Robin Farr // Communicator, wanna-be runner, mom to a little dude and believer in the paradoxical philosophies of fatalism and the strong suspicion that if we were all a little more revolutionary the world would be a better place. (Oh yeah... all comments here reflect my own thoughts only.)
I haven't actually entirely forgotten about this blog. I'm just elsewhere, thinking about other things, so this one is sort of on hiatus.
In the meantime I'll leave you this picture. I'm sure there's a lesson about communications in it somewhere.
Q: "What's black and white and read all over?"
A: "A newspaper."
If only the question posed in this old joke was as true and simple for our intranets. (Well, maybe not the black and white part.) If it were, we wouldn't have many worries about whether we're getting the right message to the right people at the right time and all that. We would build it, and they would come. But it doesn't work that way.
Like many organizations, our intranet is our default communications channel. That wouldn't necessarily be an issue except that sometimes it's our main (read: only) communications channel. People think that if we post an article we've communicated. Our communications team knows differently, but at times it's still a struggle for us to get out of that intranet box into different boxes with different tools and different channels.
I took the opportunity presented by Sean Williams's (@CommAMMO) #icchat discussions on Twitter to bring the question to others working in internal communications. Having considered the result of this discussion, a few main lessons jump out at me:
We started the discussion with a general question to get things going:
What's happening in your world that's new and different?
Broadcast communications, comics, supporting dialogue, finding a voice for communications, plasma screens, info towers, touch screens, video, and, yes, SharePoint 2010 - the answers ranged a lot:
rjfarr: Some input from me - recently used a comic strip to communicate our new social media guidelines for employees. #icchat
SMSJOE: @rjfarr have you seen the salesforce video presenting SM guidelines? #icchat
SMSJOE: here is the link #icchat
CommAMMO: Q1-cont'd - biggest issue is move fr "news" voice to "convo" - begn'g to research Yammer, touchscreens #icchat
JostleMe: Rolling out with 1st big customer -- set up in-app 'Easter egg hunt' to get users to explore how Jostle glues their org together. #icchat
rjfarr: Another tool we're just trying now w a guide for employees is a PDF w popups - definitions, contact info, etc. #icchat
CommAMMO: While I was at Goodyear, the Lux innovation center plant put together info towers - screens w/ppt, flyers, posters... #icchat
SMSJOE: Anyone experimented with QR codes on printed material? #icchat
QR codes? His response to my query (and further explained in this link from Sean):
SMSJOE: @rjfarr type of bar code square readable by readers in phones #icchat
Wow. And I thought I was up to date on tools being used for internal comms.
We moved from there into more traditional territory with question 2:
What role do traditional tactics play? What are you doing other than email?
The comment from Meghan summed this up nicely:
@mhellstern: Q2, trad tactics still necessary b/c there is a tech gap, some ppl are comfortable with new techs, others arent #icchat
Other thoughts:
rjfarr: Discussed posters at an #internalcomms Community of Practice mtg yesterday. Consensus: effective when not about events, time-sens #icchat
mhellstern: @rjfarr more traditional tactics common in our org: mass (department-wide) email, posters, announcement events, email newsletters #icchat
gacross: Still the gold std. Help sup b skilled. RT @rjfarr: Anyone doing much w face-to-face? Tough in our org - big and large geo area. #icchat
"A ha," I thought. (I'm working on this now.) "But how?" Glenna had an answer:
gacross: I teach this 2 sup.Use D'Aprix model. RT@rjfarr:@gacross Happen 2 b working on plan re just that(help sup b skilled).How do u do it? #icchat
This was followed up later with some helpful input from IABC:
IABC: .@gacross @rjfarr Here's the link to The Face-to-Face Communication Toolkit by Roger D'Aprix, ABC. http://bit.ly/r63kw #icchat
IABC: .@gacross @rjfarr More on F2F comm in the Nov CW Bulletin. Articles by D'Aprix, @ThoughtPartner, @CGoman, etc. http://bit.ly/dhJBt0 #icchat
From inspiration to challenges, we covered it all, leading up to the final part of the discussion, the responses for which brought us back to the age-old question - regardless of tool or channel - about what we're actually trying to accomplish:
How do you evaluate success?
