The other week I made a mistake...

I spend a very great deal of time making mistakes. They range from the:

• inconsequential typo, abetted by my profound inability to get any better at typing
• failure to express myself or findings clearly – but I normally get another go at that
• horribly inefficient ways to analyse data or present findings – but the victim there is me and my time
• wrong research method or design – bigger issue, but normally only identified in hindsight, and besides, if you ask smart (enough) questions in smart (enough) ways, you’ll get answers

Clients and potential clients: I promise, I get most of what I do right. Being a very small business means there is more opportunity – and more imperative – to learn from mistakes. I also think that a small business maybe has more of an opportunity for a little more humility. A little of that gets a great deal of goodwill. So, I reflect on what I’ve done, how I solved issues and how I can do things better.

Which is what makes my mistake so maddening. It’s something I observe all the time and resolved never to do myself.

When people want a research need filled, they often come to me with a pre-ordained method, or they try to predict what’s discoverable, or where,  or they simply try to make their request more technical.

Please don’t. Just tell me in Plain English what you want to find out, and we can work it out from there. At the heart of all my research is a simple Who/What/Why/Where/When question.

That’s what I didn’t do. I assumed I knew what was available and looked for that. I had a little knowledge … and the old adage was proven. If I’d asked the person with the full knowledge a simple Plain English question, I’d have got what I needed first time.

The consequence? This time, no harm done. I owned up, I apologised, I did the work again, and I got it back within the original timescale. 

And that’s the thing for small business; all you have is your reputation. One bad piece of work can easily cancel out the twenty good before it. You’re not as enmeshed with or bound to your clients as bigger business.

So what have I learnt? To keep looking for where I could be going wrong. 

Hard? Yes – I’m always right, right? Essential? Indubitably – I’m not always right, am I?

There's something missing

Whenever  I talk to employees, it never takes long for them to tell me about it.

Because it’s missing, it makes them unhappy, disengaged or just confused about their work.

And that means they’re not as productive as they could be.

What’s missing is the right level of communication. And – to some degree – it’s missing everywhere. 

Without the right communication, different people have different knowledge at different times, so getting things done becomes much harder.

Without the right communication, people feel overwhelmed at times, so they start to switch off.

Without the right communication, there isn’t a single, understood version of the truth, so people start to create their own.

Look at the Engage for Success Four Enablers

• Strategic Narrative
• Engaging Managers
• Employee Voice
• Integrity

Communication is the foundation for them all.

Look at my list of twelve factors that make or break the employee experience:

• Status and Reputation
• Integrity and Values
• Leadership and Vision
• Management and Support
• Expectations and Focus
• Voice and Contribution
• Accomplishment and Control
• Recognition and Value
• Learning and Progress
• Time and Place
• People and Teams
• Environment and Process

Communication enables all of them. People can’t know what’s expected of them, how they should do it and what’s in it for them without a good dialogue.

Now, comms is tough. It’s probably getting tougher, because organisations need to react and change more quickly than before, and their people need to follow.

Or even, their people need to lead.

Read this passage on Employee-Led Innovation from the London Business School: “Innovation, as a bottom-up activity, is about trying to do things that go beyond our job description. By definition, it is about taking time away from what we are officially being paid to do, in order to try something that offers uncertain pay-offs, at some time in the future, to someone else. Even if we convince ourselves that we can find the time and resources to do it, we also have to persuade those around us, and we have to push against all manner of formal procedures and systems that were designed to maintain the status quo. All of this is well known. But companies still struggle with how to overcome these obstacles without compromising today’s business”

Communication must play a large part if those obstacles are to be overcome.

We understand this. But we also know that the precise issues are different at different organisations.

So we are asking people what their biggest communication challenge is. It’s a single free text question, with a couple of optional follow ups. So you can tell us if it’s the channels, the message, the culture, the whatever.

As a thank you to all that take part, we will send them a copy of our report that details the most frequent communication challenges, and offers insight into how they can be addressed.

Take the survey here.

Does democracy work?

Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn. Donald Trump. Boaty McBoatface

All delivered by transparent and equitable democratic process. Yet, whatever your ideological stripe, almost everyone thinks at least one of these signals the collapse of intelligent civilisation.

