Some chief executives send a weekly email to tell their staff how things are going. Others hold an online Q&A every few months, or post their thoughts on LinkedIn.
I am not sure any do exactly what Greg Jackson does at Octopus Energy, the British household energy supply group he founded in 2015.
Every Friday at 4.15pm, he encourages Octopus’s 13,000-odd staff in eight countries to join “family dinner”: a mildly chaotic half-hour online session of cheeky, rapid-fire presentations from Jackson and his top managers on the latest company news.
Here’s what happened at one I watched the other week at the group’s London headquarters on Oxford Street. As 4.15pm neared, staff began to log off, grab drinks from company fridges and settle in front of a large screen in an office auditorium.
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Jackson soon materialised online to talk about people he had met at Octopus Live customer sessions being held around the country.
A couple in Manchester had brought their bills down to £12 (€14) a month with a home battery, heat pump and solar panels. A breast cancer survivor had cried as she told him how Octopus had helped her manage bills.
Then the group’s country heads came on to deliver their news, amid video clips, jokey animations, a stream of online staff comments – and a lot of Jackson interjections.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed as his chief executive for Germany reported the company had just swept all 36 categories in industry awards for customer service and innovation. “That is unbelievable,” he said, joking that his Italian equivalent would be furious.
“Absolutely f**king great!” he hooted, as his man in Tokyo revealed 600,000 Japanese customers. He liked the news from Japan and China so much he announced that a prize of a free trip to both countries would go to the two employees who could say how many solar panels were installed in China in 2025.
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Entries will be “off the charts” by competition cut-off time on Tuesday, he told me later. It’s all part of the effort to entertain staff while reinforcing company priorities such as industry leadership, prices, clean energy and customer service. The format alternates each week.
A global session like that one is followed by a country one, then another global one and then one for individual teams. Jackson hosts all except the team events, meaning he is doing a session three out of every four weeks.
It’s time-consuming, he agrees, but crucial “if you want to keep a global company focused on the same objectives and know what we really want”. A lot of organisations would do well to adopt this type of approach.
Too many bosses leave it to managers to do the communicating. Or lumber staff with long, repetitive and widely unread emails that reek of little thought or care. Or livestream rare, stilted and largely uninformative presentations.
Saying that, Jackson is hard to imitate. He has a good sense of comic timing that he can deploy with relative ease since Octopus is privately held, plus a background in tech where playful online town halls are more common.
It is more complicated when you run a listed company with more than 200,000 employees in 56 countries and you are axing some of the most expensive ones, as Georges Elhedery is at HSBC.
He has made internal communication a priority for his senior managers since becoming chief executive in 2024 and does plenty of it himself. Along with emails at quarterly results time, he appears at regional town hall meetings and at panel discussions with top executives, and has online chats with outside guests, such as DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.
Matt Brittin, the BBC’s new director general, has taken a similar approach, appearing at online Q&A sessions for the broadcaster’s 20,000-plus staff, hosted by presenters such as Adam Fleming.
At McKinsey, global managing partner Bob Sternfels writes a regular blog about anything from the forces affecting clients to what he has seen on his travels. He also pens less frequent but more substantial letters about news affecting the firm, or ideas he wants everyone to know about.
I know of other bosses who send out videos, or write chatty emails about family holidays, or hold ask-me-anything staff Slack chats.
Ultimately, what matters most is understanding one’s priorities and conveying them as thoughtfully, regularly and non-tediously as possible. Anyone who can do that while making people laugh is well ahead. The rest can gain a lot by trying. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
