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?

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.

Successful stakeholder engagement – you’ve planned it; how do you achieve it?

Identifying key stakeholders and stakeholder groups is one thing – in some ways that’s the easy part. What’s much harder is successfully engaging them on a continuing basis.  I think stakeholder work is similar to doing strategy – breathe a big sigh of relief once the plan has been done and then get on with the day job…

But nasty things happen if we lose sight of stakeholders. What’s that stat about how many programmes are regarded as being successfully completed? I’ve seen a few estimates over the years but all of them say the percentage is pretty low. I’d bet that a lot of it is due to losing track of where the stakeholders are at.

So what can we do about it? Here are some things:

• Treat stakeholder groups and individual stakeholders differently. Since we can’t communicate with everyone individually we can gather some people into a group and work out how best to keep them informed – and maintain a dialogue if necessary. This is not going to be the one-on-one relationship that you need for the really important stakeholders (the ones whose individual support you really need for success)
• Use a range of channels for your stakeholder groups – a mixture of one-way comms that provide the consistency of message and two-way so that they get tailored messages that are specific to their situation (answering the ‘what-does-it-mean-for-me’ question)
• Enlist the experts to maintain the one-on-one relationships. This can be easier said than done, since both parties are likely to be busy. You can facilitate it by seeing if you can provide them with a good reason (latest update?) to maintain that contact – and it can be just a short phone call, it doesn’t need to be a big briefing session or anything time-consuming
• You can also use this call to ask your stakeholders what’s new at their end. They may not be aware that something changing in their world will have an impact on yours
• Match people up – for example, marketing people tend to have a different focus than the techies. And also, if there are technical changes, a techy is more likely to spot if there will be an impact on you (or vice versa)
• If your work is not already on the agenda of senior level meetings see if you can get a short update on there – even a half-pager that can be handed out if not read out. It’s better if you can have someone in there face-to-face but that’s not always possible
• Don’t rely on the fact that having stuff on the intranet or Sharepoint or whatever will keep everyone up to speed with progress. It won’t
• Keep re-visiting your stakeholder map to make sure that programme changes haven’t shifted where people sit on it. It’s often the case that things don’t quite go as expected, however much you try and manage risks or anticipate problems (sorry, challenges). You might find somebody has become more influential than you expected (e.g., there will be more of an impact in their area), and that’s dangerous to ignore. I’ve never worked on a programme that went from beginning to end as we expected it to, not ever ever
• Remember that it’s easier to get people’s attention at the beginning than some weeks down the line, when something else new and shiny has come along that may seem to be more interesting. That’s just human nature. See if you can find a different angle to bring something fresh (do an interview with one of the team?) – and this is where social media can help as well…

Anyway, hope some of that helps. As always, I’d be interested to know what you have found that works well – or didn’t if you’re happy to share!

Three levels of stakeholder engagement planning… four if you count mine

I was discussing stakeholder engagement with a client recently and they asked me whether a full-on stakeholder engagement plan was actually worth the effort. Good question, I thought.

Certainly a stakeholder engagement plan is always part of any communications strategy that I develop. But of all the elements I think this is the trickiest one.

Why? Because it’s hard to do it well and simply. Most companies I’ve come across recognise the importance of engaging stakeholders but don’t know how best to go about it. A few others have had a go and then lost interest as other priorities take up their time.

Too simple and it won’t work; too detailed and it’s time-consuming and a pain in the proverbial.

So why bother?

Something is going to be different in the future. You need to tell people about it. If they have a role to play in this future, you need them to tell you what they think of it. So far so obvious, maybe.

But the value of stakeholder work is that it seeks out right at the beginning those people who aren’t front of mind but whom you ignore at your peril. Approaching them only once you become aware they are a potential showstopper means you have to go through the whole story with them – plus there is the added risk that they are miffed you are only just speaking to them now or wary because it’s all gone on without them so far.

What’s the solution?

