Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Employees Are NOT a Captive Audience: Rethinking Digital Comms w/ Sharon O’Dea & Jonathan Phillips

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Employees Are NOT a Captive Audience: Rethinking Digital Comms w/ Sharon O’Dea & Jonathan Phillips · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:02
Speaker 1: Hey, IT Changemakers, and welcome to The Dex Show with
0:06
Speaker 1: Tom McGraw. Let's get into it.
0:10
Speaker 2: Whenever you're measuring any kind of experience at all, you really,
0:14
Speaker 2: you can't do it without communication. Dex, of course, is
0:19
Speaker 2: no different. The ability to reach out directly to users
0:23
Speaker 2: or employees, to talk to them, to survey them, it's
0:26
Speaker 2: always been kind of integral to the very concept of
0:28
Speaker 2: a Dex platform. And that's one of the reasons we're
0:31
Speaker 2: so excited to welcome today's guests, true subject matter experts,
0:37
Speaker 2: deep subject matter experts, and the very concept of what
0:40
Speaker 2: is known as digital internal communications. Sharon O'Day and Jonathan
0:46
Speaker 2: Phillips have spent a combined four decades helping large complex
0:50
Speaker 2: organizations rethink how they communicate with their people for the
0:54
Speaker 2: past 10 years. They've worked together as Lyphos Partners and
0:58
Speaker 2: they've recently co-authored a book together too, which we're going
1:00
Speaker 2: to get into momentarily. But just to welcome you both
1:04
Speaker 2: to The Deck Show. It's genuinely great to have you
1:06
Speaker 2: both with us. How are you doing today?
1:08
Speaker 3: Very well and very happy to be with you.
1:11
Speaker 1: Yes, we are.
1:12
Speaker 4: I'm sure you'll find out over the next hour or so.
1:14
Speaker 4: Absolutely huge employee experience nerds. So we love any opportunity
1:18
Speaker 4: to talk about this stuff. So thanks for having us on.
1:20
Speaker 2: You've come to the right place, Sharon. Let's begin with
1:22
Speaker 2: you a little bit. Tell us a little bit about
1:24
Speaker 2: your career and the work you're currently involved in. And
1:27
Speaker 2: what was the seed of you becoming a huge employee
1:30
Speaker 2: experience and communication nerd?
1:34
Speaker 4: Well, I think I was probably just a more generalist
1:36
Speaker 4: nerd before I got into specifically digital employee experience. But
1:40
Speaker 4: like a lot of people in the sort of communication space,
1:43
Speaker 4: I started off as a writing and communications person. And
1:46
Speaker 4: then I moved into the sort of more digital side
1:48
Speaker 4: of that. So I started off in UK government. So
1:51
Speaker 4: I was in local government and then moved to the
1:53
Speaker 4: House of Parliament where I was intranet manager there. And
1:55
Speaker 4: I also did one of the first mobile intranets for MPs,
1:58
Speaker 4: in fact. I did a stint actually helping the Iraqi
2:02
Speaker 4: parliament in Baghdad, which puts difficult stakeholders into perspective.
2:07
Speaker 1: But then I moved to be.
2:08
Speaker 4: Head of digital comms at a global bank at Standard Chartered,
2:11
Speaker 4: first in the UK and then over in Singapore. But
2:15
Speaker 4: then when I moved back to Europe, I came back
2:17
Speaker 4: and started Lithos Partners with John. But it was a
2:20
Speaker 4: kind of combination of I've always worked in communications, but
2:22
Speaker 4: I've always also been very kind of quite geeky and
2:26
Speaker 4: nerdy anyway. So I've been tinkering with websites since I
2:28
Speaker 4: was a teenager. And those two things sort of combined
2:31
Speaker 4: into something like a career, just as this space has
2:34
Speaker 4: been evolving at such a pace as well. So I
2:36
Speaker 4: ended up on the more digital side of internal comms
2:39
Speaker 4: working with sort of complex organisations in government, in banking.
2:42
Speaker 4: And then, yeah, the last 10 years, John and I
2:44
Speaker 4: have been LIFOS partners and we work with, well, all
2:48
Speaker 4: sorts of different organisations in a range of sectors. But
2:50
Speaker 4: I guess what pulled me into employee experience is that
2:53
Speaker 4: as a communicator, you might not own the tools, but
2:56
Speaker 4: you sort of inherit the experience that people have of them.
2:59
Speaker 4: And you definitely get the blame when it's bad. So
3:01
Speaker 4: I think there's a lot to learn from it. Always
3:04
Speaker 4: help us improve that space.
3:07
Speaker 2: Now, but ask Sharon before, not to... leave you waiting there, Jonathan,
3:10
Speaker 2: before we get to you, but what was Baghdad like?
3:14
Speaker 2: What years were you there?
3:15
Speaker 1: You've got to ask.
3:17
Speaker 2: That was 2011. 2011, yeah.
3:21
Speaker 1: Interesting.
3:22
Speaker 2: What would I say?
3:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:23
Speaker 4: I'm dodging the roadside bombs in the quest for better
3:25
Speaker 4: on my houses, but yeah, it was an experience.
3:29
Speaker 2: Jonathan, same invitation to you. Tell us a bit about
3:31
Speaker 2: yourself and your own route into this space.
3:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny, actually, because when I reflect on people
3:37
Speaker 3: who work in this space, you work in digital internal
3:40
Speaker 3: comms or you work in digital employee experience. Actually, the
3:43
Speaker 3: people that you speak to come from a range of
3:46
Speaker 3: different backgrounds. They might be journalists. They might be IT specialists.
3:50
Speaker 3: They may be internal comms experts who've kind of found
3:53
Speaker 3: themselves into this space. And in truth, I'm very much
3:56
Speaker 3: the same. So Fresh out of university, pretty much, I
3:59
Speaker 3: started working for the Coca-Cola system. I was in the
4:01
Speaker 3: Coke system for about 20 years in various forms. For
4:04
Speaker 3: various reasons, I ended up in one of its early
4:08
Speaker 3: nascent digital roles. And this was a point in time, Tom,
4:11
Speaker 3: where if you were working in digital, that anything that
4:13
Speaker 3: had the prefix digital on it suddenly became yours. So
4:17
Speaker 3: it was a department of a wild shape. I had
4:20
Speaker 3: digital comms in there. but I also had digital procurement
4:23
Speaker 3: in there. I had websites in there. All of the
4:26
Speaker 3: company's digital assets were mine. I think you can probably
4:29
Speaker 3: get the theme. If it had the word digital in it,
4:31
Speaker 3: JP's department was the one that it came to. And
4:35
Speaker 3: ultimately that became such a completely unworkable shape of a
4:38
Speaker 3: team that I decided that it needed to be split up.