There was the cynical - or maybe it's just realistic:
Wedge: #icchat Q4 Success. Should be about impact, behaviour change and engagement. But mostly it's about whether it "was sent on time"...
And there was the question of definition:
jgombita: @Wedge wouldn't all of those fall under the umbrella of "outcomes?" (PR measurement.)
There was the "we're trying":
rjfarr: Re: measurement - Now building this into our calendar. Also using standard list of Qs that are better than nothing. #icchat
And the, "Hmm, that's a good question":
mhellstern: Q related to Q4 of #icchat, how do u measure things like effectiveness of digital signage, promo items given out? not as easy as web, email
And, of course, sometimes it's just about getting people involved:
CommAMMO: don't assume. Might be enuf to foster dialog. RT @csledzik: @rjfarr still needs 2B tied back 2intranet or else where 2expand msgs. #icchat
Overall, the one-hour chat has 223 tweets and 23 contributors. You can read the full transcript here.
Thanks once again to Sean Williams for the opportunity to guest host. I got some great specifics and lots of good stuff to think about. Next #icchat is Nov 30, 2-3 p.m. US (ET). Hope to see you there!
In a previous post I talked about how we communicated new social media guidelines to employees.
Today, in an internal comms chat on Twitter, I mentioned this as one tool we've used that's a bit different. People of course want to see it, and I don't think there's anything secret here, so happy to share.
It started out as an innocent question.
"Sean," I asked. "Interest in #icchat on creative comm approaches?"
The response: "Interested in being a guest host?" I should have seen it coming. He's wily, that Sean is.
One of my biggest challenges is figuring out how we can effectively communicate to employees in our organization - in ways other than the intranet. Sure, the intranet is great, and it's our main communications channel. But there a number of issues with it, as with any intranet:
And those are just the simple problems. Aside from effectiveness, sometimes I just want to do something that's more engaging. We've tried a few things and we've had some ideas that haven't panned out for one reason or another. But I'm always interested in sharing ideas with other internal communicators and hearing what ideas they have to offer. There are a number of great internal communications pros on Twitter, and I'd love to pick their brains.
So... "Eep! Sure," I told Sean.
This Tuesday, Nov. 16, from 2-3 ET I'll be joining Sean Williams as guest host for #icchat. I'd love it if you'd join us, and I'll do my best to make it worth your while.
If can't - or didn't - join us, I'd love to hear examples of what you've seen work well using communications channels other than your intranet.
“Love that I can tweet a question to a colleague and get not one but two answers within minutes,” I tweeted. It was meant to be a yay-for-technology statement. An I-love-the-people-I-work-with moment. But it generated an interesting dialogue that makes a different point entirely.
"I love that you use the word colleague, @rjfarr," Trent said. "At one employer it was the norm while at another it was cause for strange looks."
A couple of others - ZebraCracker, Wedge - got in on the conversation. It was determined that "colleague" is more of a Canadian/UK thing whereas "co-worker" is a bit more common in the US. I don't know if that's universally true and, admittedly, "colleague" is a term I've relatively recently adopted, but it's one I use intentionally.
The difference, for me, is that a "co-worker" is someone I work with. A "colleague," to me, is more than that - we work together, sure, but we're also partners. We're on the same team, as it were.
Ironically, the Oxford dictionary does not make this distinction. But clearly, as evidenced by Trent's comment above, others do.
So what?
Because how we talk about others matters. How we talk about ourselves matters. And for those of us working in employee communications, we have an opportunity to use these subtle linguistic distinctions to shape the culture of our organizations, even a small amount. Even, dare I say, if the effect of this is something we can't measure.