Here’s a suggestion that you can tailor to most situations.

Level 1 – I’ll skip through this because you’ve probably done it (or similar) before… 

• Run a session with as many interested parties as you can muster and come up with as many possible stakeholders as you can – don’t dismiss any at this stage 
• Now you need to analyse or map them. Lots of ways to do this: suggest you start with the simple (1) high or low power/influence versus (2) high or low level of interest (you can refine later if you want – see below). Stick ’em in the appropriate quadrant
• Step back and review – chances are that everyone is aware of the high/high quadrant. It’s the high influence/low level of interest you need to focus on – plus of course any stakeholders that had been forgotten up until now
• Agree what action should be taken for all stakeholders. At the high/high end, this might be a briefing session for a specific group (who’s going to do that and when?) while at the low/low end it might be an intranet news article to keep people up to speed

Level 2 – variations on a theme

• If you want to go to the next level of refinement, you can do further analysis of each group and look at their  size and position relative to each other. Just gives you a better understanding of the overall stakeholder landscape and the size of the task
• Alternatively, you can go for a different sort of mapping that is particularly suitable for individual stakeholders rather than stakeholder groups. Rather than the four-quadrant tool suggested above you can look at the level of impact on them versus their current level of commitment to the change. One tool I’ve used shows three levels of impact (high, medium, low) and six levels of commitment: resistance, compliance, agreement, personal buy-in, personal participation and full commitment
• When you place people in here then review it will be clear where you need to focus your efforts (anyone in the resistance/high impact column is an obvious one)
• It’s worth mentioning at this stage that the relationship with individual stakeholders needs to be managed at an appropriate level. If you need to work on a Board member to shift him/her along the commitment axis you’ll need to persuade someone of equal seniority who is directly involved in the change to go speak with them

Level 3 – here’s the rub

• This is all useful and a good start if you haven’t done it before. But there’s a big but…
• To do this really well you also need to look at where they are compared to where you want them to be – people don’t stay in the same place, and indeed they shouldn’t if you are expending some effort in engaging them
• So this type of stakeholder plan needs to account for their current level of engagement and your desired level of engagement for them. Interestingly, you sometimes find that there are some people you would actually like to be less engaged
• And having done that, you need to re-visit the plan regularly to see what progress (or not) is being made and take action as appropriate (and track those actions)

You can end up with a mega-spreadsheet that covers all of this and if there is appetite to review this regularly within the group then that’s great. Alternatively you can review it on your tod and highlight any concerns with the appropriate people.  Personally I most often go for a lighter touch and maintain a fairly simple stakeholder contact tracker. It lists all the stakeholders and stakeholder groups, then has columns for who last contacted them, when and how. Then at least I can see pretty quickly if we have dropped the ball.

Next time I’ll share some thoughts on how to achieve that engagement….

Measuring and managing

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” they say. Generally speaking, I think most of us would agree with that. Maybe you have sat down with the senior management team while they go through their Key Performance Indicators and tut over a failing sales campaign or rejoice in a customer satisfaction survey. They need to know what’s going well and what not so well in order to fix it. Obvious.

Not quite so easy with internal comms, however. I’ve included measurement in every single comms strategy I’ve ever written but (don’t tell anyone) I don’t think I’ve ever completely cracked it. Of course, you seek feedback from people and measure site hits on the relevant intranet pages, but all it takes is someone with an axe to grind and they will be able to pick holes in your findings (I do love a good mixed metaphor). If they challenge your findings you need to be able to justify them.

Measuring what you have communicated is not much use as what’s important is not what you’ve communicated but whether the message has landed as you intended it to. We may communicate perfectly what we would like people to do and they may understand it. If they then carry on regardless and go on doing what they always did it doesn’t matter how much you have communicated or how beautiful it looks – it’s essentially a waste of money. We can say we have communicated x key messages in line with the comms plan, but it’s whether behaviour or attitudes have changed and whether the outcome is different that’s important.

