52 | Best practice Leadership, Engagement and Internal Comms tips for remote workers

Hello there, my name is Scott McInnes and you are very welcome to this episode of the Inspiring Change podcast, a COVID Christmas cracker. It is episode 52, it is December 2020, and what a strange year it has been. Of course, COVID and coronavirus sweeping through the world, causing lots of hardship and sadness, and from a work perspective, you know, meaning that we have had to cope with a very, very different world of work. Many of us working remotely and grappling with not just perhaps the technical and the work aspects of remote working, but also the juggling of children, the emotional aspects of not seeing family and friends and having sick relatives, and of course all the potentially, you know, poor mental health that comes with that. Well, despite all the negatives, I am generally, as my friends will tell you, I'm generally a pint-half-full kind of a person. And I do think, and I've written written about this a couple of times in the blog. I do think that every cloud does have a silver lining, and COVID no different, as a big gigantic global cloud, has very much had a silver lining too. So I wanted to put together a couple of episodes of the podcast— this one, episode 52, and the next one, episode 53— where I speak to some leaders about what they've been doing to help create connection with their people during this period. And my hope is that during these episodes, what you'll end up with is a load of ideas or seeds of ideas or things that you can do in your own organizations to help connect your people a little more strongly. So here's how this went. I spoke to 8 execs, both previous guests on this podcast and friends of mine, um, who I got on to share their, their ideas and what they've been up to over the past few months. I asked them 2 questions. In this episode, we're going to get to question 1, and in the next episode, we'll get to question 2. In this episode, this is what I asked them: from a leadership engagement and internal comms perspective, what's the most impactful thing that you've done or initiative you've launched to keep your people connected, motivated, and empowered since March? They came up with some really, really nice ideas, and as I said earlier, little seeds of things that perhaps once you've listened to this, you might take away and think to yourself, yeah, I could do that in my company, I could do that in my organization. They're from a mix of commercial and non-commercial, from a mix of sizes, from 400,000 people in Sodexo all the way down to much, much smaller companies. So I hope you enjoy this. To kick us off, we've got Denis Doolan, who is Chief of Organizational Excellence at Special Olympics. I'll let him tell you more.

Well, my role with Special Olympics is a global role. I'm part of the global leadership team, the executive team. And also globally responsible for leadership development. So this is a huge question we had to ask ourselves back in March and April when things kicked off. And one of the things we did pretty early on, and we'd never done it before, strange as it might seem for a global organization, we put in place a biweekly webinar. And the simple idea was to stay connected. At the very beginning, because of course not just our immediate staff, but the country leaders all around the world in 200 countries, you know, with no real means of knowing what was happening with them, staying in touch with them, and so on up to that point. So, uh, it quickly took a shape of its own. We've— we added in things like best practices, things people were doing in response or in reaction to what was happening. Well-being pieces because it was such a big, huge disjoint for people that they were facing in a very, very short space of time. And then, of course, operational matters. An organization like Special Olympics, same as any business that's delivering services or products on the ground, we had to stop some of the things we were doing and start replacing them with digital engagement. So all of those things became our sort of routine topics that we kept coming back to, and we used a good mix of internal and external speakers. So it wasn't always, you know, someone inside saying, here's what we're doing. We sometimes, we were through contacts able to get some great outside people involved who were just able to give that perspective of what was happening in the wider world, and not just in the nonprofit or in the sports sector, but much wider afield. You know, we had speakers on from Harvard, for example, and others. So I'd say in summary with that one, it was a really, really good move in terms of integration and connection and people feeling less isolated. So much so that we're actually going to keep it in place when the pandemic has eased off or gone away. It's something we're going to keep for the foreseeable future. The second thing that we did was much more recent, actually. We set up a leadership academy in 2015. And it's, you know, your typical in-person intervention, mainly targeting emerging leaders, but a lot of our country leaders and headquarters and regional staff as well. And that's been really, really successful over the 5 years since it started. We've reached about just under 500 leaders all over the world. Again, very, you know, professional interventions involving a lot of really top-level leadership providers, you know, Skillsoft, Planter companies, um, and so on. But what we realized, of course, through the course of this year was that we weren't going to get back to in-person very soon. So we started to build towards a complete pivot, in a sense, towards quite a different model, and we've called it Academy for All. Uh, the first one was in September And I mentioned earlier that we have about 500 who've gone through the in-person piece in 5 years. We had almost 400 on the first Academy for All webinar. So huge change in terms of our ability to scale, to reach, to have very topical interactions and interventions with our leaders around the world. It was, I think, about a 2-hour session in total. We did one for the east side of the world, let's say, and one for the west. As you look at it, you know, let's say, compared to Greenwich Mean Time. And we really, again, see that that blended approach— so continuing with the in-person to some degree, but moving to using digital or virtual academy for all workshops when the time is right, and in between those in-person workshops— that's something we're going to stick with because it was very, very successful.

