Making HR comms less ‘meh’: Real talk, real connection, real impact

00:03 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Welcome to HR Disrupted with me, lucy Adams. Each episode will explore innovative approaches for leaders and HR professionals and challenge the status quo with inspiring but practical people strategies. So if you’re looking for fresh ideas, tips and our take on the latest HR trends, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the things I hated doing as an HR director was having to send out the all staff email, because usually I was sending out horrible things like oh, we’re cancelling Christmas parties this year. You know it was always pretty miserable. And then you’d get a whole load of emails back with angry, unhappy staff. So it was always an unpleasant experience.

00:52
But this one time I sent an email I can’t remember what it was about now and I got a phone call which was unusual at the BBC because they used to like to write emails rather than call direct. But it was a guy in the newsroom and he said oh hi, lucy, I just want to give you some feedback on your email. And my heart sank and he said your emails are crap. I was like well, thanks very much, jim, that’s great. And then he went on to say he said because they’re just not you, they’re boring, they’re dull and nobody really wants to read them and, apart from being slightly offended, I kind of looked back at my emails and I thought, actually he’s right.

01:33
I was so concerned in my communications to be, you know, accurate and fair and balanced and I’m not saying that I should have been making jokes when I was cancelling Christmas parties, but there was something about the way that we communicated it. You know the way we communicated in HR, that it was all about accuracy, it was all about being balanced and reasonable and it just ended up feeling a bit sterile and boring. This episode is all about how we can make our communications in HR really impactful. How can we cut through, how can we grab their attention? And with me to discuss this is my co-founder of Disruptive HR, karen Moran. Hi, karen.

02:23 – Karen Moran (Host)
Hello, great to be here.

02:25 – Lucy Adams (Host)
It’s lovely to have you here, and I know you share my view that HR comms can lack impact. So what do you think the problem is?

02:35 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, I think you’ve just summed it up, really, with your BBC story. I think we try, and you know we’re so worried, aren’t we, that we want everything to be the truth and and we’ve got the evidence, so we give them lots of facts and um, then we rely on our powerpoint slides, don’t we? And if we’re, if we’re letting managers loose, then they have their scripts of what they’re god.

02:58 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, they’ve got to have a detailed script. Say this then and it’s normally.

03:04 – Karen Moran (Host)
You know all the sort of stats about the business it might be. I don’t know D&I stories, data churn, figures. You know we’ve all been there, haven’t we? We’ve sat and looked at PowerPoints and just thought, oh gosh.

03:18 – Lucy Adams (Host)
I don’t want to be here.

03:20 – Karen Moran (Host)
I think that we, you know, it’s natural, isn’t it? I think we kind of work on the assumption that if we have this kind of clear business rationale, if we appeal to people’s logic and we give them clarity, they’re going to go. Yes, you know, come on, let’s do this, let’s make this change, but unfortunately I’m not sure that it’s working for us, for us.

03:41 – Lucy Adams (Host)
No, I mean, I think the biggest problem is our brains aren’t wired that way, are they? You know, if we present people with logic, facts, data, it only really appeals to that part of the brain that is about, you know, analysis and processing information. And yet what we’re often trying to do with our communications is to get a reaction. You know, we want people to engage with it, we want them to remember it, we want them, we want to inspire action. But if we’re only presenting facts, data and logic in a kind of slightly inauthentic way, we’re not going to get that emotional response. We’re not going to get that emotional response, you know, if they kind of engage with it on an intellectual level, rather than us winning over hearts and minds. You know, it’s like the inner cynic is woken up, isn’t it? So if we really want our comms to land, then and this is, I suppose, the first trend that we want to look at is that we need to get better at telling stories.

04:52 – Karen Moran (Host)
We do, we do, and I think you and I have seen some brilliant examples about how companies are doing this differently. So we’ve got Santander and they introduced carpool karaoke.

04:58 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And.

04:58 – Karen Moran (Host)
I just love that because it was getting their leaders in a car, in a casual setting, and they would just talk about you know how the bank was doing the goals, but also more personal stories about them, which, of course, is what we really want to know. We want to know about their lives, we want to know about their career challenges. So I just think that’s just again the stories that make us just feel much more intrigued and interested. There’s another company, dropbox, and they do this with kind of career stories, and for them it was around trying to move people away from thinking they needed like this kind of clearly defined career path. They would talk about employees stories about where they’d gone, how they jumped around, how they’d kind of ended up in a role that they didn’t expect, and it was kind of helped to inspire them about the possibilities, which, again, is a really nice way.