4:42
Speaker 3: And the bit that I kept was digital comms. That
4:44
Speaker 3: was the bit that came, you know, my greatest passion.
4:47
Speaker 3: And I Worked then with companies or company internally to
4:50
Speaker 3: build better intranet systems, better digital workplace systems, better employee
4:55
Speaker 3: engagement experiences, ultimately to help the company work better. Now,
4:59
Speaker 3: wound on the clock to about 2016, and I found
5:02
Speaker 3: myself on the other end of an opportunity. And Sharon
5:05
Speaker 3: and I came together at that point and formed Lithos Partners.
5:07
Speaker 3: But I guess for me, the employee experience stuff came
5:11
Speaker 3: about through that early mess of, look, what is digital?
5:14
Speaker 3: What does it mean? How can we help employees get
5:17
Speaker 3: the job done? done better and kind of learning on
5:19
Speaker 3: the job through those early.
5:20
Speaker 2: Days fascinating and you stay with you for a moment
5:24
Speaker 2: Jonathan you've co-authored a book together I think relatively recently
5:27
Speaker 2: right tell us a bit about that and what was
5:29
Speaker 2: a question or problem that made you want to want
5:32
Speaker 2: to write it yeah first place.
5:35
Speaker 3: Yeah so look the the book came out in in
5:37
Speaker 3: July and so we've had a few months now of
5:40
Speaker 3: getting it out there and talking about it which has
5:42
Speaker 3: been fabulous but the genesis of the book is probably
5:45
Speaker 3: 18 months, I would say, earlier than that. And Sharon
5:49
Speaker 3: probably tells that Genesis story better. So I'm going to
5:51
Speaker 3: pass it to her deliberately, and then I'm going to
5:54
Speaker 3: take the reins back as we go.
5:55
Speaker 1: Okay, why don't we do that?
5:57
Speaker 4: So the official story is we just felt there was
6:00
Speaker 4: a gap in the market for all the bits of... So,
6:03
Speaker 4: you know, as both of us have talked about, lots
6:06
Speaker 4: of people fall into managing digital employee experience. You come
6:09
Speaker 4: from some other sort of background, potentially you're a communicator
6:11
Speaker 4: by trade.
6:12
Speaker 3: And.
6:12
Speaker 4: Suddenly you find yourself responsible for employee experience, for dealing
6:15
Speaker 4: with IT, with HR. Suddenly you're talking about APIs and
6:18
Speaker 4: building business cases. And they're all the things that you
6:21
Speaker 4: never really got any training to do, but somehow landed
6:23
Speaker 4: in your lap. So we felt there was a need
6:26
Speaker 4: to guide people through that process. I'm sure John will
6:28
Speaker 4: talk about it a bit more in the beginning. The
6:30
Speaker 4: real story, however, is that... So both of us do
6:33
Speaker 4: a lot of writing and speaking and so on in
6:35
Speaker 4: this space. And I was speaking at some conference or other,
6:38
Speaker 4: and I had to write a biography of myself, which
6:41
Speaker 4: if you ever do this, you'll know is Absolutely mortifying.
6:43
Speaker 4: So I figured I would, it had just come out.
6:46
Speaker 4: So I was going to ask ChatGPT and see what
6:48
Speaker 4: it came up with. This was, you know, two, three
6:51
Speaker 4: years ago now when it was still relatively new. So
6:54
Speaker 4: I asked it to write a biography for this conference.
6:56
Speaker 4: And like a lot of things, particularly in the early
6:59
Speaker 4: days of things like ChatGPT, it.
7:01
Speaker 1: Was, it was okay.
7:02
Speaker 4: It was like about 70, 80% good. It kept giving
7:06
Speaker 4: me better degrees than the one I actually have from
7:09
Speaker 4: universities I didn't.
7:10
Speaker 2: Nice. Nice. Take them.
7:12
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly but it.
7:13
Speaker 4: Also was very insistent I went through a few drafts
7:15
Speaker 4: that I was the author of two books and they
7:18
Speaker 4: were something like the digital workplace a practical guide and
7:21
Speaker 4: like a guide for leaders or something and I'm like
7:25
Speaker 4: no but I would read both of those I'm surprised
7:28
Speaker 4: I haven't heard of them so then I kind of
7:30
Speaker 4: went and looked up who had written these books because
7:32
Speaker 4: I was going to buy them and then it turns
7:34
Speaker 4: out that they didn't exist and that took me down
7:36
Speaker 4: this this rabbit hole of why it would hallucinate something
7:39
Speaker 4: like that. And of course, it's that based on what
7:41
Speaker 4: it does know about you, this is something that, you know,
7:43
Speaker 4: it can hallucinate into existence that it thinks should be true,
7:46
Speaker 4: which of course it wasn't. So I then wrote a
7:49
Speaker 4: piece for an industry publication on what this tells us
7:52
Speaker 4: about LLMs, but also how LLMs themselves are changing the
7:55
Speaker 4: way that we communicate. And then off the back of that,
7:57
Speaker 4: a publisher got in touch and went, wow, would you
7:59
Speaker 4: write it though?
8:00
Speaker 1: And the answer was, of course, yes. So eventually it hallucinated.
8:05
Speaker 4: It went from being a Jack to BT hallucination into a,
8:08
Speaker 4: this which is on my desk that's.
8:10
Speaker 2: Amazing yeah that ruins my next question which is uh
8:13
Speaker 2: you know tell us about your first two books Sharon
8:15
Speaker 2: you know I know.
8:17
Speaker 4: I know you've got to see what snakes into existence
8:20
Speaker 4: next but having just recovered from the 18 months spending
8:25
Speaker 4: we spent written this one I think I won't I
8:27
Speaker 4: daren't ask what I should do next.
