The Goldilocks Rule

Subtlety has its place in writing, of course. Specifically, it has its place in literature, where it’s often agreed that the more interpretation possible, the better the work. But subtlety has no place in employee communications. And it certainly has no place in “great place to work” applications. At least, not in the actual part you write down.

If you’re working on the latter right now, do yourself a favor and think in terms of Dick and Jane, not Virginia Woolf.

This is not, of course, because the judges read at a first-grade level. It’s just that they’ve got a job to do and to do it they need information. The last thing you want to do is make them read between the lines. (Or worse, read your mind.)

This may seem obvious, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. I’m constantly seeing Great Place to Work submissions—and myriad other “best employer award” submissions—that omit the most important facts.

Here’s how it works: You set out to answer a bunch of open-ended questions about your work environment and culture. You’ve got a good company that works hard to support its employees, so you know you have a shot. You reach the question about how well management listens. Easy! First, you assure the reader that management does, indeed, listen. Then, you mention an event in which management listened. “Done!” you think, and move on to the next question.

But you’ve left out the most important part. The part that describes how management listens. The part that all but proves management listens.

For example, lots of companies have town halls. In some, leaders show up, make speeches, provide prepared answers to a few questions that have been submitted in advance, and leave. In others, leaders invite discussion, candidly answer questions from the floor, promise to personally provide an organization-wide answer to any emailed questions that should follow, and ask what else employees need. Do you see why it may not be enough just to say you have town halls?

Or say you have a system for employees to submit suggestions. Great. You write that down. But do employees know about it? Do they use it? And if they do, what happens then? Does anyone respond to their suggestions? Have any suggestions actually led to changes in the way things are done? That’s the kind of information that demonstrates you’re a company that listens.

In some ways, writing about management communications is relatively easy. Other kinds of questions actually do require some subtlety—not, as I said, in your writing, but in the way you think about your response. Maybe you have an organization with a real sense of mission—employees are passionate about what they do and feel they are making a difference. You can’t convey this by simply stating it’s the case. You can’t convey it by copying out your mission statement.  (Although you probably should do both these things.) Somehow, you’ve got to show that employees feel that way. This can be tough, but there are several ways you can approach it. Maybe you’ve got quotes from employees about how they feel. Maybe you’ve got quotes from customers about the level of committed service they received. Maybe you’ve got stories about employees going the extra mile—demonstrating by their actions that they care more about their mission than their job description.

Connecting the dots in this way is critical. But it’s equally important not to be distracted by some dot that has no business being there. According to my secondary sources, it was Chekhov who said: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” In other words, include the details that make your point—any other details are a distraction.

For instance, if you’re describing a policy supportive of employees, you’ll want to say how it works and who it benefits. You might have some statistics on usage, or feedback on how helpful it’s been. But you don’t have to go into details about how employees go about signing up for it, or include fine print from your legal department about the occasional exception to the policy. The extra detail just confuses the message, requiring the reader to figure out what matters and what doesn’t—a variation on having to read between the lines.

Which brings us to what I’ve just dubbed the Goldilocks rule: Good communications have not too little, not too much—but just the right amount of information.  Apply this to your “great place to work” submission, and at very least you’ll ensure you’ve gotten your message across.

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Houston, We Have a Challenge

Raise your hand if “integrity” is one of your company’s official values. Or maybe “honest” “candid” or “open” communications are on the list?

Why is it, then, that internal communications are so often dishonest? I don’t mean the outright-lying kind of dishonesty, although it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that that goes on in some organizations. I’m talking about your beating-around-the-proverbial-bush, euphemism-spouting sort of dishonesty.

This is the kind of dishonesty that thinks words like “problem,” “bad,” and “weakness” are profanities—never, under any circumstances, to be used in civil company. This is the sort of dishonesty that throws around words like “redundancy” and “right-size,” or that makes managers say things like: “That’s a great idea and [insert statement making it clear your idea will go absolutely nowhere].” That’s right: the sort of dishonesty that categorizes “but” as a dirty word.

Where does this fear of  ”negative” words come from?  

For some, it appears to be a kind of magical thinking: if we say things are bad, they will become so—and conversely, if we pretend things are better than they really are, maybe they’ll get better. Others apparently believe negative words are too scary: write or say anything too negative and your audience will become so upset that your intended message will fly right past, unnoticed.

I don’t mean to mock these ideas. A lot of careful psychological research has gone into findings about the power of optimism and about how people hear or don’t hear what we have to tell them.

The problem is, whether or not there is some truth to these theories, there exists something a lot scarier than the unvarnished truth. And that’s dishonesty. Because when you use words dishonestly, here are just a few of the barriers to communication you start nailing into place:

• You put a chink in your credibility. Do this enough times and you might as well give up on getting anyone’s attention, ever again. (If there’s no fable called, “The Boy Who Cried ‘No Layoffs Coming,’” there ought to be.)
• Your message loses its point. Think of it this way: if you’ve sugarcoated a potential disaster, why would employees shift into “urgent” mode to address it?
• You lose certain otherwise-useful words, wed forever to their euphemistic meaning. No, I don’t think anybody will miss “right-size”—which wasn’t even a word in the first place. But what about “challenge” and “redundant,” for example? These words have perfectly good, useful meanings already. If you colonize them to mean something else, you could find yourself without a good word when you need it.
• You condescend to your reader. This is a topic worthy of a post in itself, so I won’t go into it in great detail here, but just think how much better a response you’re likely to get from employees if you treat them like the adults they are.
• You risk confusion: “What, exactly does it mean when you say you really like my idea and you have no intention of using it?” Or (worse): “What do you mean you’re firing me for lousy work? Last I heard, we were talking about all my ‘opportunities for improvement.””

