Insight: ‘Tick the box’ communication

Annie Hayes

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Insight: ‘Tick the box’ communication

By Annie Hayes

Colette Dorward, founding partner at Smythe Dorward Lambert, explains why ‘tick-the-box’ style, internal communications fails to address employee needs.

She acknowledges that communication is often best measured by results rather than process.

In some organisations there is still a ‘tick-the-box’ style of internal communications. It is typically felt when a new leadership is put in place, or the company is in a crisis, and then suddenly everyone realises that they haven’t done enough. Employees are not really making the right kinds of decisions, or moving fast enough, or smiling at the customer enough, to deliver what the company wants. It is at this point that questions start to get asked:

What else can or should have been done?

How can we get our people to understand what this organisation is all about?

How can we get more out of our people?

This is where it becomes more of a conversation and less of a ‘tick the box’ process.

Communication is a very personal thing. Some people may need to give a rigorous team briefing every week at 9.30am in order to discipline their thoughts and get their ideas across to their team; other people can manage to convey everything that’s required without having any formal process in place. Typically in large organisations and bureaucracies you’re often required to tick the box to show that you’ve done the team briefing, otherwise you’re not seen as communicating successfully with your team. However, I think what people need to do is judge by results and not by process.

There is a significant role for internal communications to play. In understanding an organisation’s employee base: what it needs; what it wants; what its obstacles to change are. It is crucial to understand how you can direct this information in front of your leadership and your management team so they can adjust what they’re doing to fulfill the needs of their employees.

I am a huge fan of focus groups, which involve talking to people and giving them space and courtesy to express their views, as opposed to channelling them into someone else’s idea of what they should be thinking or be satisfied with.

So, yes, they’re more cumbersome, in the sense that they take more resource – because we have to talk to people, and that takes time. Ideally, in a perfect world, that would all be built into management. However, this usually isn’t enough because information can get distorted by the hierarchy and the power structures of any organisation, be it big or small. A number of checks and balances must be set up to try and create a way through that.

Internal communication is about knowing your people and trying to understand what will work best for them, whether you’re trying to surprise them, or reassure them, or just lift them up. I think sometimes there is a real value in shock and surprise, in doing the thing that nobody expected you to do. It jolts people out of their thinking and can make them look at things differently.

What you can’t do is video an event, send it off to your junior or remote workers, and expect them to replicate the experience. You see this happen all over the place: there’s a management event, and then there’s a kind of watered down version dribbled out to everyone else and they’re expected to understand everything as a result. I think that’s fairly short-sighted. You have to think of the results you want and the people involved – or go and do something else.

This is an extract of a full interview, Internal Communications: From Information to Inspiration, published by Shoulders of Giants, priced at £14.99.

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HR Zone readers can snap up a 10% discount on the audio CD by ordering through the website (www.shoulders-of-giants.co.uk) and entering the following code: HRZOFFER06. Offer expires 30th April 2006.

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