Corona Life, Adelaide Style: a dog in the den

When you are in a lift, do you look straight ahead or do you look at the floor? One of the most memorable internal communication campaigns I have seen took advantage of people ‘looking down’ and put signs on all the lift floors. Genius!

That idea was rolled out at when I worked at Nokia, which put big signs on the floor of the lifts saying quality dialogue doesn’t happen on email.  

As email interactions surged in Nokia, so too did the need to remind the Nokia team that you can’t effectively communicate with email alone.

A decade later and that message is just as true. In fact, given that our reliance on email and electronic messaging has only continued to grow, it is even more relevant today. 

A lot of communication in my time on the phones was on email. Some of the use of email was to do the current environment eg social distancing. But there was also clearly a strategy. For example, there was a three-times-a-week email from the senior leader with ‘expected’ messages like pandemic response and policy news. And also as expected, in between the serious messages we came to know about the leader… and about her dog. You can relate to her better if you know she has a dog, right? 

As I sat there taking calls from the unemployed, I became annoyed by such communication. I didn’t want to know about her dog. I wanted help with my calls. I wanted better training. Above all, I wanted to hear local updates.

I am sure there were good intentions in her emails. But one of my fellow newbies summed it up best: ‘another load of management cr*p and who gives a &£^£ about her dog’. Ouch!

Another ‘epic fail’ (in my view) in the contact centre was the use of email to launch an online ‘suggestion portal’. We were all encouraged, by email, to ‘Tell Jen’ (a senior leader) our ideas for improvements. Some people made ‘I know what I would like to tell Jen’ comments. Others just ignored it. Not one person I was sitting with intended to submit an idea via the online portal. 

And there lies the killer fact about quality dialogue; no one in my circle cared and the email requests had failed to engage us. 

One of the key failures of these management emails were that they were not complemented with local updates. Another issue was that it was all one-way. There was no dialogue; this was ‘tell-sell’. 

In the ‘Tell Jen’ example, there was no local leadership encouraging us to use the suggestions portal. The senior leader asking for ideas wasn’t someone I knew. There was no obvious ‘what’s in it for me’. There was a mis-match of the ‘bring ideas to the table’ message on the same day we got another warning we would get the sack for dress code violations or inadvertent computer access. 

There was no quality in the dialogue.

As a senior leader, sometimes you feel ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ when communicating. You know some people are sceptical or dismissive while others are keen to hear about everything going on in ‘HQ’. You want to encourage ‘involvement’ but you know others are better positioned to drive engagement, such as Team Leaders. 

I know this challenge particularly well. For more than 20 years across multiple jobs I used an electronic newsletter called ‘From David’s Den’ (FDD) to communicate management updates, give thank yous and the like. I even used it to make me seem more relatable (albeit I have never had a dog to talk about!)   

My recent ‘dog’ experience doesn’t mean the death of FDD, but the experience has been a great reminder that management communication has to be consistent with other things going on. And while you can’t please all of the people all of the time, anger and worse still, apathy, should not be the outcome. 

Even in these ‘socially distant’ times we leaders can still talk and find ways to communicate meaningfully. But if we rely too heavily on email…then if you pardon the pun…the risk is things will ‘go to the dogs’.     

Do you need help with managing communication or engaging with your teams? I am available now for contract or permanent opportunities.