I’m not saying that your messages to employees when bad news strikes should be missives of doom.

You can put things in a positive light by pointing to the actual  positives involved—and there is nearly always a positive. You can emphasize everything the company is doing to mitigate the current damage and to prevent bad things from happening in the future. You can highlight the goals of whatever action you might be asking employees to take, and linger on how good it will feel to reach those goals.

You can create a mood with words, and you should think about what mood you are creating. But don’t do this by using words dishonestly. Because if you do, you’re doing a disservice to your employees, your company and the entire English language.

Have you seen an example dishonest internal communications? Comment below! 

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Communication: The College Tour Edition

Their jobs should be obvious: sell the value and unique features of their schools to the excited teenagers and anxious parents (or is it the other way around?) that troop through their offices each year as part of that modern ritual, the college tour.

But the very first two schools my son and I visited on our own college tour a few weeks ago proved something I should have known: nothing is obvious.

I’ll call them College of the Bad Example (C.B.E.) and Right University (R.U.), because they provided almost laughingly perfect examples of bad and good communication.

Lesson 1. Target Your Audience

C’mon now, you say, isn’t this a little elementary? Apparently not.

As it happens, my son is a budding jazz trumpet player who wants to go to a conservatory, so that’s where we had arranged tours. In most cases, when we set up our appointments—weeks in advance—we answered questions about his specific interests: classical or jazz? Vocal or instrumental? Performance, theory or composition? We also informed the schools that he was a high school junior, trying to decide where to apply.

When we arrived for an information session at C.B.E., dozens of other families were there. We quickly learned that they comprised a mix of high school juniors, like my son, and seniors who’d already been accepted and were trying to decide whether to attend. They also comprised classical and jazz musicians, composers, singers, musical theater types—you name it.

Rather than planning in advance for this disparate audience, the admissions staff began by announcing that they might split the group in two: admitted students and high school juniors. Shortly after that, while we continued to wait, they announced that they’d decided not to bother splitting up the group, they’d just talk to us all at once and “pardon us in advance” if some people might find the information repetitive.

The result? Well, as it turned out the admissions staffer who led the session said next-to-nothing anyway (see below). But if she had, you can bet almost none of it would have been information specifically relevant to a high-school-junior-jazz-trumpet-player. We could have gotten a lot more by spending just fifteen minutes on the website.

In contrast, when we showed up for our appointment at R.U., we found just one other family. This is not because there weren’t lots of prospective students visiting the school. As we would learn later, when we met for the actual tour part of the tour, a dozen other families were there that very day. But unlike at C.B.E., we’d each been assigned information sessions with different people at different times of day, based on the specific areas of study our kids were interested in—and where they were in the application/admissions process.

Not only that, but when my son was handed a packet of information about the conservatory, it included a sheet of paper detailing the curriculum for the specific division within the jazz department that he’d expressed an interest in.

Lesson 2: Check In With Your Audience

At C.B.E., the admissions staffer ushered us into a room packed with chairs and began by asking for a show of hands of who was a junior and who was an already-admitted senior. She apologized again in advance for saying anything some of us might already know. Then she stopped asking us anything at all and just talked. Without addressing either audience.  See below.

At R.U., our two families sat down around a table and the admissions staffer asked each of the students (both boys) to tell her about their interests. She listened carefully to the first boy, without interrupting, and then said there’d been a mix-up; his interest was in musical theater and she’d thought she’d be talking to two prospective jazz students. However, she told him, she’d be able to tailor the information to fit his needs. After listening carefully to my son, who talked about his musical interests in detail, she said he may have been misled by the name of the division he thought he was interested in: she felt he’d probably prefer one of the other divisions within the jazz department and she explained why.

Then she proceeded to give us a great deal of detailed information both about the school in general (see below) and about our kids’ prospective divisions within the conservatory. She spoke about theater groups and performance ensembles they might be particularly interested in. She spoke about current students and alumni who had similar interests and what they were doing now. At the end of the hour, she led us back to her office so she could give my son a new sheet of paper; this one detailed the curriculum for the division she thought might suit him better. She also suggested two faculty members for him to talk to.

Lesson 3. Get Inside the Heads of Your Audience

For the admissions staffer at C.B.E, it was just another day. She’d woken up, eaten breakfast and come to work. At the end of the day, she’d go home again.

She failed to realize that, for the rest of us, it was a day—or more probably a week—out of our tightly scheduled lives. We’d travelled hundreds of miles, in some cases. Paid for plane tickets or gas, paid for motels and meals, left work behind and chosen not to visit another college somewhere else, just so we could spend one hour trying to get information that would affect a decision that might have an impact on our kids’ entire lives.

Sure it was nice that she was friendly and a little casual. But neither my son nor I appreciated her endless banter and jokes that had nothing to do with information-sharing. I happen to know something about this particular college. It has a fascinating history and an unusual approach to both academics and student life. Our admissions staffer mentioned none of these. In fact, over the course of the hour, it was remarkable how little information she managed to convey.

The admissions staffer at R.U. was also quite personable. But she wasted not a minute of our time, providing so much meaty information about the program, culture, curriculum, size, admissions process, acceptance rates—you get the idea—that we could hardly write it down fast enough. Which is fine, because she also came prepared with much of that information in printed form, so she could turn most of her attention to responding to our specific needs (see above) and answering our questions.

There you have it. Three good lessons learned, all during the week I swore I was taking off from work. (The problem with a career in communications is you can never take a vacation. Communications—good and atrocious—are everywhere.)

We’re encouraging our son to look past the awful job they did communicating at C.B.E., and try to find out more on his own, because the school has a good reputation.

Will your audience lend you the same slack?