8:30
Speaker 3: But that's how the book came to be Tom which
8:32
Speaker 3: is is quite an amazing thing and then we started
8:35
Speaker 3: working with publishers to kind of you know, build that
8:37
Speaker 3: structure together and figure out exactly if that book was
8:40
Speaker 3: to exist, what would it actually look like? And our
8:43
Speaker 3: thinking then was, coming back to the kind of early
8:45
Speaker 3: theme of this conversation, people come into this space with
8:48
Speaker 3: lots of experience, but lots of varied experiences, and they
8:51
Speaker 3: find themselves suddenly having to manage a labyrinth of different tools,
8:57
Speaker 3: comms tools, HR tools, finance tools, whatever it may well be,
9:00
Speaker 3: and bringing all of these things together into a coherent,
9:04
Speaker 3: singular digital employee experience is a huge challenge. So we
9:07
Speaker 3: decided that the book was therefore going to be essentially
9:10
Speaker 3: the book we would have loved to have read had
9:13
Speaker 3: it existed 20 years ago at the start of our career.
9:16
Speaker 3: The book that we hope people will pick up and go, well, look,
9:20
Speaker 3: I know something about comms, but I don't know anything
9:22
Speaker 3: about ethnographic discovery. This is the book that's going to
9:26
Speaker 3: help me advance the individual channels in my organization, but
9:30
Speaker 3: get better at the job that I do. So that
9:32
Speaker 3: was really where it started. Retrospectively, someone said to us
9:36
Speaker 3: a couple of months ago, the reason I really love
9:39
Speaker 3: your book is that it codifies things and it creates
9:43
Speaker 3: a common language that we can all then use to
9:45
Speaker 3: discuss this complicated space. And I loved that. And Tom,
9:50
Speaker 3: I wish we'd thought about that when we were writing it,
9:52
Speaker 3: but I'm delighted that it has proven to be something
9:55
Speaker 3: that people can go, okay, here's a lexicography for what
9:58
Speaker 3: we do. This is a language for where we work
10:00
Speaker 3: and to give people an opportunity to kind of come
10:03
Speaker 3: together in that.
10:03
Speaker 4: Sense I'd probably build on that one a little bit
10:06
Speaker 4: and say also this space is much more complicated than
10:09
Speaker 4: it used to be and maybe a little bit less
10:11
Speaker 4: forgiving so John and I both talked about having been
10:13
Speaker 4: in this space a long time and you could sort
10:15
Speaker 4: of cobble it together as you went along and make
10:16
Speaker 4: it up but probably one channel at a time and
10:19
Speaker 4: actually we've You would have just a few channels and
10:21
Speaker 4: a few rules you could rely on. And now it's
10:24
Speaker 4: like a mosaic of tens, hundreds of tools held together
10:27
Speaker 4: with like really small teams dealing with really high expectations.
10:31
Speaker 4: And the audience is getting more complex. The channel mix
10:35
Speaker 4: is getting more complex. People's expectations are getting higher every
10:38
Speaker 4: year for our digital experience because of everything we use
10:41
Speaker 4: every day outside of work. We realized also that there
10:46
Speaker 4: is a need to just get your head around that
10:48
Speaker 4: and think about how it all works together to deliver
10:50
Speaker 4: something that works for your organization and works.
10:52
Speaker 1: For the people in it.
10:53
Speaker 2: So we're, we're, we're simulation theory, eat your heart out.
10:56
Speaker 2: We're living inside a chat GPT hallucination this afternoon. Something
11:00
Speaker 2: like that. In a very good way, in a very
11:02
Speaker 2: good way. Let's, let's hone in a little on the employee. Sharon, we, we,
11:09
Speaker 2: we talk a great deal about customer experience and But
11:13
Speaker 2: what are the things that make an employee's experience distinctive?
11:17
Speaker 4: I think the biggest thing for me is employees didn't
11:20
Speaker 4: choose to use your systems. So a customer who hates
11:22
Speaker 4: your app or your website, they'll leave and go somewhere else.
11:25
Speaker 4: An employee who hates your intranet, hates your employee app,
11:28
Speaker 4: they'll build a WhatsApp group or somewhere else to go
11:32
Speaker 4: or find their way around it. So you're starting to
11:35
Speaker 4: fragment the experience there. But also, we have to remember
11:38
Speaker 4: that this isn't Engaging with your channels, whether that's your
11:42
Speaker 4: comms channels, the transactional tools you provide, is not really
11:46
Speaker 4: their job. I mean, it's the admin overhead of having
11:49
Speaker 4: a job, but most people see it as a way
11:52
Speaker 4: of helping them to be productive, or in many cases,
11:55
Speaker 4: it does the opposite of that, or it helps them
11:57
Speaker 4: understand what they need to do to represent the company,
12:00
Speaker 4: to do their job effectively. Neither of those are the
12:02
Speaker 4: core of people's jobs, but it's essential to them being
12:04
Speaker 4: able to do it well. So it's different from operating
12:09
Speaker 4: in the customer space because they're not customers in a
12:11
Speaker 4: traditional sense, but they are absolutely critical to a company's success,
12:15
Speaker 4: which requires different sort of approaches.
12:16
Speaker 3: I think there's another angle, Tom, as well, which I
12:19
Speaker 3: want to build on. We work for a company called
12:20
Speaker 3: Lithos Partners. Lithos is a Greek word for rock. And
12:24
Speaker 3: that's important because I'm a geologist by training. And if
12:27
Speaker 3: I can always look for a geological analogy for this,
12:30
Speaker 3: I'm going to bring one into play. So here we go.
12:33
Speaker 3: If you imagine some beautiful tropical sea somewhere, somewhere maybe
12:37
Speaker 3: you've been swimming on a vacation somewhere, there's a slow
12:40
Speaker 3: drip through there of sediment and bits of bone and
12:43
Speaker 3: mineral and shells that's kind of imperceptibly falling out of
12:46
Speaker 3: the water and creating layers of rock underneath. And they
12:50
Speaker 3: compact over time. And you can see these beautiful strata. Ultimately,
12:54
Speaker 3: think of the Grand Canyon, if you will, of all
12:56
Speaker 3: of those layers that you could read like a book
12:58
Speaker 3: all the way through. Inside an organization, it's almost identical
13:02
Speaker 3: to that. Every decision, every tool, every workaround, every team's
13:07
Speaker 3: channel that manages the workaround for the tool that doesn't work,
13:10
Speaker 3: all of these things build up into layers in an organization.
