Building a Communications Plan from Scratch

I'm Kisam Patel and you're listening to M and A Science, where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during MA deals. Before we get started today, I want to let you know I recently published a book called Agile M and A. We all know the M and A process is highly inefficient and there's no real standard or evidence based approach to completing M and A deals. Agile M and A is a project management framework that emphasizes responding to changes, collaboration and continuous improvement. This means your team will improve identifying risks and opportunities during diligence as well as planning and executing integration so you can actually deliver on predicted value drivers. Get your copy of Agile M and A on Amazon or any major bookstore. Learn more@agilema.com hi. Today I'm here with Stephanie Carty. Stephanie is a corporate communications professional with more than 15 years of experience at companies like GE, KPMG and others. Her expertise is in executive communications, ensuring top leaders communicate with honesty, clarity and credibility. Today we're going to talk about how to best prepare for day one and avoid disasters. How are you doing today, Stephanie?

I'm doing great, thanks. And you?

Wonderful. Maybe if we can just kick off with a brief introduction on yourself.

Sure. I have been doing employee and executive communications for over 15 years with a variety of different companies, including GE and KPMG and more recently in the healthcare space. And my role is internal communications, helping make sure that executives communicate with their employees and then employees understand the why behind changes within the organization. And I've been involved in everything from divestitures to acquisitions to mergers. And they're significant events that impact everyone involved, no matter where they are in the organization.

Can you start me off from the beginning? When does planning actually start?

So as soon as possible is what I would tell you. The communications planning typically begins right before signing, so those sometimes due diligence done before I get involved. But even knowing that a transaction is in consideration is useful for the communications team so that we can take that into consideration when we're planning other communications. But for the actual event, it usually takes place before signing. So most transactions have a signing announcement and then they have a closing announcement.

How do you go about preparing for it? Who's involved?

Well, everybody should be involved. What's interesting about internal communications is it can sit within several different places within a company. So sometimes internal communications is part of marketing and sometimes it's part of hr, and sometimes it just doesn't exist at all. And People will assume that their marketing folks who are doing PR will take into consideration internal communications. But when we can get involved in the beginning, it makes a lot more sense so that we keep employees connected. So investor relations often thinks about, you know, going to the marketing or PR team for the press release. Your employees should never learn about something from a press release. They should learn about it from their leaders.

That makes a lot of sense. Is there. Do you have a view in terms of where communications sit? Because you mentioned sometimes it sits with hr, with marketing, or doesn't exist. Is there something that you see in your experience where it is ideal?

You know, I have to say that I think it really does fit with. If there's a corporate communications function itself where that is standalone, separate, that works great. So corporate communication, doing investor relations, external, common, internal, comm, that actually works very well, especially for companies who have a lot of merger and acquisition activity. If there's not, and it has to be between marketing or hr, I find that it fits better with hr. The HR team tends to be more in touch with the employee response and the culture. So communications being connected to the actual changes employees are going to experience, I think makes a lot of sense. It's where it's been most successful for me. Most marketing people can consider employees as one of their audiences, but it's not their priorities. When the function sits within marketing, it sometimes takes a backseat to branding and external communication. So I'm a big fan for partnering with hr.

Interesting. So primary is to have actually a dedicated function, then fall back on hr.

Yes, yes.

Let's talk about the components that go into communication, because I know we mentioned having a press release. There's internal employee communication, and then obviously communications with customers and vendors. Could you maybe outline if there's any of those that I missed and what the order would come in?

