122 | Mastering Internal Communications: The Lifeblood of Organisations | Emily Hecker

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

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Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. Lovely to have you here. Lovely to have you back if you've been before, or lovely to have you here if you haven't been before. Stick with us. This is gonna be a super episode. Firstly, my usual couple of asks before we get down to today's guest. If you're listening on Apple or on another platform that allows you to give us a little rating and a little comment, please take 2 seconds to do so. I would really, really appreciate it. It helps to get the podcast out there and out to people people like you who might find the content interesting. The second thing is just as usual to thank our podcast sponsor and friend Workvivo. Today we're actually going to be talking about internal communications and may actually get onto this subject. But if you are struggling to connect with your organization, I think that's a particular challenge for organizations now kind of as we move into hybrid working, or as I hope we'll eventually do, we'll just call it working because that's just what it is. Let's not keep giving it a name. But if you are struggling in that area, then workvivo.com, they've built a really cracking management platform. So pop along there and have a look, workvivo.com, and you will hear a little bit more from them later on. So my guest today, I said that we were talking about internal communications. It's a subject that's very, very close to my heart because that's where I came from before I set up Inspiring Change. So I'm really delighted today to be talking to Emily Hecker, who's a US-based internal comms strategist. And she's actually just written a book. And Emily, I don't know where you get the time, given you've got a full-time job as well. She's the author of Me, Myself IC, and we'll talk a little more about that later and how you can build an internal comms department of one effectively. So, Emily, good morning.

Good morning. Well, it's morning for me. It's not quite morning for, for you. And who knows what time it is when your listeners are enjoying this podcast as well.

We are super international. Get us.

Oh, it's incredible. The internal comms community is a lot smaller, particularly with the internet and LinkedIn. It's such a small world, but it's a very inclusive, exciting world.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, listen, while we're thinking about that and, you know, and I said to listeners already that you work in in the world of internal comms. Why don't we go back a little bit? Tell us a bit about your career and what you do today. Just give us a bit of an intro to Emily.

Sure. Well, internal comms, like so many of my peers, is not a career that I imagined I would end up in. From little on, I thought, well, I wanted to do something with writing. I grew up writing stories for my dolls, my stuffed animals, writing little plays for them. And obviously, that wasn't gonna be a lucrative business unless there's someone out there who is turning this into a career, in which case, please let me know. My childhood dreams could come true still, but I knew I wanted to do something with writing because I loved the process of storytelling and creating narrative. And then when I was a little older, so I was in high school and had the opportunity to take a journalism class, I thought, wow, this is an actual role within the world that allows me to unleash my curiosity in the world and really lean into that storytelling ability. So I ended up studying journalism at university for my undergraduate degree. Spent a few years in publishing exercising those muscles, and then had another opportunity to move into corporate communications. And as I alluded to before, I never thought as a young professional or aspiring professional that corporate communications was a career. This was a mystery to me, but it was exciting once I got into it and I realized, wow, all the skills that I acquired in my training as a journalist are really coming into play here where we're learning about our audiences, understanding our audiences, writing for that 8th grade level. That all of these different things can be applied in a different and also exciting world. And then as I leaned further into the corporate communications world, that's when I discovered internal communication. And again, this was just a whole new world for me that was exciting, where we could have so much power to inspire, inform, and engage employees because internal communication is such a connector within organizations, and it's so important to make sure that we all feel part of something bigger. So for that, now for the last 10 years in my career, I've been in communications at a variety of different industries— publishing, as I mentioned, financial services, insurance, retail, and currently global facility management. And I have to say, it's been an incredible journey over the last 10 years where I've had now the opportunity to transform internal communication from these very nondescript copy-paste send factories into strategic partners, which is the sweet spot for them. And now I'm leading internal communication for a global workplace experience and facility management company, as I mentioned. So, I'm responsible for developing and implementing the internal communication function from, essentially, from the ground up or restarting it. We're in the process of growing our communication function, of which internal comms is just one small part. So, a large part of what I'm doing these days is just laying the groundwork for that foundation, both explaining and demonstrating the value of internal communication.

Brilliant, brilliant. Well, thank you. That's, uh, it's, uh, that was really insightful. Thanks. Um, you know, it's interesting, and there were, there were 4 words that you used there. You said connection, You said inspire, inform, and engage, and I guess they very much form part of your ethos around internal communications. And I just wonder, from your perspective, what is good internal— and listeners, I'm doing that thing with my fingers, the good speech marks thing— what is good internal communications?

