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June 16, 2021 by Aaron Schoenherr

Another transformation brought on by the pandemic? Internal communications have become more important than ever before.

We all experienced it: the constant emails about safety protocols, reassuring check-ins about remote work logistics, regular video messages (often from the CEO), and any number of other efforts to stay connected during a difficult time.

But already, the frequent, transparent and authentic communications employees have come to expect is waning: a recent survey found that 40 percent of employees have yet to hear any vision on what post-pandemic work life might be, and another 28 percent said what they’ve heard remains vague. For professional services firms whose success relies on recruiting and retaining talent, this poses real cause for concern – especially when 1 in 4 employees are planning to look for a new job as the pandemic subsides.

These headwinds make it all the more crucial to reimagine your internal communications strategy for a post-pandemic future. Here’s how to do it well.

Embrace Authenticity and Vulnerability through Your Internal Comms

Most professional services firms operate in a pretty buttoned-up atmosphere. It’s the nature of the work. But when the pandemic put us all in the same boat — working remotely while juggling the demands of home life — something powerful happened. Leaders invited us into their living rooms for video updates. Unplanned cameo appearances from our children, partners and pets livened up non-stop Zoom meetings. Unscheduled phone calls became a refreshingly analog way to connect. Working from the back patio with birds chirping in the background became a new norm.

The surprising result? Physical distance notwithstanding, many of our interactions became more authentic and vulnerable than ever before.

Don’t let this new authenticity and vulnerability go by the wayside when you return to the office. No one wants to revert to sterile email updates and canned messages. Create an internal communications strategy that relies heavily on personal connection, harnesses the power of storytelling, and creates a strong sense of belonging. In other words, fight to keep it real.

Leverage the Face-to-Face Communication Cascade

Even as our interactions grew more authentic during the pandemic, official internal communications grew more prescribed and controlled. Emails were painstakingly crafted, those CEO living room chats were highly scripted, and real-time feedback loops often fell by the wayside.

Leadership consultant Patrick Lencioni suggests another, if counterintuitive, route. “The best way to ensure that a message gets communicated throughout the organization,” he writes, “is to spread rumors about it.” In other words, we’ve all seen how rumors can undermine our best communication efforts. But what if we lean into the underlying human behaviors that contribute to the rumor mill and make those tendencies work for us?

That’s where a communication cascade comes in, replacing a dry, top-down messaging strategy with personal conversation and connection.

Start by involving front-line leaders to determine the broader strategic themes you want to get across. From there, empower those leaders to disseminate the information to their direct reports as they see fit. Employees continue communicating the news down the chain to their own team members, who are free to discuss the information with their colleagues.

Since you won’t control how every word is delivered, it involves less scripting and more trust. Cascades also create expanded feedback loops, resulting in more ownership of and buy-in for the messages you want to communicate.

The outcome? A more authentic, effective and comprehensive communication loop than the leadership team could ever have achieved alone.

The Power of Storytelling in Your Firm’s Internal Communications

If you want a cascade to work, turn your messages into stories that make your communications personal and engaging.

For instance, perhaps your organization wants to release an internal statement on the anniversary of a significant current event, such as the murder of George Floyd. You feel pressure to convey a point of view on this important social issue, but you also know that firms like yours often lack diversity — especially in leadership positions.

Sending out a company-wide email could lead to unhelpful rumor mill chatter about your firm’s commitment to racial justice. By contrast, a communication cascade — combined with storytelling — has the potential to inspire your entire organization to talk about the issue in a constructive way.

In this scenario, start by having your leaders tell their teams about your firm’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Ask leaders to invite employees to share personal stories of how racial injustice has affected them or those they care for. This opens up channels for authentic conversation with employees about the firm’s commitment to DE&I. It might even lead to honest reflection and feedback that compels you to think through how to strengthen your firm’s values and better live them out.

Transformation like this takes thoughtful, open conversation and a willingness to hear feedback and respond to it. It also requires leaders to embrace vulnerability. And it all begins with stories that capture the hearts and minds of your people and inspire you toward action.