Yeah, there are lots of pieces. Even if you're just talking about, we're announcing that we're signing an agreement to make something happen. And that's usually the first thing that you would publicly tell people about. And sometimes that one's less elaborate. Right. It's a press release and an internal announcement, depending on the size of the organization and whether the organization is privately held or publicly held. But if it is publicly held, a press release is almost always required. And what I always want to make sure to do is communicate with employees concurrently with the press release. Because of concerns about insider trading, you can't do it much earlier than concurrent with the press release. You can have conversations with certain levels of leadership. But you can't do broad announcements in a publicly traded company unless you're announcing it publicly as well. So those pieces that we'd see on a signing or like beyond the press release, sometimes you would have what they call a micro site, which is a small website that's just dedicated to materials about the transaction and that gives a place for investors to go that's not, you know, one company or the other. If it's a merger, it's a combined site. I'm a big fan of giving people talking points. So a manager toolkit with here's what we say about this, here's what as a leader I should be saying to my employees about this transaction. And FAQs, it's better to anticipate what people are going to ask before they have to ask it. You can do emails to customers and vendor letters. And if you have events going on during the announcement. So sometimes you have people who are at trade shows or other industry events, you want to equip them with what they're allowed to say about the transaction during those events. Because mostly people just want to be in the loop. They don't want to get questions that they can't answer, don't know how to answer. And in the absence of being equipped, they'll make things up. Like most people won't default to saying, I don't know, they'll say something. So it's always better to give people something to say rather than have that void of information. And then the media inquiry process, like a lot of times people have no idea that they're not supposed to talk to the media or if they know they're not supposed to, they may not know whom to refer someone to. So you always want to make sure you have clear, if you get an inquiry about this, here's who you send the request to. And there's some other stuff. You know, there are things like, I'm interviewing people right now, or I have job offers in process. What do I tell people who I'm recruiting? It's a big change for an organization, even a small organization.

Yeah, you mentioned quite a few interesting tools. I like the idea of the microsite making sure leadership's armed with talking points and having these frequently asked questions, FAQs out there as well. I'm curious on the whole announcement piece because you always notice it. I think you got a good point. When it's usually the public company deals where they'll announce them ahead of time, then it's kind of funny. Like we had a recent one With Google's acquisition of Looker, where it didn't get announced till almost a year later, I mean, finally closed till a year later. So that's always like kind of a funny thing. What drives that between doing that versus like announcing it when it's closed? What drives that and what's the big difference when things are said and done between the two?

It's typically, I mean, you won't see a public company not announce something that is considered or could be considered material now. So if a transaction is significant enough and the company is public, they're going to announce it. Privately held companies have a lot more leeway, but they get excited sometimes and they just want to go ahead and announce it. I've seen long delays in between signing and close and I've seen very short periods. Right. And so some of those where it's like we sign and then four weeks later we close. It's like, well, that was a lot of work for something that didn't take very long. The public companies almost must do it if it's material. The private companies have a lot more leeway because they're privately held. They tend to be more open with their employees. And so it's nice when you're communicating because you want to, not because you have to.

Right.

And you have a lot more wiggle room and leeway in the timing in a privately held company. And you can, you can do things in the right order. Right. Like ideally you would verbally tell people, leaders that this was going to happen and then those leaders would verbally tell their teens it was going to happen and then they get a message and then there'd be a press release. But because it being material information, you can't do that in a lot of circumstances. It used to be we could kind of get away with like, okay, the press release went half an hour ago and we have this kind of window before anybody might notice it internally. But now in the day of Google Alerts, as soon as you release a press release, it's your employees are notified, Right. They're following the company news, they're getting Google alerts on their company. And so as soon as you do the press release, people know about it.

Probably got like 100 different internal group chats and all of a sudden it's going to be trending between all your different group chats.

Yes. So it's like literally, I've been, it depends on where your company's headquartered. Right. So the mean, I've sent things at like 2 o' clock in the morning east coast time because it's before market in France. Right. And so people are like, well, thanks for telling us at 2am and I'm like, well, we were telling you when we told France, so, you know, that piece makes it harder because ideally you would want everybody to fill in the loop before it became common knowledge outside the company.

Gotcha. So the big companies, the public ones, they'll do it as part of required material disclosure because obviously companies like Google are doing a lot of acquisitions that don't ever get announced and they're kind of under the radar. But if it is something that big, then, then they'll go ahead and do that. And then as well, you sort of seen the private company side where they may not be required to do that, but then just the way they operate, they may naturally be more open to discuss. Seems like, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that it's just generally better to start talking about this earlier than later.

Yeah. Because it gets out very, very quickly. Right. So when you have teams who are working as hard as you must work on an M and A deal, it starts to become very visible, even just from the being unable to connect with certain leaders. People start talking. It's better to talk about it as soon as you can internally. You'd be surprised. I mean, people can read into executives meeting off site in a particular physical place, right. Oh, they're here. They must be talking to this company down the road. People really do pay more attention than you would expect that they might. And they read into things. So as soon as people start using a project code name, people start hearing the project code name.

What are components of M and A integration People don't realize go into a smooth transition.

