54 | How a focus on more human internal comms can help to build amazing cultures

Welcome to the Inspiring Change podcast, where I talk to leaders about internal communications, engagement, leadership, and the role they all play in creating amazing cultures.

Where people work is no longer just a paycheck. It is part of our identity, and that means a lot to employees. The companies that step up and do the right things will be rewarded with loyalty, with engagement, with productivity, with ideas, all of those great things. The companies that won't are going to continue to struggle.

Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Inspiring Change podcast. Happy New Year. It's the first episode of 2021. I'm actually surprised I got that right, because it normally takes me about a month to actually get into remembering what year we're in. It was a strange Christmas, quiet, but I hope you all had an opportunity for some downtime and an opportunity to spend time with small groups, admittedly, of friends and family. For me, I think what last year showed was that connecting people and remaining connected to each other and to our organizations as we all ended up spending so much time at home was so, so important. And for me, there's going to be, I think, a continuing focus on maintaining that connection between each other, between our families and friends, and our workplaces. And I'm really delighted today to be welcoming back a guest who I was actually looking back, hasn't been on for 6 months. It was 6 months ago that we spoke to Chuck Gose, who is my, my guest today. Um, Chuck is, I think, probably he, he's the self-confessed cheerleader of internal communications. Um, he's a senior advisor in Social Chorus, um, which is, um, a US internal comms, US-based internal comms platform provider. He's also a podcaster. Um, he's had the Icology podcast for about 5 years and more recently the host of Culture, Comms and Cocktails. Um, so Chuck, hello there, welcome to the show.

Yes, it's a privilege to be invited back. It's always nice being on this side of the microphone. As you've said, running podcasts before, it's nice to be the one sometimes answering questions and being on this side than the one posing the questions. So thank you, Scott, for having me back on.

You're welcome. And actually, I was only— I was on actually a podcast that was released yesterday, and I said exactly the same thing, how nice it is to be able to tell you what I think rather than simply asking questions. So that's brilliant. Listen, I gave listeners a bit of a flavor there of what Social Chorus does, um, and what you do, where you've come from. Why don't you give us a quick bit about yourself?

Yeah, so my, my background is all in internal communications, and as you shared, I do pride myself on being a bit of an internal comms cheerleader, but also a bit of a button pusher from time to time, and maybe pot stirrer from time to time when it comes to this. And, uh, having been in internal comms at General Motors and Rolls-Royce along the way with a couple stops, and then there Basically had one foot in comms and one foot in tech for about the last decade or so. And recently for the last 3.5 years, I've been at Social Chorus where we're focused on that digital employee experience. Years ago, Social Chorus was known as an app company, but now we focus more on reaching employees wherever they are. It could be an app, could be web, could be email, could be some other system that people use to communicate with. But my job there as a senior strategic advisor is to work very closely with the communicators at these companies and help them create a strategy and get people engaged and even push them and challenge them a bit on not maintaining the status quo. And we saw that in 2020, the resiliency of internal communicators and how the— I think they realized some of the power they held, not from an ego standpoint, but from an ability to make change and have an impact in a business. And so that's what I have the fortune of doing every day is getting to work with communicators from around the world to help them strengthen communications, engage with employees, and change the business wherever they are.

Great, thank you. And I think it's really interesting, you know, when, when we think about channels and, you know, in organizations we'll hear, we'll just stick in Slack or just stick in Workvivo or just put in, you know, that's going to really help to improve the quality of our employee communications and our internal comms. And actually, I don't believe that just doing that will actually work. You can put in all the technology you like, but if you don't have a culture which is in any way two-way, is in any way trusting, that people feel as though they can have their say, that they can pop online and say, well, you know, I'm not sure I quite agree with that, Chuck, you know, what about this type of idea? Then actually it just falls on its bum. And I think it definitely needs, as you say, somebody like you to come along and actually help them do that rollout.

Absolutely.

Let's talk a little bit about the billion-dollar question, purpose. And it's something that we spoke to a lot of guests about last year. And I think the importance of purpose was really, really highlighted in 2020 and making sure that people maintain that connection, really felt part of the organization that they were in. I just wonder from your perspective and your experience, what the role is of internal comms and internal communicators in helping to get purpose out there in a way that's really impactful. How can they bring it to life? What have you seen that's worked really well?

Yeah, I think first and foremost, it's important for communicators, and especially internal communicators, to define their own purpose inside their organizations. Because I think once— when I've seen internal communicators figure out what their purpose is, it's not about getting a paycheck, it's not about showing up to work every day. That, that should not be the purpose of an internal communicator. That's an end result of being a great internal communicator. But defining your purpose as a communicator, what drives you, what motivates you, what keeps you reinventing and recreating and pushing boundaries, I think that's important because what, what I think sometimes internal communicators forget is that we are also employees. So we are also our audience that we are creating for. And sometimes that's a good thing. And sometimes that's a bad thing because we, I think, assume everybody knows everything that we know because we're interested. Hopefully we're interested in what we're communicating about, whereas other employees may not be or may not know to be interested. In a topic. So I think for communicators first to define their purpose and then challenge employees, not in a negative way, but in a positive way, push employees and ask them, what's your purpose? What motivates you? And then just sit back and listen. I know that's something we talked about back in June was I think that's something hopefully that companies learned in 2020 was to listen more to employees. What I don't want to have happen is in 2021 for people to feel like, much like we have socially in some regards, we've gone back to thinking life is normal. It is not. I want companies to keep that operation in place, to keep listening to employees because now for a lot of organizations, I'm not saying every organization did that, but for a lot of organizations, they've now set the tone. They've set a new tone for the organization. I think that's important for them to listen to employees as they continue to craft that tone.

