10 | How to make your internal communications more human

Welcome to Face Forward, the inspiring change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. So good morning and welcome to Face Forward, the inspiring change podcast on all things internal communications, leadership, change, and engagement. It's exciting this morning because I'm here in London. It is a beautiful day outside, it's 28 degrees, and here I am with Harry Ashbridge from Monzo, sitting in the basement of their offices. In very trendy East London. I had a chat, I had a brief chat on text last night with Paul Rippon, the CEO from Monzo, and he described Harry as Mr. Words and said that I was going to get on splendidly in this podcast, so that's all good. Harry, thanks a million for coming on the podcast.

Thanks very much for having me, and sorry for putting you in the basement.

We'll go get the sunshine later. Yes, we'll go get the sunshine later. So I guess first of all, maybe tell me a little bit about you, where you've come from, your experience, and your role here in Monzo Bank.

Sure, yeah. So I've been at Monzo since the start of the year. I was just saying to you before we hit record that, funnily enough, even though I've only been here 6 months, that puts me in kind of the first half of the company because of how fast we grow. But yeah, I've by no means been here for the whole journey. I'm relatively recent. Before that, to go back to the start, I came out of university, I did a master's degree in history, which is kind of doubling down on being unemployable, and got a job in editing, became a glorified proofreader at a company that trained bankers. So I've always kind of had a bit of an interest in financial services generally, just because it's an industry I always thought could and should be doing better, especially in communication. And didn't love my experience in that first company. And one day I saw an advert for an organization called The Writer, and they said on their website that they were interested in stopping the tyranny of linguistic mediocrity. And I just thought, oh my God, sign me up! That's for me!

I'm in!

Yeah, and I didn't even realize it was a thing. I didn't realize there was an industry that people got paid to write everything that these companies churn out, or at least train people to write that stuff for themselves. A little bit of both of those things. Just a hidden world that I didn't know was there. So I jumped at the opportunity and I was at The Writer for about 6 years, starting out as the editor and kind of working my way into consultancy and writing and training. And agency life was fantastic and I learned everything I know, what little of it that is, but I wanted to do something that was more kind of long-term, see the fruits of my labor a bit more thoroughly, and I was casting around for a company that I thought was doing things the right way and really interesting, and Monzo was there, so I jumped ship at the start of the year.

Great, and what's your role in here?

So my job title is writer, and essentially my remit is to look after the words that we produce internally, externally. I sit in the marketing community team but it's by no means just marketing stuff. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit later on about why I think that's important, but basically any words that we produce inside and out, very important stuff on the front page of the website, teeny tiny terms and conditions, not that we have many of those, but what little we produce, my responsibility is to make sure that it all sounds and feels like Monzo.

And before we talk about you a little more, tell us just a wee bit about Monzo Bank.

Sure.

Your purpose and where you've come from and why you exist.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's actually really good timing because this morning, actually right now, we're publishing a blog post about what our mission is because it's something we haven't really defined particularly well in the past. Monzo is a bank that lives in your phone. We are a purely digital bank. We don't have any branches. And really, we're born among the kind of the ranks of these challenger banks to try and solve the problems that traditional banks haven't done particularly well. Trust in banks isn't particularly great. Customer service in banks isn't particularly great. I mean, that's what the numbers tell us anyway, the NPS scores that they get and the customer satisfaction scores. And also just the fact that finance seems to be a difficult, complicated, slightly faceless thing to deal with. And our mission is believing that money should just work for everyone. We want to make money work for everyone, partly in terms of making the most of your money, helping you be on the best deal for your energy company, that kind of thing, but also just that it should be a seamless, easy thing, not stressful, not charging you exorbitant fees for slipping into an overdraft that you didn't know you had, that kind of thing. So it's a little bit about fairness, a little bit about transparency, and mostly just about taking the worry out of what should be kind of a nice easy thing to deal with. Looking after your money shouldn't be a hassle.

Brilliant. And that leads really nicely into the reason that you and Monzo caught my eye. Of course, I've known of Monzo since the beginning. In fact, I was having lunch with Paul the day last year when the FSA granted your full banking licence. So you said very politely, I'm just going to leave the phone on the table if that's okay, because I might be getting a call from the FSA with our banking licence details. So I've kind of been watching you, and it's really, really interesting. What particularly caught my eye in the past couple of months, and the reason we're having this conversation, was your tone of voice. And when you look back through some of the blog posts, back to some of the earlier blog posts, I'm a huge advocate for tone of voice and the benefit it can bring to an organization. As I said before we started recording, I was a key part of developing AIB's tone of voice along with John Simmons, who I believe we both know.

