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Today's guest leads internal communications, that foundation medicine. If you're not familiar with them, check them out. They're transforming cancer care by providing patients, physicians and researchers with a deep understanding of the genomic mutations that drive cancer. So, in short, they're saving lives. Love the mission and I loved speaking with Alison Drake for today. Like I said, she runs internal communications and I think right around the time that we recorded this they actually won an award for the modern Internet of the year, which was just fantastic. We talked a bit about change communications, internal communications and how they can better serve changed within the organization. Bad to have alison. They're listening to see sweet blueprint, the show for sea sweet leaders here. We discussed nobodys approaches to organizational writiness and digital transformation. Let's start the show. Hey, I listen. Thanks so much for being here. I George, thanks for having me. So today we're going to talk about internal comms and I thought a great place to start is why is it so misunderstood? It's a little it's a loaded question really, I think. You know, when folks think about internal communications, they think of the tactics, right the email that goes out, the Internet page, they see in their company slack or teams or or things of that nature, and often folks think of the people behind that as just the doors, right. They think of the people that are pushing those emails out and making those updates on the Internet and sending those slack messages out, but they don't realize necessarily that there's a whole practice behind it, right, that this is actually a studied field, that there's theory and messaging behind that, that that there's strategy behind communications. It's not just the thing that you see, that that hits your inbox at there's thought and strategy that goes behind that. So I think you know, when folks think about internal communications, they often think about the thing that hits them personally. But if a lot of people don't step back to think about the people that are behind the scenes, that are making that happen, you're not just the newsletter people know. I mean we do an amazing newsletter. We do a kickass newsletter every week, but put it takes a lot of work to get there. So so that you know, they're just viewing the tactics or maybe if something's bugging them like some sort of a symptom that's going on. How should they see internal comms and what is that? I think probably the under utilized value that internal COMMS has. I think we're folks. I think I think the pandemic is a really good example of how folks could view internal communications. Right when, when the pandemic it in March two thousand and twenty companies who didn't have internal communications professionals in their organization, which some, some smaller companies don't, but folks who didn't have an internal comms function realize that they were at a severe disadvantage for communicating to their employees. There was an instant change that happened in March two thousand and twenty for companies, for employees, for folks who are at home, for day cares, for kit for everything and communic getting that change is hard and it's not just, you know, sending our an email and saying well, we're going to go home from for, you know, a... |
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...week, two weeks, and really at the beginning of the pandemic nobody really knew, but there was thought that had to go into how do you communicate this? How will this land with employees? What should we say. How should we say it? Should there be Faq's that that go along with it? And it's it was a comp it was probably one of the biggest communication challenges there was because it was a change communication, a huge change for people, and so thinking about communications professionals as I hate using the term strategic thought partners because it's so overused, but that's really what we are right so it's having a seat at the table and thinking about how will this be received, how will the information be preceived, and recognizing that the chant that potentially for when talking about the pandemic, that there could be a change impacting employees and how will they how will that change be perceived? So really having a seat at that table sort of early on and that discussion of sort of not handing them, handing communications folks the output, but being involved in the input of in the discussion. Yeah, the probably another example where the pandemic just shining magnifying glass on this value or this issue that's there. But I would hope that people can leverage that value and advert for smaller changes, right, for for more day to day changes or just initiatives that are going on. You know, we always talk about digital transformation and where employee experience me, it's customer experience. And what I find is you not only need to tell especially for these long running initiatives that might be, you know, one, two years, you not only need to get people bought in, but you need to continually get them bought in, because there's going to be pain along the way and if they don't remember why the heck they're doing this, there's they just get frustrated and they spin out. So I'd be curious if you have any kind of stories from the trenches on how you leverage internal COMMS and change comms for those non pandemic. We're going through some sort of a change in our organization. Yeah, it's so true, right, and so many people think about change as like, like big change, right, like massive change, or having a reorg and you know to two teams are merging into one, or you're going to be acquiring a company or there's a merger and acquisition right. So a lot of people think, oh, we only need to bring an internal communications when they we're gonna have this massive change, and I think a lot of times people maybe minimize the smaller like you mentioned, like a process or a systems. Systems changes are hard. I remember. I remember when we were changing from Microsoft teams to slack and so many folks were like, Whoa, we're just going to flip switch and change from teams to slacks. Like, wait a second, we can't. We can't just do that. We have to tell people sort of why we're doing this and and sort of bring this bring people along this journey and show them why one system might be better than the other, in this case, why slack was more useful for the business than potentially teams. But that's just one small example of having to sort of bring internal communications in and bring them along and and help folks understand that. There's education that needs to happen. There's the why. That needs to be why. They needs to be explained. You can't just flip a switch and make a change. And that was a big system change, but there could be a many small changes that happened in organizations where people... |
