Inside story

Has COVID Democratised Internal Communications?

Has working remotely actually made it easier to communicate with employees? Emma Duke examines the ways in which internal communications professionals have adapted and learnt.

BY EMMA DUKE

I have only attended one Zoom quiz this year. I’m not very competitive, and two small kids make it challenging to focus on anything for more than five minutes. The pandemic changed the way we were able to interact in so many ways, in so many parts of our lives, but when the Edelman Trust Barometer came back saying the source people trusted the most was their employer communications, it clarified the vital role of Internal Comms professionals.

On 1 April this year I launched a new, merged division for Oxford University Press. We had been planning that launch since the previous September. We had put a lot of planning into it, a lot of messaging, technology and content work… and then in mid-March everything changed. I considered announcing the cancellation of the launch to 2,500 employees based across the globe. In a world where their attention was now focused on the safety of themselves and their families, where they would be able to buy food and pick up medicine safely, surely this wasn’t a priority for them?

I was very wrong. We had a massive sign-up rate and were deluged with questions. Our managing director and our comms team did an excellent job of reassuring people, answering their questions and connecting them… and the feedback was incredible. Our colleagues in China, having dealt with the situation for months by then, were able to provide advice and pass on lessons learnt. Our employees were able to connect with each other more than ever before. We had a common experience and an opportunity to engage.

This format shouldn’t have been new to us. We have access to good technology and are a strong team, but the realities of pre-pandemic work meant that, if you were based in a large office where the CEO or an MD is also based, you had more access to them. Likely, you will have been in the room as they gave their livestreamed presentation, and at a time that worked for your working hours. You might have used Yammer occasionally, but you were surrounded by colleagues and friends in the office.

Conversely, if you were based in a smaller office around the globe, or part of the sales team, you would likely need to dial in to a call early or late in your day, you would need to ask your question (either by email or on an app) in a situation where you couldn’t read the rest of the audience, or where you might not know other audience members. How would this question go down with the CEO? Would they even answer it? What will people think of me?

This (quite specific!) example got me thinking about the impact the pandemic has had on employee engagement tools, principles, and practices. Has the pandemic actually helped us do our jobs? Has it forced us to implement the two-way communications channels and environments we’ve all been talking about for years?

Olivia Calvert, Head of Global Communications, Workplace from Facebook told me recently: “In March, overnight, companies sent their employees to work from home and most didn’t know when they’d return. For many, this posed a huge problem – how would they keep in touch with their staff? And I’m not talking about white collar workers sitting behind their Mac books drinking coffee in East London. I’m talking about frontline workers – nurses, retail staff, flight attendants. These groups traditionally don’t get company mobile phones or even have work email addresses. A few weeks in, it was clear an intranet or newsletter or mass BCC email job wasn’t going to cut it.”

Like many, my organisation sped up the roll-out of technology support such as Microsoft Teams. Yammer engagement soared. Calvert also said: “We saw a huge increase in interest. In a handful of months we shot up from three million to five million monthly paid users, and are still seeing steep growth. We also saw our average sales cycles shorten and go from a few weeks to a few days.”

Technology suddenly became crucial to enabling employees to access important information and connect with colleagues. Increasingly, the focus of Internal Comms teams became community management and how to increase open rates for important emails from leadership. Julie Chakraverty, from Rungway, suggests this was where we were going wrong. “There are real barriers to people absorbing outbound communications: firstly, a lack of time to read emails, then some confusion on behalf of the employee – ‘if I’ve got a question, who do I ask?’. Finally, and most importantly, there’s a confidence issue. If you look and sound different, you don’t want to raise your hand on certain issues.”

CAN YOU HEAR ME?

Johnathan Tetsill from Feedback Films credits Communications professionals for listening better during this time: “Those elusive but important watercooler moments were not happening in the office anymore, but on Yammer or Workplace for all to see. Comms professionals started looking at what their people were talking about and needed support with.”

But are we listening hard enough? The ability to ask questions of leaders on an equal platform – never mind where you’re based – has helped, as have enterprise social networks, but what about the quieter voices in the organisation? What does this new world of internal comms mean for inclusivity? Chakraverty adds, “The idea that you’ve said in your values that you’re transparent, and that the world will just follow you, is just daft. If you really want an inbound comms mechanism, a way for comms teams to really understand what answers people want answering, you need to make anonymity possible. That way you can really touch the topics that are at the beating heart of the company.”

IT'S HARD TO READ AN EMAIL FROM A SIGNALLING BOX...

While anonymity might make it easier for employees to speak up on sensitive subjects, how has communications changed for employees who weren’t office-based? Pippa Arthur-Van Praagh, Head of Product Adoption at Reward Gateway, says “For companies who have a mix and have some employees still onsite (in factories, warehouses and shop floors etc.), they’re not as able to 'attend' or access all of the great content and communications that’s occurring online.” At Network Rail, the majority of employees working are dotted across the country’s rail network. Laura Cosby, Internal Communications Manager, comments, “Briefings from team managers are crucial. It can sometimes be a challenge to engage our frontline colleagues when they work across the region, and often on shifts. Our staff are key workers, so during lockdown they continued to go into their work locations, and these briefings took on another level of importance. “Based on feedback from colleagues, Cosby and her team set up one-to-one phone calls with senior leaders, increased the frequency of virtual leadership calls to give more opportunity to engage with the business, and gave office-based staff “an insight into the reality of frontline roles with a video series of interviews with maintenance and operational colleagues.”

VIDEO KILLED THE KEYNOTE STAR

Johnathan Tetsill from Feedback Films echoes the importance of video in profiling and including employees in communications: “We have been persuading clients to take a user generated content approach to decentralize comms for years. The effect COVID-19 has had is quite amazing. Our clients created engaging content that people actually wanted rather than top-down comms that people found irrelevant. Building conversations amongst people who didn't usually get involved in internal communications but also let comms identify key people within the business (influencers) that could be relied upon to start engaging conversations.”

Has the pandemic forced us to implement the two-way communications channels and environments we’ve all been talking about for years?

Video as an internal comms channel isn’t new, but it took on a new form this year. From getting a glimpse into the CEO’s living room, to regular appearances from children and animals, none of us have been able to separate work and home life as we normally would (I recently chaired a panel session for 200 employees before realising my washing was hanging out behind me the whole time). But having everything on show has helped leaders establish a level of authenticity never reached before, continues Tetsill: “No longer could CEOs get agencies in, storyboards made, and 37 versions of one film produced. Comms people could actually say: ‘No, that's not going to happen, you have to film yourselves’. By doing this, CEOs made themselves much more human, but it also nudged them into communicating directly via their phones with their people.”

A recent survey by the Institute of Internal Communications asked members what areas they expected to see the biggest changes/improvements in focus within organisations as a result of the pandemic. Health and wellbeing and manager and leadership comms were both at the top. If we are to take lessons from this experience into 2021 and a future with a vaccine, surely the increased inclusivity of our channels would be at the top of our priorities? When the world fell into crisis this year, as professionals we adapted, got better at listening and opened up, and we facilitated more trustworthy dialogues between leaders and employees. Many of us had our budgets cut, but we got creative, finding new and more efficient ways to engage and motivate our teams.

If a new normal is established any time soon, it will still be very different from our pre-COVID lifestyles: far more flexible working practices will necessitate more flexible employee communications, engaging staff in different ways, at different times and using new platforms. The internal comms response to COVID-19 fills me with faith that we’ll be able to achieve that, and with it, a better experience for our audiences.