Empty slogans. Meaningless phrases. Management-speak.
Organisations used to get away with it.
Truly.
We’re casting our minds back to a post-Birtian BBC world where the writer of this article spent many a happy year, despite the internal communications initiatives that would occasionally be rolled out from on high. They had little to no impact on teams making the television programmes and were often met with dismissive derision. Honestly, one of the reasons TV series W1A is funny is because it isn’t as far fetched a parody as you’d think.
We’re not at the BBC any more, and we’d like to think internal comms campaigns have improved.
There’s certainly no longer any excuses for superficial-feeling communications to staff that don’t reflect real change and care about wellbeing and the quality of working lives.
Verity London’s most recent webinar looked back at the year that is 2020 and reflected on what it meant for the purpose in business agenda.
Recognising that many brands have yet to find their purpose and embed it into their organisations, we asked our expert panel what the first thing they recommend businesses do to begin to introduce a purposeful culture into their companies. The answer was to start with your employees.
We know that 62% of millennials would rather work for a company that is having a positive impact on the world (Global Tolerance Company). So bringing purpose into the heart of your organisation is good for business as well as good for your teams.
Having a purpose helps attract better candidates for roles, and making work meaningful is one way to ensure they stay. It sounds obvious, and yet it’s 2020 that’s felt like a watershed moment. Despite the growing clamour around mental health and team engagement over the past few years, it feels like it’s this year that has led to the very real changes that could be one of the positives to have come out of the pandemic.
Verity London Managing Partner, Debra Sobel moderated a session on this topic in November for This Can Happen, an annual event that went virtual this year, covering mental health in the workplace. The changes companies had been forced to make to the way they communicated with staff all had one thing in common. They were backed up with real and meaningful action and a caring approach as many began working from home.
We heard about senior leaders checking in on individuals, increased levels of kindness and empathy in communications as people were given permission to be more genuine, and increasing interaction and innovative engagement activities to keep everybody connected. Stripped of the formality of the physical boardroom, we are suddenly able to become more human in the workplace.
Lessons from that session, and others have shown us just some of the things we can all put in place to make our staff communications more purposeful. Here are a few actions we can all take :