Another reason that communications efforts are notoriously difficult to measure is that absorption of the information we are trying to share is subjective and influenced by how negative or positive the message is.  If you’re telling people that they have a pay rise you get their attention immediately and, if it’s equal to or (less likely these days) more than they expected, they are likely to be happy with this communication. We need to consider carefully what we ask people and be specific on the topic.

It also depends what we are measuring for: the successful communication of a programme or an activity, or the performance of the communications department?  You’d ask different questions, I think.

So we have a good reason to be selective about what we measure and what conclusions we draw from it. By all means measure site hits, but don’t conclude from that the higher the hit rate the better. There are a number of reasons people might return to it – not always different people checking it out because they have been told it’s so good (unfortunately).

Where appropriate, it’s a good idea to focus on whether the outcome matches expectations. To what extent are people following the new process (as an example)? Focus groups or other F2F stuff help with digging below the surface to find out what could have been better. Both qualitative and quantitative methods have their place.

I’m a bit suspicious of hanging too much on surveys from the time that I ran two versions of a survey across matched samples and found that the results were quite different: where I had asked a number of questions leading up to the final ‘overall what do you think?’ question the results were much more positive than where I had asked this question first, and then gone through the separate components afterwards. The questions were the same; they were just in a different order. My conclusion? Asking the question up front gave an instant reaction, a reflex. Asking it last, after people had been reminded about all aspects, seemed to have made them think that overall the change had been positive. Further exploration was needed.

The result is that it seems to be wise to (a) be clear why you are measuring things, (b) be selective and focused on a few important things (unless you’re doing a simple comms audit), (c) use a wide range of methods to help you cross-check your findings and (d) be careful in your conclusions, taking account of other factors that might skew the results.

Social media (again) – cart before the horse needed?

I was re-reading Elizabeth Lupfer’s interesting article on building a roadmap for internal social media (re-posted on ragan.com) and a thought struck me. Her approach is eminently sensible and follows the straightforward comms approach of identifying the need and then working out the best solution (i.e., channels) that meet the requirements.

However, it did make me wonder if there is enough experience of and familiarity with the wide range of available SM channels and their pros & cons to enable us to decide which would be best. We all know when a newsletter fits the bill, or an intranet article, or a workshop, or a presentation. That’s because, like all old friends, we know their foibles, when they are right and when they are best left alone.

But we have a load of new guys on the block all wanting to be our new friends. The list of social media products grows every day. Some, like Yammer, seem to be gaining broader acceptance and we are getting to know them better. Others, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are perhaps more familiar outside of the business context. One client of mine swore by HootSuite; another liked Storify. There are tons of them, and no doubt there will be more. How to choose the right ones? If I identify that an organisation could do with a more collaborative environment – and let’s face it, which doesn’t – how can I arrive at the best solution when I haven’t experienced them all?

Now I know these all do something different, and this leads me to another thing.  I’m wondering if some of these new-fangled tools fit needs I didn’t even know I had.  Like the iPod when it was first introduced. Or, I daresay, the intranet. I don’t think we started with a bunch of requirements and then thought, ‘what we need is an intranet to sort this out’. I think we learned it was possible and thought ‘what a great tool this could be if we use it right!’

This makes me wonder whether there’s a case for introducing some of these tools on a small-scale basis and seeing how they get on. Then we can work out if we need them or not. Or is that just heresy?

That’s what happened to me with Yammer. One of my clients used it, and it was growing like mad because people liked it. So I hopped on board to see what it was all about. Now I would recommend it I think fairly widely because it has potentially such a broad reach if used the right way.