Great to hear from Dennis there on how they improved and increased their focus on leaders, and particularly that whole piece for me around how they've normalised what was very much crisis communications, taken some of the things they did back at the very start of the COVID crisis, and they've just become BAU and they'll continue them going forward. So really, really interesting to hear that. Next up is Margot Slattery, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Sodexo, who talked to me a little bit about some of the survey work they've been doing with their staff to find out exactly what's going on with people before they jumped into action mode.

It's a great question because I think we're like many organizations evaluating this constantly. The one thing that we've done, and there have been many things, but probably the biggest impact is actually doing a sort of voice of the people. So not a survey, but actually pulsing at a moment in time. So we did sort of two different ones. One was just first of all, literally, how are you feeling? And then followed up by a second one with a series of some short questions to measure engagement and understand, I suppose, where people were at. And that has been revealing in both understanding where people are at, understanding what people haven't been saying, and understanding what people are saying and what's coming across strongly. And understanding, as you know yourself, some of the science behind that, because obviously it gives you some insight to things like net promoter score, et cetera. Among your own people. But for us, measuring D&I was one of those things. So it was one of the questions that people were asked in the second follow-up. I won't call it a survey, but that voice part. Yeah, the Pulse. Yeah. Yeah. And we got a really high scoring about the value that people felt about diversity and inclusion. And maybe that kind of is a second part of that question is that we had done quite a bit in D&I to try and keep people engaged. From, you know, coming back and saying what have been the things that are coming out of the pandemic for our own people, so doing an internal survey across 30 countries, feeding back to people, recognizing how people were feeling, understanding some of the impacts, the global impacts and the Sodexo impacts, and then really talking to those as a D&I team, we could see from a point of view of voice or from Pulse that this had really mattered to people. And then we could also see with some of our demographic questions what had resonated well. So we'd ask people things like their gender, race. Now, not every area. It all depended on what is legal and what you can ask in that. But what people answered or didn't answer. So were people who were, for instance, identified as female feeling really happy and flexible working? So there was some— you could get a little bit of insight to that.

And what did that data allow you to do? So once you got that data back from the Pulse survey, what are some of the specific things that you did in response to that data that you now had?

Yeah, so I mean, I report into our global head of people. So I suppose there's strands of different people doing different things. What I'm personally doing from a D&I and HR perspective is looking and saying, across those demographic part of questions, what's that telling us around D&I? So is it telling us that people who are, you know, maybe women or people who might identify as LGBT+ are less comfortable being in the, in the home working, that they're more anxious to get back into? So what's that kind of bringing up? And then how are we playing that back? So we are taking that information, trying to disseminate it, doing analysis, understanding, and understanding what regions that's coming from as well. And then we're first of all playing that back, or at least discussing it with our regional teams. And then the next part is to kind of try and put that together and build a picture. So we're in that phase at the moment. So we've had those regional discussions. So we're trying to sort of, I suppose, test and say, as a region, is that something you're aware of? What's that coming up? So if I give you an example, you might find that we might have had some lesser responses from some of those groups in some areas, and then we find out when we talk to the region that, um, people who might fit that purpose are furloughed. So the furlough information says, okay, that's the gap, now we understand the gap. So again, using that insight to connect. And maybe the last thing I'd talk about is then building some of our communications and our campaigns around that. So, you know, I'll give you an example: gender violence. We did a big campaign last— on the 25th of November on that, and a lot of that has come out from a point of view that women are at home and working, and there's a lot of information globally and within our own organization that people are finding it harder. So we talked to that, and that resonated really well.

That was great to hear from Margot how they used voice of the employee to find out what was going on so that they could actually find out the best way and the best things they could do in order to be of help to their staff based on their various situations globally. So really, really interesting stuff. Next up is Leóncha Fanon, the Head of Corporate Affairs and Communications from Permanent TSB, one of Ireland's main banks.

