Podcast: Internal Comms' key takeaways of 2020

Jonathan Davies

29 mins read

Table of Contents

2020’s almost over. (Phew!) This was the year of the wind of organizational change:

Internal Comms – “the slightly unsexy, younger brother of marketing” grew up to be the wise sage on top of the mountain, whose advice was needed by everyone. Black Lives Matter influenced another movement – one of Diversity and Inclusion, and while the global pandemic was happening, people were trying to figure out if their house was a home or an office.

To reflect on those and many more events from 2020, we’re tuning in with Lindsay Kohler and Russell Norton – a dynamic duo from scarlettabbott. Russell spots trends at the workplace, while Lindsay gets to the bottom of it. It’s time to wrap up this crazy year!

How did Internal Comms handle the pandemic?

Jonathan Davies: Absolutely. Diversity and Inclusion is one of the two biggest things that I see moving into the next year on the big list of priorities by now, but hopefully number one on it. We will definitely be discussing that. We have a behavioral scientist onboard today, and we've got a person who basically has an overview of everything that happens within the space of employee engagement among all of the clients they treat. We’ve got a trend spotter and a behavioral scientist. This is going to be quite good.

I guess the first thing that we could start off with is the pandemic, which hit most countries when it came to the lockdown around March.

We’ve discussed this quite a lot already on our podcast, but obviously now have the benefit of looking back at it and saying, “Maybe some things shouldn't have been done the way they did.” I'm very curious. How do you look back at what happened during those initial lockdowns?

How Internal Comms handled the effects that it's had on companies, employee morale, all of that stuff?

Lindsay Kohler: That's a great question. As Russ said, it's really his job to spot trends. It's my job to stay close to him, to figure out what the trends are. We saw mental health take a spotlight that it's never had before because of the loneliness and the stress that the pandemic caused.

We saw huge hits to motivation and morale, and companies trying to figure out how to keep both of those up. As the pandemic went forward, we saw huge issues of fairness and inequality exposed. You've got people that got to work from their couch and people that had to go in every day and face the pandemic, and figure out what that did to overall morale. We saw organizational trust issues.

I could just keep going and going. I'll stop there for a moment, but I would say in short, we've seen what normally would take ten years to develop and expose over time happen in ten weeks.

Russel Norton: I think the thing that I would add onto that from an Internal Comms perspective is just a massive reprioritization of what people were working on, what organizations were working on.

What was fascinating was things like digital transformation, the launch of enterprise social networks, for example. All of a sudden those decision-making processes could happen that much faster because there was a really urgent need for a decent communication platform that combined everyone in an organization.

Whereas some of the kind of longer term content space projects, maybe the shutters came down on those because they just weren't driving value. What I think almost every single Internal Communicator that we work with learned from that period was to ask that question of “What's the ultimate need? What's the value that this project is driving? And if it's driving a ton of value, let's work our socks off until we can get it launched, and let's not worry about the other stuff.”

It was fascinating to see what was achievable in a really short timescale. People did some incredible stuff and stuff to really, really be proud of.

Jonathan Davies: I think the part about value is really interesting and I think that one of the things that I've noticed there is, first off, the decision-making process in companies has sped up exponentially. I'm seeing traditional companies realizing that they need to change, they need to adapt to digitization. They need to allow for asynchronous communication because it's just not a viable way to try and do everything synchronously anymore.

I think that one of the reasons why that works is that for the first time in a very long time organizations and Internal Communicators have been able to agree on what is value right now at this moment in time.

Throwing the layers of approval out the window

Jonathan Davies: Now I'm curious because essentially, like Lindsay said, we have eight layers of approval to go through before in order to get something done. That rule book got thrown out of the window, because it had to, there was no choice. Businesses needed to move faster than before.

Have you seen anything because you've both helped a lot of clients through this time? In retrospect, have you seen anything go wrong because those approval layers were thrown out the window?

Russel Norton: I wish I could say that I had. I'd love to say that because we partner so closely with our clients, we've helped them not make any of those mistakes, but that would be incredibly cheesy with me. I haven't seen it go wrong.

I think I've seen instances where people could have done more. People could have pushed it a bit harder and a bit faster. There's been some natural tensions that have arisen. I think it's come more as we've come out of crisis mode and settled into our new reality.

There are some teams that are still operating with a slight crisis mindset that need to free up some of those team meetings and some of those sign off processes or ways of working, where they shifted to new virtual ways of collaborating in response to the crisis.

I think it's more about investing in what's next or lack of investment in what's next, rather than something that they got actively wrong.

Lindsay Kohler: I wholeheartedly agree with that. I think the biggest risk is not taking the headspace and the time to define the new rule book that you want now that the old one is gone. Again, when you're running so fast in crisis mode, there's a chance that you'll step on your shoelace and trip.

I don't think that we've really seen active tripping or falling into a restless point with our firsthand experiences with our clients. Of course they didn't trip. We were there helping them along.

How Black Lives Matter led to the Diversity and Inclusion movement?

Jonathan Davies: I think that's a really interesting point because I've always been of the opinion that that rule book needs to be thrown out of the window entirely. I haven’t heard any horror stories myself.

Removing layers of approval has not led to any massive issues from what I have heard. I think that the interesting part is that pre-pandemic, Internal Comms was one of the most neglected disciplines in the business.

However, it gets one of the biggest layers of approval in the business. If everybody wants to be so involved in it, why does nobody actually care to give them the budget?

