Author: Nailia Tasseel

…and to follow on from my last blog, here’s something that reinforces the issue!

Many organisations we work with see Trust as a critical factor in gaining competitive advantage. But to create a trusted organisation – if that is how you want to be perceived by your customers and external stakeholders – you have to begin with your employees.

I recently attended an internal comms conference where the question was asked, ‘Who Do Think Your Employees Trust Most’? The vast majority of delegates, given the choice of Chief Executive, comms team or line manager opted for the line manager.

Never has there been such a need to engage the organisation as a whole, and in particular line managers who are so influential to their teams. Organisations need to look at different and more engaging ways to reach through to this layer of the organisation. If you can’t get this strata of employees to trust the decisions and strategy that is being set by the executive team, how can you possibly expect those at the coal face to trust them?? And if employees don’t trust the senior team (or worse, their line manager), they remain cynical and their levels of engagement and performance will drop dramatically, impacting on customers’ perception of the organisation.

Trust is built over time. Invest in engaging your people at every level, and the rewards will follow.

Get the organisation talking and you’ll find innovation. Innovation is what drives organisations forward. And an organisation of engaged employees is far more likely to be one that achieves innovation. What is an engaged employee? Read this…

A client told us about their experience when they decided to send a promotional mailing to all their customers all over the world.

Being a contemporary kind of company, they had decided to use a trendy design and all was encased in a smart black envelope with the logo in the corner.

Within a few days the client was flooded with calls from Asia. Customers were asking what was the matter? They dared not open a black envelope, as this symbolised incredible bad luck and death in several Asian cultures.

It just goes to show – great design in communication can meet its match with culture!

We love this poem by Elspeth Murray, which echoes our frustration at the complexity, jargon, irrelevance and clutter that litters communication within organisations today. Elspeth wrote the poem for the launch of the cancer information reference group SCAN (South East Scotland Cancer Network) in January 2006, which has been trying to improve the quality and speed of services for people with cancer.

This Is Bad Enough

This is bad enough
So please…

Don’t give me
gobbledegook.

Don’t give me
pages and dense pages
and
“this leaflet aims to explain…”

Don’t give me
really dodgy photocopying
and
“DO NOT REMOVE
FOR REFERENCE ONLY.”

Don’t give me
“drafted in collaboration with
a multidisciplinary stakeholder
partnership consultation
short-life project working group.”
I mean is this about
you guys
or me?

This is hard enough
So please:

Don’t leave me
oddly none the wiser or
listening till my eyes are
glazing over.

Don’t leave me
wondering what on earth that was about,
feeling like it’s rude to ask
or consenting to goodness knows what.

Don’t leave me
lost in another language
adrift in bad translation.

Don’t leave me
chucking it in the bin
Don’t leave me
leaving in the state I’m in.

Don’t leave me
feeling even more clueless
than I did before any of this
happened.

This is tough enough
So please:

Make it relevant,
understandable –
or at least
reasonably
readable.

Why not put in
pictures
or sketches,
or something to
guide me through?

I mean how hard can it be
for the people
who are steeped in this stuff
to keep it up-to-date?

And you know what I’d appreciate?
A little time to take it in
a little time to show them at home
a little time to ask “What’s that?”
a little time to talk on the phone.

So give us
the clarity, right from the start
the contacts, there at the end.

Give us the info
you know we need to know.
Show us the facts,
some figures
And don’t forget our feelings.

Because this is bad
and hard
and tough enough
so please speak
like a human
make it better
not worse.

© Elspeth Murray
www.elspethmurray.com

(If you would like to use this poem, please contact Elspeth at elspeth@elspethmurray.com)

Another one for the cabinet…..we are delighted to receive yet another accolade for our work with EDS, which has just won a Silver Quill at the IABC’s Southern Region Conference in the US.

IBM recently asked their staff, and those of their major clients, to pitch ideas via a secure website about what the company should be doing. Within three days they had 37,000 responses.

This mass focus group of employees was all about active participation (and involving their major clients – who provide a very good steer on what customers want from IBM – was a great idea). It’s testament to the fact that employees and customers have an enormous collective wisdom and experience which is far far greater than that of any single management team.

We have long believed that collaboration, brainstorming, participation, group discussions and dialogue not only empowers and engages employees, but creates a massive energy within the organisation which, managed and channelled carefully can result in innovation, knowledge-sharing, learning, engagement and ultimately better performance. Of course we add storytelling to the mix, but a major part of our programme – and the bit that starts to generate real value – comes when teams gather together to discuss the different strategic priorities in the company’s story, the role they’ll play, and the action they need to take.