13:14
Speaker 3: We can simplify them into people layers, cultural layers, technology layers,
13:18
Speaker 3: process layers, but broadly speaking, that's it. So the HR
13:22
Speaker 3: layer is fabulous, Tom. It works beautifully because everyone in
13:26
Speaker 3: HR has made decisions that suit HR, and they've built
13:29
Speaker 3: this kind of cohesive structure. coherent layer of HR tech,
13:32
Speaker 3: which does a beautiful job. So is finance. So is HR.
13:38
Speaker 3: So is procurement. Marketing have done the same. Comms have
13:41
Speaker 3: done the same. Every part of the function has kind
13:43
Speaker 3: of built these layers up. But I regret that the
13:46
Speaker 3: human experience, the employee experience, is in the vertical through
13:51
Speaker 3: every single one of these layers. So every employee will
13:54
Speaker 3: start the day in email, and then they'll do a
13:56
Speaker 3: little bit on their HR tool, and then there'll be
13:59
Speaker 3: a little bit of learning and development, and then they'll
14:00
Speaker 3: have to claim their expenses and fill in a ticket
14:03
Speaker 3: for a system that doesn't work somewhere. So what we
14:06
Speaker 3: end up with is unlike the external experience and the
14:10
Speaker 3: customer experience, which invariably tends to be with one product
14:13
Speaker 3: or one way of working through one company, the internal
14:17
Speaker 3: experience is this mash, horrible mash, of individual application experiences
14:23
Speaker 3: and processes that constitute one person's day. So we talk
14:27
Speaker 3: constantly about the context switching between different UIs and different
14:32
Speaker 3: user experiences, the complication of login systems and different colors
14:37
Speaker 3: and labels and all of those things, which are truly
14:41
Speaker 3: impacting how people work and what their experience of work
14:44
Speaker 3: actually is. So yeah, it's a really different space from
14:48
Speaker 3: a customer experience to an employee experience. And again, if
14:51
Speaker 3: there's one additional complication is we often talk about employees
14:56
Speaker 3: as if they're one homogenous group of 10,000 or 20,000
14:59
Speaker 3: or 50 people, whatever the magic number is. But the
15:02
Speaker 3: reality is none of them are experiencing these things in
15:05
Speaker 3: the same way as each other, even. Some are focusing
15:08
Speaker 3: much more on productivity tools, some are much more on
15:10
Speaker 3: HR tools. And so the individual employee experience is actually
15:14
Speaker 3: incredibly varied, much, much more maybe than a customer experience external.
15:19
Speaker 4: And if I may build on that one a little bit,
15:21
Speaker 4: you know, I started by saying, What makes the employee
15:24
Speaker 4: experience distinctive is that employees, they didn't choose to be there.
15:27
Speaker 1: They are forced to use it.
15:28
Speaker 4: What we have frequently found is that because there is
15:32
Speaker 4: that assumption, well, they can't choose to go somewhere else,
15:34
Speaker 4: that it is frequently underinvested or lack of focus on
15:38
Speaker 4: it because people go, well, it's not allowed to go
15:39
Speaker 4: somewhere else. when actually one shadow channels do pop up
15:43
Speaker 4: but also if your external brand promise is about you
15:47
Speaker 4: know your digital ambitions or how effective you are and
15:50
Speaker 4: people's lived reality is the complete opposite of that you
15:53
Speaker 4: have a gap and that translates into the way you
15:55
Speaker 4: might deal with customer customer problems and customer experiences so
15:58
Speaker 4: two things can't be.
15:59
Speaker 1: Completely divorced from one another the contexts are very.
16:02
Speaker 2: Different similarly is there is there a tendency for organizations
16:06
Speaker 2: to not just Think of employees, as you put it,
16:09
Speaker 2: sort of as a captive audience you therefore don't have
16:11
Speaker 2: to worry about. Almost to conceive of them a little
16:13
Speaker 2: bit too narrowly, just as a workforce that needs to
16:16
Speaker 2: be informed rather than, you know, people who need to
16:18
Speaker 2: be understood and to contribute to that wider ethos and
16:24
Speaker 2: personality of the organisation.
16:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it.
16:26
Speaker 4: So communication, we often forget, is a two-way process. So
16:30
Speaker 4: if you think of communication as, you know, just informing people,
16:33
Speaker 4: then you can stop at send. But understanding is a
16:36
Speaker 4: secondary part of that and people need spaces then to ask,
16:40
Speaker 4: to challenge, for it to be okay to be confused
16:44
Speaker 4: in public or to ask questions and make sense of
16:47
Speaker 4: things with their colleagues. So it's actually about creating not
16:50
Speaker 4: just spaces to publish stuff or to send things, but
16:54
Speaker 4: also to enable that kind of sense making to happen together.
16:57
Speaker 4: And actually in the book, we talk about communication actually
16:59
Speaker 4: is breaking down into five layers. People use all different
17:02
Speaker 4: tools for these and it's sort of the mix you use.
17:04
Speaker 4: will be different for each organization, but ultimately whatever stack
17:07
Speaker 4: you use for your communication covers five basic areas of functionality.
17:11
Speaker 4: And most, well, all communication will go through all of these.
17:14
Speaker 1: Planning.
17:15
Speaker 4: That's how you work out what you want to say,
17:17
Speaker 4: who to, and crucially why and how you're going to
17:19
Speaker 4: measure it. Next up we have, we call it collaboration
17:22
Speaker 4: or co-creation, which is, you know, how you create the
17:25
Speaker 4: artifacts of communication. It might be writing an article and
17:28
Speaker 4: getting signed up on it or creating podcasts like this one.
17:31
Speaker 1: Or making a video, whatever it might be. Then you
17:34
Speaker 1: We'll publish that.
17:35
Speaker 4: I mean, just putting it somewhere where people can find it,
17:37
Speaker 4: where it's searchable and so on. When you have somewhere
17:41
Speaker 4: to put it, that could be an intranet, could be
17:43
Speaker 4: an app, could be something else entirely. We have to
17:46
Speaker 4: think about the distribution and that's getting the right message
17:49
Speaker 4: to the right people on a channel that suits them
17:52
Speaker 4: and their ways of working and the context they're working in.
17:55
Speaker 4: So that might be digital signage. It could be some
17:57
Speaker 4: kind of push alert. It could be an email. It
18:00
Speaker 4: could be a story on the front page of your intranet.