So there's, there's probably two things that come to mind for me when I think about how we maintain that level of engagement and communications with staff throughout COVID-19 since March. The first was about building trust through communications. So I think communications, everybody would agree, has never been more important, whether that be with our colleagues, whether it be with customers, or whether, whether it be with local communities. And we've certainly seen that at a national level, and for individual companies, it really is no different. So our organizational purpose is centered on trust, and we really saw that come to the fore in the way the organization responded to the pandemic, as well as the response provided by our, by our own people to support each other, to support our customers, and for the wider community. And building trust through communications might sound simple, but it certainly isn't. And there were a number of ways in which we did that. Firstly, it was about the volume of communications, and often we would say 'Oh, you don't want to be sending too much stuff out, you're going to burden people with too many communications.' But in a crisis scenario, I think clarity of message in a time of uncertainty was probably the most important thing for us. So first and foremost, it was about providing colleagues with pay certainty in the first instance so that they, they could leave those concerns at the door in terms of how they were going to provide for their families, because in the first instance they were going to get paid first and foremost. That's what we needed to reassure our colleagues about. And from that then it was about providing reassurance around our health and safety protocols, around how we were treating colleagues in our branches across the network and making sure that people understood that we had the highest standard of health and safety protocols for both them and for customers. So our communications focus was really to provide that trust and reassurance to colleagues and to the wider customer audience externally. We sent over 100 communications communications since March focused on— yeah, a lot of communications focused on COVID-19. These are COVID-19-specific communications. So it was everything from the pay certainty communications that I've mentioned, health and safety protocols, technology and new ways of working, the introduction of Zoom, the introduction of Teams, our new day desk that we launched. So over 100 communications which provided colleagues with clarity in a time of complete uncertainty in a world that had fundamentally shifted and changed. That was really important to us. The other piece of that is visible leadership, and it's something in Permanent TSB we're quite good at. We're not a heavyweight organisation in terms of structures, so it's important for us for leaders to have visibility through the organisation. It's part of our culture anyway, but through COVID we ramped that up and we had a new CEO appointed in that period as well, and he was very focused on ensuring that he was connected with colleagues right across the organisation. So we ran over 30 AskExco and ask CEO sessions throughout that period. And they were just open sessions with no agenda. And we would get anywhere from 100 to 200 people attending at any given time to ask leadership, all online, all virtual, all Zoom. I mean, we transformed our ability to run communications on Zoom and Teams platforms overnight. And everybody kind of got on board with that. And it was a way to still engage with people and connect with them when we couldn't do it in the physical location. Building trust, communications, the frequency, the clarity of message, the response time was also very important. So every time there's a government announcement or every time we anticipate there's a government announcement, we were very quick to respond with our communications so we could provide clarity to our colleagues and in turn our customers about how we were providing that support and how we were responding to this pandemic as we move through it because the situation is uncertain as we know.

The issue of trust in organizations between staff and the companies is, is something that pops up all the time in the world of internal comms, engagement, and leadership. So it's brilliant to hear how Permanent TSB really brought the whole trust agenda to life, and particularly their purpose, bringing this life through their purpose, which for me killed two birds with one stone. I think when you bolt onto that the whole leadership visibility piece, it made for a very, very powerful cocktail. Next up is Brendan Foley, the founder of Sea Change Now.

It's a brilliant question, and it's probably the first question that most clients ask me is, how can we keep everybody connected in a world that's so disconnected? And there's two things I've seen done, and there's one thing we do ourselves in particular that I think is really, really effective. So I think the first thing is, um, you've got to enhance the positives. And how do you do that? One of the fantastic ways that we came across, and we shared this with our clients and we practice this in Sea Change Now, is that we start our meetings with gratitude. And gratitude is everybody goes around in a circle, more or less, or on the screen in each box and says something they're grateful for at this moment in time. And some people, it's really, really big stuff. Other people, it's really simple. It could be that they have a cup of tea in front of them. Someone else, it could be an appreciation for the fact that you know, they're healthy because someone they know is not. And it's extraordinary how that changes the focus of the mind to actually focus on— even though there's a lot of difficulty around us, there's also a lot of great things happening. And that's a really powerful way for people to connect. The other complaint people have is that the world has become much more functional and that work has become much more functional, and therefore a lot of the social aspects of work have disappeared, and therefore that state of connection starts to disappear. Again, when you share a little story about yourself and especially what you're grateful for, sometimes you add a little bit of a backstory and people learn a little bit more about you. And ultimately, I think true stories, as Guy Raz always says in his podcasts, you know, stories are just the most extraordinary way to create empathy. Once we understand somebody else, we're more empathetic and we see that person a different way. And one of the things we facilitated have been check-in sessions for teams where literally over 60 to 90 minutes We have no agenda other than checking in and saying, hey, how are you?

