A Comms Strategy in four days

Time is not always of the essence, of course, but if it is, and you need a communications strategy in a hurry, it can be done. Even from scratch, if you have access to the right information... I know because I just did it.

This is how it happened.

Day One
I read everything that I could find that might be relevant, looking for the context of this piece of work. Presentations, reports, plans, research findings. Of course not all of it made complete sense - it's like being handed a few pieces of jigsaw puzzle. You can see they do fit together, it's just not exactly clear how yet. I started a mindmap (in pencil).

Then I spoke to as many people as I could. They gave me more jigsaw puzzle pieces. I asked them what outcomes they were looking for, who they thought the key stakeholders where, what information needed to be shared and how things were communicated at the moment. Specifically, what was working well and what wasn't. I scribbled furiously. In between meetings I browsed the intranet, saw what was already there. Made more notes.

At the end of the day, I re-read the stuff I'd read at the beginning of the day. More of it made sense now. I was grateful I'd used a pencil for the mindmap.

Day Two
More meetings with people, more pieces of the jigsaw - because of the conversations I'd had the previous day I could ask more informed questions. With the senior people I asked if it was ok for me to record the conversation so I could listen to it again later and make sure I'd captured everything. I gathered more presentations, more reports.

I was able to listen in to a teleconference where some of the team dynamics became more obvious. A  picture of the end game was forming.

Took a first stab at the scope, objectives, key stakeholder groups, types of messages that needed to be communicated, channels to use, channels to avoid, potential channels to introduce.

I went back over the initial paperwork again and gleaned as much on timescales as I could. Then I emailed everyone I had met, plus others they had nominated, saying this was what the timing and milestones looked like, asking for comments, additions, amendments. Updated that part of the mindmap. I did the outline of the Briefing Deck I would be using to share the Comms Strategy with my sponsors.

Day Three
I caught up with the key people whom I had met on Day One. I ran my initial thinking (i.e., first stab) past them to get their reaction. It was mostly favourable, some amendments needed, some changes in emphasis.

More work was needed on looking at feedback mechanisms, how they worked and whether more would be required. I thought a bit about the culture, where the open and closed doors were. Considered what might open the closed ones.

I met with the people who had the detail of what needed to be communicated. I hadn't wanted to meet them at the beginning as I knew what they told me would make more sense now.

Each of the key areas I had been working on could now be fleshed out. It was clear that one of the key stakeholder groups was going to be the people managers. They had no consistent, regular communication so their knowledge was patchy. That impacts on all three main comms elements (stakeholder, messages, channels - but you knew that).

I could now take an in initial view of risks and resources. I updated the Briefing Deck.

Day Four

I listened to the taped conversations again and I re-read everything. Some of the things I'd scribbled down made sense now so I could refine what I'd written. I re-visited the mindmap.

Then I spent the rest of the day concentrating on the Briefing Deck. I was looking specifically for where I had gone into too much detail, and where I hadn't explained enough. I showed it to a friendly colleague and asked for comments, took those on board.

I checked to see who had come back to me on my timescales email. As you'd expect, some had, some hadn't. There were a couple of "don't know yets". I'd kept the timescales high level in the strategy (the detail would be in the plan), and fortunately nothing contradicted what I had included. I had, though, gained some useful information that I could build into the assumptions and risks.

At the end of the day I took the sponsors through the deck - they were happy with the strategy and asked me to go forward to the plan. Result!

Building from the bottom up

I’m doing a piece of consultancy work currently that has thrown up an interesting challenge. It’s a challenge about scope. Now normally I don’t do things like how to manage meetings and teleconferences. For me, these are day-to-day communications and I try to avoid bringing them into what I’m doing as there is usually quite enough to get on with without straying into how effective (or not) these are. Leave that to Training folk, say I. 

However, in doing the research into the ‘as-is’ I’ve got some interesting results. This is probably because I’m working with one department and they don’t have anybody responsible for internal communications. It just happens… And it’s an educated workforce – they are all of degree level with a fair few PhDs in the mix. They are experts, know what they’re doing and communicate when they have to. They are all articulate and know how to express themselves, but scholarly writing is not necessarily a good grounding for good business communication.