18:02
Speaker 4: And then the final layer of that is discuss, which
18:06
Speaker 4: is about where we ask questions, we make sense, we feedback,
18:09
Speaker 4: and we recognize that communication is a two-way process where
18:12
Speaker 4: people can respond and ask. So actually, you need all
18:16
Speaker 4: five of those covered in some kind of way. And
18:18
Speaker 4: I think what we often do with employee communications is
18:21
Speaker 4: miss out part of that process.
18:23
Speaker 2: So how is AI already changing internal comms? Not only
18:27
Speaker 2: how is it sort of revolutionizing it positively, I was
18:29
Speaker 2: also curious to know, If organizations should also be wary
18:33
Speaker 2: of it to some degree, is a potential threat to
18:36
Speaker 2: their human voice, their judgment, their sense of authenticity internally.
18:40
Speaker 3: Communicators often arrive in a communications role because guess what?
18:44
Speaker 3: They really love communicating. They love writing. And so sometimes
18:47
Speaker 3: I think a lot of communicators right now are feeling
18:50
Speaker 3: a very deep existential threat from AI because AI is
18:54
Speaker 3: a very capable writer. If it doesn't write as well
18:57
Speaker 3: as a communicator in an organization today... And I would
19:00
Speaker 3: argue it probably does. It absolutely will do in another
19:04
Speaker 3: six months, 12 months. I'm very, very sure of that.
19:07
Speaker 3: So I can see the worry that a lot of
19:09
Speaker 3: communicators say, well, it takes away the very thing that
19:12
Speaker 3: I think I am good at. My positioning, I think
19:15
Speaker 3: our positioning is, for sure, I get that. But actually,
19:18
Speaker 3: maybe it can take away the things that you're not
19:21
Speaker 3: quite so good at. maybe the administration of communication that
19:24
Speaker 3: you don't necessarily like as much. That ultimately means that
19:27
Speaker 3: it frees you up to do the thing that you really,
19:30
Speaker 3: really love doing. But above all, communicators are writers, but
19:34
Speaker 3: they also happen to be brilliant judges of an organization.
19:38
Speaker 3: They understand instinctively what needs to be communicated and well.
19:42
Speaker 3: They're temperature checkers. They are excellent at judging the communication need.
19:47
Speaker 3: And I think that those are still human skills. that
19:50
Speaker 3: are not going to go away, even in an AI world. Anyway,
19:52
Speaker 3: that's on the creation side. Consumption side, Sharon, I think
19:55
Speaker 3: there's something there too.
19:57
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess building on that, you've talked about how
19:59
Speaker 4: it's useful for drafting, summarizing, spotting patterns, all that kind
20:04
Speaker 4: of thing. And that could free up capacity for higher
20:06
Speaker 4: value work. I think the thing that is less clearly
20:08
Speaker 4: addressed is about capacity to consume, which is AI has
20:13
Speaker 4: one made it easier for anyone to produce communications, but
20:16
Speaker 4: it hasn't made any additional time in anyone's day thus far.
20:20
Speaker 4: So people are drowning in information. And we are, you
20:23
Speaker 4: see that in the data that actually people are producing
20:26
Speaker 4: more and more communications, whether formally through the comms team or,
20:30
Speaker 4: you know, spitting out decks from Claude, the 28 slides long,
20:34
Speaker 4: and people are then using AI to summarize it. So
20:36
Speaker 4: because they haven't got time to consume all of the
20:39
Speaker 4: information that's around them. So AI, I think when it
20:42
Speaker 4: will be really transformative is where it's able to ensure
20:46
Speaker 4: people have got the information they need, perhaps anticipating that
20:50
Speaker 4: need and hyper-personalizing it for the context in which someone's working,
20:54
Speaker 4: rather than just enabling the production of more stuff. And
20:58
Speaker 4: the problem we're seeing at the moment is there is
21:00
Speaker 4: more and more production and less and less focus on
21:04
Speaker 4: what do people actually need. Which goes back, I guess,
21:06
Speaker 4: to the point that John made there around truly understanding
21:10
Speaker 4: that applying that level of judgment. And we start off
21:12
Speaker 4: the book, as indeed we start all of our projects
21:14
Speaker 4: with clients, with discovery, which is actually understanding what the
21:18
Speaker 4: real problem is. And honestly, the problem is almost never
21:21
Speaker 4: the ability to produce more content. The problem is actually
21:25
Speaker 4: that there is a mismatch between the content that is
21:28
Speaker 4: provided and the channels it's provided on. and people's real
21:32
Speaker 4: working context and needs. So actually we spend usually sort
21:36
Speaker 4: of eight, nine weeks with a client looking at the
21:39
Speaker 4: reality in which people are working. That might be the
21:42
Speaker 4: time they have in the day, their digital skills and confidence,
21:45
Speaker 4: their access to devices, particularly if they're in some kind
21:47
Speaker 4: of frontline role, might be quite restricted. They may only
21:50
Speaker 4: be able to use a certain type of device or
21:52
Speaker 4: maybe only have five minutes in between seeing clients or,
21:55
Speaker 4: you know, they're driving or similar. So actually we need
21:59
Speaker 4: to make our channels for Communication for transactional processes that
22:03
Speaker 4: work for the real windows that people have in their day,
22:06
Speaker 4: whether that's accessing a terminal in a factory, on a
22:09
Speaker 4: phone in between something, on the bus, on the way
22:12
Speaker 4: to work. And if it doesn't fit the reality of
22:15
Speaker 4: someone's working day, it simply won't be used. So actually,
22:18
Speaker 4: I think the challenge with AI is it is at
22:21
Speaker 4: the moment contributing to a sense of overwhelm. But what
22:24
Speaker 4: it does have the potential to do is actually fix
22:27
Speaker 4: that problem at the same time, which is to be
22:29
Speaker 4: able to become adaptive. And ensure that your transactions, your
22:33
Speaker 4: products and services are accessible to employees at the time
22:37
Speaker 4: of need on the device that they are using in
22:40
Speaker 4: the window in which they have to access it. We
22:43
Speaker 4: are not there yet, but I believe that the potential
22:45
Speaker 4: is there.
22:46
Speaker 2: We're going to end with some constructive advice for people
22:48
Speaker 2: to go away with. But before we get there, you
22:51
Speaker 2: both have such fascinating resumes, as they say across the pond.
