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.

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.

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.

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…

People not channels?

I’ve seen a lot in the last couple of days about channels. Social media is clearly “the in thing”, and quite rightly internal comms folk are looking to make sure that they incorporate this into their thinking and take advantage of the active audience participation that derives from it.

There have also been a few things about PowerPoint recently. Unlike social media, this is now seen to be a bad thing. And quite rightly internal comms folk are advising that this is not always a good tool for presenters to use in support of their message.

But it made me wonder whether this emphasis on the method of delivery is distracting us from concentrating on our audiences/stakeholders. Social media is not for everyone. Lots of people don’t get Twitter or Facebook and we can’t force people to participate. PowerPoint is not always wrong. Bad PowerPoint is, but you can still do good things with it. A good presenter using PowerPoint is going to be better than a bad presenter using Prezi.

Analysing stakeholders and accounting for their different preferences is at the heart of effective communications. Because they like different things we need to use a range of channels to get the message across. Because they have different levels of understanding and different levels of interest we need to tailor messages to get them to land properly. We need to ask them what they heard, what they understood, what they took from our comms so we can keep it going and do it better.

And hardening my nose for a minute, we also know that some stakeholders are more important than others (which is why we do all that analysis, mapping and engagement plan stuff). Would you use social media to hit your most important stakeholders? Maybe not. I have to admit, though, that I have used PowerPoint for this (*ducks, awaits onslaught*).

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?