Guess what? Delivery is important

Ok, I’ll stop being sarcastic. But it’s difficult. After all this time I still see people saying – as if it’s a new thought – that it’s not enough just to write a strategy, you have to deliver it. (Go on, I defy you not to be sarcastic in your response to that.)

I know it’s not a surprise that there remains a need for the statement. Given the amount of effort – and usually time – that it takes to get a strategy agreed, everyone is usually heartily sick of it by then and not feeling at all inclined to deliver it. (‘Thank God that’s done – now we can get on with some real work!”) And that’s assuming it has actually been approved. I’ve worked on many that became out of date or out of favour and just ground to a halt.

I don’t want to get into a debate about what a strategy is. For some organisations it’s a 200-page in-depth analysis and detailed way forward. For others it’s four pages of PowerPoint. Most I have worked for didn’t really embrace strategy, they just thought they should have one. The emphasis on ‘do’ rather than ‘think’ is at fault. The key I think is to show that strategy ensures that all the ‘doing’ is going in the right direction, with purpose and energy towards a point on the horizon and activity is not meandering all over the place – or worse, pulling in opposite directions.

Never has the saying ‘the devil is in the detail’ been so true. A strategy at too high detail often states the obvious or is not meaningful enough.  But getting below that brings the danger of getting bogged down, going down a few blind alleys and generally testing people’s attention span.

Here are some thoughts about how to get round this:

• Firstly consider what it’s for. Why are you doing it and what outcome are you seeking? What is that point on the horizon and how will you describe it?
• What should you call it?  Avoid the word ‘strategy’ if the word conjures up past failures with those people you need to engage. Some organisations think strategy is high-falutin’, airy-fairy nonsense and an excuse not to get on and do things. Here, using a word like framework, roadmap or just plain simple ‘plan’ will remove an unnecessary obstacle right at the beginning. Other organisations prefer the word strategy (or program) as it implies a deeply thought out long-term success plan. Just use whatever will work best. The content can be the same whatever label you attach to it.
• Spend some time at the beginning identifying all the stakeholders.  I think I might need a whole other blog entry on stakeholders but for the moment let’s just say that you want to get on board everyone who has the potential to scupper your strategy. You’ll make it very difficult for yourself if you suddenly realise towards the end that you really need the IT Director to be happy with your proposals.  Take just 20 minutes over a coffee at the beginning of your strategy development to ask each of the key people for views. This can save hours because if you do it later you have to go through the whole thing in more detail and from scratch. And since nobody likes to be an afterthought they are likely to be less receptive.  You can’t deliver an internal comms strategy on your own.
• Keep meeting the same people throughout strategy development. Things change so fast and you shouldn’t rely on them to remember to tell you if something in their area will make a change to what you’re doing. Likely they will be busy working out what it means for them, far less what it might mean for you. Make time for a quick chat – if you have something of value to them to share, all the better. If not, even just a quick catch-up phone call might nudge them to recognise that they have something to share with you. Please, please, don’t leave it too late.  If they hear from someone else that what you’re doing affects them and you haven’t spoken to them about it, it will be difficult to get them back onside.
• Plans always change. Some more frequently than others but what percentage of your plans get implemented with no changes? For me it’s zero in the last five years. I think I implemented a plan once 20 years ago with no changes but the organisation I was working for had the turning circle of an aircraft carrier and my plan was delivered before anyone realised the course was changing. Work to milestones – some of these may be immovable so they are very helpful markers. Stay flexible in how you get to those markers. The greatest benefit of a highly detailed plan is that it makes you look super-organised. But the amount of time you’ll spend updating it is disproportionate to its value.
• The key to delivery is to make sure that everyone knows what they are supposed to be doing and when. Giving them a copy of the plan and expecting them to follow it is unlikely to achieve this unless you have people programmed to be perfect. People forget, or something more important crops up, or they feel unsure about it and don’t want to get questions. Obviously the more people involved in the delivery the more opportunity there is for it to go wrong. Try and keep them close and let them know that you will always follow up just to check things are progressing as they should. And remember to thank them – even if they’re just doing what they’re supposed to it makes people feel more appreciated.

It’s stating the obvious to say that writing a strategy is pointless unless it gets delivered. But I also think it’s pointless to write a strategy that turns out to be undeliverable. Of all the successful things I’ve delivered, I can’t *hand on heart* say that any of them went completely as described in the strategy. But that doesn’t mean the strategy was wrong, it just means we took a different path to arrive at the same destination and it’s that last bit that’s important.

Let me know what you think….

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?

