of straddles works internal comms and does other things but for by by and large team of one and a half

The copy editing, the proofing is so important. And even though you're the one that wrote it, there's mistakes. And I think when you're able to take your copy that's done, punch it into AI and say, can you proofread this? Make sure it's in AP style. ⁓ Make sure this resonate. know, all the little prompts, that's the power of it. And it's like, wow, I totally missed that Oxford comma.

kind of said the same thing here. like how they streamlined it. That's where there's really no excuse. I was telling someone there's no excuse to really have a poorly written piece of content these days if you just take the time to proof it.

Chris Brennan (51:53)
Yeah.

I totally agree with that, especially with the repetition of information where, like as humans, we're just sometimes anxious to go, I need to double down on this in case they didn't get it, but when you run it through a system like that, it's like, no, actually say it here and make it clear and then move on. And now you've reduced the text because you're not actually just overlapping the same message a couple of times when it's like, did I get it across? That sentence is doing a lot of work here. Maybe I could break it down.

Dave Cordero (52:30)
Yeah.

Chris Brennan (52:33)
Excellent. So ⁓ let's move on to the final reflection. If someone's listening to this and wants to make one or two ⁓ decisions to make their comms more visible this quarter, what do you recommend they start with? So they're invisible at the moment, probably similar to 2017, but in 2026, what do you recommend are like the first couple of decisions or items they should be looking at?

Dave Cordero (52:59)
tough. would have to, I think I would need some more input. I'd have to almost go back to what I did nine years ago and try to understand the landscape of you know what type of employees are we dealing with, how many frontline, how many remote, ⁓ what's the email frequency, where are the opportunities to shore up some messaging and make things easier. ⁓

I would look and see do we have town halls? Do I have a voice ⁓ in shaping those town halls? So there's kind of a lot that goes into that. ⁓ I guess I would.

Chris Brennan (53:34)
But that's

great though, because you're saying first ask the right questions. ⁓

Dave Cordero (53:39)
Yeah, yeah, and he said listening

tour and if I guess that would be my answer if you feel invisible do a listening tour go Go talk to the yeah

Chris Brennan (53:45)
Yeah, a lot of them don't, I can tell you.

They're jumping at having an answer out of anxiety rather than calmly and confidently asking the right questions. So I think that makes perfect sense.

Dave Cordero (53:57)
And I've yet to

find a senior leader who has said, no, I don't want to sit down with you for 20 minutes over coffee. you spread it out and say, OK, it's February. By the time we hit June, I would like to have met with 10.

and keep notes and what are the themes try to have similar questions you can baseline then you're able to go back for yourself and summarize that and don't forget the power of AI you can summarize all of that you get the key themes and now all of a sudden you go to your bosses and you say listen I just spent three four months doing this listening tour here is where I think we're missing the mark here are the opportunities and here are some solutions I want to implement

that would your boss would be like my gosh this guy's this guy or gal is really looking around the corners here trying to be a problem solver you got to be a problem solver you know it's talking to somebody and they're saying you know nobody really knows how to do their job like nobody knows what they're doing but it's the people that have the ability to troubleshoot problem solve see around corners those are the ones that figure it out and can make a difference

Chris Brennan (55:11)
I love it, it makes complete sense. It reminds me of the screenwriter William Goldman's ⁓ quote about the film industry, nobody knows anything. I was like, everybody goes in going like, how do I, I'm like, we don't know anything. Like people don't know what a hit is, they don't know what works, like they tried something and failed, they tried something they didn't believe in and it succeeds. It's like, but what you're saying I think really resonates, which is like, you have to show them like that.

Dave Cordero (55:19)
Yeah, that's similar, yeah.

Chris Brennan (55:37)
the right approach and back it up with a bit of data. So actually doing that interview tour would really work because they see somebody who's active, not passive. And that way you can actually get a lot of your own agenda across because you've got the buy-in and they've kind of went on the journey with you instead of surprising them with no context.

Dave Cordero (55:47)
and you know you

And I think if you're, if you have the opportunity and if you're lucky enough to be in charge of internal communications, like take a step back and you need to, you've earned the right to be the expert in that space and you need to be assertive.

with respect, you know, have that social EQ, but you need to, just like if you met with an analytics person and they came to the meeting, they're the expert, right? You're not gonna, you're not gonna question the work they're doing or the top sales guy. Like you need to, you have the right to kind of be a badass in that space and come prepared and have all the different things and the metrics and why this will help culture health. And you need to own that.

Chris Brennan (56:27)
Right.

Makes sense. Okay, so if you have time, we just have a little mini game that we like to play at the end. It's called the comms role play Q and A. And so.

Dave Cordero (56:51)
Love it. Okay.

Chris Brennan (56:55)
I will play a skeptical executive asking some tough questions to a comms leader. You're the comms leader and this is just how would you answer this? One of the benefits of this that we like to do is it kind of showcases to our audience other ways of answering these questions because some of them are trap doors, some of them are gotcha questions and it's always important to know because they come so frequently to everybody but it always feels like a fun time where we could just kind of play that out in this space.

Dave Cordero (56:57)
Okay.

Yeah

Chris Brennan (57:25)
Does that make sense? All right, so question number one. What would actually break if we cut your comms budget in half tomorrow?

Dave Cordero (57:26)
makes sense.