Perhaps we should we acquire a few carts and see if the horse likes pulling them…

Social media – what you can and can’t manage…

The best thing about internal social media is its ‘by-the-people-for-the-people’ nature.  As communications managers this can go against the grain somewhat – it’s much more comfortable to have channels that we can control, where we know what’s going to be said because we are the ones saying it. But recent studies (for example, ACPO, Gagen MacDonald and a piece in the HBR that I talked about below) show that social media is increasingly expected by the younger workforce to be available within their workplace and it’s getting to be a differentiating factor for them when choosing an employer (US-based but the rest of the world will follow if not already there). It’s not going to go away.

Internal Communications can’t and shouldn’t have control over social media content – this takes away the whole point of having it. A bit like your mother checking your Facebook updates before they go up – who wants that! But we should review it and take action if necessary to keep it a resource for people to use freely without fear of castigation.

So we’ll be in the situation where we manage channels used to convey messages and tell our stories, while participating in and accounting for (but not directly managing) social media channels where our people will talk about our messages and stories, sharing their views and opinions.

How comfortable will we be with this free-for-all? Depends on the culture and maturity of the organisation in question. Where this is positive there will be self-regulation and it’s less likely that something unsuitable will go up there. (Trolls will stay under their bridges.)  

Of course in an unhappy organisation there is more risk. Here’s a vicious circle: senior leadership doesn’t trust its people, which leads to employee dissatisfaction, which would lead to negative comments on open communications channels, which would prevent leaders from allowing these channels, which leads to more dissatisfaction and even more distrust.

How to break this? Well, you need to sort out the source of the problem.

Sometimes it’s due to where the organisation is at: major transformation programmes often lead to nervousness within both management and their people and so not the best time to introduce ISM. But if it’s already there you can’t quash it.

Another stumbling block is with those in management who see social media as a time-waster. (The same used to be said about the intranet.)

A key part of the solution is implementing a policy. I know that sounds really dull and boring (that well known double act) but at least everyone knows what the rules are and it’s easier to redress things that go wrong if you can show that the policy hasn’t been met. If you haven’t already got one, it’s a good idea to ask for people’s help in setting one up – particularly those who are really interested in social media. This gets them on your side of the fence and their knowledge will help you get it right!

The challenge (as with all policies) is to keep it comprehensive, short and clear. Make sure that you say something about removing offensive content and perhaps try and keep it on a positive footing by suggesting all the things social media is good for. That might help the senior doubting Thomases as well as dissuade people from posting what they are going to have for lunch that day…

Managers still need to manage

I was interested to read a blog in the Harvard Business Review on the role of the manager in communicating to their staff. One of the points made is that social media will remove the power of the manager in communicating to their people as the latter learn and believe more from social media. This statement in particular caught my eye: “Managers will no longer be able to communicate with just a small circle of trusted advisers — they'll be expected to interact digitally with a much broader range of people both inside and outside the company.” Hmm. That’s some assertion. And possibly purposefully provocative.

I am a fan of social media  (this is a blog!) and there’s lots of stuff in previous posts below about social media. But managers will always need to manage their people and you don’t do that through social media, you do that by having a proper face-to-face conversation.

And I don’t buy that younger people only communicate through social media. I just think they make less of a distinction between written and spoken communications. My sons (20 and 17 now) carry on a conversation that they were having face-to-face by texting the people they just left. To begin with I thought this was weird – but then if you want to keep a good conversation going why not carry it on via your phone when it’s so easy?

Also it’s not just younger people. People in older age groups are increasingly getting involved in Facebook and Twitter – though possibly not quite to the same extent.

Managers know their people and the good managers have always worked out the best way of communicating with employees, depending on who they are – what they do and what kind of people they are. If you manage a department full of techies, you’ll probably manage them differently than if you have a department full of sales folk. If you know that Bertie likes to have things in writing then you’ll probably give it to him that way, to get the best out of him. If Julie’s always in a rush to get on with things you’ll probably be more succinct so she’s not clawing at the door to get away after 20 minutes.

Social media just adds another few ways of keeping in contact with people. But it’s not a replacement for speaking with people, gauging their mood and reacting accordingly.