Bret Keisling is joined by Lori Atone, Learning & Development Director at TVF who shares an EO A-ha Moment about the forming of the NCEO's Innovative Communication Coalition. Open to National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) members, the purpose of the coalition is for participants to create and share communication initiatives, activities, and projects that make employee ownership stronger.
The coalition focuses on ideas to build engagement and strengthen ownership culture, with topics such as celebrations, leveraging EO for recruiting and onboarding, maximizing the effectiveness of required communications, and determining the best way to explain how stock valuation works -- and more.
Lori will be Bret's guest in an upcoming two-part episode of The EsOp Podcast.
The NCEO's ICC Inquiry Form can be found here.
Listen to this episode on Soundcloud or subscribe on Google,iHeart, or Apple Podcasts.
The ESOP Podcast is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License.
About Lori Atone
Lori Atone is the Learning and Development Director for TVF. Lori began her career at TVF as a Textile Development Coordinator, which gave her insight into textile challenges and learning opportunities. This further developed her passion for the industry, which continues to grow to this day. Working together with TVF textile experts, Lori teases out pain points, captures knowledge, and delivers quality content to our team. Lori’s intellectual curiosity around fabric, along with her passion for developing a learning culture, make her a valuable asset to TVF.
Lori is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and obtained a master’s degree in learning design from Purdue University. She is fluent in Japanese and is considered to be the resident expert in Asia.
In her free time, Lori enjoys listening to audiobooks, traveling, and exploring other cultures. She is a dog lover who can’t walk down the street without stopping to greet each dog in her path. Lori loves college sports and is a big fan of the College World Series. She lives by the motto, “An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” [Source: TVF, Inc., Our Team]
Mini-cast 228 Transcript
[00:00:00] Bret Keisling: Welcome to the ESOP Mini-cast. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Bret Keisling, and as it says on my business cards, I'm a passionate advocate for employee ownership. Over the next two weeks, on our primary EO/ESOP Podcast, my guest will be Lori Atone of TVF, an amazing employee-owned company that was the springboard for what has become Empowered Ventures, an ESOP acquisition company headed by previous guest, Chris Fredericks.
[00:00:36] Lori's two-part episodes will focus on ESOP education and the many things that go along with it. Like all of our guests, we began with Lori's EO A-ha Moment. She actually shared three of them. The third one caught my attention because she discussed a work group within the NCEO that I was unfamiliar with, the Innovative Communication Coalition.
[00:00:56] Here's Lori Atone.
[00:00:58] Lori Atone: I have been working with the NCEO for the last few years, and in various ways just working, doing different things.
[00:01:07] And I think the way they listen and have acted, there was an idea that I first had about a year ago, or a year and a half ago, that we as ESOP companies should share information and pool our resources and just improve them. As like, we're all in the same boat. I remember I met with Corey Rosen about it in person, happened to be in person, and emailed Loren Rodgers and they responded immediately, like literally, I think that day, and got other people that could help with this idea. And now we have, this is an actual thing now, this Innovative Communications Coalition, that is a peer-based group. We meet and we try to improve resources and have, and talk about different ways of, really spreading the ESOP gospel. Trying to like maybe someone would have a resource that they feel, hey, this could be improved, how can I improve it? Someone else has already done that. You know, sharing ideas, just sharing resources.
[00:02:12] And then the idea at the end of the day, we haven't come to this point yet, but it's to have a repository on the NCEO website so that NCEO members could actually download these resources you know, as they need them.
[00:02:26] And not that there aren't resources already, there are, but just this idea of constantly improving them and making them more engaging, more appealing. So, that's something, just the way they jumped on that immediately. It feels, it was mind blowing, really.
[00:02:39] Bret Keisling: We're going to include a link to the NCEO's website, where they talk about the Innovative Communication Coalition. The group focuses on ideas to build engagement and strengthen an ownership culture with the goal to create a repository of ideas that can be shared with other NCEO members. It will focus on topics such as celebrations, leveraging EO for recruiting and onboarding, maximizing the effectiveness of required communications, and determining the best way to explain how stock valuation works.
[00:03:10] The Innovative Communication Coalition was started by NCEO members and it's open to ESOP companies who belong to the NCEO, looking to educate, inform, and engage their employee owners. In our show notes, we'll have a link to an inquiry form if you're interested in applying to be part of the group.
[00:03:28] I was pleased to see that the leadership group, along with Lori Atone, includes our friend Kerianne Geist of Andesa Services who's also a previous podcast guest.
[00:03:38] With that, we'll wrap up today's episode of the Mini-cast. I hope you'll join me over the next couple of weeks for my full conversation with Lori Atone. She's a great guest and we covered a lot of ground.
[00:03:47] Thank you so much for listening. This is Bret Keisling. Be well.
[00:03:51] Bitsy McCann: We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook at EO Podcast Network and on Twitter @EsOpPodcast. This podcast has been produced by Bret Keisling for the EO Podcast Network, original music composed by Max Keisling, branding and marketing by BitsyPlus Design, and I'm Bitsy McCann.
Standard Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are my own and don't represent those of my own firms or the organizations to which I belong. Nothing in the podcast should be construed as guidance or advice of any kind in any field and the fact that I mentioned an organizational website or an advocate or a company on a podcast does not reflect an endorsement, but if you've heard your name or your group's name mentioned on this podcast, I'd love to have you come on and talk about it yourself.
A note on the transcript: This transcript was produced by Descript, an automated transcription service. While it has been reviewed by The EsOp Podcast, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the transcription. Please refer to the original audio when citing sources.