Yet the research gave me food for thought. They send a lot of emails – on average 15 a day. They spend a lot of time on teleconferences and in meetings – works out on average at a couple of hours a day. So not surprisingly their main wish is to improve in these areas – that will save them time and their tempers. And, just as importantly, their stakeholders have said the same thing.

Of course there are some other things they need to look at too. They have no intranet (unless you regard a raggedy hotch-potch of SharePoint Teamspaces as an intranet, which I don’t). They also have no leadership channels – they have a great Leadership Team but their comms are ad hoc. Their people are unsure of the bigger picture (such as the strategy) and their place in it. They are not as yet completely sold on the idea that they do need to know this, but I can show ‘em that at the right time.

So I asked them what would make things better, they told me and I’m now working with them on improving the simple channels first. It’s a global organisation with regionally based training so my first point of call for consistency in these areas isn’t there. And do you know what, it’s really interesting and perhaps too much overlooked.

We spend much time thinking about all the great things like internal social media but my guys want fewer emails, shorter and more targeted. They want an agenda for their teleconferences and meetings, with pre-reading and follow-up emails. They want to know who’s doing what and when, they want things to start on time, finish on time and decisions to be made. They want to know how to plan their comms and some of them want to know how to manage their stakeholders better. So I’m giving them a bunch of checklists, templates, guidelines and tools. It’s back to basics but that’s looking like a good thing. Tall buildings need strong foundations; the towers and spires come later.

Why doesn't change work?

I came across the Towers Watson Change and Communication ROI study via The Street, with a quote from Kathryn Yates, global leader of communication consulting at Towers Watson, saying “less than half [of major organizational changes] stay on schedule, come in at — or under — budget or hold people accountable for deadlines... The average survey respondent went through three major changes in the past two years.” This set me thinking about some of the change programmes I’ve worked on and the things I’ve learned.

In my experience the challenges lie in four key areas: leadership, culture, engagement/ownership and management.

Leadership

Senior people sponsor all sorts of initiatives and there is always something new around the corner that will distract their attention. I think this is one of the reasons why there is often a fanfare at the beginning of a change programme – because the people managing it want to show the senior folk that they are getting on with it. However, the next change team will be doing the same thing, and the next, and so it goes on.  The ideal here is to try and link all the changes together, somehow, so that the leadership team don’t feel that they are sponsoring lots of simultaneous programmes, and lose focus or interest.

It’s easier to achieve change if people know that the senior leadership team want it but it’s not enough on its own. One place where I worked I countered some resistance with the immortal phrase “The Managing Director is really keen for this to happen” to which the response was, “Oh he’s always going on about that.”

Culture

Some cultures are just more willing to accept change than others. Some of it may be down to industry – where they are fleet of foot they may be more prepared to (and used to) change. Perhaps it’s more to do with longevity – the longer something has been the same the more difficult it is to change it. But I have also seen the other side of the coin – change had happened so often that people were fed up with it. The lesson here might be to let change settle in and learn from it before going on to change it again.

Engagement/ownership

These are not exactly the same thing, but the problems are the same so that’s why I’ve lumped them together.  For me, ownership is about taking something on, moulding it for that particular purpose or function and being accountable for it. Engagement (in change terms) is more about being willing to change behaviour so that the end result can be achieved. Either way, lack of it is the kiss of death.

The key is to get past the intellectual agreement to a change to it being embraced in practice. An early lesson I learned – just because somebody agrees that something needs to be done doesn’t necessarily mean that they will actually do something different when it comes to it.  Don’t walk away thinking, “I can tick that off my list now, they understand why change needs to happen.”

Avoiding the feeling of change being ‘done to’ people is also preferable. To help with this, I still like William Bridges' work on change/transition best (search for it if you don't know it, there's loads of references). 

Management

Well of course there are vast quantities of resources dedicated to the successful management of change so I’m not going to encapsulate this in a paragraph. I think the key problem is that there is a tendency to plan too far in advance. I can honestly say I have never worked on a programme where the original milestones were met. Something unexpected always happens. So plans need to be flexible enough to accommodate this.

I also think that many programmes are overly ambitious in their timescales and their budget (the latter often dependent upon the former, of course).  You can see why – you need to sell it to the leadership team and they want lots quickly for not much money.