And I think, if memory serves, when I asked you in June, do you think that organizations traditionally are good at listening, your answer was pretty emphatically no, that is true, not.

And, and, and, and I want to be optimistic about it. I want, I want the— because there's no excuse not to, I think, at this point. I think we, we've pushed employees into new areas that, that might be very comfortable, some might be very uncomfortable for others. And I'm— and again, it's not this discomfort makes great change. Sometimes people might not particularly enjoy working from home. They might not particularly enjoy, that might be a great place for them to be productive. They might wanna go back into the office. And you mentioned the culture piece earlier on, that is gonna be an interesting part of this because I think we're seeing cultures being tested, cultures being stressed. I'm not one of those believers that a company has a culture and it's just, rigid thing and it's a couple words that you can throw out there. I think it's this amorphous thing that moves and ebbs and flows as one person leaves and another person comes in, experiences leave, new experiences come in, that culture changes. And then I think a big opportunity in 2021, and this doesn't fall on the shoulders of communicators, but I think communicators can certainly help surface it, is looking at microcultures inside of organizations, looking at specific team cultures, because that might explain why there's certain friction between departments or certain frictions between individuals because we each bring our own set of experiences, our own values to it. Sometimes that's in alignment with others, sometimes it's not. Not saying that that's then a negative thing, but there are many cultures or microcultures that exist inside a larger corporate culture. I know a lot of people describe culture as, you know, the way we do things or the way it feels. That's also going to ebb and flow throughout a year. If you've ever worked in a sales-driven culture, the way it feels at the beginning of a quarter is very different than how it feels at the end of a quarter. That's okay, but let's recognize that and let's start to surface and listen to employees about what they want and need out of a culture and how they would define that company culture.

Yeah, and I think, you know, that whole idea of having subcultures and having microcultures is a really good thing. You know, as you were talking there, the kind of the analogy I was getting in my head was a rowing race with, you know, 6 or 8 people in a boat all rowing. They're all going the same direction, they're all heading to the same finish line, but actually they might be dressed differently, or some of them are wearing gloves, or some of them aren't. You know, it's, it's just different how they get to that endpoint. It's going to be different from team to team to team to team. And that's okay, because if we're all heading to the same end goal, if we're all in pursuit of the same purpose or vision, then that's got to be a good thing. And surely that's a really important role of internal comms, to make sure that we're getting that purpose, that vision out there, to make sure that we are all rowing in the same direction.

And, and I think that, that's a great point you bring up. And, and that's something that I saw at, at Social Chorus in 2020 was a very clear, defined focus for the year. Even pre-pandemic, when we all got together as a company in January of 2020, there was a clear focus of this is what will success will look like for us. It was very simple, very focused, and thankfully we were able to achieve that, but it was because it was simple and everybody knew their part. Everybody knew their piece. Companies, as we all know, tend to make things very complicated. They tend to put a lot of words in areas that we don't need words. They tend to gloss over things that shouldn't be glossed over. And I think the more we can simplify— there's a— fortunately, one of the organizations I've had the privilege of working with in 2019 and 2020 has been Amazon. They have many corporate values out there. One of them is reinvent and simplify. And that's one of all their values. That's the one that resonated with me personally is I think that's a chance for internal communicators in 2021. We reinvented much of what we had to do and what the status quo was, or we've now established new policies, new procedures, new practices at our businesses. But maybe now it's that time to simplify what we're doing and really focus in on what's working and let's scrap the stuff that's not. Working.

Yeah. And I think what always amazes me, and it's, you know, you're right, that whole idea of strategy and it just, you know, it comes out as a 50-page deck and, you know, we're trying to get that out to employees. What's always amazed me is why isn't internal comms invited to the top table to help cut through all that wheat to really get to the nitty-gritty of what it is that the employees need to know? Why is that? Why is that not happening?