Communicate that Employees Belong

Internal communication isn’t just about providing updates on company directives or even weighing in on matters of cultural and historical significance. It can also be used to create a strong sense of belonging so your employees feel more connected to and personally invested in the organization.

One leader we work with noticed a desire among his team to stay connected to the physical office during the pandemic, especially when the monotony of remote work began to set in. Art is important to his firm and greatly contributes to the atmosphere of the physical office space. Therefore, he decided to begin telling the stories of the firm’s art collection through a series of emails that promoted a sense of connection and place among his employees.

With an imminent return to the office on the horizon, he’s now exploring opportunities to create a guided tour of the art collection for team members. He also plans to include the tour as part of the onboarding process for new hires. The pandemic made this firm’s love for art even more meaningful, all because a leader had the creativity to use it as a visual and symbolic representation of their overall culture.

Opportunities like this one will emerge for your organization, too — if you’re willing to seek them out. Many of your employees have missed the office just as much as you. Find ways to signal that they belong when they finally return.

Now’s the Time to Enhance Your Commitment to Internal Communications

You’ve worked hard to keep employees informed and engaged during the pandemic and have made great strides in ramping up your internal communications efforts. But the benefits of effective communication transcend COVID-19. Good communication contributes to positive morale and leads to a greater sense of employee loyalty and commitment — pandemic or not.

Don’t let the momentum you’ve created fade away with a return to the office. Instead, double down on your efforts to make your internal communications strategy more effective and compelling. Your entire organization will emerge stronger as a result.

June 15, 2021 by Greentarget

Some big names in ad tech have gone public in recent months as advertisers look for programmatic ways to get in front of consumers. But is the rise of ad tech also fueling the rise of fake news?

After watching the phenomenon for years, CNBC’s Megan Graham thinks it is. In this episode of Authority Figures, Graham and host Aaron Schoenherr discuss the proliferation of copy-cat sites trying to game the ad tech space and how things have gotten worse since the start of the pandemic. The problem is hitting traditional newsrooms and reporters like Graham, who demonstrates the problem in real time during this episode.

Episode Highlights:

1:30 — Megan provides an overview of the ad tech landscape
3:33 — Megan gives her thoughts on the rapid escalation of new players into the ad tech market and the role ad tech plays in the dissemination of fake news
10:37 — Aaron and Megan discuss websites monetizing both fake and human traffic to their sites
12:40 — Megan explains how she created a fake website that “plagiarized” her own content for an article and applied to ad tech monetization partners
16:50 — In real time and using her own article, Megan shows how quickly fake sites work to plagiarize journalists’ stories
19:00 — Megan shares the steps brands can take to combat this gaming of ad tech systems
22:37 — Megan discusses how brands black-label their ads from appearing next to certain terms and the role of human intervention in ad tech
26:09 — Aaron and Megan examine the future of the ad tech industry
28:40 — Megan shares who she views as an authority

May 25, 2021 by Greentarget

A year after George Floyd’s murder, companies across America are still struggling with their place in the country’s racial reckoning. Many quickly released statements on diversity, equity, and inclusion – but they need to back up their words with actions. They need to go beyond the performative.

In the first of two episodes, Authority Figures host Aaron Schoenherr and Tanarra Schneider, Managing Director of Leadership & Culture at Accenture, discuss how organizations can – and should – go beyond the performative from an internal and external standpoint. Effective communication on these issues is about embracing vulnerability – and elevating diverse voices within organizations.

Episode Highlights:

1:48 – Tanarra discusses her background and advocating for her new role as Managing Director of Leadership & Culture at Accenture

4:53 – Tanarra explains how she keeps fear at bay and embraces discomfort

7:57 – Aaron and Tanarra discuss vulnerability in leadership

10:32 – Tanarra shares the common struggles among leaders who don’t know how to get vulnerable

14:10 – Aaron and Tanarra discuss going beyond the performative as companies look to communicate effectively as a result of the racial reckoning

20:00 – Tanarra shares her experience working within organizations as a female leader of color and encouraging them to go beyond the performative

22:20– Tanarra makes the case for why organizations need to put people in leadership who fundamentally understand the needs of the different groups they represent

April 20, 2021 by Greentarget

Should we put out a statement? Apply this decision tree and find out

We saw it last year in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. We saw it again after the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January, and again amid the Georgia voting-rights outcry. We’re seeing it now in the wake of the guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin.