I work in a public sector organization, and when I took over the role of editor of our intranet a few years ago I staged a small rebellion and quit using the term "public servant". Yes, people are there to serve the public. But what we wanted to do, especially as it related to our organization's delibarate and stated attempts to change our culture, is have people think about themselves as employees of the organization to allow us - the collective "us" - to define the employee experience in a way that went beyond what we're doing to serve Joe Public.
A colleague of mine (one I haven't actually met in person, mind you, but one I consider a colleague all the same because we've shared information and we have many of the same values) pointed this out just yesterday:
"Really not a fan of the term 'misery ministries.' How we talk about ourselves matters," she said on Twitter.
"Misery ministries"? Really? I wasn't at the event she was tweeting from and so don't know the context in which this term was used, but it strikes me as...unfortunate, and I can see why she commented on it.
Because she's right. How we talk about ourselves matters. The simple fact is that the words we use affect our perceptions of our work. They affect our perceived value. They affect our relationships. And so, if for no other reason than because it matters, we internal communicators should choose our words carefully.
Today was the culmination of a very, very long process. Really very long. Did I mention it was long?
Today, after months and months of work, we released social media guidelines for employees in our organization. I had the distinct pleasure of being involved with the development of the guidelines in addition to leading the internal communications. I can actually say that without sarcasm, because despite moments of extreme frustration with how complicated this was, it was really, really interesting.
I will leave discussion of policy and legislative considerations in developing public sector social media guidelines to others who are better versed in this than I, but I did want to share a bit of the approach we used for the communications.
We starting throwing ideas around ages ago. The initial desire was to do something wild, something cool, something worthy of the topic. We had some good ideas, but they depended on being better able to nail down the exact approach to these guidelines and, more importantly, the timing. So did we get wild in the end? Not really. But we have great resources for employees, clear - and hopefully engaging - communications and we can build from here.
The word from on high
The approach to our social media guidelines was very much shaped by a message from the head of our organization:
"...overall these guidelines are based on one important philosophy: we trust our employees to be responsible in their use of these tools, just as we trust them in every other aspect of their work."
So we built on that in the communications.
Trust
This concept is basic, and really, really important. It's a critical philosophy and it's important to put that right in the guidelines and then tell employees this is the foundation on which you want to build. So we used that message in our materials. We put it right in the feature article for our top story on the intranet home page. We also did a video with the head of the organization talking about this and we referred to it as our top executive "on trust". Not "on social media" - on trust. We did it in a simple interview format, and we put together questions to get him to talk about trust. Employees - and their bosses and their bosses' bosses - need to hear this from the top.
Culture change
We also got him to talk about culture change. Our organization has come a long way, baby - we can see the course we need to follow to change things within the organization in order to make things like social media successful, but in many ways we're still at the first tee. (Well, maybe the second.) Executives need to support that culture change (hoo boy, do they) so we got the one at the top to talk about it openly. We hear employees all the time say, "My manager won't even let me post on [the intranet]." We are by no means the only organization that has to deal with the perception that anything community-based is a waste of time, but we're going to have to address it if we're going to overcome it. We put a piece about exactly that in a brief Q&A section.
Risk
Social media comes with risk. Some organizations have had it blow up in their faces quite spectacularly. But if you believe the risks outweigh the benefits, as we do, then you go for it. It's summed up nicely in one section of the video where our "CEO" (if you will) quotes someone who has said, "We trust our employees not to do something that’s stupid." (Oh look, there's that 't' word again.)
Personal use
These guidelines are about public tools - social media use on behalf of the organization. But it's not that simple anymore, is it? Employees want to know what they can tweet. They want to know if they can log on to Facebook from their computers at work. They want to know if they're going to have to tear up their business cards if they blog publicly about their work. (Ahem.) But whether this is what the guidelines are about or not, these are valid questions. And the real answers are: It depends. So we addressed the basic questions and we included some explanation about how our Standards of Conduct apply. And as one of our next steps, we're going to offer some scenarios to help employees understand this better.
"The cool thing to do"
Social media is the in thing, right? Gotta have a blog? Competitor has a Facebook page?
Not so fast, Sparky.