05:52 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Yeah, and there’s another example of, I think, great storytelling from the HR team, and it was something that I was, you know, I was lucky enough to be personally involved in. It was actually a direct line, and you know what it’s like when an organization wants to communicate its new strategy. Yeah, the typical way they’ll do it is they’ll get a big conference, they’ll get all the leaders in a room, they’ll present the strategy and then they’ll give them some kind of packed takeaway. You know back to your point about having scripts and PowerPoint decks, and then you see these poor leaders going out there and trying to deliver material that isn’t theirs and trying to convey it and end up reading the script or just delivering it in a way that employees. It just doesn’t kind of work for them. So what Direct Line did was they did the first bit in the same way, in that they got the leaders together, they talked to them about what the strategy was, but then, in the kind of later session, later part of the conference, they trained the leaders in how to use an iPad to record a video, or they gave them tips on storytelling techniques. They showed them how to create a visual impact with a poster, and then they said look, here’s a range of materials, think about your team. What would work best for them? Now go away and take this strategy and put it into language or a format or a channel that is going to resonate with your team. So they were kind of personalizing, but they were bringing in this storytelling and it went down so well and they actually you know, we don’t always measure the impact of these conferences, but they did and they found that the people who worked for the leaders who’d been at that conference, who’d been on the receiving end of this storytelling about the strategy, they were kind of, you know, 10, 15 percentage points more engaged with the future direction of the company, you know.

07:55
So I think it’s that kind of sense of let’s not give leaders a script to follow. Let them find a way or help them and support them to put it into their own voice, think about their audience. Um, so yeah, I think the storytelling is is definitely something that we need to get better at and it doesn’t always feel comfortable, but I think it it definitely is something that we’re seeing is a trend in HR communications, that that storytelling, that authenticity is being, is being brought through through, and I think this kind of leads us to the second trend that we’re seeing in HR comms, which is kind of honesty you know, grown up adult to adult communications. Again, a lot of our communications can be quite parental, can’t it? And it or it can be slightly inauthentic and and I loved the example that we saw from Ogilvy, the advertising agency, and, and this was their response to the Black Lives Matter movement you know, during that period so many chief execs and HR teams were thinking right, well, how do we convince our people that we’re great at this and that, you know, we have a much more ethnically diverse workforce and perhaps they realize? And they went in straight into action, whereas what Ogilvy did was that they put out a letter Obviously it was an internal letter, but they also put it out publicly where they just admitted that they’d failed. You know they said, actually we’ve let people down, we haven’t done enough, because what it does is that at least establishes some trust, before you then move into perhaps doing other activities and and carrying out different campaigns.

09:50
And and I think that that honesty is at the heart of of that. You know that authentic communications, if we feel that it’s too scripted, that it’s too contrived, we don’t trust it. Um, and you remember, at the BBC, you know, we had our internal newsletter which was called aerial. And I remember when I was going through my budget, when I first arrived and I saw this, this you know item in the budget for this news, this newsletter, and I thought yeah, great, that’s fine.

10:23
And then I was told that aerial newsletter, the you know employee newsletter, was editorially independent and I was like what? You don’t control it, we don’t have total control over it. And it was uncomfortable, wasn’t it, you know? They would kind of criticise leadership, they would criticise what we were doing, and I’m thinking I’m paying for fact that it was uncomfortable at times. It was read by everybody, people trusted it, it felt authentic and obviously was in line with the BBC’s values about being editorially independent and authenticity and trust. And so I think sometimes that kind of need to just tell it like it is, even if it’s uncomfortable, is definitely that trend that we’re seeing around. Yeah, authentic, honest, grown up communications, even if it feels uncomfortable, yeah.

11:32 – Karen Moran (Host)
And I think, even if it feels uncomfortable and you’re going through something you know that’s, that’s really scary for people, or people are worried, actually that kind of human honesty really works. So remember that example, was it WD-40, where, I mean, it was a long time ago now, back in the financial crisis in 2008, but they came out with a statement saying our motto is going to be no lying, no faking, no hiding. And I just think that we just relate to that, don’t we?

12:02 – Lucy Adams (Host)
and automatically think, feel that we’ve got a bit more trust completely and that those kind of conversations where leaders fronted up and are visible. You know, you and I have both worked in organizations where the minute there’s bad news to be delivered the leaders are like nowhere to be seen, are they?