Gosh, I don't think anybody who's not in the thick of things gets how much work is involved and how many people have to go talk to one another and figure out the mechanics, you know, doing due diligence and how complicated that can be, given access to systems and limitations on what information people are willing or want to share with each other. It's a lot that goes on before that signing announcement even happens. And then you've got two companies who've not worked with each other before. So there's a whole lot of trying to get to know each other and figuring out who's taking the lead on what and who's drafting what. And it's quite complicated. And, you know, people are always just like, well, why didn't they do X or Y? And it's like, wow, that we did Z is pretty good. So I would say there's lots and lots of planning and intention and research that people are doing before they can even say we'd like to do business with each other.

What are some of the behind the scenes things that you do that are not necessarily seen externally but are actually very important to do or manage?

Well, I'd like to say that it's something pretty sexy, but I have to tell you, it is all the just tactical logistics of making communications happen. To be able to communicate with your own employees is not an easy thing, much less to then be able to communicate with employees who are not yet yours or who have just become yours. The logistics of that is crazy. Right. Like you would think that leading companies would have very clear distribution list and define groups of people to send things to. But I have to tell you that Outlook distribution lists are just chaos and mayhem everywhere. So it's those logistics. It's like, can I literally get people an email to people? Can I literally get people from another company onto our conference calling system? Can I, can they see my Day One video without me taking their network down? It's the logistics of it that get really complicated and you have to operate a little bit in the dark. Right. So I had one CEO who wanted to go to an acquired site for the Day one broadcast and he wanted to do live streaming video. And I was just like, I can't do this. Like I can't make this happen. I can't even get into this building until we're ready to close. So I can't go and set this up. And I don't even know if they have a space that'll hold 50 people. Right. So it's, it's the tactical logistics that are actually way more complicated than they should be or anyone would think they are.

Wow. Death by tactical tasks.

Yes. It's just, you know, like I will tell you that there's probably been combined a year of my life dedicated to sending emails in batches of 500 because that's the limit that Outlook will let you send to if it's not a defined distribution list.

Wow.

It's a really high level strategic things that I do.

What drives a smooth transition?

Oh, leaders. Absolutely. The leaders taking it seriously. Seeing that the employees are their primary audience, they get pulled in a lot of directions if this is a significant announcement for the business. So they have to talk to investors. Critical clients want to talk to them on day one and they may kind of say like, oh, we'll get to employees later. But when the leaders are very engaged and very concerned about the impact on their employees, it makes all the difference.

I mean, how do you get that? I mean, how do you. Because you're telling me and you notice this. But what specific actions can you tell if a leader. Things are going right and there's good leadership there versus not, it's how much.

Attention they paid to it. Right. It's asking the right questions like, who should I, you know, I've had leaders who are like, who should I meet with? Right. Where should I be? Not, oh, I'm going to be here because of this investor event, make something happen around that. So good leaders are really asking the question, like, how should I connect with these employees? And when they're willing to do that, you can give them lots of opportunities. Right. Like, people like to see the new leaders. Road shows right after day one are actually very helpful. It just, you know, a CEO has limited time, so a lot of time and it's uncomfortable. Right. So talking to a new group at a place of change where you don't have all the answers, like, when is my email actually going to work? Is an uncomfortable thing. So when you see leaders who are okay with like, I'm perfectly fine going and talking to these people and telling them we don't know yet, that's the difference in leadership. When they're more like, I'm too busy and I need to go deal with these higher level tasks, that's where employees can get lost.

Right. This makes sense. I mean, this is almost like any great company is very focused on their customers and almost in the position of M and A. Your employees are essentially your customers. Is your leadership focused on the employees?

Yeah, because, you know, your employees are interacting with your customers all the time. Right. And if you equip them to do that, they'll do it well for you. If you don't, then your customers are going to hear, well, we don't know, we haven't heard, we haven't been told. And that kind of concern, that fear can bleed over into your customers who think, oh, well, this is just not going well. And it could just be people haven't told them it's going well.

So we can agree. Leadership should be obsessed with employees.

