🚦Internal Communications Introductions: Meet Becky Graebe

Senior Director, Communication Expert at Dynamic Signal

I enjoyed talking with Becky Graebe to learn about her career path. This is her internal communications story.

About Becky

Becky Graebe is Senior Director, Communication Expert at Dynamic Signal, the leader in employee communication and engagement platforms headquartered in San Bruno, CA. 

Based in Raleigh, NC, she works with global organizations and communicators to help connect, align and engage employees in modern and meaningful ways, wherever they are and in the manner they choose. She is an advocate for empowering the workforce to reach beyond individual roles, connect to subject matter experts throughout the enterprise, and influence the organization’s overall image and reputation via social advocacy. 

Prior to Dynamic Signal, she was Director of Communications at SAS in Cary, NC, the Great Place to Work Legend where she served for more than 16 years. Her responsibilities included traditional employee communication efforts, an award-winning global intranet, executive communication, crisis communication and enterprise social networking channels. She has also held employee communication roles at MassMutual in Charlotte, NC, and Indianapolis, IN.

She is Past Chair of the Employee Communications Section Executive Board for the Public Relations Society of America where she also served as Conference Chair for the Connect ‘16 Conference and as the Communications Committee Lead for the Section. She has served as a volunteer journalism instructor with Citizen Schools, and is an active member of Triangle Women in Communications.

She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Marketing from Stetson University.

What sparked your professional path into Internal Communications?

In college, I took a business communications class. It taught about writing for business, writing to your customers, handling customer service situations, celebrating anniversaries and more. It felt like “hand and glove” for me - it really fit.  When I graduated with a Marketing degree, I thought that I would go into banking. I was interviewing for a big bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

At the time, the interview process was long and in the interim I started working temporarily for MassMutual, and I was focused on writing projects, putting together a newsletter and other communications projects. By the time I got the bank offer, I was well entrenched in this position and I absolutely loved it. So, I turned down the offer at the bank when I eventually received it and I’ve been in employee communications ever since. I have been very happy with the field ever since. 

How do you describe your role to others?

The way that my team views our role: we are the keepers of the culture. We make sure to recognize what culture is and allow it to thrive. We don’t believe that our role is simply to push out information, but to be the catalyst for conversation. Everything that we do, we try to present it in such a way that it sparks conversation and ideas and further discussion. 

We want people to talk amongst themselves to answer questions and share ideas. It is important to us to embrace the big objectives of the company and break them into manageable pieces so employees feel they can see their role. We want to talk about work topics.  

What is one project you are particularly proud to have accomplished?

I introduced an enterprise social networking platform before they were popular, in particular Slack. We were watching social media unfold in our personal lives, but we weren’t yet applying all the value and goodness that comes from people being about to collaborate with their roles at business organizations. 

In 2013, we introduced a platform to global employees. There were a lot of people who had fear with all the risks of adopting an open atmosphere for commenting, interacting and idea sharing. It was an open space for idea sharing. But if you turn off the risk, you turn on the rewards. We felt our organization was ready to take this on as an initiative. It wasn’t a time when organizations were introducing this level of transparency to share an idea, ask a question or comment on a work topic.

I didn’t know how it would go, but it became such a part of the culture. All ideas were respected and encouraged. We didn’t just say this philosophy, we put the tools and platforms out there to practice it. This changed the perception of leaders who were more focused on the risk side. I respect those opinions: these were people who headed up our legal department or HR department. But, getting them to take that risk with us was a big piece of success. We put everything into place to take this step with precautions in place, we offered to monitor as much as we can and at some point, you have to step out on faith. Convincing them to do that with us was a really fulfilling project. 

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

Listening is the most important. It’s about listening to leaders: what they are saying and what they are not saying. You also must hear people out at all levels by being willing to listen to what they feel they need. It’s also about having the courage to ask additional questions or respectfully point out a different perspective. 

To give an example: if I’m working with an executive to share an important message about a big change and there’s not enough context for people to buy-in, I speak up because if I’m hesitant to understand, others are going to have those same questions. My role is to respectfully push back, to ask: what would you say to employees who feel their role might be impacted and can we talk about ways to get ahead of those worries. It’s about being willing to hear people out, but also to step into the arena and ask the tough questions that we know are instinctively coming and help our leaders get ahead of them.

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

There are formal ways. In some respects, one of the silver linings of this pandemic is that so many professional organizations have opened up learning opportunities to be virtual. PRSA has been a good source of that for me. 

But, also conversations like these or finding a group that you can learn from - what are you working on, what is something you’ve learned this quarter that you can share - those discussions are important too. More than ten years ago, I had a friend in PR who wanted to introduce me to her friend who worked in internal communications. It started with lunch, then we started a LinkedIn group that’s now grown to over 400 people now. 

It shows that you can start things now in a virtual sense and open up the conversation, but it doesn’t have to be formal with bylaws and dues. It can be groups of people that can be anywhere and can pull people together for a roundtable to ask people to answer questions: what’s something you’ve done that you’re proud of or what was one of your biggest challenges.

It really pays to take initiative and try to pull people together. Invite your five or six friends and ask them to invite one more friend to grow the group. I learn as much from other people’s experiences to discuss real time best practices. It was like a Show and Tell to share what people are working on or toss out your biggest challenge. Real experience is hard to top it. 

There are also wonderful blogs and podcasts that have been very helpful to me. This profession is constantly evolving. Over the last year, with communication moving into the spotlight, it’s such a window of opportunity. People at all levels of a company, from the frontline to top leadership, are seeing the value of what communications can bring to the table. It’s exciting and it’s up to us to continue how to prove its  importance and value. 

How do you share what you have learned with others? 

I’m working with PRSA Employee Communications to help college students to make sure that students have the opportunity to connect with internal communicators so they get to hear from the profession when they are in college. I don’t believe it’s introduced in a lot of college programs, the focus is on PR, content marketing or philanthropic grant writing and less on the important role of employee communications. We are trying to put something together to help students learn more about this opportunity of study.