Podcast: Enabling remote management is 2021's biggest challenge

Jonathan Davies

21 mins read

Table of Contents

Some of 2020's challenges are sneaking into 2021 and gaining momentum. When will this all end?

It won't of course, the world has changed and some things just won't be the same. Luckily, we have Intactic's CEO Preston Lewis here to help us combat the biggest obstacle: managing workforce remotely.

You can listen or watch the podcast, or scroll down to read the full transcript. Choose fast, because the new episode's waiting for you!

The International Communication Podcast Episode 23 from Happeo on Vimeo

Jonathan Davies: Alright. Welcome back. We're here at it again for the second episode of what is going to be a beautiful, beautiful year in 2021! Today I've got an awesome guest here, Preston Lewis, who I was introduced to by a mutual friend who was also on our podcast before. Preston and I got to talking about a couple of really, really relevant issues right now and we believe Internal Comms can play a specific role in that is going to hugely impact organizational efficiency. But before we dive into that Preston, please introduce yourself to our wonderful audience.

Preston Lewis: Thank you for the introduction. My name is Preston Lewis, CEO of Intactic. We are a modern communication consultancy, been in business for over two decades now, working with over a hundred companies all over the world we positioned ourselves as a hybrid strategy, consultancy and full service creative agency.

Jonathan Davies: Awesome. Well, two decades of experience talking to you, right here. That's gonna be amazing, Preston, one of the first things, when we started talking that really jumped out to me and that you're quite known for is your philosophy on leading as a human. I'm really curious, maybe as an opener, we can start talking about what does that actually mean?

How to create a human-centric workplace?

Preston Lewis: I think it's a really great place to start, to set a good foundation, not just for the conversation that we're having, but just our work as professional communicators. It's an interesting thing, even this morning I saw another ad for another leader.

In this case, he was at a tech company that was going to speak about creating a more human-centric workplace. As buzzwordy as it can sound today, I think what's really important to remember is this is not a new concept by any means. Communicators in particular, and we talk about creating more human-centered workplaces or communicating in a more human-centric way.

It's another way of maintaining our focus and being audience-centric. We are communicating with people at work just like many communicators do. Whether you're selling a product or a service, our arc focus is on communicating and engaging people at work. When we say being more human, it's important to remember that we, as human beings, intrinsically care about a handful of things, but really two things bubble to the top that I think are most relevant.

The first is that we don't like to look stupid or not look good. It's an uncomfortable feeling that brings anxiety. It's actually mostly unconscious to most people, not just at work, but for human beings. Number two, we need to feel loved.

When we think about love and the context of this particular workplace communication, what we can boil that down to is just like in any good relationship outside of work or inside of work, feeling loved means feeling heard or listened to. When we talk about engaging people or creating more empathetic workplaces, or what defines our listening strategy, our focus is ensuring that people continuously feel heard. Then the work is of course, ‘how do we do that?’ I just answered the ‘why’. But the ‘how’ is much more difficult. It's about creating more human centric workplaces. If we can remember our focus and remember those two things, we're heading in the right direction.

Jonathan Davies: That's awesome. You're actually reminding me of two very wise lessons an uncle of mine once taught me, that I applied to Internal Communication whenever I can. The first is if you want somebody to hear you, you need to listen to them first – you already touched upon listening, which I think is a very, very strong point. Then the second is that when people listen to you, they only hear what they want to hear.

Psychologically, we're programmed to just filter information that's interesting to us by our mental frame model and all of those things. Does that touch upon what it means to really communicate to humans, but also as a human?

Preston Lewis: Absolutely. Let's get into it. I think that when folks are listening to this podcast, what can they leave with, but what is it that we can remember to do really well, or whether what can we be reminded of?

There are lots of different ways to think about that. About those points: Sure, we need to listen first. The other day I was thinking about my daughter who loved Hamilton, the play and that famous line that said, ‘talk less, smile more’. On so many levels, that's such a valuable piece of advice. To me smiling means listening. It creates time and space for that. But back to the point, when we think about another way of saying that, that making that same point that your uncle made is that we, as human beings, our ears aren't open.

We're not interested in hearing anything other, specifically in the context of work, ‘What is our organization doing to address my concern?’ When we think about concerns, we define concerns as something that if the concern can be addressed, that's very valuable to me.

We look in the context of change communications and change management. We always talk about looks as we're crafting our messaging or the narrative, if we're not directly responding to what it is that keeps people up at night. What is your concern or what keeps you up at night? In the context of work, if we're not responding to that initial often unconscious, sometimes conscious concern for people, then they're never going to listen to anything we have to say.

Jonathan Davies: Basically adopting this philosophy to the first step is listen, because you need to figure out what it is that does keep them up at night. Start communicating to them.

Preston Lewis: It's interesting. Because we talk a lot about what it is that we could do to make the biggest impact, that's why we often find ourselves doing that one-size-fits-all approach. What I suggest or recommend is: there is what we need to communicate to everyone. There's also, what are the pervasive or most common concern sets that exist within the organization for our audience?

Of course we need to look at the messaging in terms of what we're communicating. Often the concerns of our leaders are often the cases that we need to make sure are being communicated. It's another way of saying that we are constantly revisiting our role or identity as communicators. The priority for us is to be much more of a facilitator than a communicator.