I believe leaders should be obsessed with employee communication and perfectly okay with telling people this is going to take time and we don't have all the answers because those are facts. Right. I think the most surprising thing about divestitures, acquisitions, mergers is they take 10 times as long as the normal person would expect. They would. And if the deal itself doesn't take long, the integration will. And that's the fact. Right. It's just reality and it's not doing anything wrong. It's just reality. But people, if they don't have that expectation, they expect to see immediate change. And the months that go on in which nothing changes or nothing's been clearly decided, that's the hardest part for people. That's hanging out with uncertainty.

Right. I could see that happening.

Yeah.

Can you walk me through milestones when communicating M and A?

So we talked about the signing agreement. There may be regulatory approvals along the way that have to be garnered. And those are nice points of communication for you to be able to say, we've made this progress. They're not necessarily meaningful to employees, but sometimes in that interim period between sign in and close, they can be a good update. If you've got a good integration team together that's pulled together prior to closing, there are some good things that, you know, we've met each other, we know each other. You can communicate those things as milestones. And then it really works up to closing, which is day one. It's very rare that you have a closing that happens like after the market closes and then day one is the next day. But that sometimes happens. Usually you do your. The transaction has closed, that announcement before the stock exchange opens in the morning, and then you have a day one. Right. So that can be you're no longer part of our company, or it can be welcome to our company. And there's a good deal of communication people may need on that first day, depending on the scope of the change. So if the company is changing its name as part of the transaction, there's a lot of branding and how to, you know, answer your telephone and what your email signature should look like, really, those kinds of communications that people will spend time and energy thinking about if you don't give them direction. If it's a small, we've just brought them in, then you still have to communicate with the new group of employees. So, you know, here's the timeline of how we see you joining our company and what changes are going to happen. So signing few things in between, big deal on closing in day one. And then, you know, integration can take months to years to happen.

Yeah. So it seems like it tails out with a pretty ongoing, consistent, well, not consistency, but process with integration.

Yes, yes. And I have to tell you, for anybody who's considering buying something and leaving it alone for a long time, you're just prolonging Your agony. So the longer that you let something that's been added to an organization not be integrated, the harder it will be eventually.

I'm realizing that I think people that don't really know integration have that view that they should delay it and do it over time.

I'm not seeing it work unless you truly have no intention of integrating the company. If you really want to operate them separately, standalone business unit, not ever going to connect them because we're either going to just operate them that way or we're going to sell them later, that's okay. Still not great. Because people, people want to either be apart or be left alone. They don't want to be anywhere in between. But the sooner you can work on the change, people are ready for it. People expect to see a change at day one and so they're more ready to deal with it than they will be in six months when they've decided, oh, we're okay, nothing's going to change for us.

Everything builds up to day one. What is day one like?

It's good, it's exciting. You know, it's exhausting for a communicator. So I will give you, I'll tell you a story about my exhaustion on a day one, but from the employee experience, they should have some sense of this is what has happened and this is what we are saying, who we are saying we are now. And here's what I can expect. And so the really good day ones I've seen have had a really high executive touch at all leadership levels. So you might have a day one all employee town hall or you might have an all employee conference call with the executive, or you might simply get an all employee video and email. But then you would have your business unit leader would then do a touch point with you and your manager would then do a touch point with you. I had one company that had a really nice setup where we did an employee gift on day one for everyone. Even employees who were not part of the new, you know, who weren't newly added existing employees got a gift as well. So, you know, if you can make it feel like a fresh start for people, that can be really exciting. And it doesn't take a lot to make things feel fresh. You know, really just talking about what's important to the company and the direction for the company and helping people make the simple changes they need to make. To think, you know, just process things they do can make a big difference. It's a crazy time though, right? You've got lots of moving pieces and lots of questions from all of your audiences. So the more you're prepared, the better you can respond or equip people to respond. Right. That's the best thing you can do is equip people to communicate themselves.

Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. What often goes wrong?