And they're—

for an hour, an hour and a half. Incredible.

And people will feel the time flies. So that's something really, really powerful. In terms of motivation, I think what's really, really important is this idea of reminding people that they're brilliant. You're still brilliant. You may be working from home or working remotely.

You're still great.

And I think it's very easy for people to get into a place that they kind of are not receiving the normal sort of accolades or the normal sort of recognition that you might get if we were in a situation altogether. So I think that's a really important thing for leaders to do, is to really remind people of their brilliance and thank them for their work. You know, don't make it a throwaway thing. As we always say, it's the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. So make sure your winners are getting some compliments and the people are doing great things. I suppose the final thing on that was very much around this idea of productivity. And a lot of people, you know, having to take leave, etc. You can actually see that probably by the 14th of December, you know, the whole country more or less shuts down. So it's about 4 weeks to win 2020. And we've used this with a lot of clients, which is, how might you win 2020? It's been a crap year. Nobody wants this year again. But you know what? Is there something you could do personally or collectively or as an organization that would just allow you to close out 2020 in a really great way? You said, you know what, no matter what, we achieved that, or we did that. And that's actually created a lot of motivational energy for people to kind of say, you know what, I want to park this, and I want to finish strong. The last mile, as we call it.

Yeah, because isn't it easy now to say, well, look, sure, we're in the middle— we're nearly at the end of November already. And actually, suddenly, that 14th of December actually isn't the 14th of December anymore. It's nearly the 27th of November. I think today we're having the chat, and suddenly it's 6 weeks that's lost.

Yeah, exactly. And I think it's those reframing pieces that if leaders can do that with their teams, they will really, really benefit from it. And I think having conversations around those aspects are really powerful to people because it's not like 2020 is lost. It's actually, let's use this last bit of time we have to show that we can finish strong. And for all of those individuals listening to this who might be looking for a promotion or will be going into a January review, there's something called a recency bias, okay? So finish the year strong, folks, and, uh, guess what? It might actually pay off when you go to meet your boss in January.

Some really practical thoughts and ideas there from Brendan, and I absolutely love that focus on people connection and enhancing the positives. Um, next up for us is our second not-for-profit. It's Carmel Doyle, the CEO of the Jack and Jill Foundation.

Well, when the COVID-19 Bus, Hit, Jack and Jill, just to put a little bit of context on it because we have to put context in it for people, everything was cancelled overnight. We had galleries booked for Incognito, we had been on roadshows in every county, and we had a schools programme, so overnight from the 13th of March everything was cancelled, and that was a big shock. So the first thing we had to do with our people was to sit down and assess the situation and bring people with us. Now there's no program for doing that except sitting down and trying to assess the damage, and what I would say to people, it comes down to good crisis management. Actually sit down and assess what has happened and what's the impact on your business, in our case on our charity. So in our case, we had to look at the service side and keeping the service going, and we also had to look at the fundraising side getting the money to keep the funding in, bearing in mind that all the traditional fundraising was gone, wiped out. So I would say, first of all, it's not so much a program, it's just honesty with staff. It's sitting down with the management team and looking at the budget. One of the best tools we've had throughout COVID is a rolling budget where Matt Hoban, our chief financial person, would have been putting together this budget with the best worst and middle scenario on a week-by-week basis, Scott. Now, this was something we would have had month by month, but now we were looking at a projection rate week by week, and it was devastating to start with. But I do think you have to have that honesty and courage to assess the situation, look at the damage, and call it. So we had to call it then. We had to call it that we were looking at half a million in terms of a shortfall for Jack and Jill to keep the fundraising side going. Now, more importantly, looking at the service side, we immediately had to meet with the nurse managers and our core nursing team and look at how families were going to cope through COVID and how are we going to tailor our service around that. So the first and most impactful thing we did is we sat down and we assessed the situation. We assessed it honestly from a figures point of view and from a service point of view and then we got into action mode. And now, just bearing in mind, it does take some people to get on board with something like this. In any shock and crisis, some people are in denial. 'It couldn't be that bad, Carmel. Couldn't be that bad. You're overreacting. Maybe we're moving too fast here. You're not talking about half a million projections, surely. This isn't— this isn't going to last.' So once we brought people with us, starting with our management team, and backed up by a board that was now meeting weekly board meetings is what we moved to. And also bearing in mind that COVID-19 wasn't any— it wasn't on a risk register anywhere, it wasn't on our risk register. So crisis management was the best thing we did. We assessed the situation honestly, with courage, with care, starting with the families and how we were going to have to tailor the service around these families. And then somehow finding a way to fill the gap that COVID had left in terms of traditional fundraising. So for example, one of the best things we did was with Incognito, which was our traditional mode where we went to a gallery, we had the saw booked in the Laverton Cork, and first of all—