Inherently, when you position the role that way, it becomes two-ways. As a facilitator of information, we need to constantly revisit how we address what leaders need to communicate or do we need to communicate as an organization and what is it that people care about. Then we can respond to those concerns and then we can move forward in the right direction and have much more thoughtful conversation about the things that matter to everyone.

Jonathan Davies: Having spoken to a lot of Internal Communicators since we started doing this podcast, I'm pretty convinced that Internal Communicators have come to grips with communicating and when it comes to sending messages. When it comes to that, they've really tried to adopt that human way. In general, the disciplines become a lot better with it.

But how about the other side of it, which is you need to also go to that leader who wants you to communicate something? Let's say it's Q1 strategic objectives. How do you convince a leader also that this is the right approach to take? How do you work?

The listening strategy

Preston Lewis: That's bringing us right back to what we often call ‘The listening strategy’. To just say that we're listening is one thing, but we need to be very strategic about that. We need to ensure that we're balancing very time-based listening tactics, so beginning and end.

We need to have one pulse question that's open for the day on Wednesday. So very specific kinds of targeted listening exercises or tactics along with what I call the ground cover – the constant listening. Especially these days, we're going to have the ability to have open-house conversations with our leader or a leader on the team. It’s often best practice now that really shakes things up rather than one specific leader. On the third Thursday of every month for an hour, that's that expectation that needs to be there.

When we think about making sure that our leaders can trust that we are constantly listening that requires trust between the communications team or function, or leadership team.

Jonathan Davies: Oh my Gosh. Ladies and gentlemen, Preston is also going to be co-hosting next time. No, you're absolutely right! First off, there's some really, really powerful advice in what you just said. To any Internal Communicator listening right now, still feeling like maybe they're being pigeonholed or stuck in what the old paradigm of Internal Comms is right: listen to Preston and take that advice to heart, please, because it's a great way to shift your job from being just that ‘send, send, send’ to really being the facilitator of Internal Communications.

Preston Lewis: This is a very specific example of what we're seeing in terms of the impact that new ways of working are having in the global workforce.

Let's not dive into new ways of working and the behaviors that drive that, but let's really keep this actually quite simple. Let's remember the fundamentals of our work, of creating better experiences through more effective communication at the workplace.

What I love about that data point is that it's reminding us that fundamentally people aren't leaving organizations, they're leaving managers. Your day, keep it even more simple, beyond being able to say and be proud of the company that you work for, it's enabling us to get through the days and empowering us to do our best work. That’s the relationship that we have with our entire team.

A very big part of that is our manager, right? We have the best team in the world, but if we have a manager that isn't effective, it just doesn't feel good. It decreases morale, decreases performance for the broader team.

Jonathan Davies: So this was the juicy bit, right, Preston? We discussed a couple of cool things and now we talked about higher-level leadership and Internal Comms’ position there. But we also know that there's a big issue in companies everywhere right now, and that's management.

Management is starting to feel the pressure of working remotely, of having a team to manage, of needing to listen to their leaders and commute cascading information. In fact, we ran a survey recently and we concluded that while 14% of employees say that they are likely to leave within the next six months, which is kind of a normal number, 43% of managers said that they want to leave within the next six months – that's alarmingly high! I'm really curious to hear if you have an idea of why that is?

Preston Lewis: To be very clear, I know of course that we work with many organizations that the ‘New way of working’ isn't new. There's been a lot of virtual teams for many, many years. For many years, we've learned how to be effective there.

What’s different today is there's just more of us. Before it was optional, now it's not. It's not optional to choose to work virtually.

What do people managers need?

That's where the rubber meets the road for people managers. Then it falls back on us as communicators and as leaders to say, ‘What are we doing to address that specific need that our people’s managers need at any level?

We can revisit the foundation of communicating effectively with that manager. The foundation has three main systems and processes. Firstly, I need the skills and the support that are more effective to communications: people managers.

Secondly, skills and capabilities – are we providing the learning and in some cases training or just the information people need to revisit their skills as a manager, as a communicator?

Then thirdly, as an organization, as terms of our communications infrastructure internally, are we tactically putting in place the right things to sustain a new level of effective communications?

When we build more effective people managers communication strategies, we need to balance it with those three things.

Jonathan Davies: I think that there are two subjects that I'd like to explore here. One is the relationship between a higher-level leader and a manager, because you're absolutely right. People don't leave companies, they leave leaders or they leave managers, and managers also have managers.

That's a very good point. First off, what can an Internal Communicator do to grease that cog in the wheel a little bit better than how it's going now?

Preston Lewis: If they continuously are hearing feedback and comments from their team, about ‘When are we going to get information about a timeline of returning to our traditional offices? How has the pandemic impacted our business? What do we know now that we didn't know three months ago?

What can we do now as an organization to support our people? Because we've been doing this for a year now, it's been six months since anything's been communicated to us’.

That really illustrates that our leadership team understands what's different today.

Jonathan Davies: Thank you so much that there was so much information and such good advice packed into a beautiful, 30-ish + minutes by now.

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