Oh, people will say that they're going to do it and they're going to communicate and they don't. So you know, when you rely on leaders to host meetings with their teams and they just don't do it, that can leave a real gap. I had it happen one time where we had an announcement and the employees in Europe got really mad because they were like, no one talked to us about this. And I'm like, your general manager was scheduled to speak to you about it. What happened? And they really. No one ever spoke to us about it. So it's when you know you've got a nice, well laid plan that you think the pieces are happening and then people just don't do them. Yes, that's a gap. Right. And, and people can take it personally and they can hold it against you for a while. The Europeans were mad at me for a long time and I'm like, there was a plan, it wasn't followed. What else goes wrong? Technical problems. Right. You get. Try and get a lot of people on a telephone and you have technical issues. I can't remember my last CEO right before he walked up to do the town hall, I said, don't take for granted that people know what we announced today because I'm not quite certain that the email went through to everyone. So make sure you go through the details of what we announced. Don't just say, well, that was an exciting announcement today. Here's what we're going to do next. Because they may not know there was an announcement.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it's better. I have to say the technology part's a little better now. I'm not having so many things crash on me because of volume, you know, at once upon a time, if you sent all your employees to look at something on your intranet or on the Internet on the web, you would crash your servers. Right. We're not having that kind of problem as often.

That's a good thing.

I'm like, yeah, except, you know, I mentioned the micro site earlier and we did take the precautionary step the last time. I did a deal of limiting access from our internal networks to the micro site to limit employee traffic to something that was intended for external people, people just to protect the site from too much Traffic.

Oh, it's a good set precaution.

Yeah. There's a lot of things that you have to think about that are intended to keep everybody safe, but then can restrict the way you communicate. So, like whitelisting. You know, if I try and email a company, an external company, directly from outside, outside, and I send batches of 500 emails to employees at a different company without it being whitelisted, then nobody's going to see it. Right. There's, there's all of these security blacklisting and things to keep us from spamming people. And then I'm like, okay, well, but they're my employees now.

Yeah.

Simple things like that. So I tell you, when you say who should be at the table, it's not just the IT person who's going to say, our systems, our customer systems can all connect to each other. Even essentially is the IT person who can say, yes, I will get these things whitelisted for you.

Yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like some of the biggest challenges on day one is really around communication and just making sure communication is carried out effectively. Does that sound right?

Yeah, it really is. Making sure that people are serving in that role. Right. It can be scary to be in front of employees during the middle of a big change, and executives are often equipped to do that. But unless you've equipped the managers, they won't necessarily. They'll say nothing instead of getting involved or they'll say the wrong thing. So I always do my best to make sure that anybody who has direct reports should have some information to share with that person.

Right. And if you look from the employee's perspective, their biggest concerns are, do I still have a job? How am I getting paid? What else?

What's happening to my healthcare?

Yeah, but benefits, my benefits.

Number one is, do I have a job? Number two is what are. What's happening to my benefits? Number three is usually like, can I go work in another office now? I'm always like, why do people suddenly want to go work someplace else?

That's the thing. They want to work from home. Everybody wants to work from home.

Now they want to work from home or they want to work from that, you know, other company's office down street. Right. I'm like, I can't even get my executives into that building. You want me to reserve you a cube? But it, you know, it really is, what does it mean for me? Right? What, what does this mean to me? And the first parts of that are fear. Right. I'm afraid of what bad is going to happen and then after that they start looking for the opportunity in it. Right. Oh, could I work from here? You know, does this give me a better care? Are there other jobs in this organization that weren't there before? But you have to get all of that fear piece has to be addressed first and foremost.

Yeah. It seems like there is like an initial shock that happens initially and then once people get over that, then things settle down. It's almost like with any change, except obviously M and A is probably one of the largest magnitudes of change that could happen.

Yeah. And they don't have very much choice in it. Right. You feel like you have some choice when you join an organization and you've accepted a job offer and you've done your own personal due diligence about I want to be part of this company. And then suddenly this company is changing and you have to help them understand what that means for them and that it will take some time before they will see a change.

Right. What happens after day one?

After day one you start working on, hopefully you start working on integration and you don't just leave people alone. Then you get a whole lot of the tactical communications around email integration and systems integration and those can take, you know, I would say typically it takes two years where you're doing now we're moving you on to our single sign on platform and we're moving you on to our HR system. And there's a lot of communications around that. And that's when people start getting frustrated because things they knew how to do or systems they knew how to use are now being replaced and not always by a better option. Right. Expense reporting systems people have very strong feelings about.

I agree. That's one of the things I have to proactively do. If one of the our customers gets acquired, I have to go visit and make sure that we stay relevant to what they might potentially replace it with.