And this is where you auction off pictures, this is where you auction off pictures that have been created by, in some cases, famous people, and you're bidding on a picture that could be— have, have been painted by Bono.

Exactly. So you've got over 2,000 beautiful pieces of artwork. So the whole collection moved online and the whole shop, the art shop, moved online. And that was scary because we've never done that, but we had great backup. Uh, William Fry was sponsoring us, so they looked at how they could help, because I think in a crisis it brings out the best in partners as well. Everybody wants to know how they can help, so we had to take that help. It was all about building momentum. The families did say to me, though, you know, your new normal is my normal normal. That fear you have of getting infected, that fear of the unknown, everybody's talking about it now, but that's my reality day to day. So what that does is it actually, when we as staff hear that, that inspires us to change and to keep going. That inspires us to keep going. So there was no simple program. We went into crisis management mode. We were honest in terms of, you know, what the figures had been, had happened, and the flattening effect of COVID But what it didn't flatten, flatten, is it didn't flatten our service. We kept that going. Our nurses found a way. They updated policies, procedures, kept in touch with the HSE, made sure our nurses had the correct PPE, all of that was a given, but the connection most importantly was kept with the families, and I think that stood to Jack and Jill.

And I'm—

the proudest thing about Jack and Jill is we've kept going, we've kept the service going through COVID, we've kept the connection going.

To Carmel's point there, I think it's really easy to jump into action mode just to start doing things, but she made a really good point that that whole idea of just sitting down Assessing where you are and working out what to do next honestly and with the team is really powerful so that everybody has that line in the sand and knows where we're going next and you can bring them on that journey with you. Next up is a real friend of the Inspiring Change podcast. It's Pedro Angulo, the Head of Leadership Development in AIB. I've actually termed, coined a term now, which is the Pedro Effect, because every time Pedro comes on the podcast, we see a giant spike in listeners. So here's Pedro with a few words of wisdom.

We have put a lot of things in place to help our people cope with these difficult times and challenging times. A lot of the things that we have done is we have rolled out the right technology and tools so that people can work and collaborate virtually. We have developed a lot of people leader guides. And we have provided our people with a lot of supports. Another thing that we are doing that I think is best practice and is being done by other organizations as well is we are encouraging our people across the board to unplug and disconnect and to make sure that they very clearly and take a lot of care in protecting and setting clear boundaries to the point that I would encourage people to make sure that on their calendar on a daily basis, they set work time as well as rest time, lunchtime, lunch breaks, coffee breaks, in a way that, as far as they can, they can protect that time to do things that allow them to take a break and to disconnect and to replenish the energy that they need to be more effective, to make better decisions, to be happier, and to build resilience, and to be overall much happier and better.

And how much of that whole idea of disconnecting or having the right to disconnect, how much of that do you think is cultural? And how do people get around that?

Yeah, I think, look, I think it sounds great in theory, but it's difficult in practice. Our home has become the pub, has become the holiday home, has become the university, has become everything. A lot of us are spending 24/7 in the house, and that's really, really difficult to the point that our brain, our brain doesn't know whether you are in break or— it doesn't distinct. So it is clear that we set very clear designated workspaces. So that that room is your office. And once you come out of that office, lock it, throw the key, and then make sure that you get your brain to realize that you are into a different space, you're in a different mode. And enabling the brain to make that disconnection so that the brain knows, okay, now it's time to relax. Oh, now it's time to enjoy with the family. And to create those breaks to help the brain to make those distinctions is really, really important. I think, you know, look, regardless of anything, if you have a leader who is compassionate, is friendly, is respectful, is all of that good stuff, if you have a good leader, it makes it easier to disconnect. It makes it easier to, you know, to be okay working anywhere, whether it is remotely or in the office. And to your point, if you have a leader that doesn't create psychological safety and obviously is a taskmaster, well, it makes it very difficult to disconnect. Whether you are at home or at work. But in general, I think, you know, people, leaders can do very simple things to encourage people to manage that. So for example, you know, try not to send emails, you know, after hours, because then obviously you put people under pressure to send back a response. And even if we put a tagline at the end that says, look, I'm working whatever flexibly and do not feel that you have to respond to this email.