And so?

Some things I’ve learned:

• Small steps are better – easier to sell to the leadership team (they don’t need to worry about a massive impact on their people); easier to plan; easier to achieve and quicker to get on with. Just make sure that the small steps are all going towards the right point on the horizon.
• Pilots are great – in line with the above, people will buy a pilot more than a wodge of change in one go. You also learn more, you’ll engage more people who will own it (champions!) as they have been involved in it and that will make the full change more effective.
• Keep everyone informed on progress – yes, they may think “not that programme again” but that’s better than them thinking “whatever happened to that – did it fail?” The right level of detail is important – keep it high, maybe even just a few bullet points with more information available for those that want it.

Anybody got experiences to share?

Helping your CEO listen...

Despite – or maybe even because of – the increase in social media in the workplace there is a need for organisations to demonstrate leadership. The notion of cascaded information going in a nice sequence from top to bottom with feedback going bottom to top is at best outdated and arguably was always a misconception.  Nowadays information of all sorts zaps about the place in all directions, like a million pinballs in play at the same time. We need to introduce some structure to it in order to help our people make sense of it, to separate the important stuff from the general noise.

There are a number of ways to achieve this but here I thought I’d concentrate on one – leadership demonstrated by listening and reacting to feedback.

I read an article in the McKinsey Quarterly from Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer (and what a good name for a communicator, by the way!) – it’s a really good article and shows how an enlightened leader can have a hugely positive effect both culturally and operationally through ‘proper’ listening.

Mr Sharer listens on a personal basis and has his own method of gathering information but not all of us work with CEOs who have the same outlook. So what can we do to help?

Firstly, to state the obvious, CEOs need to take the broadest overview of the whole organisation and even they have some limit to the amount of information they can absorb, however clever they are.  I think of this like a piano keyboard – there is a wide range of notes that they should be hearing, not just the few in the middle, even though those are the ones probably played loudest (usually the financials). Other notes can resonate just as much but they need to be played to CEOs if they are not able or willing to do it themselves.

So in internal comms we should look to drive or facilitate this as appropriate. First, analyse what your CEO already does, how well s/he does it and where the gaps are. Maybe they read a few reports but do little face-to-face, or maybe it’s the other way around. Have a look at the table below for some ideas – and add your own…

Unfortunately, some CEOs may do little or nothing, in which case you might want consider a phased program where they will see the benefits build up rather than looking for too big a change in one go.

Whatever you want to do, you’ll need the CEO to want to do it too and that means selling the benefits. CEOs are always busy and if they feel they don’t have time to do any more you’ll need to persuade them otherwise. Enlist the help of others if necessary – you might need a Board Member or two to help out or even sponsor the program on your behalf (the HR Director might be supportive if you don’t have a Comms Director).

From the employees’ perspective, it’s not just the CEO being seen to listen; the key is that people know something has happened as a result of this listening. We all want our voice to be heard, our opinions to be valued. So make sure you find effective ways of communicating this too.

Here’s an idea for a high-level plan of action:

• Analyse current position – what happens, when, how, why and where
• Define the desired future position
• Look at the gap – analyse how big a change is required
• Prioritise what needs to happen
• Write a (private) engagement plan for what needs to happen – whom do you need to consult, who can help you, who may be unenthusiastic about it and what will you do to change their minds – most importantly, how will you show the value of the activities to the CEO?
• Write a delivery plan – assuming your engagement plan is successful how will you deliver the activities? This will be your public plan so include the key tasks from your engagement plan
• Write a comms plan – how will you communicate the new activities to your people? How will you let them know what has happened as a result of the CEO listening? Include a review within this, where you look at how things have gone and what needs to be changed as a result. I’m a real fan of doing pilots – low risk, simple positioning and much easier to sell to the CEO than a big, high-profile program of action
• Implement, review, revise as necessary

 Any thoughts?

Trust = Loyalty = Retention

Flicking through Edelman’s Trust Barometer made me reflect on some solutions I’ve used over the years to build and maintain trust within the different organisations that I’ve worked with.

One of the things that Internal Comms should do is help build employees’ loyalty to the organisation but you can’t have loyalty without trust. So if it’s an issue – or might potentially be one – it needs to be fixed.