Yeah. And you know, people have gone through these changes within their own organization already frequently. So it's like you have to tell them, oh, you're going back to this expense reporting system you were relieved six months ago to have gotten rid of. Right. Or now we're changing your timekeeping system. It's all of those things that people interact with that you're willing to learn when you're new to a company. Like you're like, oh, I'm a new employee, I've got to figure this system out. But when you've been doing it for some time in your current role and it feels like an arbitrary change and it may not be a positive change. It may not be an improvement in your opinion. It, it gets to be a bit wearing on employees. You expect to have to do some of it, but then it takes two years and people, it gets tiring.

You think it's going to get faster? I feel like with all these technologies and people now understanding how M and A works, it's starting to think about use cases more often when it comes to Tamina.

I think for smaller organizations it can go faster because you're going to see people more on cloud based tools that have just are simply easier to integrate. These larger organizations are just still working on some really massive legacy systems.

Yeah, I would agree.

And they, they just, they're intentionally not easy to connect to other things. I think, I think for smaller organizations, absolutely. I think it could be a lot easier. But for the large organization, it's just like moving a mountain sometimes.

Stephanie, what kind of surprises have you seen?

What surprises have I seen? Sometimes leaders and companies won't show up at all for a day one. So a good acquisition to me has a degree of handover. Right. Like these are our people and we're handing them over to you and we're being nice and everybody's seeing this happen and it's a day we're not just leaving you behind and abandoning ship. Right. There's a nice handover between the two teams. And I've seen some leadership teams just be like no, they're yours and just not show up at all.

Wow.

I can't, I can't imagine being willing. Maybe I, maybe I feel more maternalistic towards people. I can't imagine just giving them up and not having a handover. And I think it's been the biggest surprise like what organizations will just be like, yes, they're yours now. It can be surprising to me some of the things that you get pretty close to closing and people haven't thought about just from a employee benefits, employee decisions. So sometimes people forget that people have 401ks that are going to have to move and that they have vacations that need to be accounted for. There's some of that, but it's just like whoa, how did you guys overlook the fact that you might need to give people days off in the new world? That often though does work in the employees favor. A lot of times people haven't accounted for vacation that's been taken. So sometimes employees get a whole reset on their vacation after the acquisition because nobody was tracking it to begin with.

That's funny.

Yeah. What else have I seen? What Bad things have happened. Things. Sometimes leaders take it on themselves to just announce things before they're decided. It's not usually your executive team, it's usually somewhere three levels down in the organization. Someone just decides to send an email reassuring people about something they shouldn't know about at all. Wow, that one's always fun. Sometimes people jump the gun and go into office space and start measuring office spaces or put buildings up for lease before it's announced. Wow, what else have I had happen? Not too much bad behavior.

Can you give me an example of like what not to do on day one or leading up to day one.

What not to do? Talk about change too much without being specific. So a lot of people get excited and think people should be excited about change and they'll just, in big terms, talk about this is going to be a tremendous change for us. But then they won't tell people what's actually happening. And that's not inspiring, it's just terrifying. People really would rather you tell them what's not going to change. And there's a lot of stuff you can usually give in specifics, like you're still gonna get paid, right? We're not changing your pay cycle. There's specifics you can usually give people what else not to do. Don't just hand your employees off without saying goodbye to them because you might want them in the future, you might have them as a customer in the future. So if you are the divesting company, treat them as if you could eventually rehire them and treat them as if they are valued and had been part of your organization. Right? You're divesting of a business. You're not divesting of the relationships that people built. Don't do the massive layoffs if you're going to have them more than three weeks after close because people start getting comfortable that nothing's going to be announced. And after about the three week point, if you then do layoffs or major changes in leadership, people are almost aghast, right? They're just really surprised by it. They expect change early. And by early they mean very early. Right? In the first couple of weeks. The longer things take to change, the more dramatic it feels for people. And it's hard to do those changes in people early because you don't even know what people you have when you're acquiring a company sometimes. So it's hard to say, we're gonna, these are the positions we're gonna need to keep and these are the positions we have going forward. But if that takes a Long time, you've let people relax and then they feel shocked and surprised again.

Those are really interesting views.

Yeah. It's hard though, right? A lot of people are just really surprised when a leadership change happens on day one. But that's the cleanest if you can make it happen. If you have a major leadership change happening on day one, it lets people go forward knowing this is a different place.

What makes creating a comp plan for day one so taxing or difficult?

