Dialog Academy – Employer Branding in our way

It’s not easy for a communication agency to live this long in highly competitive market, and yet, we feel like we just started. We’re still enthusiastic, filled with all kind of ideas and we wish for 20 more years.

Beginning of Dialog Academy

Exponential growth is known to be the most sensitive moment of any business. It’s important to evaluate every single step to stabilize things and prepare for further development in the upcoming period. However, what these steps actually are and how to execute them properly are not easy questions to answer.

We don’t do anything without good research, so we started by examining the organizational climate. Our exponential growth and strong development in the digital communications segment, which until then was not immanent to us, required good analysis. And the results showed that we need to communicate more with our employees, we need to listen to them more and involved them more in decision-making processes.

Dialog Academy was created precisely on these grounds. We wanted to hang out more often, share knowledge, experiences, victories, and defeats in a comfortable, collegial atmosphere. Initially, these were weekly gatherings and exchanges of basic business-related information, but over time, we gradually introduced new elements.

Dialog Academy – Education and Employer Branding

How to reach all employees, engage them in the exchange of ideas, and at the same time solve the problem of information fluctuation? We’ve found a solution.

First, we introduced education to our Academy through presentations of communication strategies and case studies, and then introduced workshops with internal lecturers, whose topics were selected by employees.

Then, we upgraded our education with fun elements; we introduced quizzes in which the teams, with lots of laughs and some positive competition, fought for symbolic rewards. Later on, we expanded our out-of-office activities to sports and gastronomic activities such as bowling, skating or picnicking at Ribnjak.

Step up to the Dialog Academy as it has become now come from the idea of ​​inviting external experts once a month to engage in complementary occupations as guest lecturers. Again, they were suggested by employees, and management just had to make sure they showed up. So far, Nikola Stolnik (Good Game Global), Manuela Tashler (Leader), Iva Taiber (Next Level Consulting), Željko Krešić (BBDO) and Davor Runje (Airt) have come to visit us.

Plans for the future

There are many ideas and plans we have for our Academy, and the list of external lecturers is filling up quickly. But for now, the Academy is resting. We work from home and we socialize online. It didn’t take us long to adjust, because digital is how we live every day.

We can’t wait to celebrate the war against the COVID-19, and when that happens we will celebrate long and noisy!