Every company gets to the point when people are overwhelmed with communications. But you really can’t stop to communicate. HR and top management constantly receive feedback on how many meetings everyone has and how no one reads important updates in 1000 slack chats.
This kind of feedback is a good starting point. But you can’t effectively act on it.
Here is how you can learn some facts on which you can act:
Regular surveys: not only once per quarter
No one from your target audience loves them, and they are still essential. So help your people with their struggle. Be ruthless to a number and complexity of questions: the less, the better. It is our job to find the right questions and ask them the right way, not our respondents to spend an hour answering a survey.
The first thing I did with surveys at my last job was change of the questionnaire so we can have 15–30 questions instead of 70+ with the same quality of data. Before it I never saw people more happy about yet another survey.
Make sure to use not only big questionnaires and forms once a quarter but other ways to ask and get answers. Use emoji reactions and open questions in chat. Yes, it’s not the best data ever, but the best for quick decisions about the next projects. Such as “Do you guys feel like starting fun team activities in August, or projects will be still on fire then?”
Collect feedback constantly and rightaway. Look at the engagement rate of communications: number of attendees, reactions, chat activities, number of questions asked. Start collecting feedback on events with emoji reactions right after they finish, when everyone is still involved and willing to say something, not with a huge Google Form a week later.
Create a working group… and it will be your findings advocate
You wouldn’t find in this text anything about “just ask team leaders and HRs”, because it will be just a broken phone game. They have another perspective, not equal to what’s happening in the opinions of people around them.
I’m not saying the opinions of other people working with people don’t matter, they are! These people also can bring even more to the table if you include them in a working group to research communications issues together. So you can use their impact and their resources later to pitch and explain your findings and decisions for the whole company.
However, make sure to also include in your working group enough people from your final audience: developers, analysts, project managers, whatever. They will bring firsthand what and how they and, most importantly, their closest colleagues think.
Such a working group may be an enormous help to make your communications and projects more simple and attractive. One head is good, two is better, and a team is best, I’ve checked.
Custdev your people
If you find yourself somewhat responsible for internal communications, try to look at them like at product. Use ABCDX segmentation, JTBD, A/B tests, metrics hierarchy, any approach you see suitable for current situation. It will help you at least change perspective even while you are thinking about it and if you will try to use it finally — you will learn things you even didn’t expect to find out.
You will learn to ask questions another way. Not “Would it be nice if we conduct a hackathon?” but “What do you people go to hackathons for?”. You will learn to rule them all, from the audience to stakeholders, with emotions that are really happening with people, not some abstract eNPS numbers.
The product approach almost does your job for a communicator once one starts using it. If you’ve been thinking about using something else from a different field, don’t hesitate. It’s all about being creative and open to ideas, from your people, your team, and yourself.
Act on what you’ve learned and make the act visible
Wait a minute, you can say, this article was on how to research where is root cause of communication issues. I say it all doesn’t matter if you don’t act on your discoveries.
If you ask something from people, even an opinion, make sure to get back to them and show them what you’ve learned and done based on it. Because if you don’t, next time they won’t talk to you at all.
It’s not enough to just publish another survey with text like “Well, last time you said that it’s dark in our offices so we added some lamps”. No one reads it, no one feels the problem at the moment, no one needs this info at the moment.
It should be like this: we know about the problem from people, and once we resolve it, we announce it loudly. “Hey guys, a month ago many of you said that we have some light issues, and that was definitely not okay on our side. So we’ve fixed it today! Thanks for your openness and feedback, no issue will go unnoticed. Feel free to reach us out any time, and look how awesome our conference room looks with new light. I bet you can make photo shoots in it now! [pic]”
It sounds like a little stupid thing, like no one would care. They did care enough to share it. They will care again, trust me.
Surprise, you can combine and make something different
It’s not about choosing 1 or 2 approaches and sticking to them till the end of time. Use every tool you know, discover new, combine and reinvent them. Set on fire your Google Forms and analogs and forget about them if something works better for your team. Make your act on your learnings another way to measure ER, get feedback and ask something.
People are different and love different things. Communicators love to work with different things. Do not deny yourself the pleasure of being different once upon a time.