Well, you've got to get everybody on the same page. So if you've got a divesting organization that is. Does feel ownership in its employees and is involved in the planning as you need them to be, you have to get in alignment on what you're saying. And it's difficult to get alignment within your own company about what you're going to say about something, much less about across two companies. So in the example of a merger, you've got to get everybody comfortable with this is what we're saying to this combined group. And that can be really challenging because you're working like on my side, I'm working with communications professionals I've not even met. I've not even seen the way that their employees have been communicated with in the past. I don't know their channels and I don't know their language. So it's almost like working with. Well, it is. It's working with a completely new team of people to create something that makes sense to a new combination of people that really can be a tough thing to do. And you're all trying to be polite to each other, right? Because you don't know each other. So you're trying to be polite with the other people on the other side of the deal. Get to something that's mutually agreeable and that takes a whole lot of time before it's even passed up to leaders to sign off on.

That's interesting. It's. It's interesting how you mentioned that the whole perspective of the companies internally have their own way of communicating as part of their DNA and culture. But then when you're looking at your day one communication, you gotta get both sides aligned. Even though they have their own unique ways. That does sound like the biggest challenge.

Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, and often, depending on the size of the organization, I'll hit the like, well, we don't talk to these people, right. We don't have a way to communicate with people below the director level as managers. Right. So some organizations say, okay, we have leadership communications that go to these specific levels of employees. But if you're trying to get deeper into the organization, they may simply not have a practice of doing it and may not be able to. Right, we get in that logistics issue again. But it's that how do we talk to people? What would seem normal, you know, for some organizations, having the business unit leader be the one to deliver a message after the CEO did would seem frightening. Right? Because they would. The CEO would just cover it and it would be okay. Anything else would seem overly dramatic for them. So it's getting aligned on that and making sure that you understand how they're used to being communicated with. And sometimes you have to improve the way they're used to being communicated with.

I want to get your perspective on the real fundamentals of communication because you made a good point earlier about getting into the details. So don't just make vague communication, but actually add some details so people understand what it means for them. I'm curious on. Take an example. We're going to announce a bunch of layoffs. We're going to lay off 30% of the workforce. Walk me through a good way to communicate that.

Okay. The pieces of communication that people don't see are the individual communications that happen. So any major change involves a series of people talking one on one to people or to groups of people. So you want to do this cascade of verbal information before broad announcements are made. And that takes planning and coordination. So if you were going to have a large reduction in force, you would have a plan for how do we address the people who are immediately being impacted. And if you can do it concurrently, it's wonderful. But usually it's the same people needing to talk to people. So you do notifications of impacted employees, then notifications of non impacted employees, and then you do a general announcement. A lot of companies get really uncomfortable about doing the general announcement because, you know, HR will often try and say, well, we can't get it done as quickly as we need to get it done. Because ideally, if you're notifying people, it should happen in a 24 hour period. And it takes a lot of coordination to make that happen. Because, you know, people can be on vacation and things, but the goal is to make contact with everybody and then do a broad announcement. And to be as specific in the broad announcement as you can. Because I have to tell you, if you say a small number of employees, and to you, a small number of employees is 500 because your organization is 15,000 and to someone else, 500 employees losing their job is, you know, horrible. So when you're specific, a number is a number, right? It's better because I'm like, if you don't. If you're not specific, people will make up a number. And then you're having to deal with the reality of the number, right? So then you have this. Now I've got to tell people, no, no, it wasn't 500. It was, you know, 30. And they were over here and they were doing this thing we're not doing anymore and not at all related to what you're doing doing. So you want to be make sure that you've notified people who are impacted, notified people who are not impacted, and then told everybody it happened. And I have to tell you, if I get pushed back on anything, it's that I don't want to tell people when we've laid people off, and I don't want to tell people when people have resigned. I'm like, they're gonna find out, right? You can either tell them and help people understand the why, or you can react and respond to the questions that you're gonna get when people find out. It's better to tell people and deal with it. You can be respectful and you can be empathetic and you can help people make sense of it so that they feel less concerned about their own position. None of which you can do if you just try to act like it didn't happen.

What about when you're giving news to those that are impacted? How much of the why do you want to divulge?