Yeah, formerly of The Writer.

Yes, yes. So I had a great time with John developing that. And it was when you published your tone of voice and I saw that and I read it and I loved it because I thought it was great.

Thank you.

We'll talk a little bit more about it in a while. Why, as an organization, did you feel the need to write a tone of voice?

Right. I mean, every organization has— most organizations have a set of writing styles. They will be communicating with people through writing probably the primary way that they communicate, especially more recently, you know. Unless you are purely a kind of service retail company where you have lots of branches and lots of shops that people come into and talk face-to-face, the writing that you produce is the main way that people interact with you. Your emails, the website, the booking confirmation platform, whatever it might be, the live chat you go to for customer service, and all of those words that you're producing all day, every day are adding up to what you're like to deal with. And if you don't have a handle on that stuff, then the face that you're projecting to the world is incoherent, sometimes inconsistent, sometimes very much not what you want it to be. Most companies are pretty good at making the shiny brand customer-facing advertising stuff quite good, and they'll spend time and money on making that really work. But then behind the scenes and what we like to call the kind of nooks and crannies of a company's writing doesn't get the same kind of care and attention. You have acres and acres of terms and conditions. You have slightly patronising, if not downright aggressive, debt-chasing letters. You have kind of confusing process-driven stuff on the inside that doesn't really make everyone feel comfortable and confident that you know what you're doing, let alone what they should be doing. And then brands wonder why there isn't great trust and there isn't great kind of belief in what they're doing. And so every organisation has, like I said, these kind of various tones of voice, these different styles, approaches to writing. And it's my great belief that if you want people to really believe in the values that you say that you have and what you say that you stand for, then one of the things you have to do is It's be true to those everywhere all the time, and that means making sure that your writing everywhere all the time supports what you say you believe in, the values that you say you stand for. And that is what trying to nail down one version of your tone of voice, your approach to writing everywhere all the time, is about. And it's kind of an ongoing, never-ending challenge.

So is it about— is tone of voice then about putting manners on everybody in an organization, both internally and externally, to make them talk exactly the same, effectively turning them into automatons, that when you speak to one person, you'll hear the same tone as the exact next person and the same with the next person?

Yeah, I've seen it approached that way. I don't think it works particularly well that way for a couple of reasons. One is that if you walk into a branch of a shoe shop and everyone behind the counter that you speak to reads off exactly the same script to you, you'll feel like you've stepped through into the Twilight Zone. It's a little bit eerie. People don't talk the same way. So it's slightly jarring if everybody sounds exactly the same all the time. Secondly, it's incredibly hard to police. You know, if you're a company of more than 50 people, how the hell are you going to make sure that absolutely everybody's always towing that exact party line all the time? So no, I don't think it's about everybody sounding exactly the same all the time inside and out, but it is certainly about everything feeling like it has kind of a family resemblance. So if we believe in these set of values, we want to be transparent and open and friendly, what does that mean in our approach to writing and how does that carry through everywhere all the time? Not just when we're trying to sell people something, not just when we're trying to attract people to come on board and download the app and open an account, What about when we've got vulnerable customers who are going through a really hard time? How do we deal with them? What does transparency and friendliness and openness mean then that feels consistent with how we do it when we're advertising some great new product that we think people need and want and we want them to download it?

And I guess transparency, friendliness, and openness, how that's portrayed by Jim, Bob, Sarah, Billy, or Amanda are a bit different. Yeah, because that will bring a bit of authenticity with it and a bit of trust and a bit of transparency. Yeah, but actually it allows them— is it fair to say that it's almost you're effectively providing maybe a framework and guidelines rather than rules?

Yeah, yeah, so they're called guidelines for that exact reason, and it's the great, that list of writing tips that you get from— oh my God, I'm forgetting the name now. Plain English. Yeah, the Plain English guidelines that says, you know, break any of these rules, sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Because you're— what makes for the best writing, the most effective writing, is empathy fundamentally. Your audience, who you're talking to in that exact moment, if that means deviating slightly from this plan to have a better result and make them feel connected and listened to, then obviously you should chuck some of this stuff out of the window because you're in that situation, you're the person there and then. And we hire very, very smart people who are I think one thing that unifies everyone here is a real sense of empathy, like everyone really cares, driving themselves to distraction with trying to do the right thing for customers. And that means that if you try and tie them to this rigid set of rules, they're just going to lose their minds trying to follow that but also do the right thing for customers.