I think you would see a big hit in culture is what I would say if you're if you're talking internal comms budget that would limit our

the employees the way we do. And listen, I understand that there are goals and there's aspirations, objectives for the organization from the sales standpoint, but it's the people, right? I mean, if you look at the number one reason people leave an organization, it's very rarely for more money. Believe it not, that's the myth. It's like, there's more money here I'm leaving. I think when people leave, it's because they don't feel valued. They don't feel like what they're doing is...

being recognized. ⁓ So it's a very slippery slope to cut anything that's going to take away from culture. And we've seen that so many times with the even programs that we've taken away and the pitchforks that come out. it's like I would say if you look, there's a number of books that I've read that talk about it was one.

of CEOs ranked the importance of culture and it's always like one or two but then when they start going into like sales it's like wait what about the culture so it's like we know in our heart culture is important but and that's what's going to create a healthy organization but we're so quick to want to cut corners and so I would just advise let's look at anything else other than culture because if you cut the internal comms budget you're gonna you're gonna lose hearts and minds

Chris Brennan (59:07)
Makes sense, great. Question two, town halls, podcasts, video platforms, signages, do we need all these channels and formats or is it just overkill?

Dave Cordero (59:18)
We need them and we need more of them. I would say we need double that amount. And I would just fall back on the five generations of employees that we have and the opportunity to reach people differently. You you have someone that someone that just watches Netflix. You have someone that just watches local news. You have somebody that just reads the newspapers. Someone that listens to radio. mean, unless we know that 100 % of

the organization has said we want this, which you're not going to get, you have to have a mix.

Chris Brennan (59:53)
I love it. makes perfect sense. And final question. Why invest in comms when sales, marketing, and product can show ROI faster?

Dave Cordero (1:00:03)
Well, similar to what I was saying before, think, you know, culture health is, it's an important, one of the most important scores you can have, right? And what was it, a couple of years ago, Chris, all this talk about quiet quitting and, know, you, when employees don't feel engaged and there's apathy and they're mailing it in, think about the, the costs associated with having to replace a workforce, the recruiting, the hiring, the onboarding.

It's better to take care of the people you have, bring them in. So I just don't see how you could do anything that would risk that culture, in the end, you're going to have to pay for it.

Chris Brennan (1:00:48)
I love it. Excellent, and that's it. You have passed the comms roleplay Q &A. Dave, fantastic. And thank you so much for taking your time out today to join us for this episode. It was really fun. I could ask a ton more questions, but maybe we'll do that on another episode.

Dave Cordero (1:00:52)
Yeah.

thanks Chris.

Chris Brennan (1:01:07)
but is there anything you want people to know? Like, should they follow you? Sometimes people like that, but I don't want to force that on top of you.

Dave Cordero (1:01:14)
I mean I can be found on LinkedIn, just Dave Cordero. If anyone had questions, they want to unpack anything. ⁓ You know, one of the reasons I was so eager to come on the show is, like I said from the beginning, I just love this stuff. And when you have an opportunity to connect with people that are doing the same thing, there's a lot of synergy there, right?

sure there's a lot of things I've said that you're like exactly there's a lot of things you've said about it and so even like conferences things I go to I don't do it for myself to go speak I do it for the relationship building and a chance to hear from others so ⁓ happy to hear from people. LinkedIn, Dave Cordero ⁓ would be fantastic but you know one thing I didn't mention Chris and it's something that we rolled out this year that kind of goes hand-in-hand with the final answers I gave about

culture and culture health is we rolled out an employee recognition and appreciation program totally free and I gotta tell you it is so cool and the number of people that are coming up to me like I love this peer-to-peer recognition essentially the way it works Chris in a nutshell is through workday if I go into workday and I type in your name I can leave feedback that person gets a generated email that

Chris Brennan (1:02:11)
Okay.

Dave Cordero (1:02:32)
goes to HR and it goes to your manager and it talks about all the things that you did and how cool you are. Now that feedback lives on your profile so you can always reference that feedback. But then what we do is we take five of the... so the tool that we use are called swing cards, you PJ Tour golf swing. So they're swing cards.

Chris Brennan (1:02:51)
you

Dave Cordero (1:02:53)
Five recipients of swing cards are randomly selected to have coffee with an executive. So we just had our first one last week and it gives employees a chance to hear from senior leaders they otherwise wouldn't have an opportunity to share who they are, share their story. And it's just this relationship building and.

I think what's been great about it, we've had 150 swing cards turned in in the last month and a half, which just tells me that our organization and any organization, they're starving for not only to give feedback, but to receive feedback. mean, again, we're people, right? And what matters most in an organization is the people. And when you have a healthy culture, people want to run through walls for the organization. So really excited about that recognition program. Something, believe it not, we didn't even have.

Chris Brennan (1:03:38)
Right.

Dave Cordero (1:03:42)
Like I said, I've been here nine years, but you'd have to go back, I think about 20, where we had something loosely like that, but a big organization like us not to have a recognition program. So if you're an internal comms person, find out if you don't have one, how you can be part of creating something. Talk about becoming invisible to visible. Now internal comms is getting the credit for helping to create this organizational wide approach.

Chris Brennan (1:04:08)
And what I love is, it's actually making visible the individuals as well. So what you're saying is people want to be visible themselves, that they want the recognition. I love it. That is a fantastic idea. Great job, Dave. And it's a great thing to end on too, that final note from going from invisible to invisible. Dave, thank you so much for joining today and for the listeners and viewers, thank you for listening and for watching. And I'll catch you next time for another episode of Modern Coms.

Dave Cordero (1:04:12)
Mmm.

Yes.

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