So you want it to make sense to them and to not be personal, because typically, if it's a layoff, it is not personal. It is because the job has been eliminated. You want to give them some of that, but they're not going to hear it. I mean, you don't hear anything after someone tells you you've lost your job. Right? The why isn't going to make it through the fear response and the emotional reaction. But you do want to equip people with it so that they can come back to it. And you do want to help people make sense of that. So this job is not happening in this company any longer. Is. Is much more palatable to come back to later than, we don't need you or you don't have a job anymore.

Would I explain? Like, hey, the strategy is to combine back office processes and that's resulting in less required roles.

Yes, you want to give them that and you want to make sure that you're communicating that in those messages. But to expect people to Hear it. They won't process it till later is what I'm saying. You do want to communicate that, and that is the overarching communication to everybody who's not impacted so that they can understand the likelihood of them being impacted later. But if you do it well, and you're very specific in that rationale, then that's why I like to do the mass notification that it gives it an end point. Right. Like we notified people today. It was this many people. Whoever's been notified. Whoever's been impacted has already been notified. And it gives a little bit of a sense of this is done for now.

Right. I like that approach.

Works. Right. People appreciate hearing about it instead of learning about it from the grapevine.

Right. Any other advice you'd give to me on my next acquisition? And I got to do my day one announcements.

Well, make sure you have a communicator with you.

Yes, I will. I'll definitely make sure we have somebody on top of that. And for that person, what would you advise?

So I would always say think about who needs. Not even who needs to know. Think about who would feel like they should be included in communications and then equip them to help you communicate. So a lot of times we say people don't need to know, and they may not need to know, but people really want to feel in the loop. So if people feel like they should have been included, including them can almost never be a mistake.

Right. That makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

Stephanie, what's the craziest thing you've seen.

In M and a craziest thing I've seen? I did, like, 25 versions of a comm plan before. We had a buyer one time.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. We had no buyer, and I wrote the communication plan 25 times. And then I was on the phone the night before signing, and the attorney says, well, what we should say is, I forget it was something like asset only or whatever the terminology we were using. And the lawyer goes, stephanie, you've written that it's in version 21.

Wow.

Okay. I'll pull it out tonight before midnight, and we'll put it in version 25. You know, I do believe in planning. I like good plan, but, you know, sometimes you have to know some things before you start drafting.

Yeah, but I mean, is it generally good practice to have a series of iterations so things are well thought out?

Oh, yeah. Because I have to tell you that the. The writing, what you are actually going to say about a deal drives decision making. So it's not like I'm helping people communicate what they have decided. I'm helping them see what needs to be decided. And that sounds like I'm making myself be important, but I come to these things with questions that I know that employees will ask. And when we're reviewing what I've written as answers, you can see that decisions have not been made. Often the drafting of the Collins plan drives decisions in the actual how we'll bring these companies together. It all sounds well and good until you have to try and explain it to someone. And when you literally are trying to explain it, that's when you get it. Right.

Gotcha. So it's got to pass the conversational test.

Yeah. It's got to like, would I say this to, you know, my employee sitting in the room with me? Would it make sense to them? Would they buy it? Is it true? It's got to be true first. That's my standard is, well, I will help you communicate what is true, but does it make sense? Right. Does it matter? You know, are these big enough reasons for people to want to stay with us through this change? And it does it. You know, it's very funny. What I have had people, leaders do is ask me how I've known things. Like I've drafted documents that say, you know, this is how it's going to work. And they've been like, well, who told you that? And I'm like, I don't know. I made it up. That's why you're reviewing it. Right. Is it going to work this way or is it not? So sometimes they think I have information I'm not supposed to have. And I've just kind of put pieces together and said, well, this is how it should work. And then when we're literally wordsmithing it, we're deciding how it will work.

So be go through iterations and test things out.

Yeah. But not 24.

Yeah. Put a limit on it.

I will also tell you that I like to throw in kind of random statements sometimes to see what the other side will change. Right. So if you're in the middle still of the deal, I occasionally like to say, this is what's going to happen to see what the other. Other edits will be.

Yeah. Yep.

Right. So how you change my document about what we're saying about this could often indicate to me what your intention in this is. I. I've done that before. I've said, like, let's just make them change it. Right. They're like, oh, well, they're not going to agree to that. I'm like. Then we'll see when they change what I'm saying about it.

Right? Hey Stephanie, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for taking the time to teach me how to run Day one communications.

My pleasure.

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