And the two are almost incompatible. Yes, nearly. So you got to your three pillars. Your three core tenets, if you like. How did you get to those three? I presume in an organization like Monzo, you didn't lock yourself away in a small dark room like this one and work out on your own what those should be. How did you go about creating those guidelines and working out what it was you wanted to stand for?

Yeah, well, one of the things that first attracted me to Monzo was the fact that it it felt like there was a clear sense of style when it came to writing. There was a personality that came through quite clearly, and it was those things. It was being kind of radically open, very, very transparent, very warm, very friendly, you know, the use of emojis, which at the time, a couple of years ago, seemed quite radical, although quite a lot of organisations are coming in that direction now, but it seemed quite fresh. And so when I arrived, it wasn't a case of going, "Okay, so what do we stand for? Let's bring in an agency and come up with a brand onion pyramid ladder, whatever shape you want it to be." It was the case of going, "So these are the things we're already doing. What are the umbrellas that they all sit under? So all of these things that we're doing over here about caring about what our customers care about, about, you know, making sure that they're listened to and feel like we're always on their side. Okay, well, that's about being friendly and warm and empathetic. And all this stuff over here about being really, really open to the point of almost it being uncomfortable and saying things that other organizations wouldn't. Well, this is radical transparency, so that's what that is. And it was kind of just grouping all the things we were already doing, putting them into buckets, and then going around and talking to the people here who've been responsible for all of that stuff and saying, so, what— why is it that we did things this way? And usually it was just, "Oh well, it just seemed like the right thing to do." And in an organisation which was, you know, 3 and a bit years old now, a lot of people spent a lot of time caring about this individually, and they just had this responsibility because they took it on top of what their day-to-day job was. And as the organisation grew, that got harder and harder to do, so I was just here to kind of tie all these existing strands together and go, "Okay, well, in a set of guidelines, if we say we're transparent, that what we were already doing, that maybe we didn't realize we were doing linguistically, is these things. So it meant that we weren't using any jargon. It meant that we weren't slipping into the passive voice. That sounds a bit shifty because you're not saying who's responsible for what. Your account has been closed. Well, who closed your account? We know it was Monzo, but that kind of thing is a bit shifty. So it was kind of putting some practical linguistic points onto existing ideas and ways of doing things so that when it comes to training people here internally to follow that tone of voice, we could say, "So you understand that we're transparent and that we're friendly. What it means in writing to be transparent and friendly is these 3 or 4 things, and in all of your writing that you do for any audience, any time of day, no matter what it is, these are things you can do, and if you do those, you will feel like you're writing in the Montez style and everything that we do will have that family resemblance I was talking about earlier.

So you're lucky in that when you came here, I guess in many ways, as you say, you were pulling together the strands of things and effectively creating guidelines to help to keep people talking in the way they talked already, writing in the way they wrote already, and dealing with customers in that same way as well. And it was like getting that down on paper in many ways.

Yeah.

Which is interesting because I think in lots of organizations it's almost the polar opposite. It's about trying to get them to do things completely differently. Although sometimes, you know, I know in my experience there was a will because I think people are inherently good. I think people are inherently transparent and inherently open and trusting and trustworthy. And I think sometimes you have to just give them a build a bridge to allow them to be those things in their writing and how they deal with with each other and how they deal with customers. So slightly, I suppose, slightly different perspective. Tell me about the monkeys, because that was— the monkeys was one thing in the tone of voice guidelines that really, really caught my eye. And as a tip, listeners, if you take nothing else away from this podcast, which you mightn't, take this away: the monkeys.

Right. Yes. I mentioned the passive voice earlier, which when I talk about it in training sessions or conferences or whatever, quite often people just have a kind of a blank stare because it isn't really something you get taught, certainly at school, in English. If you learn a foreign language, you'll know about the active and the passive voice probably, but if you're a native English speaker, you might not. So there's kind of two modes of speech in English: the active voice and the passive voice. We pretty much always talk in the active voice, and so when we hear the passive out loud, it sounds a bit odd. The passive voice is where you don't know who's responsible for something, basically. So an active sentence is something like, "I shot the sheriff." The passive version of that is, "The sheriff was shot." Well, who shot the sheriff? We don't know. This happens in political writing all the time. Prime Minister comes out and says things like, "Mistakes were made." It hasn't actually said who's made those mistakes. Or, "Actions will be taken." It hasn't said who's gonna take those actions, and it just seems a bit shifty, and it's kind of a bit used car salesman-y, you know, we're dancing around the edge of something.