The first thing to address is what makes you think there is a lack of trust. Feedback is likely to come from a number of sources – could be formal employee surveys, direct feedback from people via intranet, feedback from managers as to what their people are saying, or just the general rumour mill. Gather it, analyse it, but then the key is to identify what’s causing the mistrust. My experience has been that these are the main reasons:

• Mixed messages – the comms they are given by formal channels don’t match what they are hearing elsewhere. Perhaps their managers aren’t engaged and just brush off their enquiries. Perhaps other people who seem to have more knowledge than them say it ain’t so.
• Unmatched expectations or unmatched experience – the comms they receive lead them to believe something is going to happen in a particular way and it doesn’t.
• Vacuum – they don’t hear anything at all! Beware: rumour rushes to fill a vacuum. One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is persuading senior management that keeping people in the dark doesn’t mean that they will hold their judgement until you decide to let them know what’s going on. By that time they are likely to have heard about it from someone else (probably a few someone elses) and no need to guess how accurate and balanced that information is going to be...
• Puff – this is to do with managing expectations. Not a good idea to puff up the importance of a change if it will fall flat when people hear about it. They just feel let down.
• Secrecy – if you only give the absolute minimum of information and refuse to answer questions with no explanation then people rightly feel aggrieved.
• Same old, same old – I worked with one organisation that was on its third transformation programme in five years. Not surprisingly they were unenthusiastic about ‘another change being done to them’ when the previous efforts had been unsuccessful. Why should they trust the next one to be more successful than the previous ones?
• Ivory tower – senior managers can get isolated from the people on the front line. This is difficult because senior managers are busy and, powerful though it is, making a personal visit is regarded as too time-consuming. Also, I have to say, there can be some reluctance from certain types of senior managers to expose themselves to a questioning front line.
• Wrong tone – a mismatch between the tone of the communications and the culture of the organisation can cause mistrust of the message. Social media may help over time here, but there is still a tendency for some organisations to adopt a very formal tone for ‘official’ communications. Stiff language provokes a stiff reaction.
• Geographical differences – there are differences between countries with regard to their culture and ways of working as well as their legislation.  I think that expansion into new countries without putting enough effort into bringing them on board can cause problems later. There can also be differences within countries.  Smaller locations can feel left out; bigger locations can develop their own sub-culture that affects their perception of the information they are given.

Once you know what’s causing it, you can decide what to do about it. This might be obvious – for instance, if mixed messages are problem, work for consistency; if it’s the tone, change it; if it’s a senior leadership team issue, maybe from lack of ownership or visibility, then you must find a way for them to demonstrate their ownership and support of what’s being communicated.

I always advocate communication to be made little and often. If you have built up trust through maintaining effective two-way communication, people will be much more likely to be understanding if something goes wrong. It’s surprising how people leading change don’t want to think about things not going to plan considering how often this happens. Not acknowledging something has gone wrong is short-sighted and undermines credibility, particularly if it transpires that people will be affected in a different way than they expected. 

I’m struck how young people are growing up in a world where there is less trust compared to when I was their age. The internet and emails suddenly dropping into inboxes looking to trick you into giving money or personal details mean they grow up to be on their guard, they don’t take things at face value. The integrity of politicians, journalists, the courts, even the police is questioned. That just means we will need to work harder and engage better to take people with us on the journey.

In praise of paper – hard copies (sometimes) rule

I’ve just written a comms plan for a client and found myself writing in a few hard copy documents within the deliverables list. Heresy! Surely everything should be online nowadays? After all, some are saying email is dead so what hope for actual, real, touchable bits of paper?