People still do.

Yeah, well, you know, it's human nature, right? You wanna do what's right, you wanna contribute. And if somebody sends you a message and you think the message is important, then you try to do the right thing and try to do what's best for the organization and your leader. But again, while you're trying to be good for others, that doesn't mean that that is good for you. And that's the thing, you know, we need to show that, A, that we allow people to take care of themselves. Because I think most people, you know, in fairness, we're always good at taking care of others. We're, you know, we're always reaching out to others, We're doing a lot of charity work. We're doing a lot of good, good things for others. But equally, you know, in order to do the best that we can do for others, we have to be good to ourselves and protect our time, protect our rest breaks, protect our walks, protect time to do things that we love. And to your point, take the time to unplug. I have done, I have asked a lot of our leaders to do what I call a 4-pillar plan. So get them to think about how to, how do they mind themselves physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.. And one of the things I asked them, among others, you know, is to have one day a week where they have no devices. Other things are, you know, go for 10,000 steps, do a random act of kindness, reach out to people that make you— inspire you, make you feel good about yourself. So there's all of these good things, right? But the one that most people struggle with is having one day of no devices. That's the one common thing that people are telling me, Pedro, It's just impossible. And the challenge I go back to them is, why do we find this so difficult? You know, you're not, well, I mean, it's not that long ago that we had no mobiles. And if people wanted to find you, they always found you. You know, life went on. The world doesn't end if somebody cannot get you. But it's just, yeah, it's that, that's the one thing that leaders find most difficult to do is 24 hours with no devices.

I think Pedro was absolutely spot on there when he talks about the, the right to disconnect or to unplug, um, and setting very clear lines between work time and rest time, work time and home time, work time and family time. Because if we don't, it just blurs into this big gray where we're on all the time, and actually we end up not being very good at any of them without that specific focus. So really, really important But of course, as is often the case, can be very cultural, and that tone does need to be set and led by leaders in an organization. So some really interesting stuff from Pedro there. Moving on, we had Denise Black from Invest NI. Denise is the head of HR, and interestingly, she actually started in that role slap bang at the start of COVID So I don't think she's actually been in the office for a day yet. Here she is.

I think it's important maybe that I first of all explain the purpose of Invest Northern Ireland. And our purpose is really to deliver sustainable economic development throughout Northern Ireland, and we staff all over the world. So for me, when I joined on the 20th of April 2020, I joined in the midst of COVID so it had just happened. So from my own perspective, the most important thing for me was I had to connect and connect quickly. And I think I was very lucky that everyone in the organization had— were sort of fully IT enabled and had the laptop when they exited the offices in March. But within 6 weeks of joining, I did a video to all staff asking for their honest feedback, explaining that we were going to do a specific bespoke invest survey, not a one-off-the-shelf, a pre-designed one. And I and a team of 4 others— and you'll be glad to know Scott McInnes, Communication Manager, played a key role in that— put together the survey, and the questions were on the impact personally, professionally, and on their physical working environment now that they were home. Because as well, you know, engagement is not just about the intangible environment of leadership, but the tangible environment. And we had staff working from their laptops in their bedrooms and kitchens.

So that was a survey specifically just on COVID to see where you were, kind of get a line in the sand kind of an idea?

Very much so. And again, building on one of your previous podcasts, the John Simmons one, I wanted the whole tone of voice and choice of words to be different to previous surveys we'd done. So very much not corporate speak, but very much more personal. And the other difference again was leaving it optional to have their names at the end, which hadn't been done before. But that was important to me from an engagement perspective that I wanted to make sure we built a culture where you felt safe to have a view and stand behind it. So that was explained in the sort of opening preamble. So the results of the survey, and then this will lead on to the tangible changes that we made, We got an 82% response rate, which was really good, and over a third leaving their names, which was a first, and over 5,000 comments. So plenty of data to analyze.

Brilliant.

