Black Belt Dojo

The end is near...

Well, my month is almost up as the guest blogger here on the Black Belt Dojo and it’s been emotional. The battle to save our employee magazine comes to a head today; I have a meeting with our CEO at 3pm. Thanks to everyone who contacted me to offer help in building my case; your assistance has been invaluable. When I know the outcome, I will add a comment to this post updating you all.

I am on leave for three weeks from the end of the day today and for the first time in a long time, I really feel like I need this break. It has been a tough month in IC for easyJet. Do you ever get the feeling that you are dodging the crosshairs of the CEO and sometimes, you are just not quick enough to get out of the way?

If Sue and Liam ever ask you to be the guest blogger here, seize the chance with both hands. During this last month, I have received emails from IC professionals from around the world, been asked to feature in a magazine as a guest columnist and even been headhunted (sadly the job is well out of my league for now…but my head is twice its normal size).

If you want to stay in touch, or make initial contact feel free to give me a poke(!) or add me as a friend on Facebook using taffysteve@hotmail.com to find me.

In a Jerry Springer stylee, I will leave you with a final thought:

When asked what they want to be when they grow up, not many children will say “I want to work in Internal Communications”. Most of the communicators I know say that they ended up in the role ‘by accident’. However, there is a universal connection that seems to run through all IC professionals the world over; we care about what we do. We know the value we can add to an organisation and we know the difference effective communications can make. Now, if only we could get others to see it…

Take care of yourself…and each other.

Steve

The boy who cried wolf

One of the challenges we are currently facing in Internal Communications at easyJet is making people aware that the challenges we are facing this year are real ones. Too often in years gone by, we have been a great example of the ‘boy who cried wolf’. At easyJet (like I’m sure it is in most other businesses) the pressure is on to continually provide outstanding financial results for the city and our investors. The good news is, we have been pretty good at it. Year after year we announce record profits, and in such a competitive and cut-throat industry, that’s no mean feat.

However, we follow a predictable cyclical pattern year after year…we issue a record profit announcement and temper the excitement of another record year with a message about how challenging next year is going to be. Undoubtedly, we will then communicate with our people about how important it is for them to save money in any way possible and about how essential our ancillary revenues are. Then, at the end of the year comes another message announcing record profits and announcing that next year will be our toughest yet…see the pattern?

Now though, we are in the position that this year really is one of our toughest yet. Oil prices are at a crippling high and a downturn in the economy signals a rough ride for us at easyJet and for airlines in general. In IC, we have been tasked with making people realise that this time, we really mean it when we say that this is a challenging time for us. Generally, the response is “Yeah, heard it all before”. I have a feeling there will be some turbulence ahead in the orange world of easyJet IC.

T5 - a perspective

Well, it hasn't taken long for consultancies and experts to start drawing the conclusion that the goings on at Terminal 5 were caused by staff being not sufficiently 'engaged' in the changes.

It's easy to stand and make judgments from the sidelines, isn't it? I spent years as an in-house person before moving into consultancy, and these days I spend a lot of my time writing and speaking about good practice. I have to say, it's a heck of a lot easier to talk about it than it is to be in the middle of it trying to make it work. Much as I prefer training and coaching to doing pure IC work now, I still do it so that I keep getting brought down to earth with a bump and don't end up making lofty statements whilst having the distinct advantage that I never have to get my own hands dirty.

Back when I was in-house, I remember getting really fed up with a consultant who stood up at an event and lambasted my company for not actively pursuing 'living the brand'-type work whilst we were going through bankruptcy. "Who will be the companies who thrive when they come through these downturns?" this person said smugly. "The ones who, despite everything, keep on with their brand work, or the ones who say now isn't the time and batten down the hatches?" Maybe s/he would have liked to try talking about brand values to thousands of employees who were worried we hadn't even got enough money to pay their wages that month, or debating whether to try and jump ship now rather than later, in case we ended up going belly up and not being able to make redundancy payments down the line.

Then there's that old chestnut 'it's all down to engagement'. Obviously. It's the answer to all business ills. Let's forget about the baggage handling system collapsing and causing massive operational disruption - actually, it's all down to leaders not sufficiently engaging their teams.

It's a handy word, engagement. Everything used to be down to 'culture'. Now we can lob 'engagement' into the mix, too.  It's dangerous thinking, and it's why some leaders end up thinking communication/engagement is the answer to everything. CEO's got a massive payrise whilst everyone else has their pay frozen and - surprise - everyone's fed up? Nothing to do with the pay issue - it's all down to rubbish communication, so we're the ones to fix it.

I know people from both BA and BAA who are extremely capable communication professionals. I like and respect them, and I go to them for case studies because I know they do good work. I hope that if there do happen to be comms-related things to be learned from the T5 goings on, maybe at some stage they'll be able to talk about it. Although I have my doubts, because we don't exactly make it easy for people to talk about learning points, difficulties or mistakes. The last person I know that did it at a comms event ended up all over the national media because some kind soul took his comments to a journalist. 

What's my point? I guess it's, let's not jump to over-simplistic conclusions from the sidelines. Coupled with a bit of wishful thinking that we could create an environment for people to talk easily about mistakes when they do happen. That's where the real learning is - but I doubt we'll all be queuing up to talk about them on a conference stand any time soon ...