Struggling with a writing job? Let me know how I can help. And if you enjoyed this post, please sign up to be notified of future posts by clicking “follow me” on the top right of this page.

A Thoroughly Idiosyncratic Overview of Three Days in Scottsdale

Yes, I write about writing. But I also occasionally write about  the field of work-life,* one of my areas of content expertise. Those who don’t come to this blog to read about work-life might still enjoy this post, as it’s really about communication. (Frankly, to my mind most everything comes down to communication.) But I can also assure you that I’ll be back to writing as a topic in my next post, “Communication: The College Tour Edition.”

*work-life, for the uninitiated, has come to refer to the universe of programs, policies, benefits and culture-changing initiatives employers, policy-makers and others offer to support people’s efforts to be whole, fulfilled, responsible people in both their personal and work lives.

The future of work-life may depend on our ability to tell stories.

That might have been my greatest lesson from last week’s Work-Life Forum, sponsored by the Alliance for Work-Life Progress — except I already knew that. It’s all about communication, baby. And communication nearly always improves when stories are involved.

But that didn’t make the forum any less interesting. It drew an entertaining mix of thinkers and practitioners from corporations, consulting firms, non-profits, think tanks and academia. Since it was designed to be highly interactive, and since many attendees have been in the field and known each other forever, it took on a relaxed, late-night-in-the-dorm feel: lots of intense conversations, lots of bad jokes.

It opened with storytelling.

We spent the entire first afternoon together in a workshop on the topic led by Mark Guterman, co-founder of MeaningfulCareers.com. Guterman had a lot to say about how and why stories work: fascinating stuff that I will no doubt pick apart and admire in future posts. But in relation to advancing the work-life field, the main takeaway is that they do work. Data alone rarely convinces an organization’s leaders that it makes good business sense to trust employees and provide them with the supports they need to navigate their many life commitments. Data alone rarely breaks through the information-overload to connect employees with programs and policies and benefits that can help them. Data alone rarely changes public policy.

Storytelling was not officially on the agenda for the second day… 

…but it was in the air, nonetheless, as participants traded real stories to get their points across or dramatized their points with fictional scenarios. (Really. A talent scout would have found it worth the trip.) We spent much of that day in break-outs called “imaginariums,” discussing the real and the ideal of leadership commitment to work-life; of methods companies use to spread wellness initiatives into the community; and of what work will look like in the future. (We began the morning with a catch-up on research, which often tells a story, too. My favorite nugget from a report called Networked Families, as reported by Judi Casey of the Sloan Work & Family Research Network: Technology allows families to connect when they are apart and keeps families apart when they are together. There’s a prize-winning novel in there, somewhere, don’t you think?)

It’s a stretch I can’t quite make to say that the final event, late on the third morning, had anything to do with storytelling, but it did have to do with communicating.

Six leading work-life practitioners were each given 60 seconds at a time to deliver advice on a work-life-related topic.

Time limits were strictly enforced through the use of a mélange of (highly amusing) sound effects that loudly drowned each speaker out after her/his minute had passed. This went on for ten rounds—an exhaustive and exhausting display of communication-on-steroids.

It was interesting to hear what they had to say, but it was equally instructive to hear how some managed to tie up their messages in a neat 60-second package while others were caught at the buzzer with a tangle of unfinished ideas. This is not to disparage those who couldn’t quite pull it together in the time allotted—I have absolutely no doubt I would have been one of them, given the chance—but just to once again point out how dependent communication is on context. In this case, the context depended on the ability to work with sound bites and the kind of small detail that brought the message home quickly: the striking statistic, the aphorism, the metaphor.

And speaking of sound bites

The actual greatest lesson I learned from this forum (since, as I said, I already knew the one about storytelling) was how to tweet. I already had a Twitter account, but I rarely used it. With help from some more digitally-savvy folks like Casey Carlson (@caseylcarlson) and Kyra Cavanaugh (@lifemeetswork), I stepped more firmly into the Twitter universe. I’m not promising I won’t step right back out again. I still have trouble understanding its value in many situations. But for now, you can get a good sense of some of the ideas flying around the AWLP Forum by checking out my tweets and those of others, at #awlp2012.

Feeling exhausted or confused by the 100 Best Companies application? Contact me for help!

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Ten Great-Place-to-Work Conference Takeaways

I’m still relatively new to this blogging business but regular readers will have already figured out my dual (and not unrelated) professional commitments:

• writing that communicates in the most powerful and effective way possible and
• organizations that are fabulous places to work.

Today’s brief post centers on the latter. Here are ten  things I took away from last week’s “Great Place to Work” conference (sponsored by the Great Place to Work Institute, of course) in Atlanta. (The company presenting  each tidbit is credited in parenthesis):

• Work is the fifth most important thing in employees’ lives, after (in order) their roles as parents, as spouses, as friends and as members of their religious communities. (Bright Horizons,  apparently based on research by Peggy Thoits.)
• Storytelling is a critical element of culture and it works best when it’s plastered across your walls (or better yet, scrawled there by employees.) (Kahler Slater)
• An organization’s mission matters most when every single employee recognizes his or her role in it—like the woman on the Mayo Clinic’s housekeeping staff, whose job includes disinfecting surfaces in patient rooms. She told a television reporter (apparently without prompting) that her job was  “saving lives.” (Mayo Clinic)
• Companies can put together some pretty darn impressive videos.  (Corollary: I can never pack too much Kleenex.)
• A successful business doesn’t get there by cajoling and coercing people to get things done. It gets there by hiring great people, then stepping out of their way. (W.L. Gore) 
• Organizational values are just words on paper. Defining the behavior that represents the value is what makes it come to life—even for engineers. (Novozymes) 
• The folks at DreamWorks get free breakfast, lunch and dinner. And they get to work at Dreamworks. (DreamWorks) 
• It’s much better to share too much information with employees than too little. (Whole Foods) 
• Employees get a kick out of managers who are willing to make fools of themselves. (CarMax) 
• Breakfast sandwiches are better when eaten hot. (Robin Hardman Communications)

How are things at your workplace?