So sort of looking at the practical things then, because on the basis of that feedback, there's sort of 3 things I took out of it. What, what were we going to do on a comms front? What were we going to do on tangibles in relation to the home working environment? And what were we going to do in relation to leadership. So on the comms front, it was very interesting to get some feedback because obviously in the first few weeks, and certainly I was encouraging very much a culture of check-in, not check-up, you know, make sure and link in with your staff all the time to make sure they're okay. And there was a bit of feedback in the sense of dial it down a bit, which I took as a positive because staff were feeling supported. And it also echoed that, but there's not a cookie-cutter approach for everyone. Some people need the high intensity, others don't. The other, from a sort of— because we were all remote, the Chief Exec and I did 3 webinars. We have done 3 webinars in the last 7 months, sort of sharing how we as an organisation are having to flex and adapt our delivery model, and then obviously how that's going to impact on the people. And that has gone down very well. And as each one has gone along, there have been more questions coming through. Also on the comms front, there was a real concern from staff on the blurring, and this is something that's echoed, I know, in anything I'm reading and I'm sure the other podcast guests will be the same, the blurring of working and non-working hours. So the pluses of remote, of not having commutes, is sort of counterbalanced by people feeling they can't switch off. So very simple things, we just very clearly and explicitly said we want people to replicate the working pattern that they have in home. So still have your tea break, still, you know, link in with your team for a team break. Agree your lunch break and take it, you know, and say, 'I'm going on lunch now and I'll be back,' and to make sure there isn't that sort of, as we heard, staff being guilty about literally getting up and leaving the laptop. So those were some of the key things on the comms front. On the tangibles then, we were able to get home office allowance of £100 to give to staff, which really went down well. So that £100 allowed them to buy a desk or a chair or a lamp and again made it easy in saying IKEA do for £79.99 a desk and a chair. So that, that was a big plus and has helped staff, and they could buy a monitor. We also then looked at the supply we had within our head office and enabled staff to go in and take equipment away and on a borrow basis to sort of make home a bit more work orientated.

And I think that voucher idea really helped because it means the staff then can have a desk that's the work desk. And I think that helps to create more— a more solid differentiation between work and home. If I'm sitting at the desk, I'm working. If I'm sitting at the kitchen table, I'm at home.

Exactly, exactly. And another very small thing, but it shows you the value of the small things— face masks, which were becoming more and more in vogue. We're very much about— we allowed staff £10 towards that and asked them to support their local business and go local and support the economy in that way. Leadership, the last one, very important on this one. Leadership, I encouraged the leadership team to very much share how they were doing personally. It was a real opportunity to show authentic leadership. In a previous survey, our leadership score had been 1 for attention. In the June survey that we did there, it was 97% positive. That's no reflection on me. This was the reflection on COVID because one of the few positives of COVID is that it stripped away that suited, booted corporate look of, you know, I'm in an office. We were now all at home in a fleece and it was the ultimate leveler. So I think the leadership has sort of changed in a very positive way. And one other thing I did was a coffee roulette. And this was also to enable me to meet staff more because I just joined. So I and an executive member from each of the leadership team gatecrashed a team meeting of one of the other business groups. Groups that we, you know, that I had never met before and the other executive had no dealings with. And we set the tone by very much at the beginning talking about how are people coping, how are you doing, you know, before moving on to any business updates. So it worked really well and that, and the staff really liked that.

Great to hear Denise there build on some of the points that Margot and Pedro made earlier on in the podcast. And sometimes isn't it amazing how it's so easy Just give people a £100 voucher to go out and buy furniture that they need, that suits their houses, suits their setup, in order to create that, that differentiation between their work life and their home life. Just really, really simple but powerful stuff. Last but by no means least in this first episode of the COVID Christmas Cracker podcast is Lisa Melody, the Head of Talent and HR Transformation in Ornua.

Here at Ornua, um, All of the work that we've done has been under that umbrella of Stay Safe, Stay Connected program that we've run. So everything that we do from an internal comms perspective, engagement perspective, leadership perspective is linked and labeled back to that. And so we've done sort of a wealth of things under that umbrella to keep people connected. And as an organization, we are very globally dispersed with employees in 14 countries across the world. So actually sort of our current working environment has actually brought people closer together globally in some ways rather than keep them very dispersed. And through things like live virtual events, suddenly things that were only done in one country we're now being— we're now able to do globally. We also have our challenge also is how do we reach out to our manufacturing colleagues who are coming on site every day. So about 50% of our employees are coming in to make butter or pack cheese every day. So how do we make sure that they stay safe and stay connected? They have different challenges, and thankfully we have very successfully created an environment for them where they have come into work every day and been able to do that.

