Navigating Employee Communications During Times of Turbulence
In this three part series, Renegade Partners' Chief People Officer Susan Alban and Cameo's former Chief People Officer Melanie Steinbach explore how startups can navigate through the supercritical, during Supercritical times - from the changing expectations around internal employee communications, to how to compassionately navigate layoffs, to exploring innovations in employee compensation. In part one of the series, they dive into how leaders can deliver comprehensive, clear, and timely communication to their employees.
One of the most critical tools in your company’s toolkit today is Employee (Internal) Communications- accelerated by the organizational upheaval felt globally during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and now at fever pitch with shifting company goals and Reductions in Force (RIFs) on the rise. As we face widespread economic uncertainty, employers will need to continue to deliver on comprehensive, clear, and timely communication. However, this is complicated by the rise in internal communications leaked almost instantaneously, an increasingly activist stance by employees, and a desire by employers to be clear without instilling fear.
The case for great employee communications
Most companies say that their distinctive edge or competitive advantage or what makes them great is their people- this was first supported by a focus on recruitment (some of us remember the release of McKinsey’s “War for Talent” white paper), and followed by better development and retention programs (which gave rise to everything from Coursera, Udemy, amongst others and even things like free food and pool tables). In order to maximize these significant investments, the best companies realized that they needed to market to employees the way they market to their customers.
However, LinkedIn, Indeed, and other networking sites have fundamentally changed the employee retention game. It is reported that 74% of employees believe there are better opportunities outside of the company vs inside. So let’s play this out. We spend a ton of money on recruiting talent into the organization, and then we lose them because it seems easier to find a promotion externally versus internally? While clear approaches to talent management are necessary, one of the most important unlocks is actually knowing the internal opportunities that exist. A great employee communications partner can help make this a much more accessible piece of information, thereby improving the ROI on the upfront talent acquisition costs.
Finally, work environments have been forever altered. The dispersion and diversity of workforces demands more thoughtful approaches to employee communications. What could be communicated in a poster or screen in the lobby of HQ now needs to be articulated globally, simultaneously, and in a way that is authentic to the company’s values. When one of us was a Chief People Officer at a fully remote company, we were often saying, “internal communications is the new facilities.”
Be Clear (but don’t instill fear)
For those who were working during the pandemic, one of the key lessons that was learned intensely during Covid was to communicate what you know, what you are going to do based on what you know, and what you still need to know (known unknowns). It was absolutely the right approach given the acute time of crisis, but we have found that this expectation for clarity has not reduced as the pandemic has waned. One thing that feels riskier now is that while there was acceptance that we wouldn’t know everything about an unprecedented global pandemic, there is less acceptance of “not knowing” when it comes to our markets and our customers, despite both of these behaving unpredictably. So how do you keep things clear without fear?
Stay grounded in the facts- our business is down 30% year over year in our Eastern European markets. This has impacted our overall profitability by 5%. We are looking for ways to improve this and are evaluating discretionary spend (travel, internal meetings, new hires) for the rest of the year.
Write to the most common level of understanding vs the most sophisticated financial explanation.
Where possible, time box the communication- the above example would be improved by adding the following sentence at the close: The Executive Team will communicate our plan by our next All Hands meeting in July.
Be Authentic and Appropriate
Employees are savvy. If your corporate voice has been light hearted and all of a sudden becomes overly serious, the collective fear level will shoot up. If you have been empathetic in your tone to date and over rotate towards clinical, employees will think the worst. The same goes for verbal communications- if you are normally off the cuff and have to go to a script, prepare for the rumor mill to go into a tailspin.
However, if your corporate tone is normally very humorous, it’s hard to deliver potentially bad organizational news with a joke. A better approach would be to call out the switch in tone: “ while we normally try to make you laugh with our posts, today’s post is no joke, and we will keep to the facts.” We think the CEO of Carta did a great job with this during Covid.
Appropriate doesn’t just mean tone- it also means the medium and style of communications. Many organizations are facing RIFs (which we will cover next), and these complex organizational changes require multiple modes of communication, including but not limited to group presentations, 1-1 verbal communications, blog posts and FAQs. We are big fans of having communications guidelines as part of the employee onboarding process- explaining how the company uses each communication mode.
Enough-Share vs Overshare
You should anticipate that all employee communications will be externally shared. The only question is when- we have seen a rise in news outlets printing written employee communications and transcripts of verbal communications. These are sometimes shared proximate to the event, but could also be used later to demonstrate lack of alignment or even of hiding the truth as was indicated at Peloton( link).
With this in mind, it’s important to take the guidance from above- clarity, and appropriateness- and use business continuity as a governor on how specific to be. Your role in employee communications is to give your employees the information they need to be informed, not to give your competitors the information they need to create an advantage over you. This is a tight line to walk for executive teams who are asked to be transparent- and who we have found to largely want to be as transparent as they can- but who don’t want to cause the organization harm.
How do you make the call on what might be oversharing? Some questions we have asked to make this determination include:
Do our employees need to know this level of detail to do their jobs well?
Do our employees need to know this information now to do their jobs well?
How could this information be spun negatively in the wrong hands? How likely a scenario do we think that is? Can we assume that level of risk?
When we look back on this in 12 months, do we feel like we can honestly say we were communicating the best we could with what we knew at the time?
Conclusion
We believe strongly that the need for excellent employee communications is not diminishing. We anticipate that it will continue to be a high value position should we enter a full scale recession and certainly will be a tool to accelerate organizational alignment for recovery. Some of you may be thinking at this point- “do I have the right person leading this work?” Or possibly “do I have anyone that I can actually identify who leads this work?” The professionals doing this likely have backgrounds that are a little zig-zagged- they might have spent time in HR, Communications, Marketing, or Business Operations/ Strategy, or preferably some combination of these. When in doubt, hire for great business judgment and clarity of thought.
One last piece of advice: as much as we will all look externally for inspiration on how to do this well, at the end of the day, each organization’s approach should be customized to their unique combination of issue at hand, corporate voice, and employee population.
About Melanie Steinbach
Melanie was most recently the Chief People Officer at Cameo and previously worked with and for Fortune 100 and privately held businesses. She is passionate about integrating the work of the People function with the strategic growth initiatives of the organization. Her expertise is in growth and transformation- of organizations, functions and individuals.
About Susan Alban
Susan is the Chief People Officer and an Operating Partner at Renegade Partners, where she supports the portfolio across all areas of Human Resources operational support. Susan brings deep expertise in operations and product, especially around launches, as well as a particular passion for learning about new future-of-work, people ops, and marketplace business.