What's wrong with you?

One of the things I have learned is the importance of starting with the problem.

For years, I have applied Stephen Covey’s adage ‘Start with the end in mind’. But conversations with an expert in agile HR has changed my perspective - a little.

Don’t get me wrong. I have always advocated a deep understanding of the business need for communication. People who have read things I have written with Sue Dewhurst or attended training with me will be bored of hearing me on the subject.

I have always argued that good employee communications begin by asking what we want people to do. Do we need them to feel loyal? Perhaps we want to promote collaboration, customer support or safe working? Maybe it’s all about external advocacy.

My point has always been that communicators who ask ‘what do we want people to DO?’ get better results than those who obsess about process or outputs. If your objective is only to build an intranet, get so many social media engagements or run an entertaining event, how will you know if you’ve delivered any real benefit?

But, all communicators know that. Outcomes are always better than outputs when it comes to planning.

The nudge in my thinking came when a client asked me to draft a problem statement for an initiative we were working on. She came from a background in agile working and had a very specific purpose in mind.

As she saw it, the problem with many professionals (especially very experienced ones) is that we can jump too quickly to the solution. After a few times around the track, many of us think we’re seeing the same old problems and feel we know automatically what will fix them.

A challenging announcement to make? Well, try working through my five questions to find the right supervisor comms approach. No one is listening to staff? Here’s how I gather data... You get the picture.

Not that experience isn’t super useful. I want my bike repaired by someone who has done it before and who’d like a trainee dentist to take a look at that throbbing tooth? Experience is a useful shortcut to a solution that has been seen to work.

The point is that too often we spend too little time really spend thinking about the problem at hand.

And when we do, we often find that the normal solutions are not going to work.

The conversation came up in the context of a L&D initiative. Staff surveys and a worrying number of exit interviews had highlighted the need for a better learning offer in order to retain and motivate staff. Technical staff in particular, were especially critical.

An on-line learning portal had been identified as the solution and significant sums were being spend on content which anyone could access. Communications were needed to tell people about this portal; an email campaign, branding and a few stunts would, in no time, reverse the negative trend in the engagement survey and turn the tide on employee attrition. An external agency had been engaged and they were billing away with a cute icon and a list of activities.

But awareness of the portal wasn’t actually the problem; developing a problem statement suggested something else.

The portal had been around for a while and relatively few employees actually completed any of the programmes that it offered. Whilst a few programmes were excellent (great content from a few highly specialist vendors), the historic material was actually pretty poor. Digging into the figures and the facts, told us that an awareness campaign would just cheese people off because they had tried the platform and found it wanting.

If people were to develop, then the content needed fixing and probably better organising. And that was a whole different conversation for the team asking for some communications sparkle to revive their ailing portal.

A problem statement requires clarity about the desired future state (‘we want people to feel that they can learn new skills’), insight into the current state (‘people are unhappy about their development and are not using the tools we provide’) and some research into the scale of the causes of the gap between the two.

This clarity has several benefits. Not least, it highlights where communication can help and where other actions are needed. And it also provides a valuable test at every stage of the planning and implementation process – ‘is what we are doing going to solve the problem we identified?’

I’ve used this clarity about the need for a well defined problem statement to reshape some of the training which I deliver on behalf of the PRCA and the The Tantalus Group . And as we head into 2023, I’ll be thinking more about how we apply the lessons of agile to how we plan communications programmes.

With Sue Dewhurst, I wrote Successful Employee Communications. Our Second edition, published this year includes dozens of practical case studies from organisations around the world.