I’m lucky: my boss (here at Robin Hardman Communications) is letting me take next week off to visit some colleges with my son. The following week, I’ll be in Phoenix for the Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP)’s “un-conference.”

It being the twenty-first century, I’ll have my various electronic devices with me during these trips. So don’t be afraid to contact me if you have questions or need anything at all. It may be a few weeks until my next blog post, though.  If you want to be notified when the next one arrives, just click on the “follow” button in the column to the right.

Beware the Adjective!

Remember “show, don’t tell?”

Generations of creative writing teachers have imparted this bit of wisdom, but if you’re like many harried communications professionals, you probably haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about how it applies to the writing you do every day.

In fact, “show, don’t tell” can be a surprisingly useful bit of advice—an easy way to make your writing instantly more original and compelling. And it can be applied in unexpected ways. It doesn’t just mean use real stories to illustrate your points, for example. It also applies to parts of speech.

Say what? Parts of speech? Yup. I may be going out on that proverbial limb here. I know it’s a gross oversimplification with a million exceptions, but I’ll say it nonetheless:

In the world of words, verbs and nouns show. Adjectives tell.

Don’t get me wrong. Adjectives play an important role in language. After all, I couldn’t have written that last sentence without one. But too often they become an easy out, a quick route to imprecision, banality or meaningless cliché.

Consider a most obvious current example: “awesome.” Few will disagree that the once rich and evocative word has lost all but the most generalized meaning. (We know it means something positive, rather than negative, so that’s something, I guess.) Now think: is there a verb or a noun as meaninglessness as “awesome”? While I can think of a few that come close (“issue,” anyone?) I can’t think of any that provide as much a temptation to replace meaning with nothingness.

I’m not a linguist, but I suspect the structure of not only English but of most languages makes it impossible to overuse words like “issue” as much as some folks overuse “awesome.” As a result, nouns and verbs rarely take on the generalized meaninglessness of many adjectives.

“Awesome” and its ilk (every generation has its “awesome”) are extreme cases. But adjectives of all stripes are about telling, rather than showing, and often in the most vague and boring manner possible. I’ve never been happier with the public school system than the day my son came home from fourth grade to say his class had held a funeral for the word “very.”

But I seem to be breaking the rule.

Enough of telling, let me show you what I’m talking about in two simple sentences. Which do you prefer?

The view from our hotel room was beautiful.

Our hotel room overlooked a field of sunflowers that spread out for acres in every direction.

See the difference? But how easy it is just to slap down a word like “beautiful” and move on to the next sentence. It takes an act of will and some hard work to stop, think again, write the why of the beautiful, instead.

Of course, you can’t communicate without adjectives and you wouldn’t want to. But you can think twice every time you are about to use one. If you train yourself to be suspicious of adjectives, to consider them potential enemies to strong communication, you’ll find that your writing instantly improves. (You’ll also avoid common redundancies. In the last paragraph, I almost wrote, “a conscious act of will.” Then I thought: is there any other kind of act of will? Surely  an act of will is conscious by definition? English is rife with such tautologies: free gift, past history, unconfirmed rumor… Stopping to think before using an adjective might have the added bonus—er, I mean bonus—of ridding the world of such pointless expressions.)

Plus, when you do need an adjective, you might find yourself choosing it with more precision and care. Some time back, I wrote about Dickens’ odd and wonderful use of the word “perennial” to describe a character. While that might be considered verb-choice as extreme sport, even more prosaic choices among adjectives can make a difference.

For example, earlier in this post, I wrote “Adjectives play an important role in language.” “Important” was probably the right word for this sentence, but I did think about a handful of other options before I used it. Here are a few other adjectives I might have chosen:

Adjectives play a necessary role in language.

Adjectives play a critical role in language.

Adjectives play a crucial role in language.

Adjectives play a vital role in language.

If I checked the thesaurus—which I keep prominently displayed for one-click access on my toolbar—I’d probably find still more so-called synonyms. (They are rarely exact synonyms, which is the whole point. Each of the above sentences has a slightly different meaning. But if I didn’t tiptoe suspiciously around every adjective before employing it, I might never have thought about what nuance I wanted to convey.)

So the next time you find an adjective creeping carelessly into your work, dare to confront it. Do you really need it? Is there a more active, descriptive, verb-and-noun-friendly way to say what you want to say? And if you do need an adjective, is the one you were about to use the best one to make your case? Challenge that adjective! Make it prove that it’s on your side before taking it in. Your readers will thank you.

Have a question about something you’re trying to write? Bring it on! 

You Know You’ve Got A Great Place to Work. So How Do You Get On That List?

On Tuesday, I’m heading to Atlanta, where for two-plus days I’ll barely step out of the Hyatt Regency. Am I excited at the prospect? You bet!

That’s because I’ll be spending those two days at the Great Place to Work Conference, run by the institute that developed and administers both the Fortune “100 Best Companies to Work For” and Entrepreneur’s “Best Medium and Small Company” lists. The annual conference draws hundreds of representatives of organizations on these lists—including an impressive number of CEOs—and hundreds more of list wannabes.

The program is always inspiring and frequently quite entertaining, as leaders get up one after another to show off their ultra-cool workplaces. Over the years, I’ve heard about companies where you can opt to slide between floors instead of taking the stairs, companies where top leadership runs meetings in drag, companies whose ethics-training videos are actually laugh-out-loud funny.