Yeah, there's so many different ways that you can answer it. When I think about what good looks like to me, I think about strategy. So, good internal communication to me is based on strategy. The function is meant to be a strategic partner. It's not meant to be purely a tactician. And what I see happening in a lot of organizations is that their instinct is to go straight to execution, and they're forgetting the bigger picture that is so critical to organizations and particularly to internal communication. So, good internal communication should always have clearly defined objectives. What do I want my audiences to know, feel, and do as a result of my actions?. And it's not just about sending emails or posting internet articles. It's about taking very purposeful action that's strategically designed, as I mentioned before, to inspire, engage, and inform. There really needs to be a lot of critical thought put into delivering good internal communication, and you know it's good by measuring its success. And yes, contrary to popular belief, internal communication can and should be measured for success. And success, as so many of my peers know, isn't, well, we sent an email, therefore we effectively communicated. And I like to remind people, your methods of measurement don't need to be overly complicated. You can conduct surveys, you can do focus groups, you can look at benchmarking reports, you can track email open rates, read rates, internet article views. There's a whole host of things that you can do to measure your success. So, there truly is no one-size-fits-all approach. The only size that doesn't fit is the one that you don't try.

Yeah, for sure. And I think what's really interesting, and actually, as you're talking about measurement, and again, it's one of those things that I think internal communicators aren't always very good at, because it comes back to proving the worth of the function, right? You're absolutely right. I fundamentally believe that it's a strategic partnership role. And I think that in order to do that role really well, you have to go back and prove your worth. You have to go back and say, well, look, we've improved strategic understanding or understanding of our strategy among colleagues by 15% from this quarter to last quarter, because we've done these 3 things. And it's not about the the fact that, you know, Emily's video got 7,000 clicks or the CEO's email got 3,000 reads. Actually, a read, what is that? Well, it's just somebody clicking on it and then maybe clicking off it. That's all it tells you. It doesn't tell you anything else. So I think that whole idea of measurement is so critically important. And Mike Klein, if anyone's looking him up, K-L-E-I-N on LinkedIn, he does a really good course on measurement, which is probably well worth having a look if it's an area that you're really struggling with. But I do agree, That whole idea of what do we want people to think, feel, and do in creating that connection is absolutely critical. One thing you mentioned there was about purposeful action. And of course, purpose sits at the very heart of the culture that you're trying to create in an organization. So, what role do you think internal communications plays in creating really powerful cultures?

So, I think it would be roles, plural, not role, singular, because internal comms does so many different things, which Quite often organizations don't know at the get-go. They need someone like myself who comes in as an expert to just educate them. So, I like to think of organizational culture as a door and internal communication as the key to unlocking that door, or at least a key to unlocking it. Because as you know, speaking with all of your guests and your expertise too, culture is filled up with a myriad of activities and internal communication is just a part of that. So, as I'm sure you've heard from other guests too and seen in your own work, The strongest, healthiest cultures tend to have employees who are aligned with the organization's value. They have a sense of ownership, and they're more likely to be committed and motivated in their day-to-day. So that healthy culture also encourages open communication, which is obviously something I'm passionate about, diversity and inclusion, and has this positive work environment where employees feel valued, they feel respected, and they feel supported. So I'm sure, I'm sure as you're listening to me say all of this, you can see, well, this is clearly how internal comms influences all of this, because internal communication is the lifeblood of organizations. And there's so many studies out there that show how it influences productivity, performance, satisfaction, all of which are key components to shaping culture. So if the communication within an organization is essentially nonexistent or just terrible, then it's not going to foster that positive, inclusive environment where employees feel that they're energized and they're a part of something bigger.

Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, it's interesting to use that lifeblood analogy because I've, I've often said, if purpose is the heart of the organization, then internal comms is its lifeblood. It's what carries those messages, those stories, that belief, that connection around the corporate body. Uh, it helps to get all those messages out there, right?

It's funny that you mentioned that. I was guest lecturing in a course a week and a half ago, and one of the students had asked me the question, if you had to equate internal comms to a part in the body, would you say it's the nervous system, just as you did, feeding all of these different messages to the rest of the body? And I had never considered it like that. But it was absolutely a spot-on comment because it is indeed the lifeblood, as we just talked about, of organizations. And that's a different way to think of it as the nervous system sending signals to the body to do this and do this or to know this and react this way.