22:55
Speaker 2: Maybe naming no names if you really can't. Maybe if
22:58
Speaker 2: you could both share an internal comms horror story or
23:03
Speaker 2: a pattern of failure that really makes you wince. Whoever
23:05
Speaker 2: wants to go first.
23:06
Speaker 3: I will start with one on measurement.
23:10
Speaker 2: So this is Coke.
23:11
Speaker 3: Yep. Oh, I couldn't possibly say exactly where it was.
23:15
Speaker 3: But look, I was set a target for the annual
23:20
Speaker 3: number of views that the intranet would reach. And the
23:24
Speaker 3: thinking behind this target, I think it was about 3
23:27
Speaker 3: million page views for the intranet, was perfectly logical, Tom.
23:31
Speaker 3: The thinking was, if we maximize, well, we get a
23:34
Speaker 3: great number of views to the intranet, then that must
23:37
Speaker 3: be because the intranet was adding value to the employee's
23:40
Speaker 3: life in some way. The information on it was good.
23:43
Speaker 3: So page views in this particular example was used as
23:46
Speaker 3: a kind of proxy for you've created a great intranet.
23:51
Speaker 2: Well done.
23:51
Speaker 3: So that was the idea. It was perfectly logical.
23:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:55
Speaker 3: So I took this target. I think it was about
23:57
Speaker 3: 3 million, as I said, and I went back to
23:59
Speaker 3: my desk. I opened a browser and I opened a
24:02
Speaker 3: tab with as many tabs as I could get. I
24:04
Speaker 3: think it was about 50 back in the day. And
24:06
Speaker 3: I set the intranet homepage as the homepage on every
24:08
Speaker 3: single one of those tabs. Wrote a small piece of
24:10
Speaker 3: code because if I'm nothing but a geek, I will
24:12
Speaker 3: do this. And I wrote this code to refresh the
24:15
Speaker 3: homepage once every two or three seconds. And I just
24:19
Speaker 3: let it run, right? And I think I hit my
24:21
Speaker 3: annual target definitely within days and certainly within the weekend.
24:24
Speaker 3: And I went back to the boss and I said,
24:26
Speaker 3: so we've, we've hit our annual target. Now what's next?
24:29
Speaker 3: And of course that was the kind of penny drop
24:31
Speaker 3: where you think, hang on a second. We're not measuring
24:33
Speaker 3: the right things here at all. And I think that
24:35
Speaker 3: that is honestly a kind of an alarm bell or
24:39
Speaker 3: a light bulb moment, I suppose, that I constantly see.
24:42
Speaker 3: And honestly, that conversation was 10 or 15 years old
24:45
Speaker 3: at the very least those kinds of times. The reality
24:47
Speaker 3: is we still see it, Tom. People measuring the wrong
24:50
Speaker 3: things and therefore coming away with the wrong conclusions and
24:53
Speaker 3: as to how well or otherwise their internal comms is
24:56
Speaker 3: actually working.
24:58
Speaker 2: Fair enough for the people who have to come up
25:00
Speaker 2: with these KPIs. Sometimes they go somewhere B, you know,
25:04
Speaker 2: they just chuck it down.
25:06
Speaker 3: One of the little advantages of being self-employed as I
25:08
Speaker 3: am now is I have not done an appraisal nor
25:11
Speaker 3: been subject to one in more than a decade. And so, yeah,
25:15
Speaker 3: I have no sympathy at all for those people setting KPIs.
25:18
Speaker 3: It's a tough world, but no, not for me. Thanks.
25:20
Speaker 2: Fair play. Jarrod?
25:22
Speaker 4: So I will name no names because it's a former client.
25:26
Speaker 4: And it's a pattern we see in lots of places.
25:27
Speaker 4: But they had lots of employees who work out on
25:30
Speaker 4: the road. They're in cars doing their job. And as
25:33
Speaker 4: a result, they had spent an awful lot of time
25:36
Speaker 4: and money on a tablet-optimized intranet. And they were incredibly
25:40
Speaker 4: proud of it until they launched it and absolutely no
25:42
Speaker 4: one used it. And they then came back to us, well,
25:46
Speaker 4: came around to us and went, we've done this and
25:47
Speaker 4: why is no one using it? So we went and
25:50
Speaker 4: spent some time with lots of different employees, including in
25:53
Speaker 4: particular the people they designed this for who were out
25:55
Speaker 4: on the road. And of course, they designed this tablet
25:58
Speaker 4: optimized intranet. In the time that they've been doing this,
26:01
Speaker 4: they switched from having two people in every car because
26:04
Speaker 4: of COVID and so on, and cost savings probably, one
26:06
Speaker 4: person in every car. You can't use a device when
26:09
Speaker 4: you're in charge of a vehicle.
26:10
Speaker 2: Keep going.
26:11
Speaker 4: There was a fundamental problem that they had there, which
26:14
Speaker 4: was there was a mismatch. And there's a pattern we
26:16
Speaker 4: talk about in the book, which is actually what they
26:18
Speaker 4: use in detective stories or in juries when they're trying
26:22
Speaker 4: to convict someone of a crime, which is they look
26:24
Speaker 4: at three things, means, motive and opportunity. Means is could
26:27
Speaker 4: they have actually done it? Opportunity, what time did they
26:30
Speaker 4: have to do it? Motive, did they have a good
26:33
Speaker 4: reason to? And the same absolutely applies when we think
26:35
Speaker 4: about our channels. And I think particularly from the IT side,
26:39
Speaker 4: There is a tendency to over-focus on means. Can someone
26:43
Speaker 4: technically access our app, our internet, whatever it might be?
26:47
Speaker 4: Unless you consider the other two factors, it's a non-starter.
26:50
Speaker 4: You know, actually, what's that opportunity window? What time does
26:53
Speaker 4: someone have in their day? And can they reasonably do
26:56
Speaker 4: the task or tasks that you need them to do
26:58
Speaker 4: in that window? If not, there's a mismatch and it's
27:00
Speaker 4: not going to work. And the final one is motivation.