You know what, I think it's because you get probably too many opinions. You probably get too many people coming in where here's the 8 things I wanna do, and here's the 8 things this department wants to do, and here's the 10 things this group wants to do. And I think oftentimes what's missing is the context of that. There was an organization who I will remain, will remain nameless, who I worked with, and they said very clear, here's our 3 priorities, and this was back in, I think, 2018. One was reduce some weird company acronym by some random percentage. I said, "Okay, great. That's obviously something you can really focus in on. What does that acronym mean?" Because I didn't know. I wasn't part of their company and they're like, "We actually have no idea." And I was like, "Okay. Well, then is that..." I think the number was like 3.5%. I guess 3.5%, is that a lot? Is that a little? They're like, "We honestly have no idea." Okay, so if I'm an employee, I don't know what that acronym means. I don't know what that NPAY— does that mean I shouldn't buy that pencil? Like, does that help random acronym reduce random percentage by a certain amount? Should I show up earlier for work? What does that mean? I think that's where as communicators, we can ask, or we should be empowered to ask those tough questions. To say our employees, we talk about the voice of the employee. This is where we need to put our employee hat on and say, okay, they don't know this. Or maybe the people that have been there 3 years know that, but the person who just came in 6 months ago has no idea what we're talking about. So how do we level down some of this communication, level up our own skills, but level down this communication to where it is simple, it is more clear, it is more direct. Here's what we're trying to do and here's what it means to you. And I think that's then where as communicators, we can help strengthen leadership. In this by adding that, those contextual layers to what might sound very simple, reducing random acronym by random percentage points. Sounds very simple, but it's, it's rarely that simple. So how do we add that context to it for individuals?

Yeah, yeah. And for me, the important question, what's the, you know, what's the why? Why does that, why does that even matter? Because I think once, even, even if it does end up being a random acronym and a random percentage, if people can understand the why of it, they're maybe slightly more likely to get on the bus.

Yeah, there was a company once I was at an event and they're a retailer and they had, and a lot of retailers have very high turnover and the turnover percentage in retail would terrify some companies that are like in manufacturing or healthcare. It's like 137% or something like that. I mean, so basically every year they almost turned over 1.5 times.

Oh yeah.

And think about that from a communications challenge, but we all have different challenges out there. But they had shared by reducing even 1 percentage point in that turnover rate saved the company $2 million.

Wow.

Because of training and hiring and consistency and productivity and all of these things. Like if I was a communicator there, that is something I would grab onto to say, how in my role, how can I impact this key number? Because we realize that impact right away. So that's something for any communicators now listening, it's a great time to do this. We should do this all the time, but we always think starting off a year fresh, here's a chance to make changes. Go to the leaders you work with, or perhaps even some leaders you haven't worked with in the past, and ask them like, what are you trying to solve for 2021? What are the issues you're facing? And whether you take all of them or you pick one of them, help them solve that problem. You help them solve that problem, not only then do you get invited into more conversations, but you've shown to the business you're not simply a communicator. You're not simply the make it pretty committee or whatever other terms I've heard people use. You, you are a true advocate in the business. You are an advisor. You are a leader in that business. You're, you're helping the business improve and grow. All it takes is going and having those conversations and helping them, because oftentimes we see communications can solve a lot of problems. We can't fix everything, but we can certainly solve a lot of problems in the business.

Yeah, for sure. The make it pretty committee.

I didn't coin that one.

I'm writing that. You are, you have now. I'm gonna write that down with your name beside it. Said Chuck Ghost, that's what he thinks of all internal communicators. No, he doesn't. I'm lying, I'm lying. Let's talk a little bit.

I think one of the challenges— Well, actually, let's pause on that a little bit.

Okay, let's, go on.

Because here, the challenge with that is there are some people in the communications profession who are happy to be a part of that. They revel in that space. That's great. We sometimes need things to be pretty, right? There's nothing wrong with that. But we can't just be that. That's the challenge. So I didn't want to dismiss the people that do enjoy it. I personally like making things pretty. But if we shoehorn ourselves into that space, then that's all we're going to be.

Well, I think you've just unthrown yourself from under the bus that I threw you under there. Well done.

Nice. Good work.

Nice one. Let's talk a little bit about last year and actually into this year again. You know, we're back in lockdown, the UK is back in a full lockdown, we're going to be here for another few months, chances are it'll be 6 or 8 months more of us all having to kind of pretty much work at home. And I wonder then, you know, you touched off leadership there and there's definitely a role for leaders in bringing people on the journey and maintaining that connectedness with their teams, obviously, they're the ones they turn to on a daily basis. But I just wonder, you know, from From a culture perspective, you did touch off it there when you said culture is moving and changing all the time. But, you know, what are some of the challenges that do you think companies are facing and how can internal comms help to address those challenges around perhaps organizations moving away from a culture that they might want to have or struggling with a culture that's starting to form because they've got 1,000 people now in 1,000 different locations because they're all working from home?