And when I think about those manufacturing colleagues, particularly because you and I, when we worked together, came from the bank and we had people in branches. But when you're away from the desk, what types of things is it that you're doing for those types of people in a manufacturing environment to keep them tied into what you're doing as an organization?

So we definitely started communicating more through things like text messaging, through apps on smartphones. These are colleagues that don't spend their days in front of a PC or a laptop, as well as team briefings. And for example, yesterday, our CEO of our business in Germany, she had a town hall town hall with all of our employees. So she kind of stopped production for an hour and virtually had screens in certain meeting rooms, she had people dialling in from home and she was able to have a town hall session with all employees whether they were working from home or were physically on site and we were able to do that safely. So I think there's a much greater focus on keeping people up to date on what's happening, what the plans are for the business. I suppose we're lucky in that we are a food business so we've had an amazing year, but a hugely demanding year on all of our staff in terms of workload. Our customers have looked for more and more and we've had to deliver that. So how do you also motivate people, mind their well-being, look after their work-life balance when you're also galloping along as a business? And parts of our business who serve the restaurant business certainly had tougher times. We had employees on furlough for certain periods of time. That has all finished now, which is great. So how do you continue to connect those employees into the business when they're temporarily out of the business as well? So it's been busy.

And how do you do that? How do you keep— and actually, and should you— you know, it's interesting, there's always a debate around, well, should you keep communicating with people on furlough? Should you just leave them be because they're not technically working? Or what's your take on that? What should you do?

Well, we probably, um, at the height of it may have had 100+ employees on furlough in Spain and the UK, and we asked them what they wanted. As you say, technically they don't have to stay in touch, so we said, do you want to hear about what's happening in the business? Do you want to be left alone? The overwhelming majority of people said, no, I really want to hear what's happening. I'm connected to this business, I'm proud of what we do, so please tell me what's happening. So that worked very well in terms of people then returning very successfully back to work after the 3 weeks or the 6 weeks or the 9 weeks that they were out of the workplace.

Okay, and from a leadership visibility perspective, I think that's one thing that we've certainly seen in terms of the clients that we work with. Lots of leaders really stepping up and becoming way more visible than they have been before, not just because they had to, but because they could, because suddenly the channels for them to do that were there. Is there anything that you're seeing your team have done to, to do, to build that visibility?

Yeah, from day one and the first week that I suppose 700 employees were working from home, our CEO started sending out a Friday afternoon message, video recorded from his house. We met his sons, we met his dog, so we got that sense of him as a person as well as how the business is doing. And there was very clear messaging around COVID and how the business was managing that and also how the business was doing. And those messages continued weekly and then biweekly, they passed on to other members of our executive team, So that sense of getting to know our leadership team better really came across and it was really positive feedback. Then there was lots of other initiatives, for example, asking employees to tell us how they're feeling. So, for example, at the moment we have a BU series running where we're asking employees to take a short video of them telling us about what are they grateful for, what keeps them grounded, what's got them through this year, what makes them them, if you like. Are they able to be themselves at work? So it links nicely to our diversity and belonging piece as well. So it's kind of a two-way piece in terms of people feeling connected. We also have a lot of wellbeing initiatives underway that are much more global than they used to be. So for example, we're all training for the Kerrygold Mile that's coming up on the 21st of December. There's a fitness program, a Commit2Fit program that's running between now and then. It's a nice bit of fun, healthy competition, lots of banter on our Yammer feed on our intranet. So lots of things for people to focus on that actually takes them away from their desks or away from their workstation and to take a break from it all because our new ways of working can be quite relentless too.

I love that whole idea of stay safe and stay connected and when they were doing all their communications around COVID making sure that they were linking, linking and labeling back to those two very simple messages and of course as a manufacturing business that works in food as as Lisa said, you know, how do you do communications and maintain connection while you're galloping along as a business, but also when you haven't necessarily got people sitting in front of computers when they're actually working on production lines. So some really interesting insights there if indeed you are working in the manufacturing sector. So that's the end of this first part of this two-part COVID Christmas cracker. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you've got some hints and some tips and some ideas. But as is always the case with these podcasts, if you have got some ideas, if you have got some hints and tips, and you've taken away some things that you want to perhaps apply in your own business, but you haven't got a clue where to start, we are here to help. So if you want to have a chat about how to build and maintain connection with your people through better internal comms, engagement, or leadership, then get in touch. You'll find more on our website at inspiringchange.ie. For now, I'll say goodbye, um, and I'll be back next week with the second part of this COVID Christmas Cracker podcast. Thanks for now.