27:03
Speaker 4: Do they really need to or want to? And actually,
27:05
Speaker 4: unless there are people who have a good reason to
27:07
Speaker 4: do something, they will do something else with the five
27:09
Speaker 4: minutes that they have. So in this case, actually, it
27:12
Speaker 4: was about understanding what time did they have and what
27:15
Speaker 4: access to devices, to content did they have? And of course,
27:18
Speaker 4: the answer in that one is, what can you do
27:19
Speaker 4: while you're driving?
27:20
Speaker 1: It's audio. But yeah, they were extremely proud of this
27:23
Speaker 1: internet that absolutely no one looked at.
27:26
Speaker 4: So lesson learned the very hard way there, which is
27:28
Speaker 4: actually understand that working context in the first place.
27:30
Speaker 1: But it's something we see over and over.
27:32
Speaker 4: People are really proud of their apps without thinking, all right,
27:35
Speaker 4: but why would someone log on? Or what time have
27:37
Speaker 4: they got to do it?
27:39
Speaker 2: You've both already shown so many sort of principles, good
27:42
Speaker 2: habits and measures that can matter and make improvements in
27:45
Speaker 2: this area. So maybe to finish with, and it could
27:49
Speaker 2: have maybe something to do with what you were just
27:50
Speaker 2: describing there, Sharon, if you had like one like most
27:54
Speaker 2: salient question for organizations to ask themselves or piece of
27:57
Speaker 2: advice of them to begin to really seek to improve
28:01
Speaker 2: their internal digital comms, what would it be?
28:04
Speaker 3: I'm going to talk about discovery here, Tom. And I'm
28:07
Speaker 3: going to differentiate it, if I can, quickly from auditing.
28:11
Speaker 3: So a lot of time you say, well, we'll do
28:12
Speaker 3: a channel audit. We'll figure out what people are using.
28:16
Speaker 3: But I think there's an important distinction between an audit
28:19
Speaker 3: and a discovery. So an audit is looking in your fridge,
28:22
Speaker 3: realizing you've got some chicken, you've got some spinach and
28:25
Speaker 3: some cream cheese and going, well, we're going to have
28:27
Speaker 3: a pasta dish for dinner. That's not necessarily what people want,
28:30
Speaker 3: but we've audited what's in the fridge and that's what
28:32
Speaker 3: we're going to get. A discovery is actually asking what
28:35
Speaker 3: people actually genuinely want. So coming back to Sharon's experience,
28:39
Speaker 3: if you do a good discovery, you understand the context
28:42
Speaker 3: of work of that particular organization and the employees there.
28:46
Speaker 3: You understand if your employees have got a minute to
28:50
Speaker 3: access your internal comms or whether they've got three hours
28:53
Speaker 3: to access your internal comms. If you do that discovery
28:56
Speaker 3: well and you understand what employees' needs are, enterprise needs are,
29:01
Speaker 3: the window in which people will be able to access
29:03
Speaker 3: that comms, the motive that they have, the context of
29:06
Speaker 3: work broadly, you can then tailor whatever you do towards
29:11
Speaker 3: that known reality. But don't assume that you know, go
29:15
Speaker 3: and discover it and understand it and then build your
29:18
Speaker 3: solutions around that knowledge.
29:19
Speaker 4: For me, it would be actually creating, probably building what
29:23
Speaker 4: John said there, which is actually understanding where you've got
29:25
Speaker 4: a lack of clarity. So I talked about those five layers.
29:27
Speaker 4: What we used to find maybe 15 years ago was
29:30
Speaker 4: that there would be bits missing in the picture. You
29:32
Speaker 4: would have somewhere to publish, but not good distribution or
29:36
Speaker 4: the planning layer was missing. These days, it's actually we
29:39
Speaker 4: almost have too many different tools and that creates confusion
29:43
Speaker 4: for the end users. So there is a little bit
29:44
Speaker 4: of understanding where you have competing channels or overlapping ones
29:49
Speaker 4: or there are pieces missing. So actually building on from
29:52
Speaker 4: that process, John talks about around discovery, which is actually
29:56
Speaker 4: also what you currently have and how there might be
29:59
Speaker 4: a gap between people's expectations and needs or a lack
30:02
Speaker 4: of clarity over where people go for what. So those two,
30:05
Speaker 4: I guess, principles follow on from one another, which is
30:08
Speaker 4: work out what it is that your organisation and the
30:10
Speaker 4: people in it actually need and where the real problems
30:12
Speaker 4: are and understand whether what you currently provide matches or
30:16
Speaker 4: doesn't that expectation.
30:18
Speaker 2: Salient advice. And we're almost out of time, but we've
30:21
Speaker 2: got time. We've just got time to do the quick
30:23
Speaker 2: fire round. Don't panic. So This is going to be
30:26
Speaker 2: for each question is for you both to give a
30:29
Speaker 2: short answer to. Sharon, you can go first, but then Jonathan,
30:32
Speaker 2: be right behind her. Sharon, all company email, essential, overused,
30:37
Speaker 2: or beyond saving?
30:39
Speaker 4: Both at the same time, which is to say, I
30:41
Speaker 4: think people have been claiming that they would get rid
30:43
Speaker 4: of internal emails and all staff emails for as long
30:45
Speaker 4: as I've been in this space, which is about 20 years.
30:48
Speaker 1: Email does serve a purpose. It gets you wherever you are.
30:51
Speaker 1: It's interoperable.
30:52
Speaker 4: It's about using it for the right things, which is
30:54
Speaker 4: about for distribution and not for publishing. So put your
30:57
Speaker 4: stuff on a channel and internet and app. Use email
31:00
Speaker 4: to get it to people where they are to point
31:02
Speaker 4: it back to that original canonical source. So it's about
31:05
Speaker 4: using it properly, effectively and sparingly. Sometimes it serves a
31:10
Speaker 4: good purpose. It's just in small motion.
31:14
Speaker 2: Same for you, Jonathan?
31:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, look, it is the same, but to build the
31:17
Speaker 3: analogy here, you know when you sit in the traffic
31:20
Speaker 3: and you're in a traffic jam and you're blaming the
31:22
Speaker 3: other cars? Take a moment, right? You are the traffic.
31:26
Speaker 3: That's why there's a traffic jam. You are the reason.
31:29
Speaker 3: So I think communicators also need to look hard about
31:31
Speaker 3: that all employee inbox and say, look, really, are we
31:35
Speaker 3: contributing anything here to the communication end? Or are we
31:39
Speaker 3: just contributing to the noise that we're creating for employees?