Yeah, I think that that is going to be something interesting in '21. And there's a— I think this is from the '70s. There's this thing called the Allen Curve. And it showed that the— this is back when people were in offices. It showed that the further distance people were from each other, even down to the feet or meters of it, however you want to measure it, the further people were away from each other, the less communication there was. So if you and I were 6 feet apart versus 25 feet apart, we would actually communicate less if you were further away. Now that what they learned is that also factors in geographically. The further you are from someone, the less you're likely to communicate to them. And that could be time zone based, right? With people working different time zones, there's fewer windows to communicate. And then additional studies, and you would think, oh, well, with Slack or with using Social Chorus or using some tool, we, we don't need distance, right? We're all together in the same virtual place. But they found that it's still the same. We communicate less the further we are apart. And especially as someone like me who's been a remote employee, I've seen the pace of communication change where it seemed maybe a bit more methodical before. It's now almost very hurried because people are adapting. They're trying to figure out how to communicate in this new world. How do you, keep people involved. I've seen myself invited to meetings now that because everybody's remote, they invite everybody. Whereas before, if everybody had been in an office, they'd have been like, "Oh, we don't need to invite the remote people." And I probably didn't need to be invited, but there's this thing of, okay, we can all get in here in one place, one virtual room, one virtual conference room, so let's bring everybody in. So I've seen the pace of communication hurry, and I'm hearing that from some of the customers that I work with, as well. The— when it comes to a culture, I do worry at times about how are we bringing people together and sharing that common vision? I think this is where leaders need to step up in ways they're no longer— if you did work in an office where a leader would walk around, think about a restaurant manager doing table touches, they, they go around and ask people how they're doing. That's easy to do in an office setting because you're going to do that naturally just being a human being. But when we're all sitting in our kitchens or sitting in our living rooms, or if we're fortunate enough to have an office at home, that's not— we have to be even more intentional. So I definitely put that on the shoulders of leaders in organizations to do that, to check in on people. And there's a lot of cultures that it's tough to say things aren't okay. And we need to let employees know that it's okay to say it's not okay. And we've heard that all throughout 2020, but I think we think about it more personally, not professionally. And so I would challenge leaders that if somebody says, "Oh yeah, things are fine, that's okay." Is it really? Like we need to push back on that. And this is where I would love to see internal communicators step up and and coach leaders and work with leaders on that to check in. But I know I said I put that a lot on the shoulders of leaders. I would also like to challenge employees to speak up, that if things aren't feeling right, if things aren't good for them, if things aren't the way they think they should be, is there a mechanism? Is there a way for them to speak up to where they won't fear of retribution, or they won't fear of, you know, revenge coming their way or something like that? Or to our point about listening, that they'll actually be heard and that people want to hear from them. So I think that's a big opportunity for this. I don't think that just because we're all remote, there's a lot of remote organizations prior to the pandemic that have been amazingly successful, but a lot of times their culture was built on being remote. So now as we go to '21, where a lot of organizations are fully remote, is it a time to rebuild some of that culture and redo things that maybe just didn't work before. But also let's keep in mind, there are a lot of organizations and businesses where employees do have to go into the office, they do have to work. So what are we doing for them as well? We work with a lot of retailers and manufacturers and distribution centers who— we stay high to the pandemic. I feel like all of 2020 was a height of the pandemic, at least here in the US. Who, you know, it was probably very stressful going into work beyond just the normal work stresses, but very stressful going into work. What are we doing to recognize that, take care of those people? Not, we don't have to always call them heroes. We don't always have to use these big platitudes out there to talk about it, but are we checking in on them? And I think that will speak to the cultures that thrive in '21, to the cultures that don't.

Yeah, I think one of my big, one of my big takeaways from last year from a leadership perspective was the whole idea of checking in, not checking up. And, you know, replacing, I think probably one of the big, and it's again, it's become one of those terms that's been thrown out there all the time, but actually it is really important that we've, we've lost the water cooler moments. We've lost the opportunity, as you said there, for the manager going around and doing that, you know, the table touch in a restaurant. We've, that's the bit that we've lost. And yes, it is incumbent on leaders to make the call and say, "Hey Chuck, how are you getting on? Listen, not really work related. I was just calling to check in." And I think often what we hear is, "Well, you know, I'm very busy doing the day job to have, you know, I've got 10 staff." That could be 10 minutes of phone call and that's, you know, an hour and a half. Where have I got a hunt? You know, where do I have an hour and a half a week? That should be a priority. And if it's not, then there's something wrong with the prioritization in an organization.

Yeah, I wanna share a personal story along those lines that I, it didn't hit me until after it had happened that, At Social Course, we have a team of advisors who I've coined and call us the A-Team, being a child of the '80s, call us the A-Team. We, and normally in 2020, we would have all seen each other either as groups or as individuals, half a dozen to a dozen times during the year. And I have not seen any of them outside of a Zoom call or something like that since late January. So there's been that miss. We obviously talk all the time, we connect all the time, but we haven't been in the same place all the time just to have those water cooler moments. To have those random conversations. And so—

For a year, a year, that is.

