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?

A presentation is a presentation, not a comms exercise

I just read a good post from Jon Thomas on good presentation ideas, which prompted me to make a comment and, this having set my mind running, I thought I’d expand on it a bit here.

The first use of a PowerPoint presentation (or other app) is to support the presenter (duh!). Jon lists five good ideas for this, and the information that resonated with me particularly was to avoid lists of bullet points and use images (he quotes Dr John Medina: “adding an image to a text-based message can increase recall by 55 percent”).

Follow Jon’s ideas and your presentations will surely be greatly improved. But (there’s always a ‘but’). Why is this not as easy as it seems?

Much as I would love to say differently, I think there is still a tendency for presenters to use the presentation as a reminder of what to say. A single image with one intriguing word is fabulous for attracting the audience’s attention. Not so intriguing if the presenter can’t quite remember the messages that are supposed to be conveyed alongside it.

If you’re the presenter, that’s fine. Get off your butt and practice. But as comms professionals we are often asked to prepare presentations for other people and they may not always do the same.

In addition to the provision of a ‘crutch’, the presenter may also be averse to what they see as a ‘long’ presentation. Much as Emperor Joseph II said of a Mozart piece “too many notes”, they see too many slides without realising that the number of slides is immaterial to the audience – one click can take you to the next slide or to a build on the current one.  A 20-minute presentation can be on one slide or 40.

Another problem – presenters think they should send on a copy of the presentation to the people who were in the audience as a reminder of what was said. (“What did that egg mean again?”)

And worst of all, I still see people using a copy of a presentation as a communication to people who weren’t even there.

So slides end up with lots of words. Lots and lots.

It’s all just laziness really.  And reinforces one of my fave rules, which is that a range of channels are needed to communicate anything but the very simplest of messages. (Shouting “fire!” is adequate, you don’t need an email to back it up.)

So put the detail on a website, or in a booklet. Put various key messages on posters, in the elevators, on the back of the loo doors, on cards on the canteen tables, on the cardboard coffee cup holders. Just don’t put the onus on the receiver to read through a presentation and play guess-the-message.