Internal communications - it's not rocket science

It all falls apart so quickly

This isn’t another posting about old age.

It’s about how temporary many great IC ideas are and how quickly IC processes degrade.

Many years ago I took on the job of Global Head of IC at Marconi.  Grand job titles were freely available at Marconi because we were going bust and my boss didn’t care what I called myself – he was just glad to have a body with a pulse to make things happen.

The problem was that Marconi had had a decent sized team just six months previously.  It had been run by a woman I still see around from time to time and believe to be one of the smartest people in our business and the team had done some great things.  Unfortunately, the company had let them all escape…and for about six months all their work fell into disrepair.

For the next two years, as we lurched from crisis to crisis I kept stumbling on the remnants of their great work.  I felt like an explorer coming across the remains of an ancient temple that had been overgrown in jungle.

But these ruins were not ancient.  The team briefing system was less than a year old, the communicators network has fallen into disuse only recently and the intranet updates had ground to a halt barely weeks before I joined.

The sad fact was that the moment you take your eye off IC processes they slow down.

For example, most team leader briefing or cascade systems need to be refreshed a very two years.  Few good intranets escape a major overhaul as frequently.

And the advert of more digital tools is making things change ever faster.

However, I think the real issue here is not the danger of redundancy.  It’s the need to farm and refresh what you have.  Building in time for major maintenance is something we all need to consider. 

 Liam

 

Authentic matters - but vivid sells

I saw a Wikipedia correction the other day that stopped me in my tracks.

Someone changed the phrase “Clients of high net worth” to “rich people”. And it struck me how the edit transformed the emotion in the original posting.

At a stroke the original article went from an anodyne discussion of business to a political statement about inequality. Before, the text avoided any sense of value and after, it posed a challenge about the advantages enjoyed by the wealthy.

All too often companies work with language that denies the passion and excitement of change with dry, cold terms.  Instead of ‘smashing the competition’ we are asked to ‘build competitive advantage’.  We talk about ‘exceeding client expectations” when we really mean “blowing customers away”.

We can all speculate why leaders do it.  Everyone who has ever written a CEO’s speech or drafted a newsletter article has seen the blood drained out of their copy; and most of us have rolled over and let it happen at some stage or another.

But we all know it is wrong.

Sucking the colour out of corporate language isn’t just a matter for those of us with ambitions to win a Pulitzer.  It’s like untying your shoelace just before you run the 100 metre final in the Olympics.

Humans are not rational.  We like emotion, we like pictures, we like making links in our minds between concepts.  When you talk like a spread sheet, your audience has nothing to hold onto.  No one ever got motivated by battling for a “five point uplift in gross margin”.

Yet as soon as we hear colour, can connect with something we admire, desire or fear, you’ve got us.  We’ll get fired up by an image of customers queuing up to pay more because we’re better than the competition.

So what is a change communicator to do?

For a start, we should come to conversations with senior leaders with arguments about the need to paint pictures.  It’s not just about helping them to tell stories (which is important), it’s about asking them what they really mean.  It’s about getting them comfortable talking as they would in the pub or when they’ve kicked off their shoes and are talking to friends.

Over the years, I’ve worked with an excellent actor who does this really well.  She starts working on diction and nerves and then tackles CEO’s about their scripts.

I’ve seen her push and cajole leaders to talk about how they would feel if their winning strategy pays off.  She nags them to paint pictures of what would happen if the competition won; what it would look like the day the bailiffs walked through the front door.

There is much talk these days about getting leaders to sound authentic.  We need bosses who we can trust; people we can get the measure of before we decide to follow them.

But we need to add to that their role to be vivid in the metaphors and images they put into people’s minds.

Authentic gets them in the room but vivid keeps them listening.

Giving up stuff for Lent

So it's Ash Wednesday - the start of Lent.  And what should communicators give up?

I'm not sure what I ought to forego apart from drinking on a school night and regretting how little I'm cycling at the moment.

But I'm thinking I'm going to avoid looking at a couple of discussion fora.

I've already unsubscribed to one that wasn't too good for my blood pressure.

However the better ones are a real distraction - it's easy to get sucked in and discover that your day is disappearing.

For example, there's an interesting debate going on about career paths for internal communicators on the Linked-in site for Employee Communications and Engagement.  And there a couple of US boards that are always worth a look.

Plus there is my daily read about all things cycling.

So, will I survive a whole month without them? 

What else are communicators giving up?

 

Bulletin board buffoons

Most newspapers do it these days.

They invite a reader to share a dilemma and then ask readers to share their advice.  I suppose if you think about it as entertainment it is harmless enough but sometimes it does feel a bit wrong.  

I'm sitting here looking at an article where someone is getting well intentioned but bonkers advice about her teenage daughter.  Recently I saw some potentially disastrous advice given to a man with a suicidal wife and still shudder at the insensitivity dished out to the man who was coming to terms with his father's homosexuality.

The problem is that anyone can comment and, let's face it, many of our fellow human beings should be encouraged to keep their bizarre or ill-formed opinions to themselves (I know this is dangerous ground for someone who writes a blog...).

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but why do we think that they all deserve a platform to express their views?

For internal communicators this is a real issue.  I used to manage an internal bulletin or discussion board for a company at which I used to work.  I firmly believed that it was good for the company to give people a space to ask challenging questions.