But the folks from the Great Place to Work Institute (GPTW), as well as many from the “Best Companies,” themselves, would be the first to tell you that you don’t have to have nap pods and ping pong tables to be considered for these lists. You just have to have employees who feel they are trusted and empowered, treated fairly and respectfully, and encouraged to enjoy their work.  And you have to make sure the folks at GPTW know that.

There’s no shortcut to getting on the 100 Best list.

It’s an in-depth application process. You can’t fake it: the heart of the application—two thirds of your score—is a confidential survey of your employees. No one gets on this list unless the vast majority of their employees agree that theirs is truly a great place to work.

But the final third of your score is based on what you say about your organization. It may not count for as much, but it does count, and you ignore it at your peril. This third of the application is called the Cultural Audit, and it has two parts. Part 1 is a long list of short-answer and yes/no questions about demographics and benefits. This part isn’t so bad; it just takes time and care to get it right.

Part 2 is the one you may have heard about. In its current iteration, it comprises sixteen open-ended questions, such as “What are the distinctive ways in which managers share information with employees and foster a culture of transparency?” “How does your company promote a sense of fairness?” “How do you encourage fun and camaraderie…?” etc. And when I say open-ended, I mean open-ended. No word counts for the GPTW: you are free to write as much—or as little—on every topic as you like.

This fact—no boundaries—instills an existential terror into some who open the application. How much should I write? What should I include? In how much detail? The simple (and obnoxious) answers are: write until you have answered the questions. Include everything that’s relevant, in as much detail as is necessary to get your story across. But since I realize that isn’t necessarily terribly helpful, herewith are three tips for attacking the GPTW Cultural Audit, Part 2:

Get Beyond “What” to “How” Cultural Audit Part 2 is your chance to brag about the things that make your organization unique. You can’t do that with platitudes and broad generalizations. For example, I don’t think there’s a company in the U.S. today that doesn’t “value teamwork.” So the question is not whether or not you value teamwork, but how you act on that: how does your structure promote teamwork? what kind of rewards do you have for it? what specific recruiting or interviewing techniques do you use to ensure you’re hiring people who will work well in teams?

Likewise, anyone can say that senior leadership is available to answer questions (and everybody does), but how does your company show that? A senior leader at one organization hands out extra vacation time to employees who ask questions spontaneously at Town Halls. Now that’s a good story to tell.

Remember What Matters, Even if It Isn’t Specifically Asked. For example, the folks at GPTW care a lot about employees having a chance to contribute their thoughts and ideas. They ask about it specifically, with three whole questions out of the sixteen falling under the category of “Listening.” So don’t limit your mention of employee input to these three questions. If you’re writing about your training program, and some of the courses were developed in response to employee requests, be sure to say that! If you’re writing about rewards programs, and some awards are based on recognition by peers, make that clear!

But DON’T Say It Ad Nauseum. I’ve helped a lot of companies with their Best Company submissions. And many times they don’t say nearly enough—they err on the side of generalities, leave out all examples and stories, focus on the what and not the how. But sometimes I see a company that is so proud of one or two particular aspects of its culture that it can’t stop talking about it. Over and over again. The same exact examples, the same exact data. This can happen easily if you’re writing by committee, with different subject matter experts assigned to different questions—and no one editor overseeing the whole thing. It can also happen if you get confused by the questions—you’re not quite sure what question your story fits best, so you put it down in answer to all the questions.

Either way, it’s a mistake. As GPTW makes clear in its instructions, you only need write about something once. You can then use a word or a sentence to refer back to it elsewhere in the submission. The folks at GPTW probably stress this mostly to make both your and their lives easier. (After all, they have to read through this thing—twice over, in fact, as part of their scoring process.) But I have another reason for saying this is a mistake, and it has to do with strong communication.

There’s a rule of thumb among communicators that once is not enough; you have to say something repeatedly to get your message across. And while this is absolutely true, I offer one caveat: not in the same piece of writing! Say it once, it’s a great story. Say it twice, it’s a trifle annoying. Say it three times, and I think, at best, that you have nothing else to say and, at worst, “the lady doth protest too much”— maybe this thing you’re writing about isn’t so darn special, after all.

So There You Have It:

Write until you have answered the questions. Include everything that’s relevant, in as much detail as is necessary to get your story across (and no more). And see if you aren’t the one up there showing off at next year’s Great Place to Work conference.

Still rather not do it all yourself? Contact me for customized help with your GPTW submission. Or, if you, too, plan to spend the better part of next week in Atlanta, just look me up!

Making It Easy

At school, my kids see a “Do Now” on the board when they walk into class. At meetings, the agenda ends with “Deliverables.” But so many communications I’ve seen leave me scratching my head: when and where is this event, what am I supposed to do to sign up for this program, how can I learn more?

Your audience isn’t stupid. But you still have to connect every dot.

They may be very interested in what you’re telling them. They may want to follow up. But the fact is, they have too much to do. Like all of us, they have too much on their desk, too many meetings and appointments, too many digital distractions and personal responsibilities. Even as they’re trying to read the communication you spent hours writing, their phone is ringing, their email is chirping, they hear the buzz of an incoming text.

They have neither the energy nor the time to read between your lines, hunt for the phone number, or Google for more information.

You have to make it easy.

Remember “who, what, when, where, why and how?” Use it. The famous axiom of journalists can remind you not just what information to include about your topic, but what information to include about your readers’ next steps. Tell people exactly what they need to do; when, where, how and why they need to do it; and who they need to contact.