It's not gonna build trust.

It certainly doesn't. No, no, no. And obviously that's very important for all businesses, but especially if you're a startup bank. You know, we're by no means too big to fail. We don't have trillions sat behind us. We don't have the government going to come and bail us out if it all goes wrong.

And you have the word bank in your title.

And we are a bank. We are a bank. As much as we don't want to feel like the banks that have come before, and we're trying to do things differently, we are a bank. And so we are tarred to some extent with that brush, and people are always looking for the chink in the armour and going, "Aha! Knew it, you were just like everyone else." And if so, if we sound like them, then why should they believe we're different? So one of the ways you can avoid that is to avoid the passive voice, and it's absolutely endemic in business writing. And once you've spotted it, you will never be able to unsee it. It's always there. So things like, you know, "A decision has been made to close your account," or "A fee will be charged." Well, who's charging that fee? So one of the ways to spot the passive voice, and it's pretty much foolproof, is to add "by monkeys" to the end of any bit of writing or any phrase or any bit of a sentence that you think might be passive. So for example, if you say, "I shot the sheriff by monkeys," that doesn't really make any sense. But if you say, "The sheriff was shot by monkeys," that makes perfect sense. So you know pretty much for sure that the sheriff was shot is passive. So, we've decided to close your account by monkeys— that doesn't really make any sense. But a decision has been made to close your account by monkeys— that makes sense. So a decision was made to close your account must be passive. Pretty much foolproof unless you work at a zoo. Yeah, in which case, in which case you just don't stand near the monkeys. But otherwise it pretty much works every time. And the other, the other test for this, and the test for good writing in general, I think, is just to read what you've written out loud.

Oh, I love that.

And because we don't talk in the passive voice, you know, talking in the passive voice isn't done by us. That's the passive version. It sounds weird and clunky. So if you read your stuff out loud, you'll hear if it sounds awkward as well. So those two things together will pretty much always let you spot the passive voice.

I love that, that read aloud and listen test, I think we called it in AIB, and they said that's a John Simmons-ism.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, he loves that. But it's funny when my kids are 12, 10, and 8, and particularly the 8-year-old and the slightly older ones when they were a bit younger, reading with them and getting them to read and look at punctuation as signposts and getting them to pause slightly at a comma, getting them to stop at a full stop, getting them to raise their voice with a question mark. All that stuff I think can really help us with our writing as well. Those signposts are massively helpful.

It is. Well, we've been talking for a lot longer than we've been writing. I like to facetiously run around here and say that everyone is a writer. You know, I'm the only one with the job title writer, but everyone here all day every day is producing writing. Everyone in pretty much every business these days is a writer. Emails, reports, presentations, whatever it is, we produce and read more words than we ever have before. And it's only since since the advent of the internet really that that's true. So our traditions and our ability to write clearly and concisely are much younger than our ability to express ourselves clearly and concisely out loud. And most of my job for 6 years in consultancy land was just going, "Well, you know, you're trying to say something here. What is it you want to say? Just tell me." And somebody would say something out loud and I go, "Well, write that down then." And it's unbelievably We're so much more sophisticated at communicating than we give ourselves credit for. When we just relax that idea of what should be professional, or the idea that more words equals more work, which is kind of a hangover from university that we have where you're taught to write to a word minimum, as if more words you've produced, the more work you've done. And you take that into the workplace and then you get surrounded by all these reports going, "Oh my God, stop, just get to the point." point, you know, and when we're talking, we're much better at doing that than we are writing down. Crisper.

Yeah, the whole idea— I love the whole idea of don't use a long word when you can use a short one as well. I think for me, that's something that I'll read through and I'll see commence. Yeah, why can't you just say start? Yeah, yeah, what's wrong with that? Yeah, I think that's— if memory serves, that was something else that was in the guidelines.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, I mean, this, this is, this is very much going back to my time at The Writer and all the stuff we used to do there and the great legacy of John Simmons and others. But yeah, and again, if you read your writing out loud, that's where you start to expose that slightly weird difference between spoken English and written professional English. We have this association of professionalism in writing which is basically formal, longer and more complicated. So you say require and request and provide, even though no one has ever said, I'm just going to the shops, do you require anything? Going forward, I require a Twix. Absolutely insane.