The guidelines, and the material that accompanies them, are very clear that there should be a business purpose for using social media. That your program area should know what you want to achieve.
This is important, too. Anyone who has failed miserably - publicly - in the social media sphere knows it sucks. It especially sucks when you've put time and effort into getting there only to realize it's totally not going to work. So we're trying to get our employees to remember that it's about more than just showing up.
Our communications are built around a rather large batch of content designed by the team responsible for implementing social media in our organization. It's resource stuff, educational stuff, hold-your-hand-when-you're-new-at-this stuff. And it's good. A lot of it was created by a very smart guy who's done a really good job at outlining information that will help the people who say, "What's Twitter?" at the same time as jazzing the people who tweet on autopilot and want to explore how they can use social media to support their work. In a number of places in that content it's pointed out that social media might not help you achieve your goal.
So we built on that in the communications, too. My favourite way is a version of this message in comic strip format. Hey, it's different!
Frame from said comic strip:
Houston, we have contact
Many of us, for so many reasons and for so long, have wanted to get these guidelines out there. We wanted our employees to have access to them and to the other material. We wanted to know what they think. And we wanted to get over this first hurdle - this putting it out there - so we can see how we need to keep building from here. That will be true of our work in social media as much as it is about how we communicate within the organization about what we're doing, how and why.
So maybe I'm drunk on the Kool-Aid, but I'm just so glad it's out there and we get to hear what others think now.
If you have any comments about how we've approached the communications, I'd love to hear those too.
Scene: A meeting room in a hotel in Vancouver. 15 or so communicators sitting around a U-shaped table participating in a 2-day course on intranets.
It's nearing the end of day two. I present last, and have the special honour of trying to figure out how to "workshop" an intranet-related topic. I abandon my pre-planning, control-freak self and decide to wing it.
This sounds much more cavalier than it actually was. This format was new for me - described as a "course" rather than a conference, with a much smaller group of attendees. Several other presenters before me, covering varied topics but working in environments quite similar to mine (3/4 from the public sector). I didn't know what to expect of the whole event, never mind the workshop portion, and didn't want my 3-hour session (!) to be either totally repetitive or completely useless.
Overall I think it went well - got some good feedback, some new contacts, and a few people who said they wanted to follow up with me as they go through their own process to redesign or improve their intranets, which I take to be a good sign. But there was one moment that outshone all other breakthroughs I've had through my presentations: I got through to an IT person.
I'd finished the presentation part of my session, where I went through what our organization has done with our intranet. My focus in these presentations is generally our content, our voice and our approach - the way we try to represent the employer while giving employees a place for dialogue and participation. I talk about how much effort we put into engaging content. How important it is to avoid corporate speak. How sometimes a good graphic is what it takes to grab the attention of someone who's busy just trying to do a job.
After a quick break, we got into the workshop portion of the afternoon. "The Taming of the Intranet," I called it, following a moment late the night before where I grasped at straws looking for an angle decided there are similarities between Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and the struggle intranets can be. We worked through prioritizing when you can't do it all, figuring out how to choose elements that will be high impact for an organization and how a good intranet can help you accomplish not only your communications goals but your organization's goals.
There was some good discussion, sharing of challenges and general commiseration.
"What other barriers are you facing?" I asked.
"IT," someone said.
Nodding heads.
A brief discussion about how to overcome this challenge and try to, you know, work as a team. And then someone spoke up.
I hesitate to acknowledge this, she said, but I'm an IT person. Have been my whole career.
She talked about how the sessions over the past couple of days had been really useful for her, but how she wasn't really sure what she was doing there. (She was strategically invited, her communications co-worker - sitting next to her - acknowledged later.) But, she said, now I get it. It just hit me, and in the last hour suddenly I GET IT. I've always thought about the intranet as my baby, she acknowledged. But I don't want to be responsible for the content.
Hallelujah.
A few weeks ago, I played the latest Twitter game: find your Twitter BFFs. (For anyone not familiar with this particular trick, Twitter BFFs "tells you who you interact with most on Twitter... calculated based on the number of times you @-reply them in your tweets" as it's described on the site.)