“Where” is also a crucial question to ask yourself as you put the information on the page, as in where should that phone number or hyperlink go? (Most likely, just after the sentence saying “Contact Ingrid Clatwitter to volunteer.” And again, at the bottom of the page. And, maybe even at the top, too.) Where should I link to?” is another vital question. (Answer: to the exact, specific place my reader needs to be in order to take action.)

C’mon, isn’t all this obvious?

You would think so, wouldn’t you? But it’s easy to get caught up in your own world, and forget that your readers are caught up in theirs. The very obviousness (to you) of the story you’re telling keeps you from remembering it may not be obvious to your readers. So here’s my list of “do nows” for anyone who expects their readers to do something based on a communication:

If you’re writing for the web…

• …and promoting a program or policy, include a link to specific, detailed information about that policy or program, including how, exactly, to take advantage of it. And then include the link again.
• …and announcing a training or an event, link directly to a registration form.
• …and asking for donations, put the “DONATE” button right there on the page—with a link to Paypal. (And if you’ve mentioned those donations can be made in installments, make sure choosing that option is as easy and automatic as checking a box.)

If you’re writing for print…

• …do all of the above, (with urls instead of hyperlinks) but don’t forget to include phone numbers. (Ever have the annoying experience of calling tech support because you can’t get on your internet, and having to listen as a chirpy recording suggests you look up your answer online?)

Plus:

• Don’t be afraid of direct phrases like “Here’s how.” There’s a reason you hear wording like this on infomercials. It works.
• Tell your readers what they will need on hand in order to take the next step. Employee ID? Credit card? Form 2XB-L1000? (If the latter, make sure to explain how to get said form—ideally by linking to it.)
• If the next step for your reader involves contacting someone else, whether it be his/her manager or an HR helpline, be sure that “someone else” is expecting the call, and knows what to do when it comes in!

Do you have a question about your employee communications? Give me a call: 718-628-4753. Or contact me via this blog.

There’s No Rule Against Interesting

I once attended a talk on the subject of employee communications by this wonderful Ragan Communications guy; I wish I could remember his name. He had us imagine a tableau I’ve carried in my head ever since:  It’s lunchtime at your office. A mid-level employee takes a sandwich back to her desk and reaches for something to peruse between bites. Two publications are at hand. One is the latest edition of the employee newsletter. The other is Cosmopolitan. Which do you think she’ll pick up?

Mind you, this particular presentation happened nearly ten years ago. Pre-YouTube. Pre-Facebook. Pre-Angry Birds.

Just because you have something to say, doesn’t mean your intended audience is listening.

So what’s an employee newsletter editor to do? You can’t produce Cosmopolitan out of your communications desk. And if you did, you’d no doubt be fired. But you can keep this very real scenario in mind when writing stuff you want employees to read.

No matter what your corporate culture, there’s no law against writing catchy, readable prose.

Sure your subject matter isn’t always as titillating as the stories the Cosmo editors get to order up. But you have an edge Cosmopolitan doesn’t have. Most of your employees have a vested interest in the information you have to give them. Even if doesn’t affect them directly, it does affect the company they work for. Believe it or not, a lot of employees care enough about their companies to want to know more. But the competition (for their attention) is whispering in their ears. So you have to meet them halfway.

Here are three tips for doing just that:

Find the hook. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned while researching the story? I was once asked to write an article about a sales conference at a drug company. For background, the editor sent me a story about the same conference that had just been published in another division’s newsletter. About six paragraphs into a boring article about what seemed to be a boring conference, the writer mentioned that conference attendees had been invited to walk barefoot across a bed of hot coals at a session about the nature of pain. Six paragraphs in! Why, oh why, did the story not open with this amazing tidbit?

Ok, not every story’s going to come with this kind of obvious, built-in hook, but most have something that stands out as interesting. Search that stuff out and be tenacious about following up if you find it. Another assignment I once had was to write about two employees who’d won industry awards. Again, a pretty boring topic on the surface. But when I called them up to interview them, I discovered that the awards were announced, as a surprise, at a conference that neither of them had been planning to attend. The conference planners had to go to great lengths to get them to change their minds about attending the conference, without spoiling the surprise. Now that made for a good story.

Bring it to a human level. Introducing a new program or policy? Describing a new product? Find someone that program, policy or product affects and tell that person’s story. Here’s the way a lot of employee newsletters I’ve seen might talk about a new online database:

LuceBoltz Aircraft has partnered with Air Literature, a new online aircraft-related database, to deliver real-time online solutions for aircraft-related product research. The searchable database, now available to all employees through LuceBoltz Online, contains millions of articles and other downloadable resources.

Yawn. Why is it necessary to write like that? Can you picture a feature on this sort of topic in your local newspaper? How would it open? Unless you’ve got a really awful local newspaper, it would probably go something like this:

When Hank Dinsmore, Regional Marketing Director, needs background information for a product, he generally calls the LuceBoltz reference librarian, or takes a hike up to the 6^th floor library, himself. If the librarian has the information he needs on hand—great—if not, Hank completes an acquisition form to order the reference document and puts aside his project until it arrives.

“It’s time-consuming at best,” says the veteran LuceBoltz employee, “And it’s frustrating, since I know that information is out there.”

But things are about to get a whole lot better for Hank. Thanks to Air Literature, our new online aircraft research database, Hank will be able to locate and download the information he needs within minutes, straight from his desk. So will every other employee at LuceBoltz.

Still there? See, even news about a fake product for a fake company can keep you interested, if it tells a good story.