IBM is serious about this approach. In Trevor Davis and Ian Bradbury’s essay in this month’s Management Today (IBM Global Business Services), they talk about the importance of “adopting a collaborative, collegiate and team-oriented approach that still leaves room for rewarding individual contributions to innovation”. And their final message rings clearly: “It’s tempting to think that innovation is someone else’s job, perhaps a task belonging to the R&D team or the marketing department. In IBM, we believe that although innovation needs orchestration from the top, everyone should be encouraged to think broadly, act personally, and contribute to the innovation mix.”

Visions of an Alpine mountaintop with happy and care-free managers flinging their arms into the air as they twirl around with members of their teams are dispelled as reality hits….

It’s that thorny old issue of making middle managers better communicators. Or communicators at all.

Well, we’d all be very wealthy if we could solve that particular conundrum in one fell swoop wouldn’t we? But it is without doubt one of the most common question asked these days and one of the biggest headaches for those responsible for employee communications.

It’s not that there are some excellent communicators out there….confident, bright people who genuinely care about their team’s performance, understand the messages they need to get through to them and spend the time and effort ensuring that those messages get through.

But equally there are many, many managers who just can’t, don’t or won’t do it. Quite often it’s because those very people find it hard to understand the strategy of the organisation themselves, and even if they do, how it relates to their particular function or team. They’re too busy to spend yet more time conjuring up another eighty PowerPoint slides to add their perspective to a strategic message which is already burgeoning with complexity. Or they’re cynical about the strategy in the first place with no sense of alignment. Or their personal agenda has got in the way. Or they don’t see it as their responsibility. Or their leader hasn’t got the message through effectively him or herself. Or they aren’t confident about standing up in front of a group and presenting. Reason after reason…. but the effect of NOT communicating effectively at the coalface can be disastrous in terms of performance.

New research shows that one in three people at ground level are not consulted or asked for advice by their manager, as if asking for advice amongst lower ranking employees is just not the done thing. Well consulting is one thing, but even the most basic strategic communication has to be a top priority.

The truth is that there’s no silver bullet. We are acutely aware of this issue as we help leaders drive strategic messages through the organisation, and have come up with a raft of approaches to make it as easy as possible as the messages hit the strata between leaders and employees at ground level, from including a cross-section of would-be ambassadors in leadership meetings, to ‘discovering’ the messages collectively (and so avoid a situation where a manager has to ‘present’ the strategy), to presentation coaching and on-line tutorials….the list goes on. But the key to all of this is to keep it simple. Simplify the top line Story so that managers aren’t afraid of presenting it, and give them simple but clear and useful tools to help them do it. Get them to add their personal stories as part of that cascade so they can take ownership of it, and allow flexibility and fluidity to enable them to interpret the Story and build an action plan in a way that’s relevant to their teams.

So back to that mountaintop. The good news is that the mountain can be climbed, streams forded and rainbows followed. And solving the middle management comms issue story is one that we tell quite well here at Percy St…

Storytelling doesn’t just help people understand and remember information – it acts as a powerful unifier.

In business we are often faced with the challenge of communicating and engaging people from across many different disciplines in corporate strategy and vision. Companies are made up of hundreds of different departments, functions, business units, skills and disciplines, but the end user is the same – the customer. Yet it is often difficult to get different people to share the same vision, understanding how their individual contribution fits with those of their colleagues who may work in a completely different part of the business.

According to Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein (‘Better Together: Restoring The American Community’) storytelling can play a powerful role here, because it helps people achieve a common understanding. Mark Dominiak from Insight Garden sums it up beautifully:

‘Even if backgrounds, viewpoints or agendas differ, the neurology and ‘language’ (for lack of a better word) of storytelling help people find common ground. Through stories, people can reconstruct perceptions of others and points of view perhaps much better than they would via straightforward rationale.

Whenever people try to convince others of their point of view, discussions become competitive. They concern what people want, not who people really are. When storytelling is used as a catalyst in interactions, people learn more about each other; from the roles others have in stories to the emotions and resolutions of situations contained therein.

When people are able to better understand the people behind points of view, they are more likely to give attentive thought to that point of view. Further, when people have better understanding of others as individuals, they are more likely to treat those people with respect and compassion. Interactions stop being competitive and become cooperative.”

In essence, storytelling leads to competitive discussions which lead to problem-solving ideas. Which in turn helps others to learn about their colleagues, their desires and frustrations, not to mention pride, energy and greater productivity on all fronts.