Feedback – not waving but drowning?

You’d be forgiven for believing that the communicator’s world will shortly be deluged by an over-abundance of feedback, since people are being asked to give their view on everything they buy. I’ve just ordered some groceries online – first time in ages – and was interested to see that every product had customer reviews attached to it. I started off reading each of them and then realised that this would more than double my shopping time – isn’t this supposed to save me time? It doesn’t, because as you’d expect, some people thought one product tasted great while another said it was awful. So in fact very little of it actually helped.

In the internal communications world, we have always been taught that feedback is paramount and certainly we can’t do our jobs properly if we don’t know that messages have landed as we thought they would, or there is a burgeoning issue we need to know about.

So it’s got to be a good thing, right? Good that people have a voice, somewhere to express a view that ‘management’ doesn’t hover over with a big stick. Not constrained by what’s asked in a survey, people are free to pick a topic and share it with everyone, just say what’s on their mind. So there is a good flow of information back and the people responsible for the subject in question will receive this feedback, welcome it with open arms and form a plan to redress any issues. Nice theory.

So what’s wrong with it? Not all feedback is actionable, or even useful beyond knowing that someone feels the subject is worthy of comment. Some of it will be a stream of consciousness, without self-regulation, a knee-jerk reaction.  Some of it will be unfair. This can make the recipients get defensive and dismissive. They are busy and not in the mood to wade through piles of stuff they can do nothing about to get to the lovely chunky bits of feedback that will help them improve what they’re doing.  

One way that internal comms can add value is by synthesising this feedback, joining it with information from other sources (cascade feedback, employee surveys, polls, intranet comments and so on) and providing stakeholders with a report that gives the main areas of interest, good and bad points. Then employees will know they are being listened to, and the stakeholders have something meaningful and actionable. Any thoughts or experiences?

Social media – the latest but not the last

Interest in the use of social media in internal communications shows no sign of diminishing. Which looks like it might result in some ‘wrong-end-of-the-telescope’ thinking by our senior stakeholders – particularly those who like to be up with the latest thing.

Nothing new in this. As I've said before, there were always those who wanted a video, or a DVD, which is now replaced with ‘should I have a blog?’ and ‘what should we do about Twitter/Facebook/Yammer?’

Wrong end of the telescope, for which read ‘looking at the challenge from the wrong direction’.  

One of the satisfying things about devising a solution to a comms challenge is identifying the range of channels that will best suit what needs to be done. Unless it’s a very simple challenge it’s likely that more than one channel will be needed as each has its own plus and minus points. Sometimes it can be useful to start with a simple analysis of the balance needed between one- and two-way communications. Mostly you’ll need both. Plus point of one-way communication is consistency for all audiences; plus point of two-way communication is that the dialogue allows feedback which, by definition, allows the message to be tailored and therefore it is not consistent.  To avoid everybody coming away with a different idea of what the message is you need a standard something for them to refer to (intranet page, leaflet, written brief, for example). To enable everybody to understand what the message means for them you need to facilitate that dialogue.

And while we’re on the subject of one- and two-way communication, I’ve heard it said that two-way communication is better. Not for everything, it ain’t. If you need something to be done fast, consistently and with clarity, one-way is best. As somebody once said to me, “if there’s a fire, you don’t want a discussion about evacuation procedures.”

Where does social media fit into this mix? Its greatest benefit is its participative nature. It can be quick in that what’s posted is there immediately, but this speed is reliant upon your intended audience identifying the message amongst the plethora of other information that’s there. And for it to work people must feel at ease with it. It’s tempting to look on this as an age thing and generally it’s true that 18-25/30 year olds are more familiar with it than old fogeys like me.  And given that senior level people again tend to be older than average employees this can help you decide what channel is best to use for what message. (In support of this I still know CEOs who ask for their emails to be printed out.)

Perhaps social media should be looked at as more of an employee engagement tool than a set of internal communications channels? Good discussion to be had there…

But even within social media, I think Yammer might be different. By all means use it to sow the seed of an idea or ask for feedback but I’d suggest it shouldn’t be used for key messages. Last time I did a channel analysis I included 19 channels that were managed by the internal communications function (including Facebook and Twitter) but the value in Yammer is that it isn’t owned by any one person or department, it develops organically into whatever the people who use it want it to be. To use it for key messages will make some users suspicious and destroy its meaningfulness.

Participate in Yammer as an employee not a comms professional.  Encourage someone else to set it up and hope it grows. Join it and contribute interesting and useful things that enliven people’s jobs and broaden their horizons. Just don’t try and manage it.