Yeah, yeah, I think so too. And it's interesting that you talked there about, you mentioned about terrible communications, because I do think that that is something that happens often. And I think that that tick box communications piece of we've sent the email, we've done the webinar, we've done this. And look, sometimes that's just because people are under pressure.

There's one of them, there's 3,000 employees.

They're under pressure, it's not a full-time job, and that's fine. But I think that sometimes there's just bad habits and poor communications across organizations. And that can be, for me, a massive barrier to building really, really strong cultures and organizations. So, I wonder from your perspective, what is it that internal communications professionals can do to help course correct when that poor communications piece is happening?

So, quite honestly, for me, this boils down to education. Or in a lot of cases, the lack thereof. So, when it comes to internal communication, organizations quite often don't know what they don't know. So, you alluded to people who may be busy, they're teams of one, or perhaps they're people who are doing internal comms off the side of their desks. So, they may have been an office manager or an assistant to one of the executives, and someone said, "Hey, we need someone to lead internal communication, and well, you have some bandwidth, or I'm going to make sure that you have some bandwidth. Here you go." And in those cases, you have no formal training in the field, so you can't be expected to know the potential for improvement or to be able to assess your situation from the get-go as something that's either being effective or not, because you just don't know, again, what you don't know. So, even if you do know there's a problem that, you know, maybe your efforts aren't addressing employees' confusion, their lack of trust or disengagement, whatever the problem areas are, you may not know what to do next. So, that's where the key phrase of professional comes in. There's 3 tiers of communication people within organizations that I like to define, and one is communicators. So, these are anyone in the organization, and they could be the CEO, they could be anyone down to the front lines. They're someone who is simply sharing messages through words and actions, or lack thereof. Then you have the communication practitioners. So, these are the people that I was just describing earlier who are physically tasked with doing something communication-related in their organization, but they may or may not have the required training to do that. And then the last category is people like myself and others who are communication professionals, that we have the practical experience of leading communication efforts, leading strategy, and then we also have the educational background of skills and strategy to do this. And only our professionals are going to really be able to build better cultures through communication. And they do this by educating the organization about what internal communication looks like. As we discussed just a few moments ago, you know, what does good look like? And your professionals are gonna be only the ones who know. And then we have to educate the organization that internal communication is a shared responsibility. It's not just owned by the one person or the small team of people who are leading internal communication. It is truly owned by everyone. We all have a role to play. So very much in the same vein of safety or diversity, inclusion, and belonging, we all own this responsibility and we all have something that we can do to further it. And again, it's about education here. So I love providing tools, resources, and training to people to help empower them to be better communicators. And a lot of the advice that I'll give them goes back to my core learning as a journalist early on in my career. So things like using the inverted pyramid approach. Where we're stacking the most important information at the outset instead of burying it in paragraph 16, 1,000 words deep into this. And we can ask the 5 W questions, the who, what, when, where, why, and for good measure, the H, how. Again, these aren't things that you need to do just as an internal communication professional. Anyone can do. We can ask these questions out front, so then our employees have the answers that they need before they even have to ask the question. And we have to understand our audiences too, which is again, a core principle of journalism and communication that if we don't know who our audience members are, what matters most to them, what their routines and behaviors look like, we're not going to be able to meet them where they are and effectively communicate with them. And we also can write in 8th grade level, or age 14 is about that for anyone else in the world who doesn't have 8th grade as their class markers. So this is a way to create accessibility with the content that you're producing. You're not using your heretofors and your moreovers, but you're saving that for maybe your English class or your book club. But we're just keeping it very accessible. So through all these different tools and tactics, we can really ensure that organizations are educated and empowered to be effective communicators and to know what effective communication looks like.

You just said the word heretofor, and that's, that's an automatic reaction. I need to just now shoot myself in the head. So listen, it's been really nice talking to you, but I need to go off and do a job on myself. But you're absolutely right. And I think actually what's really interesting is that a lot of people don't know that within Microsoft Word, and I'm sure Google, whatever the Google version is called as well, has the same, but there's actually, there's an accessibility checker within there that if you just tick that, turn on that tick in settings somewhere, look it up, I'll put it into the show notes actually if I remember, that it will tell you what grade your writing is for all the way up to kind of degree level. And you don't want to be there because not everyone has a degree. So you do want to be probably around that kind of that 14-year-old sweet spot where people do understand the language. So well worth having a wee look at that, just, just to hold yourself to account a little bit more. I think that can be really powerful.

