Channel selection: the three-way view

I recently added a comment on a forum that asked the following: “You have some urgent news to share with a large group of employees. What's your preferred communication medium?”

Your first thoughts might be the same as mine: (1) it depends and (b) you likely need more than one.

Depends on whether the news is just urgent, or urgent and important, or urgent and important and complex. And depending on the answer to that tells you what channels you need to use.

I’ve used these three dimensions for a number of things – not just to help with channels but also to help with allocating projects to people within internal comms departments. I thought I’d share it with you as you might find it useful.

It works best if you consider each of the three dimensions and decide which is driving the need to communicate. The other two may or may not be relevant – this is your secondary consideration.

Urgency first

Clearly you need something that’s immediate and ‘push’ – email, voice (voicemail or phone blast), text, or intranet if you can be sure that people will have it open and will see it. In extreme cases you need the comms equivalent of pushing the fire alarm button!

It is worth differentiating between what’s really urgent and what isn’t. Many customers seem automatically to say that their stuff is urgent (particularly those who are rubbish at planning).

Importance first

Here you need a range of channels that build on each other. Follow-through is important – the effort is often put into the launch of something important but maintaining the momentum can be difficult, particularly if other new shiny things come along to take its place. Leaving our people saying in a few months’ time “whatever happened to that project?” You need to keep the interest alive so it retains its importance.

Complexity first

Although it’s nice to simplify, some things are just complex either because of the subject matter or because of the number of strands that need to be fitted together. Here you might need to undertake some additional stakeholder analysis – what’s complex to one lot of people may not be to another. Technology and financial projects often fall into this category.

The ‘what-does-it-mean-to-me’ question is always important, but is particularly so here. One of the most complex communications I worked on was required to explain to senior management how their bonus was constructed. It was fiendishly complicated and they were understandably anxious to be able to work it out for themselves. It needed a 17-page PDF to build up the picture of four different elements each with different weighting.  But at least they understood it…Nobody else (apart from HR) needed to.

What does it mean for channel selection and management?

The impact of these on your channel selection depends on a number of factors amongst which are:

·       the extent to which you need both one- and two-way communication (just urgent may need only one-way unless you want to know how well it worked)

·       leadership visibility after the initial communication (really useful for strategic stuff)

·       continuing support for line managers (like when you have widely different audiences – managers can tell you what else their people need to know)

I’m a great advocate of using a number of different channels to reinforce and support the message. More on this in a future post...

One last thought: I read this in a report on the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer: “the average person needs to hear a story three to five times from different sources before they believe it”.  So there is an additional challenge in repeating the message but in interesting ways so that people are not bored by it. A difference between repeating and reinforcing...

Any views?