31:43
Speaker 3: So my answer is you can use those tools. You
31:45
Speaker 3: should use those tools, but use them sparingly and be
31:49
Speaker 3: acutely aware that when you're a crying wolf.
31:52
Speaker 2: You may be the traffic. Sharon, single most overused phrase
31:56
Speaker 2: in internal.
31:56
Speaker 4: In internal comms, I would say probably it would be
32:00
Speaker 4: something like we said, I mean, my most overused phrase
32:04
Speaker 4: would be utility is the number one driver of adoption.
32:06
Speaker 1: That's true. Probably internally that, you know, it would be
32:10
Speaker 1: we sent an email.
32:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, I sent that.
32:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, I sent that.
32:15
Speaker 3: I can replay what we heard from a client. I'm
32:17
Speaker 3: not going to mention which client for very obvious reasons.
32:20
Speaker 3: Send more to make sure. That's what they said.
32:23
Speaker 2: Send more to make sure.
32:25
Speaker 1: It almost physically hurt to hear that.
32:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
32:29
Speaker 2: That would seem to fly contrary to me.
32:33
Speaker 3: Somewhat. But you know what? When you're in the external
32:35
Speaker 3: world and you're in marketing, for example, send more to
32:39
Speaker 3: make sure costs you physical money. So people don't do that.
32:43
Speaker 3: They actually are really careful about what they send or
32:46
Speaker 3: publish or broadcast or distribute because it really costs you
32:50
Speaker 3: a serious amount of money. But the attitude internally as well,
32:53
Speaker 3: where's the cost, right? Well, the cost is people's attention.
32:57
Speaker 3: The cost is people caring about this stuff. The cost
33:00
Speaker 3: actually is in some of the distribution and the creation
33:02
Speaker 3: and the storage. There is cost. But yeah, send more
33:05
Speaker 3: to make sure. Please do not do that.
33:07
Speaker 2: One thing leaders think employees want to hear but usually don't.
33:14
Speaker 1: Where do I start with that one?
33:16
Speaker 4: Probably, I mean, don't know if you remember that kind
33:18
Speaker 4: of famous XCD comic where they were like, they had
33:22
Speaker 4: the Venn diagram of what's on the homepage versus what
33:24
Speaker 4: people actually want to see and the only thing They
33:26
Speaker 4: add in comms the address of the place you're going to.
33:29
Speaker 4: Same with restaurant websites or whatever. Probably people are, it
33:33
Speaker 4: probably pains me to say this, but no one is
33:35
Speaker 4: as interested in internal comms as the internal comms team.
33:39
Speaker 4: And actually what people really want is the things that
33:41
Speaker 4: help them do their job. What we can, best we
33:44
Speaker 4: can hope for is to put communication into the journey
33:47
Speaker 4: to the thing they open their browser to do. So
33:49
Speaker 4: you've opened it up to find an answer, to complete
33:51
Speaker 4: a task. You might catch their eye with the headline
33:54
Speaker 4: and hope they kick through. That's really how communications work.
33:57
Speaker 4: And I think we have to recognize that reality that
33:59
Speaker 4: people don't open their browsers with desperate to find out
34:03
Speaker 4: what their leaders are saying today.
34:05
Speaker 1: It's just not a thing that real people do.
34:06
Speaker 4: So actually, I think we have to recognize that it
34:09
Speaker 4: doesn't matter how charismatic your leader is. We have to
34:12
Speaker 4: recognize that the real focus of these channels is on
34:15
Speaker 4: enabling people to be the best they can at work
34:17
Speaker 4: and to do good jobs.
34:18
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think I'd like to hear leaders do more
34:21
Speaker 3: of the things that differentiates them as a leader. So
34:25
Speaker 3: I don't need them necessarily to communicate the stuff that
34:27
Speaker 3: could have been an email. I mean, that's cool, fine.
34:30
Speaker 3: But actually, I think I want to hear something of
34:32
Speaker 3: the human behind the story about what motivates them, what
34:35
Speaker 3: drives them. You know, let's hear more about employees' feelings
34:41
Speaker 3: and emotions about the company that they work for. I
34:44
Speaker 3: want to get behind a leader and I want to
34:46
Speaker 3: be able to follow a leader. I don't necessarily need
34:49
Speaker 3: the information from a leader. So I do think there's that.
34:52
Speaker 3: I think there's one other layer to that, if I may,
34:53
Speaker 3: which is that not all leaders are great communicators. And
34:57
Speaker 3: just because they're in a senior role doesn't mean we
34:59
Speaker 3: should stump them up to communicate things. There will be
35:02
Speaker 3: better people who can do that job. So even with
35:04
Speaker 3: the best of coaching, great leaders don't necessarily make great communicators.
35:09
Speaker 2: Thank you both so, so much for joining us. And
35:11
Speaker 2: before you go, leave us with a quick plug for
35:14
Speaker 2: your wonderful new book and where people can find it
35:16
Speaker 2: and buy it and get hold of it.
35:18
Speaker 3: I was going to say the book's been out since
35:20
Speaker 3: July the 3rd and the feedback that we've had so
35:23
Speaker 3: far has been super positive. Delighted to say that it's
35:26
Speaker 3: available for all online bookstores everywhere. But maybe I can
35:29
Speaker 3: ask this. If people are interested, go and support your
35:32
Speaker 3: local bookstore because they really need your support. They need
35:35
Speaker 3: your money. So go buy it on a high street somewhere.
35:38
Speaker 4: If you want to find out more, however, if you
35:40
Speaker 4: go to digitalcomsatwork.com, find out more about the book, read
35:44
Speaker 4: some of the things that we've written on some of
35:46
Speaker 4: the related frameworks. And there are some free downloads there
35:48
Speaker 4: as well. So you can get a little bit of
35:50
Speaker 4: a taste there. So digitalconsatwork.com.
35:53
Speaker 2: Link in the show notes, everybody. Jonathan, Sharon, thank you so,
35:57
Speaker 2: so much for joining us today.
35:59
Speaker 3: Thank you, Tom.
36:00
Speaker 1: Thank you. That's it for this week's Deck Show. We'll
36:03
Speaker 1: be back next week. And if you don't already, be
36:06
Speaker 1: sure to follow the show so you don't miss an episode.
36:08
Speaker 1: Until next time.