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Interesting. He talks about professionalism because I think that, you know, I'm sure you see this all the time and it probably gets on your wick as well, Emily, that, you know, well, you know, well, you're just new into the company. We need someone to do internal comms. On you come. Have you ever done internal comms before? No. Oh, don't worry about it, it's everyone, everyone can do comms. Everyone can do comms. Okay, great. That's like saying everyone can be a lawyer or everyone can be an accountant or everyone can be a whatever. Actually, it is a profession and it does take learning and it does take skill. And if you turn to somebody like the Institute of Internal Communication where they've got a profession map, which actually marks out, maps out what your professional journey looks like. I'm sure the IABC more internationally has something similar. There's a lot in there to learn to get from that kind of communicator, as you said, up those levels to that professional kind of height of your career. So, it is definitely something worth thinking about. And I think it's actually grossly unfair of organizations to throw people into communications roles without that experience, because how good are they going to be? Probably not that good and through no fault of their own.

Well, absolutely. I mean, you make such an important point about the accreditation. You know, you wouldn't go to a lawyer who didn't have a law degree, as you pointed out, or a doctor who didn't have a doctorate, or an accountant who didn't have a CPA. So why is it so different for communication? As you just described, we've got so many people who are maybe really good writers and someone says, hey, come on, we need someone to lead internal communication or communication XYZ, and there is no training. So you can get to the professional phase if you are investing in some professional development, you have a really great mentor, but it does take work and effort to move from practitioner to professional. So I firmly believe that anyone can be a professional, but again, it just takes education and that great professional development tools, those mentorships, great institutions like the Institute of Internal Comms, as you pointed out, fantastic ways to just learn from the experts, to get connected with people. And even if you are a professional, they're great ways to connect because we can always continuously learn and improve. I certainly don't know every single thing about internal comms. I'm learning every day, and I wanna always learn every day because then I can be better and better, and I can help others learn from my mistakes or where I've had success.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Let's talk a little bit about the whole top table thing. I don't like that term, but I think the pandemic, the pandemic really, really kind of empowered internal comms people and made organizations see the power that, that really well done internal communications can have. And it was, and it was necessary because suddenly we weren't all in the office anymore. And it was like, well, how do we tell people things? Quick, ring Emily because she's the internal comms person and she'll come and help us. So suddenly, the awareness of internal comms and the power of internal comms was heightened. I think that now that that pain in many ways, certainly the pandemic pain has kind of gone away and dissipated, I think the internal comms teams are going back kind of to where they came from, not necessarily through their own choice, but because, well, sure, we did that then and internal comms was great then, but that emergency's over now. So, 'Let's just get back to BAU.' So, I wonder, kind of from your experience and your perspective, how do you make internal comms more of a business imperative? How do you see it? How do you help senior leaders to see it as something that's really important and really valuable versus just, as you said, sending an email or posting an internet article?