All were ballot box democracy. All yes/no, tickbox responses. You can only express a single view; there are no shades of grey. Given a chance to expand, I imagine many supporters would say:

• Yes, I want to take back control, but, of course, to retain favourable trading with our biggest market
• Yes, I respect Corbyn’s principles, but I’d also like the pragmatism and charisma to sell it to middle-England
• Yes, I love the zeal and certainty of Trump, but maybe with some policies that aren’t so bonkers

But there isn’t a “Yes, but…” option. There’s no “Tell us why you gave this answer”.

That’s often what I do. I sit down with current or potential employees and ask them what they want or what they’d like to see. Often I am first met with awkward silences and exceptionally closed body language. Sometimes it’s been apparent that literacy is not strong. I’ve spoken to people who have never really been asked their opinion.

With the chance to speak, the creation of the right environment and some probing and encouragement, they open up. And they always, always give measured, considered, practical responses. It’s a constant reminder to never underestimate anyone, that everyone has opinions that should count.

But the true meaning of those opinions are only apparent in a dialogue. If you try to fix the questions, predict the response, or not allow people to fully express themselves then you can end up with unexpected results. That’s a problem for referenda, and many employee surveys.

Certainly, you end up with inexplicable results. Either in the sense that the decision may appear to defy reason, or in that you do not really understand what they mean by their answers. There isn’t the scope to expand.

So what to do? Well perhaps it’s time for the end of representative democracy and a chance for anarcho-syndicalism. Perhaps not…

For now, I think it’s about trusting employees to have the right answer and to give them the conditions in which to express it.

Swimming - and real beliefs

Swimming is pretty important to me. It's a great way to unwind. If I don't answer your call at lunchtime, that's where I am.

And so, when people don't play by the rules, I get cross. Cross enough to come up with a snarky flowchart.

But there's a thing about rules. And it's been highlighted by this year's headteacher-sends-home-kids-for-minor-infractions-of-uniform-rules headlines.

You can set out the rules as clearly as you like. But - as in my last post - it's hard to set rules, people are always trying to bend them, and most importantly, they ignore what contradicts their beliefs.

That's vital for company culture. You can state, promote and model the culture that you desire as much as you like, but if that conflicts with the fundamental beliefs of others, it won't change.

So in the pool, the belief might be: "It's not important how busy the pool is, others will have to move round me". Not a disaster, just some annoyance. At worst, a mild concussion.

But at work it could be: "The customer can wait, it's my break", or "That decision's above my pay grade", or "The most important thing is to hit my targets, everything else is secondary", or "Someone else can clear that up, that's not my job". None of which may have any great consequence. But they might. Especially if these are widely held beliefs, or if this is the real culture, rather than the prescribed one.

So before you can embark on changing or tweaking your culture, or encouraging new behaviours, you first need to understand what the reality is now. What do your people really believe?

People Can't Follow Instructions

“Acacia Avenue? Yeah, mate. You wanna take the first right, go about 100 yards then …”

Save your breath. They’re nodding. They’re saying “yeah”. They’re mirroring all your hand gestures. But they’re not listening anymore.

People are terrible at following instructions. I regularly design and run focus groups, with many different exercises. No matter how carefully, slowly and repeatedly I direct people, and however much they nod and say “yeah”, there’s always, always at least one person that does something entirely different. Often quite surprisingly different. So what’s the problem?

Of course, sometimes the instructions are not quite precise enough:

There’s the you-had-one-jobbers:

 


And some people are just nature’s wet-paint-touchers:

But there are a couple of other factors at play too:

• We don’t listen to everything

In the research summarised here “the team of psychologists from the universities of Illinois and Florida have concluded that, while we now live and work in an environment filled with information, we filter out most of what we see and hear. People, they argued, tend to avoid information that contradicts what they already think or believe” So there’s confirmation bias, but also a tendency to decide what is being asked, possibly before you’ve heard all of it.

• We’re not actually all that good at giving instructions.

In this piece of research from the University of Freiburg. “They asked dozens of participants to plan, describe and walk routes through Freiburg. All those involved were highly familiar with the city. Asked to describe the shortest possible route between two city locations, and then asked to walk the shortest possible route between those same two points, not a single participant followed the path they’d actually described”

This has a big implication for internal communications. Far too many times organisations tell people once, and assume that everyone has heard them. It’s going to take repetition and different channels and executions to ensure that people have really heard you. And even before that, you need to very closely consider if you are accurately describing what you’d like really like people to do.

Communication is increasingly quick, but in lots of ways it’s getting harder. Consider your communications carefully.