I occasionally do these things, if only for fun, but rarely tweet the results because I figure no one cares. In this case I did share my Twitter BFFs with my "tweeps" because the results were interesting: All except for one were co-workers. (And the one is a former co-worker and my boss's wife, so I figure she almost counts as a co-worker.)
My first reaction to the fact that most of my interactions were with colleagues was, "Huh. Interesting." But I've been pondering it since. You see, I think this is indicative of something, especially given that several of those same people tweeted their own BFFs and the lists were similar.
Oh sure, it might be that we're interacting most with people we actually know instead of people we don't, which is kind of counter to what Twitter is about (or at least what it's become - the original vision was much more about sharing what you're doing with people you actually know. Speaking of "who cares"...).
Aside from that, I think this type of interaction on Twitter says a lot about what is happening in organizations lately that internal communicators (and, heck, learning practitioners) should take note of. People within and across work groups are:
- Sharing resources. I regularly find relevant information for things we're working on and point colleagues (Hi, Mike! Hi, Howie!) in the direction of these resources because I think it will help them do their jobs.
- Sharing contacts. Based on what they know I'm working on, my co-workers have introduced others to me on Twitter so that we can connect and share information.
- Getting to know each other. Some of my co-workers tweet about their weekends, their kids and their vacations, their hopes, their dreams and their frustrations. I know some of them much more than I otherwise would and it helps me work with them better.
Why does it matter that this is happening on Twitter instead of inside the firewall? Lots of reasons. For one, because I'm seeing what these folks are interested in and thinking about when they're tweeting about stuff not directly relevant to their jobs, which wouldn't happen quite as much in an enterprise microblogging system.
As well, I get introduced to people from outside our organization through colleagues' Twitter contacts, which doesn't work when it's all behind the firewall. I can also interact with my colleagues in other groupings, like with some of those outside people (Hi, Nick!) who are doing similar work and who understand the opportunities and challenges we have.
Perhaps most importantly, it's something we do outside of work. What going out for a beer after work does for some people's relationships with their co-workers Twitter does for me. Don't get me wrong - I absolutely see the value of microblogging behind the firewall, and my work group, which happens to be responsible for this in our organization, is exploring options for bringing in an official, and hopefully really useful, channel.
But I feel like I know my colleagues better because of something we have in common that a relatively small number of people are involved in (I have 24 people on my "worker-bees" Twitter list, though I'm sure there are others from our organization I'm not yet following). We understand what's happening "out there" and we use it to help each other. Admittedly, I tend to be one of the more sappy ones - if not the sappy one - in this particular group of people (though I suspect a couple of others could give me a run for my money - Hi, Bowen! Hi, Rumon!) and, yes, it gives me warm fuzzies to share tweets with people I work with, even after a long day, because I actually happen to like them.
That's the thing, though. Sharing information, developing our relationships, understanding each other, building our teams, sharing ideas - that's a big part of what internal communication is about. It doesn't have to happen on Twitter, but it does. It's important not because of what people who work together are doing, but how they're doing it. They're using these relatively new tools to communicate in ways that help them do their jobs. They're doing it outside the organization's walls - both literally and figuratively - and in doing so they're breaking the mould on how internal communications works. Can work. Should work. Because this is what organizations are now. It's not all top-down. It's not all centre-out. It's not controlled, it's not scheduled, it's not monitored.
And that's all a good thing.
Here's a quick lesson for protestors: don't crash a social media/communications conference and try to make your point about cruelty to animals. Other than chicken farmers or fast food executives, we're about your next worst choice for an audience.
I can say this with conviction because this happened this week. An audience of communications professionals gathered in Vancouver for a conference called Communicating to the Public and Employees in the Age of Social Media, hosted by the organization I work for and Ragan Communications. A couple of reps from a fast food chain got up to speak about their employee communications and, before they could even get out a McWord, a rather naive young woman got up and started trying to make a point about chickens.