Well, I want to go back to what you said about the pandemic, and I too am seeing the internal comms sphere that blew, blew up, for lack of a better phrase, during the pandemic, where we all got this level of awareness that I was really grateful for. The organization I was working for at the time had a renewed interest in reaching our frontliners, which were, of course, a critical workforce during the time. And now it is, at least what I'm seeing, that return to business as usual, as you pointed out. So, for me to navigate this changing landscape with internal comms, It's really important to both show and tell our senior leaders about what we can do, what our power is. So, if I'm in the early stages of my professional relationship with a senior leader, I will run them through what I like to call my communication roadshow. And this roadshow is key to building awareness, to building understanding, and of course, to build buy-in. And this can be something that you do at any point in your career, even if you have been with an organization for a year, 2 years, whatever it might be, you can still sit down, create a roadshow, and share this with senior leaders. And what I like to include in those is, first of all, well, who's on the team? So, if it's a senior leader I haven't had a conversation with before, or they just kind of know who I am, I like to walk them through, okay, who I am, what my experience is, if there are others on my communication team, who they are, what their areas of expertise are, what we bring to the table. So, talking about our educations, years of experience, industries we've served in. I'll talk through what can people expect from me. So, what do I want internal comms to be known for? Then I'll talk through the high-level channel overview, because what I've found with leaders is they're busy people. No surprise there. We know they're incredibly busy. They often don't know the communication landscape that exists within the organization. They've seen some emails, they know an intranet exists, but they may not know exactly what's happening in each of those channels and what the purpose is behind each of those channels. Then I'll talk through how to work with me. So, I'll talk through a service model that I've established just so they understand this is my approach to things and how we can best partner together. Then I'll talk through what audiences can do. So, the senior leaders, anyone within the organization, what can they do to further my work? So, things like being proactive and partnering with me. Don't wait for the house to be on fire to call the firefighter. Call them immediately before you know it's gonna be a problem. And then also surface stories because there's a lot of great things happening within organizations that I don't personally know about because I'm not in the room for it. So, let me know, surface those stories. And then I'll also close by talking about, well, how to get, how do you get in touch with me? If I have some sort of intake form for new requests, I'll walk through how to use that. If I prefer, you know, email with this particular leader, we'll talk through that as well. I just want to return to one of the key sections that I called out, which is what I want to be known for. And this to me is so critical in the roadshow, but also just defining your vision for internal communication. And if you're a small team or a team of one, You are most likely the sole owner of this. You have a lot of power here to just define what your identity is of internal comms. And I typically define it by 4 things. One, just strategic communication. So, we are the ones who are getting the right message to the right people at the right time in the right way. We're also collaborative partners. So, this is such a key point to call out that we shouldn't be asking the internal comms team to just send an email because we think it should be an email if we're also internal communication professionals. So when you work with the internal comms team, we will walk our stakeholders through what we know as best practices, what advice we would give, and we'll devise and execute effective communication strategies together. We'll also provide executive counsel. So this goes back to the connection with senior leaders in particular, where we need to counsel our leaders to help further company values, vision, and help set the direction too. And the last thing I like to call out as internal comms is You know, most important thing is storytelling. I mentioned earlier my passion for storytelling and that what inspired that and how I got to be where I am today. And a lot of it hinges on storytelling because your internal comms team or your communication team in general tends to be the only ones in the organization who can really capture an audience through the power of stories. We know as humans, we navigate towards stories just instinctively. We love, you know, having a bedtime story, not a bedtime press release. So, something like that is really going to resonate with audiences and really the internal communication team is, is your powerhouse here. And then once we've, of course, set up this roadshow, we have to also follow that up with action. We can't just sit there and tell people on a mountaintop, this is what we do. They have to see it in action. So, the leaders can, you know, listen to us all day, every day, and we can also very quietly fall back into the woodwork too. So, If we're showing people what we're doing, we also need to be telling them too. So, you can show them through data, which we talked about measurement earlier, and this is where it comes back in, that if we, let's say, relaunch the internet, so very exciting initiative is happening, we can say, well, it looks pretty. And I'm sure everyone who is listening to this podcast has at one point in their career heard of "make it pretty" from someone. I know I certainly have, but we have done so many more strategic things with, let's say, that internet refresh. So don't shy away from sharing the success metrics. You can talk about problem that you were going to solve. Let's say it was outdated. It wasn't the most user-friendly experience. Well, we can show through heat mapping, scroll mapping, this is what the usage rate is for this particular area. Now we have changed it to this. We can see click-throughs. We can see all of these different data measurements. We can see daily active users, things like that. And this is an unbiased way to show your successes too. So, I remind my internal comms peers quite often to go ahead and toot your own horn or share your own successes because if we don't want to fade into the woodwork, we need to make sure that we're advocating for ourselves and demonstrating how we're proving our value. So, if it's something like reinvigorating the intranet, it's launching an employee app to better reach frontliners and meet them where they are. A lot of, a lot of ways that you can really prove your value. Problem-solution comparisons are a great example too, where you're setting the stage for the problem. Maybe it's something like, well, we had no single source of truth for our news and information. We had about 12 different sources that our employees were looking at. They're confused about where to go for what information. Well, now we've identified it as a problem, so let's talk leaders through how did we identify it and what we did next and what those solutions meant for us. So, we can hit the high points, we can end with the solution, lean on that data, and just really show the power of effective internal communication. And then leaders will come on board. It might take some time. We know this won't happen overnight, but eventually, leaders will get there if you're consistent about showing and telling what you can do.