Further to my previous request.

Yeah, yeah, I will endeavour to provide you with the Twix at my earliest convenience. And it's just, first of all, it takes 3 times longer to get to the point, but second of all, what people trust is kind of the humanity. People trust people. There's tons of research. There was a Gallup poll and the not long after the financial crash that showed that there was a gigantic dive in trust for big institutions in government as much as in business. We know that to be true. But what people trusted more than ever was people like me. And part of that is sounding like a person. And if your writing makes you sound like a faceless corporation, then people will believe you to be one. Because in effect, what else have they got to go on? So yeah, I mean— It seems like an absolute no-brainer to me to throw off the shackles of writing 4 times more than you need to and also having to adjust your approach to language when you're writing versus when you're talking.

Yeah, and that whole idea that the closer we get to a keyboard, the more formal we become, the more professional, in inverted commas, we become.

Yeah.

And to me and to you, yeah, that's just a bit weird.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm interested because I think that going off and coming up with a tone of voice, regardless of the organization that you work in, is reasonably straightforward. It's a piece of project work. Where the heavy lift comes is how you transfer that over to the people and you actually get them to use it in a very consistent way. It sounds like it was perhaps easier here because they were doing it already, but I wonder what were some of the things that you did to try and embed tone of voice in the general day-to-day.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Coming up with the guidelines is brilliant, and we publish on the website, and everyone was very pleased. That's kind of step 1.1 of doing it, because everyone goes, "Fantastic guidelines," and they put them in the drawer, and they close the drawer, and then they never ever look at them ever again. And that's what tends to happen, especially in bigger organisations. So the thing that makes it real is giving people the skills and the confidence and the permission to use it for themselves, and then surrounding them with examples of it actually happening in practice and proving that it actually makes a difference, a measurable difference. Those three things together, if you're doing all of those things consistently and, and on an ongoing basis, because people come and go and priorities change, that's what makes a tone of voice live. So to those 3 points, in terms of giving people the skills and confidence, run training sessions. I run training sessions. I think I've probably gotten through about 2/3 of the people here so far in the last kind of 5, 6 months or so. And those sessions are really firstly about the skill side of things. Practically, if your writing is to be putting your reader first, what you do to make that happen. You think from their point of view and you listen what matters to them, etc., etc. How do you make your writing sound conversational, the kind of thing you'd say face-to-face? Well, what you do is replace those long formal words with the more natural ones. You don't say "require," you say "need." You don't say "request," you say "ask." "Therefore," it's a 9-letter word that means "so," you know, all of that kind of stuff. But also those training sessions are equal part practical skills and kind of therapy because they're Everybody— here to a lesser extent, but certainly still— people come into these sessions with a hangover of the institutionalised idea of what professional writing should sound like. And you have to kind of strip away those layers of what your third-grade English teacher said and how you wrote at university and what you've seen in other organisations that you've worked in, because it's perfectly natural to write in this kind of formal way. Because if everyone else is doing it, you're weird if you don't. It's like going to a place and learning a new accent. You just do it automatically. It's part of fitting in. So you have to kind of pull that stuff away and say, "No, no, no, look, here's the research and the evidence that proves that writing more naturally is more effective and that this idea we have of what professional writing is just comes kind of from nowhere, just from habit rather than from anything that proves it's more useful." And then you layer on the skills and say, okay, and this is how we do it and why and how that marries up with what we say that our values are. And that's for absolutely everyone at Monzo. It's not just a customer-facing thing, because if we have a marketing team doing this stuff and then people writing in the legal compliance side of the business terms and conditions that sound completely different, everyone will go, oh, that's nice marketing, but it's just a veneer. It's just a little bit of something on the surface where you're trying to lure me in, and then on the inside it's not true, and then trust just falls out the window. And why wouldn't it? So it's absolutely everywhere, consistent all the time, and that's why you train everyone. The second part is the making it real, writing examples of it to be true. So that obviously counts for customer-facing things— the emails that we send, the stuff that you see when you open the app, anything you find on social media— but it also has to carry through into those slightly gnarly, more complicated, more regulated bits of writing that traditionally aren't very good. And my favourite example of that is our terms and conditions for the account that you open. We've made sure that those are 800 words long and they are objectively readable by an 11-year-old. And they have a mark from an organisation that goes around making sure that writing is clear and straightforward, something akin to the Plain English campaign. And that is kind of objective proof that when we say we're transparent, well, here we are. Anyone in the world can read these terms and conditions. It takes 3 minutes. Other organizations that say they're open and honest and friendly and so on, and then they've got 6,000 words that you have to read and you need a law degree to understand it, well, there's a slight jarring disconnect. Yeah, exactly. So you make it real in all of those places. You make it feel true in all the writing that we do. And then you prove that it works by saying, "OK, well, if we write in this style versus the one that we had before, what difference does that make to metrics like click-throughs and open rate and responses and our NPS and all that kind of stuff?" So luckily here, being a digital bank at kind of the cutting edge, we have lots and lots of very smart people looking at data, so we can measure pretty much anything you want to measure. So here, for example, just today I saw the result of an experiment where we tweaked a few words in a signup flow and got something like 13% more people signing up for just changing 5 or 6 words. And that's the impact that you get if you care about all the writing, rather than just the bits where you're trying to lure people in, just the whole way through, because it's all part of one customer journey. It's all part of that same experience.