It was an instinctive thought and it made me reflect on why I put them in there, before the client asked me the same thing. This is what I came up with:

• They are instant – you put them in people’s hands and they’re there.  You don’t have to wait until people have a minute to open an email attachment or navigate through an intranet site to get to it.
• You can write on them – put them in someone’s hands while they are listening to the same subject matter and they can take notes as they follow. When they review their notes they’ll make more sense because the context will be there.
• People can take them away to read – useful if they are travelling back from a venue or are overnight in a hotel and not wanting to go online.
• They can provide more detail and/or explanation – useful to build on information they’ve just heard in a presentation, for example.
• They give immediate consistency at multi-site presentations – ever use multi-site cascaded presentations to tailor key messages to particular audiences? Great, and answers that ‘what-does-it-mean-for-me?’ question. But by definition you lose consistency in the key messages (because the presenters will concentrate on the areas in which they and their audience are most interested). A hard copy of the core information given out at the end of the presentation provides that immediate consistency.
• They’re useful if you want to guide the reader through a lengthier story in a particular order  (to show the logic behind a big decision, for example).  You can put it online but people can get distracted online and start clicking away at other links.
• They are different!  I produced a hard copy booklet once for a client where our stakeholders were just fed up with the amount of information that they were being presented with. This was all do with consultation (so required by law) and there was a lot of stuff going through consultation in a short amount of time.  Everything was online, very few looked at it because there was so much and it was very dry. The booklet allowed us to join it all together, provide a bigger picture and demonstrate the benefits more clearly. Yes, we could have put it online with a big flashing star but the fact it was in front of them and looked interesting made them read most if not all of it.

Of course you don’t want to overdo it – that’s annoying to the audience (therefore self-defeating), can be expensive and is not terribly environmentally friendly.  But on certain occasions, a good old piece of paper is a vital part of an effective mix of channels.

Managers – the squeezed middle

I see the poor old managers are getting it in the neck again about their failure to manage (article in Friday’s Guardian). The raft of comments underneath this article are generally very negative (perhaps not surprising from Guardian readers) and I thought I might stick up for today’s manager.

In our field of internal comms, we deal a lot with the line managers. They are in every stakeholder map you’ll ever do, if you’re working with/in a company that’s bigger than about 12 people. Over time you come across the whole managerial range from brilliant to hopeless. Which does make it tricky when you want them to support your comms implementation, but more on that later.

First, aside from Gary Hamel’s interesting analysis, here are my thoughts on why managers don’t manage well.

Not the right people

The person appointing into the role chooses someone like them – why pick someone who thinks differently from you when that will make life more difficult? I think it’s still rare for someone to think, “I value your different way of looking at things and will employ you for your interesting and new perspective.” Companies don’t have time for different perspectives, they just want you to get on with it. So any ‘faults’ get replicated.

Not enough training

A squeeze on budget usually means a cut in the training budget. Faced with a choice between cutting money from the operational part of the business (where your product or service will suffer) versus training, who would favour the latter? Most budget-holders will acknowledge that people development is important but when it comes to a trade-off you can see which case is more easily made.

Some people are naturally gifted as managers – the rest of us need help. And if training isn’t provided people just copy what they see other managers do (including doing as little as possible)

Not enough time

Decreased budgets also have an impact on the role of the manager. I don’t hold generally with the view that managers in the past were better, but I do think that today with flatter org charts and those vexatious matrix management structures, managers are not allowed just to manage, they also have to deliver stuff. And again, when push comes to shove and you are pressed for time which route would you take? Spend time nurturing your staff and helping them to deliver more effectively in their own way or make sure your boss is happy that you have delivered your own work?

It’s easy to say that it starts from the most senior level and all managers should put people management towards the top of their agenda but (rightly or wrongly) this needs the company to feel it’s in a strong enough financial position to support the time it takes to do this.

What can be done from an internal comms perspective?

Ever the pragmatist, I think you have to work with what you’ve got. (If you’re not working with a culture that encourages good people management, changing it will take a long time.)

The biggest challenge is probably when you have the whole range of managers to support. Good managers will pick it up quickly and do it well; poor managers will do it if it’s easy and if they know they’ll get into deep poo if they don’t.

Therefore my suggestion is:

• Provide a high-level view of what needs to be done – good managers will use it and poor managers will know the extent of the work they are required to do
• Get buy-in from the top down, which means each layer of management needs to demonstrate that they are behind what needs to be done. They need to mention it at their departmental briefings, in their blogs, in their one-to-ones with their people. If it’s not mentioned again, the poor manager will see that s/he can get away with stalling on it
• Provide a toolkit focused on making the manager’s life easier. Provide a range of comms at different levels and put it online if possible as they can select the parts they will find most useful – manager Q&As are always useful

Thoughts/experiences anyone?