Lindsay Kohler: Russ, do you want to talk about Black Lives Matter and then I can talk a little bit more about fairness? What do you think?

Russel Norton: Absolutely. I think the real trend that emerged for me this year was the true understanding of privilege. That linked to everything else that happened in my opinion, because at the very beginning of the pandemic, people described it as the great leveler that no one was vulnerable, that we were all in the same boat, but really quite quickly it became fundamentally obvious that we weren't in the same boat.

If you are a senior leader in your second home or palatial mansion with perfect Wi-Fi and nice soundproof walls, you're entirely different to a quite junior member of staff crunched into a four bed apartment in London with a shared dining room, with four laptops around it, all trying to get work done.

That real divide in the haves and have nots is what was emerging. People were starting to understand in terms of what really is their level of privilege.

What is their home like? What is their Wi-Fi like? What is their setup like? Have they got kids up there? Do they care for someone? All of those questions became really clear and the impact on your ability to get work done really well was also really evident.

When then the Black Lives Matter movement came to the forefront. Were people going, “We've had enough of this unfairness”? This unfairness became so fundamentally obvious.

Again, in the weeks prior to the killing of George Floyd, the data even in the UK was starting to show us that people of color were dying faster than white people. People were starting to ask what is going on here? Why is it so unfair?

Lindsay Kohler: There's not really much I could add to that breakdown of fairness and equality that Russ just gave us because I think you beautifully described all of the nuances that were suddenly exposed.

And then we had a day of reckoning. One point I would make to that, which I think is helpful when considering your path forward and your policies forward, is that we use fairness and inequality pretty interchangeably, but they're actually not.

In general, we're sort of okay with inequality. I'm just going to let that sit there for a moment. I know that's a weird thing to say. We're sort of okay with inequality if we all have the same starting place and advantages.

It's that lack of fairness and the starting point and the advantages and all the things that we have to overcome that make people angry.

Jonathan Davies: I think that a lot of people still struggle to keep their people engaged and feeling like they're part of a larger whole, not that everybody's essentially remote.

I think that it's great to look back at things and say, “This is what we should have done.” I believe that this will be a massive issue still going into the first six months of next year at the very least. I’m really curious to hear both of you. What have your observations been?

Because we know that this was a big issue. We know that this was one of the first things that Internal Comms on average prioritized doing something about. What's happening with it now? There are still a lot of Internal Communicators that say, “Oh my Gosh, this is still a problem. People are now getting tired of all of our digital communications efforts.

Russel Norton: I mean, that's the $50,000 question for a lot of organizations right now. Information overload was a thing for the last decade, but this year people are so bombarded day in, day out with the phones, with their inboxes, with the news, with their colleagues, with their mum sending them random links of some website that she's seen about the latest hoax conspiracy.

People are not only information overload but information mistrust. They no longer really believe what they're saying. Add into that this kind of needs to keep people connected and together, and allow people to form those social bonds, particularly people who are new.

There are hundreds of people who've started new jobs in the last six months who were trying to get to know a team of people that only exist as a face in a square.

I think the trend that we're starting to see is, again, less come out of crisis mode, do a bit less, give people some time back. The big currency in people's lives right now is time.

That's certainly something that people have noticed this year that they're no longer commuting.

Lindsay Kohler: I think that the way forward is just being smart about it. What things should be in person? In what ways can you come together in person?

Because I'll just come out and say it, there is no replacement for in-person interaction. We've gotten really creative. We've done really good. The types of interventions Russ was describing are absolutely the right ones to be duty because they're around shared interests and help you get to know people better.

Russel Norton: The latest Norwegian trend word, I'm not gonna be able to say these right, and it's going to annoy me, but like "Fika" and "Hooga". The idea basically is spending time outdoors, whatever the weather.

Jonathan Davies: Speaking of money and recognition, another massive thing that has happened this year, and in fact happened extremely recently, are the presidential elections in the United States, which, even though we're not going to dive into the political side of that, obviously one of the things that this always spurs, is a big discussion on what's leadership like in our business? What are they doing now?

What could they be doing better?

Russel Norton: I think the big trend that I've noticed is authenticity, leaders really having to stand for something.

Lindsay Kohler: I think what we're also going to see, which can't wait for it to shake out, is we're going to see a difference in the type of leaders that emerge.

What will Internal Comms take into 2021?

Jonathan Davies: Now you're actually making me hopeful about 2021 and beyond. Thank you for that, I think that was very necessary.

On that note, I'd like to ask you both a final question, which is: if you look back, which thing that happened in 2020, do you want to bury in a hole so deep, nobody will ever find it again and which thing from 2020, do you think was maybe a little hidden pearl that you want to take into 2021 and just help it blossom into something beautiful?

Russel Norton: I think it was the care that emerged and one of those other trends that emerged recently is this customer connection. There's a purpose driven organization, where the customer is everything.

We meet the needs of our customers. We solve our customer's problems, all of that stuff. This was the year that the word customer was replaced with the employee, and we care about our customers as we care about our employees, as our number one priority is to care for our employees.

Lindsay Kohler: I think this is the year that we've really started talking to each other and we really started listening to each other. We started talking at work about previously taboo or stigmatized topics.

I want to understand the people that I work with a lot better than I did before, because it's much harder to connect with them.

I hope that as 2021 progresses and we'll gain this little bit of hybrid, office and home workforce that we don't forget the good things that came out of it, but indeed, please speak those bad things behind and be done with them forever.