For a couple of years I used up endless personal credit with senior leaders defending the right of some quite obnoxious people to be rude to the executives.  

And did it do any good?  Probably not.  The miserable gits moved on, little actually changed and the company went broke anyway.

Now I have reached the view that quite a few Linked-in fora are probably not worth the time of day.

My blood pressure probably can not cope with the aggressive tone of some contributors or the fatuos observations of others.  In fact the spam postings make a couple of the sites just about bearable.

What surprises me is that the fora from which I have un-subscribed are run for the benefit of communicators.  Somehow I'd expect my fellow professionals to be better quality posters.

As comms professionals we regularly get called upon to manage all sorts of infantile debates in workplaces.  Childish behaviour is often cited as one of the fears that prevents organisations experimenting with social media internally.  But give IC people a platform and we're as bad as anyone else.

Having said that, Charlie Norblum's Communicative Leadership group on Linked-in seems to be attracting a higher class of contributions than many such fora.

So, for the time being I'm cleaning up my social media subscriptions.  And I'm left with the question - is the sum of human happiness or workplace engagement enhanced just by letting any buffoon expose their ramblings to the rest of us?

Liam

PS - I do appreciate the irony in a blogger saying this!

How frank can your news pages be?

I’m shockingly old.

That brings the licence to say things which can be passed off as the ramblings of a grumpy old man (normally that is).

And it brings the curse of thinking I’ve heard it all before.

One discussion that ranged when I was starting out in communications, back in the days of quill pens and a working day that finished at 5 pm, was about the independence of the house newspaper.

I remember the fiercely even-handed approach of Rail News (back in the day when the trains worked). BA News was nicknamed ‘The Friday Firelighter’ by managers who were regularly wrong-footed by its news reporting.  And I’m still smarting from the telling off I got from the editor of the BP internal magazine when I tried to sneak in some outrageous puff about the achievements of the IT department.

Companies placed great store by the credibility of the paper or the magazine to tell it how it was and to defend their audience from an avalanche of turgid internal propaganda.

After all, what’s the point of shelling out a small fortune on fancy writers and posh typesetting if no one believes a word of what’s printed there?

I do wonder to what extent this tradition carries through to the news pages of most intranets?

Clearly no organisation wants communications to look like they have been outsourced to the North Korean information ministry.  But (irony alert), what’s the point of shelling out a minimum of resources for an instantly alterable noticeboard if you don’t control the exact wording of what goes up there?

Some time back I watched and cheered from the side-lines as a communicator defended the intranet from dull, self promoting nonsense produced by an internal department.  “We’ve worked hard to build a readership – I’m not having it scared away by this crap” I heard him say.

But it’s a tough challenge for many communicators.

On the one hand leaders need channels that are respected and valued by staff.  Whilst at the same time, many leaders want their own version of Pravda to publish air-brushed hagiographies.

Standing your ground is a valuable skill that in-house practitioners need to learn at an early stage.  But I think the trick is to be smart about who gets told to bog off and who gets coached to try better.

So who is teaching that apart from the school of hard knocks?

 

What's the best length for an internal video?

Often people ask us to help them with internal videos.  These can be anything from the CEO talking to short animations explaining a business strategy (no prizes for guessing which are the most fun to make).

Often it's hard to make them interesting but a recurrent problem is the length - especially with a talking head video.

Once a senior manager warms to their theme its very hard to shut them up.  Nothing can possibly be simplified and examples absolutely have to be given that reference every major division of the company.  To my shame, I recently was implicated in the production of an eight minute talk by a senior manager.

I'm not saying it was bad, but eight minutes is beyond human endurance.

If you look at news items on the TV they are often around 45 seconds.  They might stretch to 90 seconds if there's a bit of studio discussion.  

Watching stuff on a PC at work is tough when the film is more than a minute.  Distractions abound - if you don't land the message instantly you're probaly wasting your time.

I'd argue that's the standard internal video should aspire to.  And if it's over 90 seconds - it's probably a second video.

The difficulty is that compressing down a video script is not a skill that many of us acquire.

There are some good resources on the web such as this and this. I'm actively looking for a short course to get my skills upto date.

But I think film making poses a really useful test to the communicator.  How well can you distill a core message down into the basics?

One to ponder I think!

 

Strategy or stuff?

I've been helping a client with some benchmarking interviews in the last couple of weeks and I was struck the other day by something I heard.

One of our interviewees, the corporate head of comms in a global manufacturing company was telling us her story.  She was explaining that, for the first couple of years in her job she didn't really bother to focus on developing lots of channels. 

This threw me a little.

In every role I've ever had I've tried to buy some credibility by delivering something tangible and fast.  Although I've had the strategic game plan in mind, I've always preached that no one wants a comms manager who doesn't deliver stuff.

But our interviewee rejected this as nonsense.

Her take was that if you start the conversation with a newsletter or by fiddling with the details of delivery, you'll struggle to get attention about the issues that really matter.

So, she said that she'd spent time working on getting the senior leadership to understand how comms could help them, what their role was and how they could get better at it.  When she felt that she'd made headway there she started looking at her channels and other tactics.

She's made me question a few things.

Most of all, I do wonder whether we should all stick to our guns a bit more - which isn't always easy when there's pressure to deliver things...