Yeah, and it takes time to build that trust for sure, but I think giving them a really, really good overview of everything you've just said there, probably in about 9 minutes, in my experience of having time with senior leaders, yeah, get in, "Get it covered and then get out 'cause I'm really, really busy." So I think absolutely covering all of that is key and doing it in a way that's very, very sharp to the point and not waffly is absolutely critical to something that I have possibly on occasion been accused of. But I'm working on that with my therapist. One thing that really struck me when you were talking there was actually there was a debrief this morning that Jenny Field ran on her Remotely Interested research that she's just released. So I think the report came out today and she was running a couple of sessions today just debriefing the kind of main headlines. One of the things that she was talking about, because this was a piece of research around deskless employees, so people are out working in ambulances or fire engines or in shops or in factories that don't spend their time at desks. And what she found in that research was that whilst people working at desks, those kind of information workers, are very much more about the written word, whether that be emails or reports or that kind of stuff, actually people who are deskless Unwired, call it what you will, it's all about the verbal because actually they're spending 90% of their time doing their job. They're spending 90% of their time serving customers, making things on a production line, putting out fires, saving lives, doing whatever it is they do in their job. They don't have time to look at the stuff that internal communicators are putting out because, well, it's on the intranet. Yeah, good luck with that. I don't have time to look at the intranet. Well, we sent an email. I'm not sitting at a desk and I don't have a work phone. And you're laughing and you're absolutely right to laugh because it's what we hear all the time. As internal internal communicators that challenge back all the time. So for me, and I was saying to Jenny this morning, I said, respectfully, there's nothing really new in the research. What it's doing is simply reinforcing the fact that there's a massive, massive role for leaders to actually become that critical comms channel. Yes, we've got apps and we've got intranets and we've got email and we've got everything else. That research showed that among that cohort of staff in an organization, a notice board, was used as much as WhatsApp. A notice board, posters, the things of internal communications yesteryear, which I still believe are actually really, really important. I love a poster. Maybe that's just me showing my age. But I do think that those maybe more traditional channels, which are kind of now poo-pooed in many ways over a digital app or a channel or an intranet, I think it's about getting that mix right. And I guess, And I'm getting to a question, but when it comes to that leadership piece, and you talked about senior leaders, and you're absolutely right in counseling them and supporting them, leaders down through the organization, if we want them to be communicators, if we want them to talk to those deskless workers and be that channel, what support do we need to give them? What are they looking for?

So, it's quite honestly a mix of things. As you pointed out, those traditional channels, are so helpful. I, I'm just thinking about the example of a poster on the bathroom stalls. You know, you think about you're in the restroom, you're in a very essential part of your day, and you're still getting communication there. Well, obviously your leaders shouldn't be in there with you, but they are, as you pointed out, a very critical part of your day because they're your first point of contact. If we think about those frontliners, the only communication channel they often know is their direct leader. So, who's on site with them at the start of shift? Leading those 5 to 10-minute standup conversations. So, leaders quite honestly need a lot of different support, and what they— what we can start out with is just thinking about what the importance of leaders is in communication. So, we can again point to some research here where Forbes has this great story, a study that saying that 40% of employees are dinging their leaders and losing trust in leaders because they are poor communicators. So, if we're thinking about our leaders as poor communicators, we're not thinking about them as authentic, trustworthy leaders. We're just getting hung up on the fact that they can't deliver an inspiring message to us. And that's where leaders can really lean on effective communication, as you've pointed out. So, as I said before, you know, quite honestly, that level of support varies. We've got incredibly natural communicators in the leadership teams. They're just fantastic about knowing what their communication approach should be. They're just genuine, very honest. Very open. And then on the reverse side, you've got someone who is very uncomfortable communicating. They're not sure where to begin. And then of course, you have everyone in between. So if mo— in most, if not all cases, leaders are going to require a mix of coaching, and they're also going to require maybe perhaps some workshops. So you can have a very formal approach, you can have an informal approach, you can just do a variety of different things. And ideally, you're doing a mix of things, as we talked about the mix earlier. But before you're kicking off any sort of formal, informal coaching, I always recommend just getting a sense of what the expectations are for leaders with communication at your organization. Dig into that, you know, look through the human resources handbooks, the policies. Is there something here for our leaders to adhere to? And if there's not, that is completely fine. Then it's your opportunity as a communication professional to step in and start establishing those expectations. And it could be very quick and easy where you have maybe 3, 4 quick things. Perhaps it's something like, here, we want leaders to help employees understand what matters most. We want them to model transparency and authenticity, and we want them to invite two-way communication. And then of course, you wanna bring your key stakeholders along. So, you want to explain why we're doing this. We have to invite their feedback too, because if people feel a part of what they're creating, they'll also start supporting it. And that'll be incredibly key to getting your leaders on board, particularly at the top leadership level. If your top leaders aren't modeling great communication best practices, then the rest of the leaders of the orga— organization won't follow suit. They'll just think, well, so-and-so at the top isn't doing it. I don't need to either. We'll get on with our day, focus on the day-to-day responsibilities that we need to get done. So, of course, establishing expectations for leaders is great. But they also need practical support too. I'm sure many of your listeners have had conversations with leaders where they need frequently asked questions. They need some sort of talking points, some scripts, a ghostwritten speech, or they need something tangible in their hand and not just kind of a framework for how they should communicate. So, we can provide all of that support. Again, if they're leaning on us as executive counselors, strategic partners, and we, if we go back to the channel example too, we can also educate leaders on here are the channels that are available. Perhaps if there's a Slack channel, Viva Engage group, leaders can organically connect with their employees. They don't need to flow through the internal comms team. They can certainly reach out to us for guidance and advice, but they can also just be their authentic selves communicating in a less structured environment. So, if I had to somehow narrow down all of the things that I would talk about for supporting leaders to one word, I would say that word is counsel. So, I talked about, you know, being executive counselors, and that's what we do as communication pros. We counsel our leaders to help further the organization and set the company vision and direction.

