Hey Reader,

Many years ago, my husband was a postman. He would walk miles each day, delivering letters and chatting to people and getting tons of fresh air.

Back then, smartphones didn’t exist and the intranet wasn’t a thing. So I asked him one day, “When you worked as a postman, how did you keep up with news from the organisation? How did you know what was going on?”

He burst out laughing at the absurdity of the question. "I didn't!"

And it struck me that it’s been very normal for a long time that frontline workers who aren’t sitting at desks are seen as unreachable and also kind of unimportant. They’re not sitting at desks reading emails so I guess we just… leave them to it?

Times are changing

Lucky for us, the world is changing. Now we have tech and tools to reach our frontline workers, we also have the experience and knowledge to understand that this matters, it matters a lot.

So why don’t we take a real-time deep dive into a postal service that is using top-notch comms technology to reach and engage their frontline workers?

I invite you to join me for an event with Workvivo to learn about how Royal Mail are using technology to reach their 130,000+ employees around Britain. And most of them are frontline workers.

Register here

I’m particularly interested in this event because it’s not just a frontline organisation who have launched a new platform. It’s about a 500-year-old, quite traditional organisation who have launched an AWARD-WINNING employee app to engage their employees and help them feel engaged and included.

Yes, Royal Mail won “Best New or Relaunched Channel” at the Institute of Internal Comms Awards 2026.

If you’re nosy like me, you will want to know how they did it.

How did they:

• Launch a new app that employees actually like?
• Get 90% active users?
• Have 85,000 employees logging in every week?

I’m also curious to learn more about why they named the app “Robin” and designed a character for it, I think it’s a reference to a nickname for posties way back in Victorian times? This is a lovely nod to the heritage of the company and is a strong indicator of the thoughtful, careful approach that went into the app design and launch.

In this live event, we’ll hear the story directly from Paul Smith, Strategic Campaigns & Planning Lead at Royal Mail. This is not a theoretical "here's a framework to think about" session. It's a candid insight into how Paul and his team launched a hugely successful new channel in a huge organisation with tons of frontline workers.

What did they do, how did they do it, what would they do differently if they were starting again?

Meet the speakers

This is Paul Smith, Strategic Campaigns & Planning Lead at Royal Mail

Now let me tell you a bit about Paul, because he’s impressive in his own right. He’s been working with Royal Mail for 9 years, before that he worked in a comms agency and as a journalist. He is a deeply experienced and seasoned comms pro, and his journalist background gives him a keen sense of what stories people are interested in and what is likely to keep people engaged in content.

Paul is arguably a storyteller by profession. He’s led on Royal Mail’s “Courier” newspaper, the largest monthly newspaper in UK internal comms; he’s worked on their weekly in-house TV Channel (Royal Mail TV); he’s run their weekly podcast (Royal Mail Radio); and then he took the lead on introducing their new employee app on Workvivo which he named Robin.

(Who else is already really impressed and quite intrigued by this channel mix?!)

Paul is a dab hand at public speaking so you’re not just getting a smart internal comms pro, you’re also getting someone who is a confident speaker.

And this is Barbara Booras

And hosting this conversation with Paul is my pal Barbara Booras from Workvivo. Barbara is a warm, engaging host who asks great questions, digs into the topics that matter and makes webinars a wholly enjoyable and fun experience.

Because who says learning about internal comms has to be boring?

Register for the event here

What you'll learn in this event:

• How Royal Mail connects and communicates with 130,000 employees
• How the internal comms team switched from Workplace by Meta to a new tool
• How a 500-year-old organisation balances heritage with modern digital channels
• The role technology plays in a more connected, accessible employee experience
• Practical lessons for building trust and engagement at scale

The details:

📅 October 28th

🕐 3pm GMT / 11am EDT

📍 Online

💰 Free

Save your seat

Can’t make it live? Register and you’ll get the recording for playback.

This event is for you if:

• You’re wrestling with how to reach frontline teams
• You’d like a masterclass in a successful platform launch
• You want to see what ‘good’ looks like from an award-winning team
• You want a better understanding of how internal comms works in such a large-scale, dispersed, frontline organisation.

I’ll be there in the chat, I suspect my husband will be joining too to see what a modern postie comms system looks like! He will be SHOCKED haha.

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

PS Got this far and didn’t register yet? I got you. Thanks to my friends at Workvivo for sponsoring this newsletter and hosting these fab events.

Find me on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and check out my book​

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Want to work together?

• Join The Curious Tribe. This is my membership community for ambitious, curious communicators who want to achieve more in their roles and have fun at the same time. Membership allows you to work directly with me for 12 months, make deep connections with other communication pros who 'get it' and improve your skills through training and learning. More info here.
• Ready to review your channels and content but don't know where to start? Download my practical Internal Comms Audit Playbook to guide you through a DIY audit - no expensive consultant needed.​ This has ready-to-use templates and checklists to give you a systematic way to do your own audit which you can repeat every single year. Get it here.
• Take a shortcut. I've developed a collection of tried-and-tested templates, checklists and how-to guides for the key processes you'll need in your role as an internal communicator. You can download my Internal Comms Cheat Sheets here.​

This newsletter is not written with AI. It's a joy to write this with my human brain every week. I love writing it and I hope you enjoy reading it.

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