The Melcrum Strategic Communication Management (SCM) Summit took place last week in London and, as usual, I tweeted throughout – with the odd audioboo thrown in for good measure!
It was an insightful two days, and great to see some new internal comms people who hadn’t been to it before. I know they took some great ideas away from the summit – including our new research, Social media and you – and looked forward to going back to the office and banging the internal comms drum to their leaders!
This was the first interactive Melcrum event: augmenting traditional face-to-face presentations with technology that included live voting and screens on the tables to type messages/questions direct to the speakers. Some of the live statistics were fascinating, yet it seemed that many still preferred the time-honoured system of putting a hand up to ask a question rather than typing it in!
Truly engaging
Wayne Clarke from Best Companies opened the event with a fantastic presentation outlining the impact employee engagement has on business productivity. Emotional engagement is about people doing things because they want to, not because they have to – 7 out of 10 people leave a manager, not an organisation; reinforcing the need for line managers to be effective communicators!
“Giving something back” creates a moral connection between employees, leaders and the wider community – being ethical in business definitely carries weight. Bob Keiller from Production Services Network talked about turning business down in places where his people’s health and safety were potentially at risk – it’s part of their values, and they stick to them come what may!
Wellbeing is a huge factor when looking at employee engagement; the importance of work/life balance has been a real topic for communicators this year, highlighted by the release of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton and something we addressed in one of our Eye on Business events earlier this year.
All ears
Listening to employees also became a key conference take-out – managers seem to do a lot of telling and not enough listening. If you tell people how to do things you risk alienating them: the secret is to lead them in the right way. It’s easy to delay communications until you know everything, but that often means that you never say anything to anybody.
We need to be listening to the good and the bad; know who your advocates and ‘badvocates’ are and engage them. There are always people working against you in business, find them and talk to them, understand their business area too – that helps you make your messages relevant. “You need to engage leaders before your staff,” Russell Grossman Director of Communications for Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
Knowing your audience makes all the difference – taking the time to get to know their working environment, what they like to do in their spare time etc. can help you shape internal communication strategy. Channels must inform, connect, be personal and relevant, and there should be equal listening and talking tools. When looking at the channels to use, remember your audience (employees) choose, not you.
So what other key points did we take away from the conference?
Top ten tips…times two
Stephen Martin, CEO of Clugston, spoke about his experience after taking part in Channel 4’s Undercover Boss and how listening helped him make real differences to his business, and the people who work in it. He is a real champion for the role of internal communications in business and the importance of engaged employees – he learnt more in two weeks working on construction sites than spending four or five years in the office! His top tips:
• Be seen
• Communicate more regularly than normal
• Inform widely
• Suits and ties can be a barrier
• Ask and consult people
• Refresh your communication channels
• Demonstrate you have listened
• Hold skip-level meeting
• Find the right time to talk (not when people are reading the paper over lunch!)
• Develop your managers’ communications skills.
For 42% of the audience the last 12 months had been a huge learning experience – and when Viviane Huybrecht from KBC Group took to the stage it was easy to see why. A bank that had faced many internal communication challenges throughout the year really brought home the impact of the banking crisis to those outside the financial sector. Viviane gave us ten commandments for communicating in a crisis:
1. Visible leadership
2. Be honest, open and transparent
3. Tell it like it is
4. Use confidence to create confidence
5. Balance enthusiasm, motivation and realism
6. Be clear; KISS
7. Move fast and decisively
8. Make no promises about the future (unless you can with absolute certainty)
9. Use face-to-face communication
10. Never give up!
Talking techy
I took the opportunity to do quick interviews (my audioboo production debut) with Melcrum’s very own James Bennett, who said the KBC presentation was among his favourites, and fellow Twitterer Rachel Allen, Head of Communications at London Overground Rail Operations, for her thoughts on how the conference was going.
Talk of the use of social media tools in business is never far away – having been a key focus in May’s Employee Engagement Conference. However, one great line from the SCM event that is already being stolen by communicators as I type is this: for enterprise 2.0 to be a success we need leadership 2.0.
As a final thought – and I thank Russell Grossman for this again – to keep going in internal comms you need judgement, resilience, courage, intuition, leadership, tenacity and good grace.
