When I was 11 years old, my teacher told us about a new train that was running between England and France. She told me it goes under the sea.
Young-me was baffled. How was it going under the sea? Did it not leak if you opened a window? Could you pet fish as you went by? I think I was picturing something like this:
My teacher was, of course, talking about the Eurostar train that was running through the Channel Tunnel, an incredible feat of engineering that enabled people to travel from London – Paris by train for the first time. And the whole thing is unsurprisingly built in a tunnel (hence the name) and not the way that I had pictured it when I was 11. It looks more like this in reality:
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the Channel Tunnel (fondly known as the Chunnel) ever since, so you can imagine the absolute childhood glee on my face when I heard that Workvivo are doing a webinar with the internal comms team on the Eurostar train. I’d never even considered how internal comms works on a train running under the seabed, but once I started thinking about it I couldn’t stop.
Let me tell you about this amazing internal comms event coming up next week.
Eurostar is the company running the train through the Chunnel. It has 2,500 employees spread across the UK, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, so we’re looking at a large number of people spread over different sites, doing all kinds of different jobs. Think about it from the perspective of the internal comms team, you’ve got:
- Train drivers moving at speed under the sea
- Onboard crew and catering teams
- Station staff meeting passengers
- Engineers keeping it all running
- Maintenance teams in the depots
- And head office staff doing things like marketing and finance
So how on earth do you help all of those people feel like they're part of one company, with one shared culture, when their working day and job experience is so different? Anyone who works in a company with lots of deskless workers will understand the challenges.
This has me very curious indeed. I’d rather like to find out how Eurostar does it. Why not join me and we’ll find out together?
Join me on July 21st for a peek behind the scenes at Eurostar
Now one way to learn about how it all works on the Eurostar would simply be to do a virtual interview with the internal comms team, right? But come on, this is Workvivo we’re talking about. We can do better than that.
To pull this event together, Barbara Booras from Workvivo went onsite on the Eurostar to film behind the scenes, actually SEE how it all works and show you what working life is like onboard the train. She was able to speak directly to Eurostar employees serving food, looking after customers and of course a train driver (arguably the star of the show).
She’ll bring all of this together in this live conversation with Jon Witt, Internal Communications Business Partner at Eurostar.
Jon has a fascinating job and I am really looking forward to this candid, behind-the-scenes look at how he runs internal comms and how he navigates the challenges of communicating effectively with such a disparate and dispersed workforce.
And Jon himself is rather fascinating too because if you crawl through his job history on LinkedIn, you’ll notice that he worked at Eurostar over a decade ago in customer-facing roles and worked his way up the business. He understands frontline employees because he has lived it. He WAS a frontline employee! I’ll be curious to hear how he brings this experience into his current internal comms role in the company. This is exactly the kind of person I want to learn from.
Meet your host
Hosting the event is Barbara Booras, Head of Customer Community & CX Events at Workvivo.
I don’t often big-up a webinar host because they usually don’t play a huge role and they’re often just someone roped in from the marketing team who happens to be free. But Barbara is different. I have a very vivid memory of working with Barbara for the first time last year when Workvivo launched the very first episode of The Comms Show. We were in the virtual backstage and Barbara confessed she was nervous. “I don’t often do this kind of stuff”, she told me. “I really hope it goes okay.”
I look back on that conversation now and I am SHOCKED because what do you mean Barbara isn’t a professional TV host? She is such a natural, warm, engaging host, she could easily sit in for Graham Norton when he’s not feeling well and she’d do a great job. Since that first episode we did together, Barbara has gone on to do virtual and in-person events with Workvivo all over the world with huge success. So much so that this summer she was named Workvivo Employee of the Year in front of 400+ of her colleagues here in Ireland. You’re in for a treat with this event with Barbara at the helm.
I'll be attending this event, will you join me and meet me in the chat? Here’s what we’ll learn together.
What you'll learn at this event:
- How Eurostar connects employees across countries, locations and roles
- How to build one shared culture across a dispersed, multilingual workforce
- How internal comms supports frontline and desk-based teams alike
- The role technology plays in keeping everyone connected
- Real examples you can borrow for your own organisation
The details:
📅 July 21st
🕐 3pm BST / 10am EDT
📍 Online
💰 Free
If you can't make it live, register anyway and you'll get the recording afterwards.
This event is for you if you want to know how one of Europe's most iconic brands keeps everyone feeling genuinely connected, from the driver under the sea to the person in head office. And it's for you if you're just curious to get a peek inside the UNDERWATER TRAIN (yes, 11-year-old me is still thinking about this).
Thanks to Workvivo for sponsoring today's newsletter and for hosting these brilliant events. See you there?
Thanks for reading and stay curious,
Joanna
PS Did you grab your seat yet? You can do that here.
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Want to work together?
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