12:22
you know? They start taking the back lift so they don’t have to go through reception. And remember that time we’d uh, we’d done this. Um, I think we had to make announcements of job losses again. It was in the financial crisis and there was that one leader who said right, you know, I’m gonna go and just go and play golf. It was like no, you’re not. You get out there on the floor and you, you know I’m going to go and just go and play golf. It’s like no, you’re not. You get out there on the floor and you, you know, you front it up to people. You go up to their desk, you kind of ask them how they’re doing. You might not feel comfortable doing it, but that’s what leaders do? You know they front it up with that. As you say that no lying, no faking, no hiding. I think it’s a great motto.

13:00 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah and and you don’t have to have all the answers it’s okay to say I don’t know, you know, I think we, we respect that so much more, and I think that’s part of the problem is that I think a lot of the leaders feel like they they might not have all the answers, they don’t know what’s themselves, what sometimes, what’s going on, and that’s really tough, isn’t it, but actually even saying that yeah, yeah and saying but I’ll try my best to find out for you, yeah yeah, absolutely, I’ll go and ask HR, okay.

13:33
so, um, I’m just thinking so. I think one of the next trends that we’re seeing is about this kind of little and often, and the important part of this little and often comms is that it comes direct from leaders. So I don’t know about you, lucy, but I feel like we’ve kind of over engineered internal comms a bit, haven’t we? We’ve kind of, somewhere along the way, we’ve built these kind of internal comm teams and you can almost see leaders sort of stepping back you know, feeling like, oh, I don’t, that’s not my responsibility anymore, and so we’re sending these messages out that are feeling a bit distant, a bit corporate.

14:09
Do you remember that bank we worked with and we spoke to some of the employees there in these kind of focus groups and they all admitted that they’d got their? Anything that was from internal comms was on auto delete.

14:21 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Auto delete. That makes you feel great, doesn’t it? I’m sure there’s been some people who’ve had eight rhr emails on auto delete yeah, maybe we’ll try it with certain things now.

14:33 – Karen Moran (Host)
That sounds really, really helpful so I think we want to hear from our leaders, don’t we? That’s what, who we really want to hear from, and so we can do that in you know, quick notes, quick whatsapp short videos, but just human direct rather than that kind of very crafted sort of all all staff email. So we’ve got um deutschcom do this. Deutsch telecom do this really well.

14:58
So when they were trying to connect people who were working hybrid, they realized that just sending out these kind of facts wasn’t working, and so they created a little employee app and they just put short daily updates so it could be a message from the team lead or a quick you know email from the team lead through this message app. So, and then of course, people can watch it in their own time, depending on what hours they’re working where they are in the world, but it keeps them sort of more connected together and DentaQuest, so they just send out bite-sized emails. Again, we can learn something from that, can’t we? And they said look, just remember, it’s only the important stuff you don’t have to talk about. Said look, just remember, it’s only the important stuff you don’t have to talk about, the kitchen sink. It’s. Keep it really short and relevant yeah.

15:48 – Lucy Adams (Host)
So let’s just have a little pause here, um, just to tell you a bit about our disruptive hr club. You know we’ve we’re lucky enough to have members of the club all over the world, and they are HR professionals who want to do things differently. And with membership of the Disruptive HR Club, you get things like weekly live training sessions, you get on-demand training. You get tons of useful toolkits to help you make changes in your organization. So if you’re interested in finding out more, just head over to the website disruptivehrcom to find out about the Disruptive HR Club. It will be great to have you join us.

16:32
Okay, let’s have a look at this fourth trend, then, which is all about personalization, and you know we’re seeing the whole kind of consumerization of the workplace happening in all sorts of areas, but communication, I think, is one of those that really really benefits from it.

16:52
Rather than the kind of one-size-fits-all email or using one channel as the means to get your message out, companies are saying actually, we’ve got different types of people that respond to different messages, different languages, different language, and will respond better if we use a range of different channels.

17:12
But rather than just this scattergun and just throwing everything at it, it’s about using the technique of employee persona to really think through who are the people in our organization. You don’t need more than about three or four, otherwise it gets too complicated but being deliberate and thoughtful about those employee persona, and this isn’t necessarily about grade or job role. It’s about how they consume media and what will be most important to them in terms of messaging. And this is what HSBC did with their internal communications and their HR comms and they used employee persona things like customer focus, banker, tech driven innovator and they used these persona to help shape the message. So it wasn’t generic, it wasn’t just this bland one size fits all. It increased relevance. It was about going to where they were in terms of channel and they found that that really had a much bigger impact that really had a much bigger impact.