There were a number of problems with this:
1. The majority of us thought perhaps it was part of the presentation. It could very well have been a stunt to make a point.
2. We were there to learn and were at the end of the first day of great learning and lots of idea sharing. We weren't at all interested in the poor chickens.
3. We had the formidable Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications in the room. Mark's no newbie to this stuff, and her little stunt didn't phase him at all.
The girl's partner in protest - an equally naive young man in the front row with a flip camera - was waiting for a kerfuffle, waiting for the moment when someone angrily hauled his partner out of the room. He didn't get either.
One person pointed out we were there to learn and perhaps she'd made her point. Another suggested we get security. Another started her own tirade against the protestors by talking about the good things the company does in the community.
Mostly people just didn't say much of anything.
This lack of reaction fazed our dear, young protestor quite a bit. Without the anticipated reaction, she ran out of game plan. So she started repeating her line. Over and over and over. By this point, it was getting a little comical and a lot annoying. Finally someone near the back commented that we'd listen better on a respectful platform if she'd grant us the same. And with that she shut up and walked out of the room.
Never one to waste a teachable moment, Mark commented that he deliberately didn't give her a reaction because he knew that's what she was looking for. He was starting to explore options for getting her out of there, but in the end he didn't need to worry about it. When he commented after the fact that without a video of the desired kerfuffle the protestors had nothing, he was bang on point. From a PR perspective, ignoring them was like ignoring your teenaged brother who's trying to rile you. No reaction = boring = may as well give up.
We thought that was the end of it, but of course the group had other plans. They promptly hijacked the hashtag for the conference and spammed it, incessantly, with tweets promoting their cause du jour. After a bit we got a little sick of it and started poking back a bit by tweeting about plans to go out for a chicken dinner, but pretty much just moved on and started to focus again on what we were there to learn.
This happened to be the last session of the day, so we all adjourned to a bar for a reception/networking event. The chicken people, however, kept going. And going. And going. When we checked at about 10 pm, they were still tweeting on our hashtag. Except no one was listening.
By this morning they'd given up, and we happily tweeted the day away with nary a thought for the alleged torturing of the chickens. We learned a lesson about how as communicators we can react effectively to a situation like this.
The protestors? Well let's just say that little bit of film on the flip camera has probably been erased, making it ready for their next attempt. Let's hope they don't target the chicken farmers.
I know, I haven't blogged in a while. But an article on internal use of social media has me buzzing while I wait for a delayed plane this morning.
First, let me beef for a minute about how it's amazing I read the article at all since the whole site looks like one giant ad.
In any case, this article, which is about how Salesforce.com uses chatter to identify top employees, seems to start out well. It describes how the CEO uses their "Facebook-like" collaboration service to identify key employees and see what's going on in the organization. Fabulous! If only more executives were plugged in like that.
The CEO quote used indicates what I think is a very progressive point of view: "It's given me a new view of what's going on in the company...I can go through and see what employees are saying, what collaborations are happening, what product leaders are saying — I can get a whole view of what's happening."
In the new work-world order, this is good stuff. A person at the top of any organization would get lots out of hearing what's going on in the organization, particularly from front-line employees. This CEO sounds to me like someone who understands the benefits of - in fact, the necessity of - employees collaborating, and the opportunity to do his own job better by getting a better picture of life outside the C-suite.
Too bad the article's author doesn't get it.
"Monitoring," he calls it. And the whole article goes downhill from there.
Instead of pursuing the business benefits of internal communication and collaboration, and the huge opportunity a CEO has to participate in that, he focuses on whether or not the practice is legal. Really? This is what we're concerned about? Why didn't he, instead, find out what the CEO was doing with the information he gleaned from this resource? Or inquire about ways the employees are working together better because of this tool? Or find out whether the admittedly unusual practice of changing the compensation system to reflect employees' participation is working well for the organization? Or, God forbid, actually ask the CEO if it had occurred to him to participate instead of just reading along?
The attorney the author quotes gets it, but it's too late. The author has chosen the "m" word and he's not letting it go.