Yeah. Yes. And in December, late December, right before the Christmas holiday, we all got together to do like this virtual wine tasting that a lot of organizations do. It was very fun. We're invited to bring our partners along to it, which was great because that's obviously a big part of the work experience now, is our partners also experience our work. And it was set to go from 5:30 to 7:30. Some of us were on that Zoom call until 2:00 AM. Oh my God. And I'm one of those people that when the whole virtual happy hour thing started, you know, I was like, okay, this is pretty fun. And then I got to the point where after about 30 minutes, I'm like, you know what? I'm done. I'm good with this. Apologies to anyone who invited me to one. But for that team, that just showed to me how hungry and almost to the point of starved we are for that connection with our coworkers. And that's something I hear from other SocialWorks customers out there, but me experiencing that, the fact that we stayed on a Zoom call for roughly 8.5 hours in our kitchens, in our living rooms, just talking, just chatting, just catching up. Yes, we had some wine earlier on in the evening, But eventually that dried out, but we just stayed on. And it was really cool to see, but it didn't really hit me till the next day when I realized like how much, if I needed that that much, other people surely need that, need that that much. And I'm not suggesting everybody get on 8.5-hour Zoom calls until 2:00 AM, but that said a lot about the culture, that microculture our team has, where we do cherish each other. We do enjoy the time with each other. So we need to set aside more time to do that. And that's what I would like to see other companies do, set aside the time to really let employees connect in that water cooler type environment or the break room type environment.

Yeah, and I think, you know, your learning is very aligned with mine and your experience is very aligned with mine in terms of that whole idea of, you know, if it's a group of new people doing that kind of that 5 o'clock on a Friday drinks for an hour, that's hard, 'cause it's just everybody talking over each other. Whereas if it is a close team, or in my case, perhaps close friends, then, you know, you'll be on, you go on, you have a glass of wine, and suddenly it's 4 hours later. And you're kind of going, where did the 4 hours go? But it just went because it was natural. And it was just like you were sitting in the room together. It's just as it always has been. And I think the more of that companies can do, the better.

Yeah, I think it shows the professional connections we all see that happen inside organizations. It's those personal connections and the friendships that happen where, you know, I was fortunate. Some people may not think it's very fortunate, but I was on the road probably 50% of the time prior to the pandemic. So I was seeing colleagues and customers face-to-face all over the country, even getting to travel to Europe sometimes to do that. And then all of a sudden that disappeared and you miss those personal connections. Where my personal connections were built when traveling, other people were built when they were in the office in San Francisco. That's gone away for everyone, not just at Social Chorus, but at a lot of companies. I think it's important for companies to recognize that, yes, there's all kinds of professional connections and how our teams work together, but there's also these really amazing personal connections and friendships that develop. How do we give employees permission to set aside time to develop those? Because those obviously have dramatic and tremendous impact on that workplace culture.

Of course, people buy people, we know that.

Yes.

And we know that, you know, if I don't get on with a customer or a colleague, it doesn't matter how professional we are, it's not gonna, it's just not gonna fly. It's not gonna have the spark that it could have.

Absolutely.

Yeah. At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. People first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. Let's talk a little bit because, you know, when we speak and often on these podcasts, when I talk to people, it's people from big organizations where there might be an internal comms team. Let's take Ireland, for example, we've got, I think there's 280,000 companies here, 260,000 of them nearly are micro SMEs, so less than 10 employees. So we are a culture and a country of small companies. And I just wonder when you think about the learnings that you've taken from the big organizations that you've worked in and worked with, what are some of the big things that you think? And 'cause I mean, it is the MD of the company, right? Who's gonna be the internal comms team in inverted commas in that situation. What do you think are some of the things that they should be focusing on when they're thinking about having remote employees? Because obviously, the impact for them, if they've got 10 staff, having 10 staff at home and that's their entire company, if 3 or 4 of those become disengaged, that's 40% of their workforce suddenly not doing the do anymore. So that's a huge, huge potentially negative impact on the business. What are some of the things do you think that that MD or CEO of that small company can be doing from a comms perspective to maintain that connection with their teams very practically?

Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. I think we do tend to focus on the big companies that have comms teams, not necessarily the companies that still need to communicate without somebody in that role. So this is a good challenging question. I'm trying to put myself in that role of the MD or the CEO. I think something you mentioned very, very early on is what are those check-ins? What are those table touches that we talked about that you're doing with your employees? Are you able to read between the lines and what they're saying? If they say things are okay, or if they say things are fine, don't take that as the final answer. You don't have to challenge them on it or push it on it, but make sure that things really are. And maybe not even ask it in a simple way of doing that, where I've noticed now even on calls when you get on, we'll say, oh, how are you? Good, good. How are you? Good. But it's a formality. We're not really listening to how people are saying things or how they're responding. So that's something I've tried to even do is not just ask those generic type questions. So really get into learning your people, making sure that they feel comfortable asking you questions. And I think the bigger challenge, and this would be hard, I think, for some leaders, but maybe for small business leaders, it would be a little bit easier. How do you set up communication and remove yourself from it? So that you're not the center point, that you're not the focus of every single communication, but building that camaraderie amongst the team. I think about it from a sports standpoint where they have player-only meetings. They don't want the manager there, they don't want the coach in there. Are you facilitating those kinds of conversations so that it doesn't always fall on you? You're not this pinpoint for all communication, everything has to flow through you, much like we don't want that to happen with internal communicators either. So are there ways to set it up to where you're not, or I've seen some other organizations do it where, let's say if there is a regular weekly touchpoint, there are different people that lead those meetings. It's not the MD or the CEO doing it all the time. It's that individual. We've even started doing that at Social Chorus where we have a weekly all-employee meeting. Now we have about 120 people, so it's still a pretty decent size, but we still get together every week. Every week there's a different person leading that meeting and they're not on our leadership team. This could be somebody from support. This could be somebody who's an engagement manager, customer success, sales, whoever it is. Different people are leading that meeting. So we still follow an agenda and go through that, but it really shows that we're lifting others up and not just relying on, on leadership to be that communication focus. I think that's something I would love to see communicators do or leaders do for communication, remove yourself from it and let others facilitate some of that. My partner, Kristen Hancock, who's also in communications, very early on an episode of iEcology Podcast, she talked about this meeting format that she created, which is letting people know like, what are you focused on today? And then what are the distractions? Like, what are your distractions today? And it's not always work. It could be my mom's in the hospital or my kid got a bad grade or I'm dealing with a sick dog at home. Like, all of those things are stuff that we can't leave behind. We bring to work with us. So is there a structure? Is there a format to where you can let people can articulate and share? Yes, this is what I'm focused on at work. This is what might be pulling me away from that focus that 'Cause you don't live with me, you don't know these things are going on. And the more comfortable people can be to share those things and be open and honest with each other, then it makes sense why somebody maybe didn't respond to an email right away. It might make sense why they seemed a bit absent at that meeting. It wasn't that they didn't care. We all have lots of stuff going on. So how do we let people share those things? And I think especially in a smaller team or a smaller company, that would be really easy to do.

Yeah, I think to touch off something that you mentioned earlier on as well about your January meeting in Social Chorus last year. You know, here's the 3 things that we have to achieve this year. I think, you know, organizations, particularly when they're small, sometimes forget because the owner-manager holds everything so closely to their chest, and perhaps they're not sharing enough. Perhaps they're not saying enough. You know, we want to double revenue this year. We want to halve our costs this year. We want to get into 3 new territories this year. We want to just putting it out there and making sure that people understand it. It's stuck on the wall if it's in the office, or it's, you know, somewhere virtually on an intranet or wherever it be, but that people have a shared understanding of where it is you want to go. And no company is too small to have a really compelling vision. No company is too small to have a really compelling purpose. If you're 2, 10, or 1,010 people, arguably the same rules apply, just on a smaller basis.

Yep. And I think it's then— I think the opportunity is for that shared participation and investment in that. So if the MD, the CEO, comes and says, uh, we need to, or we're gonna 50% more revenue this year. Or she says, we're gonna get into 2 more territories this year. That those are our goals. Now to have her go to her team and say, what are your ideas on how we get there? That's the good. If the MD or CEO already comes in with, here's how we're gonna do it. Employees might agree, they might disagree. But if she says, okay, here's some ideas I have. What are your ideas on how we get there? That's when you get that investment in people. That's when you get them participating in it because they have a shared responsibility to do it. Now, these are now our goals. These are our objectives, not her objectives or their objectives.

Yeah, and we know from stats and research that we've seen, you know, you and I will have read oodles of over the years that, you know, when you involve all your people in that decision-making, when you involve them in coming up with solutions to problems, actually that in turn drives employee engagement. And back to the flip side of, you know, my point earlier of what if 4 or 5 people in your organization of 10 are disengaged, you know, wow, the impact that would have. Flip side of that coin, imagine if 4 or 5 or 6 or 10 of those 10 people are really engaged at work because you've given them the opportunity to have an input and a say in how they drive their future in the organization. The power of that is tremendous.

Absolutely.

Tremendous. Yep. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about one thing that Mike touched on. On our chat in June when he talked about onboarding. And I heard a really interesting story from a friend of mine. They've about 100 people in their firm. And he said, you know, we took on a senior sales director just earlier in the year. And because we're all remote, we kind of figured that, look, he's a senior person and he'll just come in here and he'll, you know, just get on with it, bang, you know, and off we go. He was gone 6 weeks later. So he lasted 6 weeks. And back to your point about the cost and the time and the effort of that hire, and then having to go back to the market and rehire the lost sales, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, it's 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 grand, whatever the cost of that is going to be. Mike touched on the fact that one of the big growth areas, probably certainly last year into this year, is gonna be how we remotely onboard people in a really, really effective way so that they don't leave. After 6 weeks. And he said, my God, if you could come up with a way of doing that, I'd buy it off you tomorrow. So I hurriedly put pen to paper. But I thought, you know, I thought I'd turn that to you and just see from your perspective, you know, what role do you think, or is there a role for internal comms in helping to onboard people in a way that's perhaps a bit more human in this very strange and remote, unhuman kind of situation we find ourselves in?

