Black Belt Dojo

It didn't happen in my day ...

Someone asked me yesterday how much internal comms has changed since I've been working in it. I answered, as I always do, that it hasn't changed that much, really - same issues, same problems, same basic planning process. "But surely the channels must have changed?" this person prompted.

And blimey, when I thought about it, how they have. So please indulge me, while I take a trip down memory lane.

Not to make myself sound too ancient or anything, but there were no mobile phones, no Intranets and no email when I started out. I actually used to look after a small team of people whose job it was to stuff letters in envelopes when we wanted to communicate with employees. That was just for an 'all manager' run though, because we only had 1300 of those. For an 'all staff' run (21,000) we used to go to a mailing house, making sure we booked in with HR for a print out of the right labels we needed to go on the envelopes - and avoiding Mondays and Tuesdays when the HR system was out of bounds.

(So you thought you had a hard time being seen as 'unstrategic'?  Think yourself lucky you're not fighting the tag of 'licker and sticker', and people no longer think all IC people do is stuff envelopes all day!)

We had a face to face briefing system - but no PowerPoint. So we used to get 1300 lots of flipcharts printed up, and once a month, the envelope stuffing office became full from floor to ceiling with cardboard tubes.

I remember the point when we first really started using email. In fact I'm proud to report that I was the person apparently single-handedly responsible for getting email 'in' in our division. Because the company was Royal Mail, we were in the middle of a national strike, and I couldn't get any information out to anyone because the only way to communicate was by mail ... and there wasn't any. So I told the managers I was switching to the new email system and they'd better use it because I was stopping the paper stuff.

Very exciting times. Furious exchanges in some quarters. My answerphone used to get so full every day it ran out of space. One senior leader left a furious message telling me his computer password was 'Luddite' and he'd use email over his dead body. So inexperienced were we with the perils of email, that I managed to spread a virus throughout the entire division in 2 minutes flat with one of my all manager mails. Whoops.

Can you imagine, though, how difficult it was to get out the simplest of messages? And we were the Royal Mail, so we didn't have to worry about postage charges. And yet ... and yet ... at least we had to think.  There was no chance of throwing out loads of irrelevant messages - it was too time-consuming and difficult.  Line managers were the route for most of our communication, simply because they were the easiest people for us to reach from the centre.  When we had a big issue, we put all our effort into face to face communication, roadshows and events. All time-consuming, much more expensive than communication is now, but on reflection I'd say probably a more considered use of people's time.

And not forgetting, of course, that for plenty of employees, paper and face to face is still the order of the day. No access to email, no access to Intranet, no work-connected mobile phones. But if you're in a comms department in headquarters, getting all excited about the latest social media case studies it's pretty easy to forget there's a whole other world out there where actually, really, things still haven't changed too much ...

Sue

Podcasting...help at hand

If you're in the UK you might be interested in the AGM of the CIPR Inside... details here for 3 June.

It's in Birmingham and they've linked it with a session on podcasting which looks really good...

Liam

I wish I'd been there...

Just catching up on my mail and came across this... - it's a report of a meeting in which attendees were taught how to make presentations lasting no more than 20 slides and each slide lasting only 20 seconds....

In recent months I've endured some awful presentations - often of hundreds of slides, all with 60 million bits of information on each one.

Is it because I think about this stuff that I know long and boring PowerPoint presentations are long and boring?  Why don't other intelligent people see it as well? Maybe they don't hear the voices, but perhaps that's another posting?

Which reminds me of a very strange meeting I had a client's office the other week when I was explaining to a consultant from one of the finest consultancies in the world why 60 slides might take more than 20 minutes to get through (he was hoping for some discussion as well in his allocated 25 minutes).  So I suggested we start by asking....

"As a result of this presentation, what do we want our audience to KNOW, to THINK and to DO?"

To which came the reply...

"This 'Know, Think, Do' isn't our model, is it someone else's model?  I don't think we should use a new model...."

...and there I was thinking it was just common sense.  I wonder if I can pose as a guru now by creating insights such as "don't lick power cables" or "texting whie driving is not a very clever thing to do".

Liam

...and the winner is...

My recent silence has been due to the pressure of work.  I've been fully occupied on a change programme in Scandinavia - explaining a new strategy to a workforce coming to terms with job cuts and a radical shift in thinking about what it means to be a global player in a world of high oil prices and economic slow down.

One of the things we're been debating is how an awards programme fits into all this.

On the face of it, glamourous presentations and posh frocks are probably not that compatable with a message set that includes 'driving out cost.'  But there is a problem of showing people what behaviours are valued in the new world.

I think the trick is going to be to come up with something simple - that allows managers to recognise the right performance.  We're developing something based around the four core messages in the change but the biggest headache is finding a scheme that requires minimal administration.

This will be no mean feat if we pull it off.  I know from experience that schemes like the excellent Helios Awards at BP require a lot of energy.  It's not just the paperwork in ensuring everything is open and above board.  There's a good deal of politics involved as well.

How do you avoid senior leaders fretting that the 'wrong' people might win?  Once, on a scheme I worked on I had to explain to a director that none of his people had won anything because they hadn't entered.

And then there is the challenge of keeping it going year after year.  And keeping it fresh.

Despite all that, I'm really enjoying it....

Liam