Sue   

Avoiding the pit of management speak (whilst knowing the company lexicon)

What happens to people in business today that makes them think that using the term “Singing from the same hymn sheet” is ever acceptable in any way?

Nothing, and I mean nothing gets my blood boiling quite like management speak. My colleagues at easyJet know this and for my ‘Secret Santa’ gift last Christmas, I was given a book by Graham Edmonds called ‘Bullshit Bingo’. The concept is simple enough; just take one of the bingo cards from the book into a meeting with you (so much more fun if you have a friend doing it too) and mark off any of the expressions that you hear during the meeting. Once you have a line of marked off squares, yell at top voice “Bingo!” whilst holding your card aloft. (I won’t be held responsible for any P45s issued as a result of playing.)

So what gems should you be looking out for? Take a look at this list (in no way exhaustive) and see which ones you hear in your daily working environment:

• The genie is out of the bottle
• Let’s talk about this offline/off piste
• A rising tide that lifts all boats
• Going forward
• Get our ducks in a line
• Thinking outside the box
• Working in silos
• Dovetailing
• Different levels of honesty (a personal favourite)
• Low hanging fruit
• Listen loudly

Needless to say, I could go on and I hope that some of you will share your favourites in the comments section.

Can we get by in business without being sucked in to the use of this dubious language? Of course we can. There is a chasm of difference between knowing the lexicon of our specific business to using these BS phrases to make ourselves sound so dreadfully important. Knowing how to use the former will help you to enhance the reputation of your communications department whilst the latter could be seen by some as a desperate need to look important whilst not achieving very much at all.

On that note, I am going to interface with my core business leaders to do a gap analysis on my knowledge base.

Steve

What would you do?

I have a challenge for you. I need some assistance and I think you are the best people to offer me some advice.

In a nutshell, the aviation industry is a tough place to be at the moment. Oil price is at an all-time high which means our fuel bill is also astronomical. It’s a competitive environment and we have to be the smartest and the strongest to survive.

We’ve been asked by our Chief Executive to come up with a campaign to raise awareness of the high price of fuel and also our need to keep our costs and spending to a minimum.

So, do you have any ideas? We have recently launched a campaign called ‘Ideas Pay’ which is a web portal for our staff to submit money-making or money-saving ideas. Depending on the viability of their ideas, they get a financial reward for it.

We have the option of posters, intranet news and email. We will also consider some social media as we have blogs built in to our Sharepoint-based intranet. So, what would you do?

In other news, I mentioned in my previous post about how the employees love Fresh magazine, but the Chief Executive doesn’t. It looks now as though one of the first cost-cutting measures will be the printing and posting of the magazine. It is likely to become exclusively available online. This in itself throws up some challenges, as most of our people spend the majority of their time in the air and without access to online content. Is it even worth continuing with it as an online publication? Should I fight back and try to keep it?

Intrigued to hear your thoughts…

Steve

Is the employee magazine uncool in the world of IC?

When I network with other communicators and they discover that I work for easyJet, the most frequently asked question is, “How do you communicate with a remote workforce like pilots and cabin crew?”

I’m always stumped when I get asked this as the truth is, we are always trying out different things to find out what works. We’ve had some successes and some failures, some of which I will no doubt cover over the next few weeks in my guest blogger role.

One of our biggest successes at easyJet is our employee magazine called ‘Fresh’.

There is no doubt in my mind that it can be seen as a little uncool in the world of IC to say that you communicate with your people using a magazine or newsletter. However, I tend to view it as retro-chic and the truth is, our people love it so I make no apologies for it. I believe that sometimes, in our roles as communicators we can be in danger of disappearing up our own backsides (I mean that with love).

In our efforts to remain at the cutting edge of an ever-developing field, we can sometimes forget the basics. We want to be seen by our peers and potential employers to be early-adopters of new technology in our field…and there’s nothing wrong with that. Where I believe it becomes an issue is when we try to shoe-horn a new method of communicating into our organisations. One of the most important messages I took away from the recent Black Belt course was that not every method of communicating works at every organisation.

Up until last year, our magazine was a fairly tired old affair. Called ‘Plane People’ (see what we did there?) it was a big, glossy affair with lots of pictures of our people but not much in the way of real news. Our people made it clear in a survey on our communications channels, that they didn’t like the size of the magazine (A4). They also had the perception that it was expensive to produce (a big no-no in the low-cost world of easyJet). Then to top it all, it was non-recyclable, sent in a plastic sleeve and contained no real content. So in a nutshell, they hated it.

We went back to the drawing board, brought in a new designer and produced what we have now. Fresh magazine has been designed around the readership feedback. It’s small enough (A3) for our crews to carry in their flight bags, printed on recyclable paper, sent in a paper envelope and contains content that straddles a fine line between good, people focussed stories to the latest challenges facing us in the industry. In recent focus groups, feedback has been excellent (except from the CEO, but more on that in another blog).

I like to think of myself as an early adopter of technologies such as Facebook, LinkedIn and even Second Life (I dread to think what I’ve been up to since I last visited me), but I had to learn a harsh lesson in the world of IC. It’s ok to be uncool if your audience demands it.