Yeah. It has been a challenge, and I've recently onboarded a new employee at Social Chorus. Unfortunately, I knew them before joining, but still I think about what their experience is like. They've now been with the company for a month. They've met us before, but obviously haven't met anyone since joining. But we've onboarded many people over the year who haven't been into an office, haven't met face-to-face with any of their colleagues, and I wonder sometimes what that experience is like. For them. And it'd be very easy to find out. I could just ask them, I guess I could stop wondering and stop and ask them. But I feel like I know in my mind that it has to be a bit weird. It has to be a bit challenged to work somewhere, especially when maybe that wasn't the understanding you had when you were going to join a company that nobody foresaw what was gonna happen this year, right? Nobody had those types of insights, at least that I know of. I think the opportunity here is how do we make people feel like they're a part of the organization even before they join? Even before day one. So I think about this like from a pre-boarding standpoint, what information do we arm them with? There was, I mean, I wish I could remember the company that did this. It was an insurance company based out of Chicago, Illinois, here in the States. And they talked about these mini celebrations they would do with employees where when somebody signed up, up to join the company, they sent them— I can't remember if it was $100 or $200 gift card to go and celebrate.

Nice.

On your own, celebrate with your partner, celebrate with friends, whoever, take everybody out to McDonald's, whatever it is, but go celebrate. I was like, man, what a great— not even day 1, what a great day negative 15 or negative 30 that you already feel like, okay, this company is Cares about me. They're excited about me joining. And I think that is something that communicators, we are creative, everybody's creative, but I think we often take the time to think about that employee journey. And so are there things that we can recommend that we do to show that gratitude, to show that appreciation for even from a system standpoint? You mentioned your story about that sales director being there 6 months or 6 weeks. There's a lot of studies that talk about on unique anniversaries, an employee journey, they— people tend to leave at certain times because it's a reflection point. It's a, I've been here 6 months, I've been here 1 year, I've been here 5 years. What if as an organization, there is a system that said, hey, you know, Scott's coming up on his 1-year anniversary, it's 3 months away. Let's have a check-in with Scott. Scott, do you feel you're being successful? Do you feel like you're accomplishing your goals? Is there anything that you don't feel in touch with? Get ahead of it, because we don't want people to leave, right? We don't want that type of turnover. And I think onboarding can lay a groundwork of success to where people feel like they're involved, they feel like they're a part of it. Even down to— I'm not a big swag person or tchotchke person and giving people things, but even if on day one, you know, I think back to my very first job, very first office job that I had, showing up day one and there were my business cards in the cubicle and thinking like, oh, like they were ready for me. Like they're ready to start. And so as we've brought on other people to the A-team, or I mentioned the new hire that I brought along, like how do we make them day one feel like I can be productive, that I'm a part of this, this company is ready for me. That it's not day 5, someone's still waiting around for something, or day 7, someone still hasn't received permission to get on another system. I think communication does have a role to play there in thinking through those steps and being thoughtful and creative and intentional about how do we craft that journey so that people do feel like they belong and they feel valued. Because oftentimes in the early on, that's when people are hungriest for information. They want to learn about the company. They don't want to feel left out. So, or do we have that information that's easily available to them? Or are we walking them through? We've— Social Chorus, we've had some companies go through and ask us to help put together a, like a campaign where day 1, people get this message, day 2, and day 3, and day 4, and it's taking them down a journey. Those journeys could be very different for different parts of the organization, but at least, you know, okay, we're giving them information, not giving them this big binder at once. Saying sort through it later. Nope, go watch this video or go fill out this or go, you know, read up on this or go check out this customer story. It's taking people down a path, and I think that's something that communicators are well equipped to lead.

Yeah, I think that your point about creativity, um, you know, I would add to that that what we are very good at is bringing the human. And I think that if we can work with probably HR, who's putting together the onboarding process for remote onboarding. If we can get involved in that conversation and bring the human— here's a little video of Chuck, who's somebody you're going to be working with, talking about X, Y, and Z, just so you know what he looks like and sounds like before you might meet him on the phone. Here's a great story of something we did for a client that went on our intranet, you know, last week. Here's something else that can— if we can start to inject those little bits of human. And I think back to that, that whole idea of connectedness and a sense of belonging. You know, we don't belong to a company, we belong to the people that we work with. We are part of that tribe. And if we can, if we can help to create whatever that tribe looks, feels, and sounds like, then that's, that's a really positive thing.

Yeah, we, one of the great things I love that we do at Social Chorus is obviously we, we drink our own champagne. So we use our own platform to communicate to the organization. And any new employee, regardless of level, one of their early activities when they join is to write an article about themselves. And I think about it from my own experience when I joined more than 3 and a half years ago, and the company was smaller than it is now. But it's cool to see 50 likes and 20 comments, people welcoming individuals to the organization. And I think like, as a new employee, That's probably a bit scary sometimes to throw yourself out there and post a photo and post some things about yourself and open up. But then how redeeming must that be to have people celebrate that and ask you questions about something you wrote about? Or, you know, like somebody, you know, Joy mentioned that they grew up in Ohio and I immediately made that connection with them based on where I— that's where I grew up. So the more personalized and personal we can make that onboarding and let people celebrate who they are and what they bring, and their experiences, I think makes it easier to welcome them in, but also allows employees to celebrate this new energy that's joining a company. Again, whether that's 10 people, 100 people, 100,000 people, you might think, oh, 100,000 people, we can never have everybody do their own story when they start. Why not?