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...don't realize the impact that change can have on on one particular individual, one particular team. People experience change very differently. There is a curved change and we just sort of have to having a communications professional as part of that change process and the change communication can be really impactful and help and help the change go well. That makes sense. Yea. And ideally, the more change, the more smaller and medium size changes you're doing, the more of those giant, giant, you know, Earth shattering changes you can avoid. You know, I'm curious. Focusing on that change now. Have you? How do you how do you kind of set that up as an organization? Do you dedicate in an entire part of your group to just change communications and and is that the same as change management? How does that all that fit in? Yeah, in our particular company we do have on my team we have a person dedicated to change communications, because there is a methodology and a science behind change communications and and knowing how to communicate the about the change, asking the questions about a particular change and how to how to really get into the trenches with the business and understands sort of what it is that people might need to know, might need to hear, the questions that people might need to ask and teasing that out a little bit before whatever announcement it is that we need to make. But not every organization is set up the same way. We don't have a to my knowledge. We don't have a change like a change office. So you know, it's just we have a change communications person, but we don't have a change manager. Some organizations May, but at the particular organization on out we do not. We definitely, we definitely have somebody who's focused and has the lens of sort of that change curb and how to bring people along with them. That makes sense. And when it comes to communication, I love the fact that everyone's embracing more asynchronous communication these days. You know, like, hopefully, the days of feel a an hour long. You know, thousand people in a conference, days or con I'm sure they'll come here and there, but but less of them. Curious, you know how you've been leveraging a sync communications and and how that's working for you. It's hard, I got to tell you, it is. It is because it was immediate, right, so everybody was thrust into this, this environment, and in March, two thousand and twenty of we went from that's why we did things right in person, town halls and meetings. A thousand people are what to have you in a room and and the zoom factor was was secondary, and now it's the zoom factor is primary. And if, as we start thinking about. It's so interesting because you're start thinking about now, like Oh, when we're going back, and if so many folks were so excited like yes, I can't wait to be back in a conference room with seventy five, two, you know, two hundred people, and I'm like, oh, but we we actually have to remember we've actually created an amazing amount of equity by we've created equity by going this asynchronous route right, which I think was an artifact that I didn't that didn't realize would come out of the pandemic. Right, everybody was on an evil even playing field. Everybody's on zoom, everybody can see the same screen, everybody can see... |
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...everybody's faces. prepandemic we were sort of all, you know, podge podge in different rooms and and the sound might have been bad from one and the cameras really didn't work great. But now you're on the all on this even playing field. And so what started out as a really difficult transition has actually turned into, to me and a level playing field up, a playing field for communications. That creates equity across the company because everybody is seeing and experiencing the same thing at the exactly the same time. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What I really love is, you know, in old, older times, before pandemic, you know, you'd maybe have every once in a while you have a certain department do a show and tell of what it is that they're working on, or you have a big initiative this doing a show until and and it'll be a meeting that everyone has to you know, some lunch and learn or something that everyone has to you know, block off their time and say it and you'll record it and maybe a few people watch it. But now I'm seeing more and more that primarily it's let's create this as a video and maybe rethink how it's you know. So it's primarily a video that people who are interested can go watch when they want and how they want, rather than kind of the flip side. So we've been liking a lot of that, I think. I think to the hardest part for us has been events, right, so how you keep people engage? So, yes, you have this this, you know, information push of either town halls or luncheon learns or what have you, and sort of those it can be like point like you can go and get those when you want and watch them when you want. But I think what has become really challenging is keeping employees engage on the event spectrum. So you know, we used to do, you know, all the summer fests and the happy hours and you know, whatever those things are as how do you now we're going into we're in full year two, trickling into your three of sort of how do you how to keep that up and that that becomes really hard, and in a syncressive, a syncrenous environment. Yeah, that that true shared experience to rebuild that team equity and all of that is it's tough. Yeah, because we've been remote sin for since, since day one, for you, almost almost twenty years this point, and we would still get together once in a while, right, you know, and you'd have those shared experiences and those were important to us. And we do virtual happy hours and they're great, but it's not the same, you know for sure. Instead of yeah, and that's a communication, I mean that is a that as a vehicle and that's a tool and in that, you know, it drives engagement and help sustain our culture and that's a you know, when we think about our role as as communications professionals, it's that's a big piece of it is is helping to stay plugged into that world and and being able to only do that in a remote way for twenty plus months has definitely created a challenge. So which we we knew would be challenging, but it has definitely you know, going into, like I said, end of your two, beginning of your three, of sort of continuing to figure this out his and now going into a hybrid roll sort of. How do you how do you continue to make that equitable for folks going into next year? Yeah, I'm when you have new people coming on board, how do they find that? Things they need to find and and that's maybe a good segue into the topic of Internet. You know,... |
