📁 Internal Communications Introductions: Megan Stack

Head of Global Content and Culture, Internal Communications at Dropbox

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In This Interview

• 🍪 The collaboration between the Culture and Internal Communications

• 🧶 Ideas for building community at work

• 🌐 The power of async communications

About Meg

Meg Stack is an experienced internal comms and employee experience professional. After working in PR for ten years, she joined Google in 2010 to focus purely on internal comms and employee programs, and hasn't looked back. She is now Head of Content and Culture for Dropbox. Originally from Chicago, Meg is based in Dublin, Ireland where she lives with her husband and two kids.

What sparked your professional path into Internal Communications? 

I started out in Public Relations at a boutique agency where I focused on the arts and entertainment in Chicago. Then, I moved to Ireland and joined a corporate PR firm focused on consumer-facing projects. What I loved about PR was crafting strategies, coming up with creative ideas and working with people to make really cool things happen, but I didn't love talking to the media. I could write an amazing pitch, but I didn’t love the selling part of it. 

When I started my first internal communications role at Google, it was an aha moment — something clicked and I realized that I could bring all of my skill sets, be creative, take risks and get immediate feedback from my audience. I didn’t have formal internal communications experience, but it was focusing on those transferable skills and applying them that brought me into the field. 

What internal communications projects did you work on at Google?

I worked across the depth and breadth of Google in Ireland. At first my role was very geo-specific. There were about 5,000 Googlers on-site, but there wasn't a sense of one identity. My role was creating the first ever internal communications strategy for Google Ireland. It meant indexing the cultural pieces and leadership messages to ensure it laddered up to headquarters. 

Then, I transitioned to roles in culture and community — focused on how our different culture groups created connections. I also worked with the leadership team to think of how we amplify and reward the culture side. It was fun and interesting with a focus on organizational culture and development. 

I also took on a global role supporting a senior executive with a team of 1,000 Googlers around the world. That’s where I learned meaningful change management and business messaging. It was wonderful to have that mix of projects to work on from the engagement side to the business communications. 

How do you describe internal communications to others? 

I think about it with these three words – inform, inspire and engage. Our work might not always be in that order, but we first and foremost keep people connected, try to be as transparent with the information and ensure it makes sense! We don’t want people to have to wade through all this information and make their own decisions about what's the most important, but we also don’t want to over-curate the information so that it feels like it’s just PR. 

You’re always thinking about keeping people connected and how you inspire them to make an impact. It’s also a balance between getting no response with crickets or a deluge. Internal communications keeps the conversation going, flowing and ensures it’s two-way as well. 

How have you built culture and community through internal communications? 

We’ve all had a challenge during the pandemic. A lot of the work that we do at Dropbox regional communications is built around connection and community, making sure there are ample ways for people to feel that connection. At the start of the pandemic, it was easy to bring people together. Now, video fatigue is a real thing with life and work taking over. It’s been harder to build community.  

In EMEA, we decided to do fewer things better while we rely on company wide communications for most of our strategy and messages from leadership. We translate accomplishments and celebrate locally — whether it’s products built from Tel Aviv or customers that our Sales Team in Dublin have won. We’re focusing on the fabric of our cultures. It’s so multicultural with Europe, the Middle East and Africa working together.

We created events such as EMEA Connects, it’s lighter on the business piece and focused more on fun and community, like employee talent shows and cocktail demonstrations. There are thought leadership and resilience pieces from our people, for our people. The grassroots focus has served us well to drive that connection to find what people have in common and create familiarity. 

We’re also finding ways to help people find each other. We help amplify grassroots throughout the company to help people find their niches outside of their working group or function. It’s the role of internal communications to come up with creative ways to bring people together and curate events as well as written communications that people still want to open up the video chat or check out the Intranet because it’s lively, engaging and informative.

Dropbox released its Virtual First Toolkits as an open-source resource for others. What is Virtual First and how is this approach shaping Internal Communications? 

Our new way of working is Virtual First. We always had offices around the world. But, our offices are now repurposed as Studios where you collaborate, attend team off-sites and All Hands, or meet more informally for team bonding and activities. The deep and primary work will continue at home. 

We are trying to engrain async versus sync communications. As a communications professional, you have to shift your own mindset and think — is this message we are delivering really important enough to ask 1,000 people to join an All Hands to listen to it live or can we pre-record, send it out and then say come with your questions –  using that time to have a rich discourse? 

We’re thinking about what the All Hands of the future will look like when people are back in the office and others at home. Nobody wants to go back to lots of people in a room watching other people. As a company, we have some really cool tools such as Capture that makes it easy to share your screen and record a voice over to relay short pieces of information. I have an Executive who does this with his team rather than asking 10 people to get on a 15 minute call to get the same information at the same time. 

We’re trying to be smart about how we use people’s time. Internal communications should ask themselves — why are we doing this again, is this the best use of everyone’s time and is it the most engaging? The world of internal communications has changed in the last few years, but what’s ahead of us is the real game changer as we re-establish ourselves into the new normal. 

What are the skills that are most important for someone to succeed in Internal Communications? 

I’m hiring right now and was talking to the recruiter for this role about what skills you should have on day one and what can be taught on the job. 

You must be a strong writer who can understand tone, subtlety and adapt. There are so many directions within internal communications — if you are writing for an Executive, you have to adapt your voice to who you’re writing for. If you are writing for an Intranet piece, you have to use the company tone. 

You must be organized, know how to plan events and be a strong creative problem solver! There are a lot of tools in our toolbox — All Hands, Town Halls, newsletters and more. You have to think about everything in your box and how you use them and consider when you can take a risk, launch and iterate in the same way that our engineers who are building great products do. 

It’s also important to be a really great listener and be empathetic. You can’t be afraid to give tough feedback to executives — just because someone wants something a particular way, if it’s not landing well with their audience, you must coach and push back so that it isn’t an emperor’s new clothes situation. 

If you think of what can be easy to be taught, these include running a reorg and best practices for announcements and other project-based experiences. 

How do you continue learning about the field of Internal Communications?

I try to read as much as I can! There are so many future of work articles. The quality publications such as Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Quarterly offer great insights. 

I talk to colleagues and former colleagues at other companies to share more about what I’ve learned throughout the years. 

I’m thinking about the next level skill sets that I want to acquire, including executive coaching and the psychology of organizational behavior to change a culture beyond communications. 

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☎️ Every edition of The Switchboard is personally curated by me — Julia Levy. This post is based on a live interview conversation and edited for publication. Learn more about why I write.