Get your leaders to talk like human beings. This last may be the hardest one of all. For some reason, when perfectly normal, interesting, even funny people step across a corporate threshold and are asked to comment, they turn into jargon-spewing robots. They think every sentence has to be in passive voice, every word has to be 3 to 4 syllables, and every thought has to be a cliché. This tendency is made 1000 times worse by the fact that most leaders, when asked to comment for the record, don’t actually say anything (out loud) at all. They write something down. Or worse (depending on how high up on the chain they are) they have their PR guy write something down. The result is something that bears as much resemblance to natural, human speech as Pringles do to roasted potatoes.

You can’t always do much about this. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Catch the boss saying something to a colleague, off the cuff. Or turn to your inner screenwriter and write some catchy dialog, yourself. (You’ll have to have it approved, of course. Be ready to explain how you’re trying to get employees to actually read the article, and care about what the boss says. Show her a copy of this post, if that will help. Remind her that just because someone says something in a natural way—the way they really would say it, out loud, in the real world, doesn’t make it unprofessional. It just makes it human.)

You do these three things, and see if that employee isn’t picking up the employee newsletter first. At least for a quick read. So she can get a bit of news, then turn her attention to Cosmo.

A lot of my clients know me for my work writing “best company to work for” submissions. But did you know I also write newsletter content? Contact me to find out more.

The Making of an Un-Conference: An Interview with Kathie Lingle

In April, the Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP) is holding a Work-Life Forumin Arizona that’s being billed as an “un-conference.” Since many of my readers are interested or intimately involved in the work-life field, I thought I’d devote this blog post to an interview with Kathie Lingle, Executive Director of AWLP. I asked her to tell me more about this event. We talked for nearly 45 minutes, so I couldn’t include it all, but here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Kathie Lingle

So what exactly is an “un-conference?”

We’re experimenting with turning many of the expected features of a conference upside down, in order to stimulate creative thinking. A typical conference is usually an event where a whole bunch of people sit down while talking heads present to them. It usually begins and ends with a keynote speaker who may or may not be from the same profession as the audience. In between are workshops with more talking heads who use PowerPoint slides. Some are consultants who are selling something. If you’re lucky there might be some interactivity and the opportunity to network. If you were to survey participants six months later they’d probably struggle to remember what went on. That’s a conference.

At our un-conference, the core principle is there are no observers– everybody is a participant. We don’t have keynote speakers. We don’t have workshops. We don’t have talking heads. The fact is, every attendee at our Forum could be a keynote speaker, so our goal is to structure things so the work-life profession is talking to and amongst itself, not being talked to.

We do have a storyteller who’s going to help us kick off the meeting but unlike a normal conference he’s not coming in to entertain or dazzle anyone with his own brilliance. He’s going to interview a sample of participants in advance to find out what their challenges are, then customize his storytelling tools and techniques to the real-time needs of the audience. When was the last time you had the chance to influence the design of a conference to meet your specifications?

You held an event like this last year, too, right?

Yes, this is our second year. Our first year we looked at how many elements of “conference” we could change. We thought of following the opening reception by serving breakfast food instead of dinner. We thought of playing with clothing–if we were serving breakfast for dinner, why not have everyone wear pajamas? (We didn’t end up doing this!)

We also thought about not having enough chairs, so literally some percentage of the audience would always have to be on their feet. We didn’t do that, but what we did instead, was to put “Innovation Stations” around the room. They were tall bistro tables, and they each had different things on them. One was a Creativity Station with clay, markers, paper and some other materials. Another was a Think Station where we had blocks and puzzles and things that would occupy people’s minds. We also had a Play Station with stuffed animals, toy cars, an Etch-a-Sketch…At different times people would get up and wander to one of these tables and listen to what was going on while they were kneading clay or building with blocks.

Are you going to have the Innovation Stations again this year?

Yes. This isn’t just to be silly. The perception that some of our best thinking happens in the shower is no accident. The phrase “thinking on your feet” comes from man’s origins. We were designed to run, hunt and think on the move. AWLP has always stood for innovation with our Innovative Excellence Awards and other initiatives. If you want people to be really creative and innovative, the last thing you want them to do is sit down for hours at a time and listen to other people. That violates every principle of adult learning.

I see that storytelling is a big part of the forum. Why? What do you mean by storytelling and where did that idea come from?

Well, partly it comes out of what happened last year. We spent the whole first session re-constructing the history of the work-life movement. We went back to the 60s and caught up to the current time. We had teams of work-life folks who were actually from the various decades tell us the story of what their lives and careers were like at that point in history. And we had a graphic artist with a huge room-sized sheet of paper capturing their stories as they spoke. For the first time ever we recorded as much as we could catch about the work-life story. The finished product was a pictorial work-life timeline.

At the end of that session a number of our younger people who had just entered the profession said things like: thank you so much for sharing your stories; I had no idea what it was like back then and how much all of you have led the way to the workplace I enjoy today.

We’ll have a digital image of that work-life timeline displayed as we begin this year’s forum. It’s something you can walk up to and look at and you’ll see people and companies and developments over time. It’s a way for work-life people to catch up with their own history. So that was one big reason for this year’s focus on storytelling.

The second is that those of us who have been work-life practitioners have all learned, sometimes the hard way, that the data we produce (and I believe the work-life field produces more empirical data on the impact of what it does than any other people function) is never enough. When you’re trying to get your agenda at the top of the corporate food chain, it’s not the data that wins the argument. You have to have that, of course, but you also have to have stories about the struggles and triumphs of real people that those leaders care about. It’s the combination of fact and human interest that ultimately creates change.

So we’ve turned to the professional world of storytellers and storytelling. One of our sources is Stephen Denning, who’s written a book called The Leaders Guide to Storytelling, which is all about mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. And Mark Guterman, the storyteller coming to our event, is a CEO who spends his time educating corporate leaders about the power of storytelling to set vision and create change. We’re going to be focusing on those two kinds of stories and purposes for storytelling. What we’re going to be learning is how to modulate your experience and what you know to connect with the people you need to influence in your organization and create change. How do you wrap data in the right kind of business narrative that wins your case?