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...when we first met it was it was to do some Internet work, and I'm curious that word. How do you feel about that label, the Internet word? The label actually doesn't bother me. Label doesn't bother me. You know, I've been thinking about it because I'd say up until the past few years, if someone says, you know, we're going to work on an Internet, I probably would have been like that, oh Geez, that's so boring, right, but over the past several years there's been is become so much more and and I thought, do I want the word to go away, but then I said no, because then if someone comes up with some cute word for it, that would probably be annoying, right, and you'd be like so much. They be like, Oh, this is the the employee connector, you know, and you're like you're talking about an internet right, just stopped it. But we just say what it is, right. But then I started thinking about it. It's kind of like Brussel spouts, like you had a generation that steam them and made them bland and awful and forced you to eat them, and then then we realize, oh, we can roast these and making crispy and do like a balsamic production on them, and people now seek it out and they want to have Brussel sprouts rather than being forced to. And I'm curious. You know all you know. How are you leveraging Internet to get employee engagement or and are you seeing them? If you if you do it right, do you see them engaging with it more on their own, more than being forced to? Brussel sprouts would make and is probably the best that thing that ever came came to be. Yes, you know, I I see the intrnet and as a as another tool in the toolbox right. It's another tool in our communications tool box to be able to communicate with employees and it's more of a you know, employees are going there for a lot of times policy documents or potentially to watch a replay of a video that they may have missed. But it is a really critical and every organization that I've been in the intranet is a really critical tool and channel for displaying communications and and there really is no other standing for it. It's you can have email, but it's a supplement. It's all of the things. You know, we call, I love that we call ours the hub, because it is. It's the hub and the home of the information of all the things that you could possibly need or on the hub all the things about returned office, all the things about, you know, your health and benefit benefits and welfare information. All of that stuff is on the hub. Your manager resources, your employee resources, you're on boarding stuff, even prepandemic. All of that was on the hub. Your team made it infinitely better and easier to find and much more organized and manageable to and because over time that just sort of became a dumping ground because everything needed to be on the hub. That's where people were going to find their information, so to me an internet is a critical, critical component of internal communications for an organization like ours, of our size, for sure, and anything larger for sure. It's something I really like about about yours is the you can really connect the dots between the company vision to the strategy all the way down. I can't tell you how many organizations we go into on our strategy engagements and we do interview, one on one interviews. I we always ask people, are you clear on what the company vision is? Do you know what the... |
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...strategy is? Do you know how what you're doing fits into that? And Nine Times out of ten people are like yeah, there was like a power point sometime somewhere. There's a vision. I think there's like three pillars, four pillars, I don't know what it is, and I think you know. Having it really at your fingertips there and in easy to kind of connect the dots through, is it seemed from the outside it seems valuable. I don't know if you're seeing that. For sure to me it's, like I said, it's my it's one of my number one resources in terms of it is a resource. It's place where people can go to find information about our strategy, to find, you know, it's a directory to figure out like, Oh, I saw this person's name on the in the newsletter the other day. I wonder who that person is. Let me go dig around. There's IT'S A it's a wealth of information and a way that people can connect the dots in their own way, in their own journey right sort of self select and connect the dots and find information that they need when they need it. That's great. It's something I've also seen or heard is that I don't know how much of this is a promise versus reality. Maybe this is where some BS lives. But the empowerment of the Middle Manager Tier through, you know, things like internal comms and Internet, because, man, over twenty years I don't think I've ever seen communications cascade properly. It always gets lost in there, in the middle somewhere and you end up needing to like repeated and do a bunch of executive one on ones and and it never really seems clean. I'm curious what's in your tool box as far as empowering that Middle Manager. You have a secret recipe? I wish it's probably one of the hardest nuts to crack really in terms of information cascade right, because there's a fine balance between information overload right. Imagine if you walked into your and open your inbox one morning and it's just like Bam, you've got a thousand emails from a bunch of different people because there wasn't an internal communications function and everybody decided and needed to cascade everything. Well, that would be to that disaster, which is why we don't do that. But then it's sort of you have the other end of the spectrum of well, how do you communicate? How do you know what to communicate to whom and to when, and what should be cascaded to whom and to when? Everything can't be an all employee email because that's just too much. So it's hard. It's a really, really difficult nut to crack and I think one of the things we've tried to do here, which I feel works fairly well, is we have a monthly leader and manager meeting where it's an hour long meeting where every month sort of like the most critical pieces are shared, whether it's whether you're coming into performance reviews or year and conversations or if there was an org change, whatever, the most important returned off as whatever sort of that most important topic is, sort of the month is communicated there and it's the expectation of the managers coming out of that meeting that they will cascade in their own way, whether it's in their team meetings or what have you, that information to employees. That hopefully works well, but you're not going to get everything and everybody at all times. It's just too much. There's too much. There's too much information, there's too many things to communicate. It's not it's a tough not to crack, really is. Yeah, I almost, and I don't know if this is out there anywhere, but it almost wish that there could be a... |