It’s getting harder and harder for business leaders to remain silent or neutral when events trigger an emotional public response. But while speaking publicly on these issues will always carry risks, the outcome also presents an opportunity – if not an obligation – to communicate.

In these moments, being able to draw on well-defined organizational values – what you stand for, and how you demonstrate and encourage behavior that lives up to it – should make the process easier, the reception less controversial and the potential for blowback less likely. But not all organizations’ values are apparent enough to make this communication easier. Some aren’t apparent at all.

If your organization falls into either of the latter two categories, our counsel is to get busy defining your values, in writing, now. Whatever happened in Georgia, or the Chauvin trial, it’s clear this won’t be the last time you’ll need something to guide you in addressing sensitive social moments. It may not be the last time this month.

But in the meantime, we’re also here to tell you that, no matter where you are in defining your values, you can get to a sensible decision if you think it through.

Applying a decision tree

Imagine for a moment the decision tree you might apply to the Chauvin scenario.

Will members of your constituency be impacted by this event? Very likely, given the impact and meaning of the event to Black and brown communities who are disproportionate victims of police violence; that said, in this and other scenarios, it may depend on how you define your constituency: Is it your employees? Your clients? The communities you work in and serve? All or some of the above?

Will you feel pressure from employees, clients, vendors or activists/other parties to take a position? This depends on your proximity to the event, but organizations of all types are experiencing this pressure more and more. If you’ve come this far and expect pressure to respond, then this is a no-brainer. You need to prepare a statement.

But hold on. The decision tree doesn’t end there. Consider this:

Is this issue divisive, and/or is your statement likely to cause disagreement or division within your constituency? Put differently, will your constituency agree in its interpretation of the outcome as clearly right or clearly wrong? In the best of circumstances, unanimity is rare in a pluralistic society. It certainly seems impossible within our current hyperpartisan pluralism. So, the answer is likely a yes.

So do you prepare a statement? The decision is no longer quite so clear, complicated by the high likelihood that while you may satisfy one segment of your audience, you risk alienating another or creating divisions among segments – between say, those employees who would defund the police and others who support Blue Lives Matter.

Thus, your decision needs to run through another critical filter:

Is the issue aligned with your organization’s mission? If it aligns with or impacts your mission, start writing.
Have you made such statements in the past? Have you taken actions to back those statements up? The authenticity and credibility of any statement issued to address a fraught moment will not be judged against the values that you claim to profess but by the values you demonstrate through your actions. Values reveal themselves in observable behavior. And an organization that claims to stand for diversity and inclusion, but which has done nothing to advance diversity and inclusion, needs to think carefully about how it participates in the conversation about diversity and inclusion or risk alienating its audience.

All that said, it is quite possible that your mission is in no way related to the circumstances of this event. Whether you’re back in no-brainer territory depends on the final branch of this decision tree:

Is everyone in your organization clear about what it values?
- If yes, does the recent event offend those values? If yes again, your decision to communicate is clear.
- If no – or you’re not sure – does it present an opportunity to affirm your organizational values? To evolve them? Or to contribute to positive change through a statement followed by a change in behavior?

The need to define your organization’s values – today

As we’ve seen, sometimes the decision gets trickier the more you think about it – especially if you started thinking about it for the first time the night before the verdict.

Remember that any statement that is not rooted in broadly recognized organizational values will be (correctly) judged to lack authenticity and credibility. Rather than contribute to the conversation, it will add to the noise. Under these circumstances, it would be better that you say nothing. As we’ve seen, the backlash against companies that offer weak statements regarding depredations of social justice can be fierce.

This is the world we live in: Events that trigger strong emotions on a nationwide scale are coming at us with alarming frequency, and people are looking to business executives for leadership with an intensity that may make many executives uncomfortable. Our recommendation: If you haven’t applied thoughtful energy to defining what your organization values and how you will demonstrate and encourage behavior that expresses those values, this is the time for it. It has never been more necessary.