How to improve understanding and empathy with an organisation communication plan
It can be easy to fall into the trap of doing something, communicating it once and then mentally crossing off ‘communication’ from your mental checklist for that bit of work. It's important to empathise and put yourself in the shoes of your audience. How often did you read an email newsletter or attend an all-hands meeting and truly comprehend and digest everything that was communicated?
Repetition of a message 5 times in a variety of channels will successfully convey its meaning to 80% of the audience.
My experience over my career: Repetition of a message 5 times in a variety of channels will successfully convey its meaning to 80% of the audience. First, for transparency, the choice of 5 times is arbitrary — although from experience more than that appears to have diminishing returns — my reasoning for choosing 5 was to support multiple times in a primary channel (whatever channel was best fit for that message) and a few more times in other channels that might reach people who responded better to different formats. Some people prefer aural, others to read etc. Implicit in this message is my other point — without repetition, the level of comprehension of a given message is likely to be far less!
You can read more on why this may be here:
Another strength of repetition is that it aids legitimacy. The belief that something is concrete and reflects a change that could affect people positively or negatively is influenced by how real people deem something to be. Unfortunately, it's too common in organisations for people to hear about something with grand claims only for it to fall short of expectations or to be never heard of again! If you are making a significant investment in an effort to make a positive change then match this with a significant investment in communication.
But how can everyone understand my message if, even with repetition, I can’t reach all?
I think it's helpful to acknowledge the complexity of communication and acknowledge comprehension is never a true facsimile. This can inform how you approach communications. Understanding is complex and is influenced by what each individual brings to the table. This is particularly true at the point of communication, even when repeating a key message, but there is always a point where further repetition in the near term may not be worth the effort because of diminishing returns. There, of course, maybe cause to repeat a message further in the future as important information slips from the forefront of the groups thinking. Not all is lost though, it's likely if you reached most of the group that the message does land with the remainder overtime via their peers as ideas become action and through their own repetition.
Communication planning
An approach I used, which helped ensure I was making an investment in communications which was adequate for wide understanding was multi-fold:
- Ensure the organisation has a communication structure which makes it easier for everyone who was responsible for making a change to communicate that change successfully.
- Ensure that each change communication I am responsible for is clear, thoughtful and repeated in multiple channels.
- Ensure those responsible for leading change know about the communication structure and communicate with discipline.
A communication structure which makes it easier for everyone to communicate change successfully
I find it easier to participate in communications — whether giving or receiving when they are operating in a predictable cadence. It feels analogous to a bus schedule and catching a bus. You know you can do other things but if you don’t leave the house by a certain time you will miss the bus. When there are regular forums with relevant people it's similar — I may have a question which is important but not urgent — if I know the forum is coming up soon I can park it for that forum.
Similarly, I know that people have preferences when it comes to consuming information — more on that here:
To harness this knowledge I see it as important to establish channels which support different communication styles. These include:
- All hands “Townhall” meetings (my preference was monthly)
- Blogs & Slack for announcements (I prefer these over emails as they ‘live’ somewhere so its easier to go back and find them)
- Showcases (weekly for teams plus a monthly one overall for what recently had reached our customers)
- Newsletters (generally for awareness building of what was happening across the organisation rather than announcements)
- Managed Knowledge (Sharepoints, Wikis, knowledge search engines etc.)
It's important to not only establish these channels but to communicate with people their intended purpose. To be very meta you can use the ideas in this post to ensure that this is well understood!
Each change communication is clear, thoughtful and repeated in multiple channels
I am not sure when I came across this format for planning communications — I believe it was part of something a former colleague many years ago may have shared with me and which stuck. I’ve used it myself and have coached many teams and individuals on this approach to writing a communication plan. The result has been transforming from complaints that initiatives were not getting the collaboration or participation they needed moving to a strong buy-in to change, less friction and more cooperation.
First, before I get into the details of the format, this post assumes you pair this technique along with other communications best practices — for instance, it's really helpful to write down the purpose of your communication and the audience. It's also helpful to draft an outline of your core messages. Review the purpose, audience and outline with your collaborators to ensure you are on the same page. There’s lots of other great advice out there so I will leave you to research that part yourself.
I usually suggest the team’s document their plan in their knowledge management tool of choice — for us there was Sharepoint and confluence available. Anywhere it's easy to build a table is fine — I quite liked confluence’s table and collaboration features for this but I have found it easy in Excel and other tools as well. For the row, headings list out each channel available that’s a relevant channel for communicating your message. For the column headings, we map out time periods — I typically use ‘Week 1’, ‘Week 2’, ‘Week 3’ so that the plan remains valid regardless of the commencement date.
In this matrix we have created we can then add some details of specific communication events. E.g. we are going to announce our intent to do something on Week 1, in the All-hands Townhall. On week 2 we will repeat the key messages in the newsletter, in a blog post and on Slack. In Week 3 we will reinforce in the Showcase, repeat and provide some progress on Slack, Week 4 another blog post addressing an important detail and so on.
Those responsible for leading change know about the communication structure and communicate with discipline.
To ensure the level of communication was always improving in the organisation I would share the equivalent of this post in various channels — verbally in townhall updates, as blogs etc. The goal was to ensure people were aware of the channels — at Seek Asia, I had an awesome colleague who took this on and continued to periodically enhance the channels and continue to maintain awareness.
I would engage with each individual and team which I knew had an important change they needed to engage with the organisation on and coached them in thinking in a structured, systemic approach to communicating and in the importance of the upfront investment that would save them ample time later with better understanding and issues being raised earlier.
In future posts I will share on some additional communication principles which I have found useful:
- Using multiple points of coherence to aid shared understanding.
- Share your intentions early
What approach to communication do you use? What has worked well at your organisation? For this publication, each post is a living document and I often go back and revise and improve them. Share your experience in the comments and I will incorporate these into further improvements to make these as good a reference as they can be.