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...way just based off of, you know, a handful of psychological profiles that you know you communicate in those different ways, like, like, for me, I would get the Irish Catholic like only tell me something when something's wrong, right, whereas someone next to me they might want to know, you know, all the reasons why every single decision was made and to talk to those those two different types of folks in the same way as it's impossible, right, it's impossible. It's really, really hard it. I mean, wouldn't be amazing. Would it be amazing if you could set up profiles and be like, Oh, this person wants to get information about x and you know I want information about x and you want information about why? That'd be amazing if we could set it up that way in some ways, when you think about the Internet and an Internet done well. And what we've tried to do is is we've done a based on your interest section. So if you are interested in learning about our employee resource networks, anytime an article goes up but employee resource network, you tag that and boom, you're going to get notified that there's a new article employee resource networks. That's great. That means I don't have to send an email about I mean I will send an emailbo employe resource networks, but it's sort of it gives people that option to choose what information is of interest to them. But man, it's it's hard. It's hard. HMM. And Yeah, I'd probably be hesitant at any software vendor that says that they can make that super easy. That would be be us. Yeah, that would be in and you've had an interesting career, so you've done this organizations that are, you know, forty fiftyzero employees, just a couple thousand, even some small nonprofits. What do you do differently, you know, other than the obvious. You know, what are the what are the big differences between those sized organizations? From any internal COMMS and change, it's really about the people, right. So internal comes to me is your employeese, your best brand ambassador's right. So the employees who make up the company are the people are going to go and talk about the company and who talk internally about the company, and those are your customers, right. So for internal COMMS, the employees are our customers. So the way that we the way that we communicate, so the stories that we tell or the narrative that we have. But the narrative that I might have internally just changes. It tweaks a bit based on who my customers and so, you know, in the insurance world, when I was when I was at in the insurance business, it was just a little bit different because I was speaking to folks who were working in insurance. The tactics don't change and the strategy and the mine that doesn't change. Sort of asking those questions and sort of bringing people along and if there's a change communication that needs to happen. Sort of the behind the scenes work doesn't change. It's really just how you tell your narrative. That change is based on, based on your customer, based on what your audience is, and they're all just a little bit different. MMM, it's the humans that matter at the end of the day, regardless. Yeah, they're all fun and unique in their own in terms of in terms of the different types of communications at each of the different organizations I've worked at. They're all different and unique in their own way. That's excellent. Anything else on the you know, I have a fun last question for you, but anything else that you feel from an internal comms or change comms that that we haven't touched upon? This really important? No, I don't think so. Okay. So I always like to end on you know, throughout... |
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...this could be personal or professional. What's the best advice that you've ever received? It's so basic, but it it's really true and it has never led me wrong. Trust Your Gut, absolutely, trust your gut and anything and in in deciding whether or not to take a job and deciding whether or not the in communications and writing something about whether or not you should ask a question if you're in a meeting. Just listen to your gut, because your gut will never, will never stare you wrong. It's simple. I love that advice. And there's it's simple and but man, how much does it suck when you don't trust your gut and then it goes the way that you know it is gonna go and present and every time, yeah, back you like I knew, I knew I shouldn't have done that, like because my gut was telling me that it shouldn't. Yeah, but yeah, definitely. It's it's so simple, but I we've all been in a situation where you look back, you have sort of, you know, high sights, always two thousand and twenty, but it's like, man, I've definitely had something in my goutelling me I shouldn't have done it. Yeah, that's like top three uses of time machine, if you were to have one, is to go back and follow our gut for short. Well, this is great, Alice, that I am so appreciative and and I really think that the change comms and internal comms is a huge tool in I know you didn't like using the term, you know, thought partner, but as a consultant, I live and breathe that phrase. You know I love it, and you know anytime you're going through change, I think this sooner the better to pull in those types of partners hundred percent. So thanks so much for being here, Allison. Thanks for having me. Technology should serve vision, not set it. At intevity we design clear blueprints for organization readiness and digital transformation that allow companies to chart new past. Then we drive the implementation of those plans with our pliant partners in service of growth. Find out more at wwwe that INTEVITYCOM you've been listening to see sweet blueprint. If you like what you've heard, be sure to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcast to make sure you never miss a new episode. And why you're there. We'd love it if you could leave a rating. Just give us however many stars you think you deserve. Until next time,. |