18:26 – Karen Moran (Host)
Love that, I think, as well. We we forget about our people, so they’re just an untapped resource often, aren’t they? We don’t have to do this all on our own, and I think we all at work tend to trust our teams and our people more than perhaps we trust the corporate website. Um, so we’ve got um some examples co Coca-Cola. So they did this initiative called Total Refresh, which was a podcast but a bit like the aerial BBC magazine example. It was hosted by employees interviewing leaders, and so, of course, straight away, it’s more relaxed, much more relatable. They’re asking questions that you know that probably wouldn’t get asked otherwise, and so I really love that kind of idea. Yeah, and then we can use influencers. So we’ve always got those people in our organisations, haven’t we, that are just a bit more up for stuff. We get excited about things.

19:15 – Lucy Adams (Host)
So we used to call them the office gossip in the old days, didn’t we? You know the ones that we call them natural communicators?

19:23 – Karen Moran (Host)
the ones outside smoking. Yeah, those were the days 80s, 90s because you could still smoke in offices in the 80s, do you remember? Um, okay, so, uh, yeah, employee, so Aviva they call that. They called them health heroes, so these were like volunteers who were up for championing well-being and health and so they would talk about what’s on the hub and what they’re liking and really encouraging kind of take up. And Ernst Young did it too with learning, so they had what they call ripple makers. To with learning, so they had what they call ripple makers. So these again were kind of volunteers, employees who would talk about the learning that they were doing and saw a 65 increase in participation. So I just think that really works for us yeah, definitely so.

20:17 – Lucy Adams (Host)
Final trend is all about our language, and back to that all-star female that I started with it’s. You know, our language can be jargon filled, overly formal, very corporate, and so we’re seeing this final trend of HR teams finally waking up that it’s not big and it’s not clever to use language that normal people wouldn’t get. You know, I used to use this kind of would my mum understand it? Yeah, because it’s very easy, isn’t it? You know, we, every profession, has its own language, and HR is no different, and so we tend to use words and language that can be a bit off putting, and instead, what we’re seeing now is this trend of HR really using language that fits with the business, that is understandable, is relatable.

21:10
So, for example, netflix, they looked at their learning offering and they were kind of offering this micro learning and short, you know little videos and things, and they called it binge learning. You know, because actually that’s what we do with Netflix, isn’t it? You can binge watch. So it was tapping into language that people in the organisation completely got. Or Hearst Publishing, you know, when they looked at their performance management approach, they said, look, actually, let’s just change the wording and call it career conversations because, if you think about it, you know, performance management or performance appraisal sounds really judgy and you know, I’m not sure anybody wants to go and have a performance appraisal, but a career conversation that’s something that a lot of people might want. Yeah, exactly, um. So I think you know we’re we’re kind of waking up to the fact that using language that’s really accessible doesn’t actually damage our credibility. It actually improves it.

22:17 – Karen Moran (Host)
So, yeah, user-friendly, relatable, yeah, I think we can all perhaps go back and look at our kind of handbooks and just think about how might we say it differently so that it feels more relevant? So some examples we’ve got. You know, when we think about code of conduct, it’s like instead we’re seeing things like the way we work together makes much more sense. The way we work together makes much more sense. That’s great. The employee wellness program, it is, you know, your health and happiness.

22:51 – Lucy Adams (Host)
The probation period oh god, I mean the word probation actually means um the early release of an offender subject to supervision. If you google it, that’s what it means and that’s what we put people on what.

23:04 – Karen Moran (Host)
What are we doing? So we’re seeing companies talking it, talking about it as being the settling in period or the honeymoon period.

23:13 – Lucy Adams (Host)
The one I like is the getting to know each other period, because, again, it’s two way, isn’t it? It’s not that we’re kind of trying to assess you.

23:21 – Karen Moran (Host)
Yeah, it’s, we’re actually getting to know each other yeah, it’s uh, we’re actually getting to know each other, yeah. And then I think the luck, the other one I like, is this thought I mean competency framework. What competency framework? Would your mum understand that? Um, and instead we’re seeing things like skills for success. It’s just, there’s just. We can just be a bit a bit more creative, can’t we? Yeah, and a bit more human, a bit bit more creative, can’t we?

23:46 – Lucy Adams (Host)
And a bit more human, a bit more human, and I think you know. So we kind of sum it up Great communications for HR is about being honest and authentic. It’s definitely about that kind of human to human conversation and it’s about telling stories rather than relying on facts and logic and accuracy I’m not saying being inaccurate, but it’s not. That can’t be the only message. It involves personalizing, thinking about our audience, and personalizing and customizing, both with the messaging but also with the channels that we’re using. And, finally, it’s about dropping that formal language and jargon to make it much more appealing. So that brings us to the end. We really hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you have liked it, do let us know and look forward to seeing and speaking to you next time. Bye for now.

24:49 – Karen Moran (Host)
See you soon. Bye.