You absolutely can.

You absolutely can do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brilliant. I love that idea. That's a really, really nice idea, which I will suggest back to them, and I shall roll into my framework for remote onboarding when I put it together. I'll give you a little credit, I promise I will. Last question, just thinking forward, if we fast forward 12 months, so we're now in January 2022, which if it's anything like last year was, is gonna be here like tomorrow or the next day nearly. But I wonder looking back, you know, if you were gazing into a crystal ball in a year's time, you're looking back, what is it you think the successful companies will have done to maintain that connection with their people?

Well, I think—

One or two of the big things.

I think one, they've already laid that groundwork groundwork. I think we've already seen the companies that have shown that they care about employees and that checking in with employees. I think the companies that go above and beyond in looking at creative ways to support their employees and something that's been top of mind for me, pun intended, is mental health lately. Companies have always, at least from a US standpoint, we don't have a perfect healthcare system, as I'm sure people have seen if you listen around the world, but a lot of times benefits are provided by employers, 'cause it's not a government system. And physical health has been a part of that. You go into the doctor, get flu shots, whatever it is, but mental health has been something that has really been put on the individual to take care of. And I worry about that for a lot of people as they've, as we've all, if we've been fortunate enough to survive '21 and still be employed and have friends and family around us safely, what has this done to our collective psyche? Like, how are we coping with this? And we all have our highs and lows and I think the pandemic just really more exposed it. I think we've all had mental health challenges in the past, whether we recognize it or not. So I think the companies that want to really take care of their employees and want to invest in them as people, not in them as a communicator or an engineer or accountant, but as that person, as that— I don't like it when, companies say like, "Oh, well, we're all a family here." You don't fire family members. You don't lay off family members. So we're not a family, but I understand the sentiment of it. But I think it's those companies that really invest in taking care of their people are going to be the ones that win. I also think, and this is, I would say, more US-centric perhaps than other comments, but The companies that really pony up to the table on social justice, that they walk the walk and they talk the talk. And I've seen a lot of organizations out there set new standards on, you know, and admitting we have failed, that we have not had minority representation on boards, or we have not done a very good job of addressing social injustice issues. People now have receipts on this. We now know what companies said, and they're gonna be checked up on. On this. Those companies that lived up to that, or at least showed that, hey, we are making efforts, we are really trying to make these changes, those are the companies that are going to win culturally and with employees. The ones that have failed are probably the ones that were failing before, but they felt like, oh, we got to get a statement out. We got to show that we're something to show that we're paying attention. And then they haven't done anything. There's going to be a price. To pay for that because there's now an expectation of where people work is no longer just a paycheck. It is part of our identity. It is part of who we are. And that means a lot to employees of who represents them. The companies that step up and do the right things will be rewarded with loyalty, with engagement, with productivity, with ideas, with, with ambassadorship, all of those great things. The companies that won't are going to continue to struggle out there. I wish I had a crystal ball because if I had a crystal ball in 2020, at this time last year, I would have said, hey guys, watch out, there's a pandemic coming, right? We had no idea.

Buy Zoom shares.

Buy Zoom shares, check up on Bitcoin. Yeah, check out Tesla, all of those things. But I really, I have very high expectations of how companies act and sometimes those are let down. That's okay. I have very high expectations for leaders. Sometimes those are let down, that's okay. But it's more around our companies, our leaders, our communicators, our employees. We all wanna do the right thing. I truly believe that out there. It's a matter of those are the ones that stick up for what they believe in. Those are the ones that are gonna be ahead of the game.

Brilliant, brilliant. I think we'll leave it there. A really powerful way to finish. And I think that the rise of employee activism that probably started really in earnest kind of last year, um, is going to be something that will stick with us and is, to all intents and purposes, a very, very good thing.

Yeah, the one— it's interesting to bring up because I think that if anything, the pandemic might have dulled some of that because people couldn't get— the people that were, that were conscious of those things, that we can't gather, we can't make noise. And I also wondered too, from an employment standpoint, did people, you know, like, nope, I'm just going to hunker down a little bit and sit tight during this. I don't need to make job changes. I don't need to leave. I don't need to make a lot of noise, whether they did that subconsciously or not. So I wonder, once we get out of this pandemic, will we start to see where there always seems to be this power shift between, is it more employers in power or employees in power? Who's got the greater choice and control? I think right now, it's just very stagnant. So perhaps in 2021, that starts freeing up when people can travel, people can gather, that we might see some more conversation and growth in that area. Yeah.

Well, let's hope so. Let's hope so. Chuck, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on again. Thanks so much for taking the time. Have a wonderful day, and good luck in 2021.

Yep. Thank you, Scott McInnes. Same to you.

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