Of course. And you published your tone of voice guidelines on your website. If you go to monzo.com/tone-of-voice, Tone of Voice, and I believe it's at the bottom of the homepage as well, there's a link there. What's feedback been like from customers and staff?

Amazingly, there was some, first of all. I mean, when we published it, I just thought, "Cool, that's done." I didn't expect people to respond, but they did, and it's been universally, pretty much universally, really, really lovely, warm. People are pleased to see it, they like the approach, people love the monkeys, that always goes down well. I can't claim credit for the monkeys, by the way. I talked about it earlier and I should have said it was not my thing. There was something similar that we always used to use at The Writer. Back in the day, we used to say "by robots" instead, but then that kind of came to be true. So a decision has been made to close your account by robots. Well, you know, kind of sometimes. So I switched those out and put the monkeys in their place. So people liked the transparency of that and also the practicality of it. So it's been really nice and more so than I ever could have hoped for, to be honest.

And what I love is that somebody could arguably lift, if they had no tone of voice in their organisation, they could lift yours and use elements of that, bits and pieces of it, to perhaps kick-start the development of their own.

Yeah, and please do, go nuts. It's not something we're trying to hoard. In the same that we have our approach to to producing technology, you know, all of the things that we're producing from an engineering side. We have a public roadmap, it's open. We're very, very into open banking. Our API is all out there for everyone to see. So if people want to adopt some of the stuff that we've done because they think it's good or useful, fantastic. You know, it's not something we're trying to do, something we would love the industry, the world to adopt. One note of caution to that though is Lifting something wholesale and plonking it into your organisation tends not to work particularly well. You know, back when I was at The Writer, we'd have prospective clients coming to us kind of once a week saying, "We've heard about tone of voice and we think it's really good, and we know that Innocent have a fantastic tone of voice. Give us Innocent's tone of voice." And we go, "Brilliant, that's great. So what is it that you do?" And they say, "Well, we make weapons." and we go, well, first of all, we don't really want your business, thank you. But second of all, maybe the tone of voice of a company that started in a field and sells soft drinks and gives 10% to charity and have just become a B Corp a couple of weeks ago isn't the one for an organisation that sells intercontinental ballistic missiles. And they go, oh, we never thought of that. Because what makes for an effective tone of voice isn't what their tone of voice is, it's that one, you use it everywhere all the time, and two, that it fits what your values actually are, that it actually rings true to who you are and what you believe in, so that people look at the way that you write to them, they don't go, "What is this? You're trying to schmooze me, you're trying to be my best friend, but you're an insurance company." Like, I want you to sound empathetic and be human, but I don't want you to try and be my best friend. So the elements of how we did it and the making it practical, I would definitely say universal, and the advice about swapping out formal words from normal ones and that kind of thing, definitely universally applicable. But some of the stuff that's kind of Monzo-specific to our personality, what's your equivalent of that in the kind of company that you are? You know, it doesn't have to be nice and friendly and matey. That isn't what makes for a good tone of voice. It's just, is it open and honest and people believe that it's true and you're using it everywhere? That's what makes for a good tone of voice.

And I don't think there's anything more for me to say or ask. Harry Ashbridge, writer in Monzo. Thanks so much for talking to me. It's been an absolute pleasure. I think listeners are going to learn loads from that and have a ton of takeaways to take away, as you do with takeaways. If you want to see their tone of voice, just pop along to monzo.com/toneofvoice, all one word. Harry, thanks very much for having me.

Thanks very much, Scott. Pleasure.

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