And that prove by doing then gives you the right to have that perspective earlier in the conversation, I guess, and that's so, so important. You know, let's bring Emily in when we're in the planning phases as opposed to bring her in when we're 97% baked and just send out the, you know, just send out the note internally or put the article on the intranet. So, that's not where we want to be. It reminds me, as you were You were talking there about the leadership piece that we were working with a client recently and doing some workshops with groups of managers. And we said to them, what support do you get when it comes to communicating with your team? And they said, we said, we've been told that you'll often get the content beforehand. And they said, we do, we get the email beforehand. We get no more information than the email that's gone out to the staff. So, when the staff come and say to us, what's this email all about? The answer is, I don't know, because we don't know any more than you know. So the fact that they've been given the thing the day before or the hour before to prep them actually isn't all that much prep. It's just them getting the press release or the email ahead of time. But they do need that little bit extra. You know, I talk about getting leaders in a room, getting your arms around them, really giving them the love that they deserve and the support they need to be that really, really effective channel. So yeah, it is such a critical area, such a critical, critical area. Emily, we're nearly at time now, and I have one closing question that I've been asking people as we've been going through this season of the show. And that is, if we're thinking about organizations being more effective, maybe they are that me, myself, and I team of one in the organization, what's the one thing that they should be doing to be more effective in how they communicate within their organization?

So, I think it comes down to three Cs. So, I'm gonna sneak in three things.

Ah, not one thing, Emily, not three things. Go on. You can have three things. Go ahead.

All right. I'll say it fast with no punctuation, so it, it totally counts as one. We'll just add some hyphens instead. So I'd say it's clear, concise, and consistent because anyone, whether they're a communication professional or not, can be clear, concise, and consistent with their communication. We know employees are short on time and attention, so let's keep things short. Let's keep it simple and let's keep it coming regularly because we never wanna have a mystery for our employees to solve about how they're going to get timely, relevant information for them.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant way to finish. Thank you so much. And listen, if people want to get in touch with you or find out more about the book, where do they do that? What's the best place to get hold of you?

So I'm on LinkedIn. They're welcome to connect with me there. I've got a lot of information there. And then I also have my professional website, which is www.emily-hecker.com. There's my blog on there, information about my book, and a lot of other great ways to stay in touch. Of course, I always love hearing from internal comms professionals, other people who are doing internal comms at their desks, or someone who's just interested and wants to learn more about how they can bring more effective communication to their organization.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Listen, I've loved the conversation. As I said at the top, it's something that's very close to my heart, and it sounds like it's something that's very close to yours as well. So, Emily, thank you. I really appreciate your time today.

Absolutely. It was a pleasure and a privilege. Thanks for listening.

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