But stories are not just for leaders. They’re for people everywhere up and down the line because, if you’re going to embed a family-friendly environment in your workplace, that’s culture change and you need stories to make culture change.

Absolutely. And it turns out—as we can see on the national stage right now—whoever tells the best story, wins. The really important issues are ultimately decided by the story that grabs the most attention and gets repeated most often. Another reason for doing this now is that people are absolutely drowning in an ocean of data and disconnected facts. A meaningful story can feel like a life preserver. So stories are more important today than ever before. We’re going to help people create their storylines so they can go back to work more powerful for seeing more clearly where they’re going.

Another thing I see on your agenda is an “Imaginarium.” What’s that?

I mentioned that we won’t have workshops. One of the un-conference elements we’ve worked on is a replacement for those and we came up with Imaginariums. The objective is to do a group imagining on what the future will look like for a series of  topics. In one Imaginarium last year,  people were invited to engage in thought experiments about how culture change could be taken viral within an organization. Suppose you could inject a vaccine into an organization to cause culture change. What would that vaccine consist of? How would you make that happen? People broke into teams and they figured out what they would do with that idea. Or imagine you could drive a bus up to the door of a company and out would come a self-contained culture change movement that would take over the institution. Who and what would need to be on the bus and how would the change actually be mobilized on the ground?

Out of last year’s Imaginariums we got several “Big Ideas.” Remember I said six months after you leave a conference you usually don’t remember what went on? Last year, people signed up and committed to keep working on these Big Ideas until the next conference. The Imaginariums this year are actually three of those Big Ideas that teams have been working on. They’ll come back with a bit of secondary research, more of a plan and we’ll push deeper into what the future might look like. We’ll spend time deciding how and where we can take control of our future rather than having it control us.

What are the three “Big Ideas”?

One of them is about leadership. Some research we revealed last year was a an AWLP/WFD study showing 80% of leaders in the U.S. and around the world—not just CEOs but supervisors and managers— said they “get” the work-life business case. But then in the next breath when we asked them who their ideal worker is, it’s the person who has no family commitments and basically has no life outside of work. So one of the imaginariums we’re planning for this year is pushing forward on that: using the storytelling techniques we will have learned from Mark Guterman the day before, how can we communicate and create common experience with leaders to begin to close the gap between what they know and what they do?

Another Big Idea that emerged was about taking what corporations are doing with health and wellness and trying to address the huge problem of cost and the fact that this country spends more money on healthcare than any other and yet has less to show for it. A Big Idea came up about devising a community approach to health and wellness. What can we do outside of the company that will connect with efforts going on around health and wellness in the community?

And the third one (this won’t surprise you because this is what we work-life people have been trying to do for three decades now) is how can we fundamentally change the way work is done?

You’ve said elsewhere there will be a number of work-life visionaries at this event. Who are you referring to?

Well, Ellen Galinksy, President of Families and Work Institute, will be involved in two sessions, including one about the latest and greatest in work-life research. Sandy Burud, a Principal at Flexpaths who’s leading the effort on changing work; her book Leveraging the New Human Capital is one of the most important reference sources for any of us in the work-life field. Charlie Grantham—he’s the founder of the Community Design Institute and author of the book Corporate Agility and he’s working with Sandy on changing work and just led a big conference on the topic in California. Maureen Corcoran, who has the wonderful title of VP for Health, Life and Inclusion at Prudential Financial. She’ll lead the Imaginarium on community approaches to health. Perry Christensen will be with us…

Wow. This is quite a lineup…

Yes. Perry was co-author with Stu Friedman and Jessica DeGroot, years ago, of the seminal Harvard Business Review article on work-life, “The End of the Zero-Sum Game,” which really laid out the argument for the first time of how it’s not about your life vs. your work—that you can have both. He’ll be working with another luminary in our field, Diane Burrus from WFD Consulting, co-chairing the leadership gap imaginarium. We also have the president of WFD Consulting, Debbie Phillips, and Judy Casey, director of the new Work and Family Researchers Network. The Network is having its first global meeting in June, so we’re going to be the beneficiaries of some of the advance research information for that meeting.

Of course we have Mark Guterman, our storyteller, who is CEO of America’s Next Career Center. And then we have a number of our AWLP rising stars. They’re the next generation of work-life leaders: people like Kristen McNally, Judith Finer Freedman, Casey Carlson and Kyra Cavanaugh.

Your first “un-conference,” last year, was invitation-only. Why did you open it up this year and who is this year’s forum for?

Last year was invitation-only because we wanted to keep it very small and lay the groundwork for creating the Big Ideas.  We wanted to make sure we had the people there who would stay with us after the event, so we really stuck to a lot of the core work-life practitioners who have been at the business for a long time and are dedicated to making change. We did mix that up with new talent, as well, but we put the emphasis on long-term practitioners because we wanted to get things moving.

This year it’s wide open because we’ve accomplished that objective. We have our Big Ideas pretty much fleshed out and now we want to open it up to a much broader constituency. In fact, I’m hoping that some people come who aren’t conventional work-life practitioners. We really want to push these ideas forward with the richness of all kinds of different perspectives.

So everybody is welcome?

Everybody and anybody who really cares about changing the work environment and is involved in one way or another in making every workplace a better workplace. That clearly isn’t limited to one particular group of people or any one profession.

I’m sold. I’ll be at this “un-conference” and will fill you in on my experiences when I return! (In the meantime, watch here for more posts on writing for  work-life, HR  and internal communications professionals).