Communication Lesson for the Day
Posted on Monday, October 1, 2007 by Frank Roche
You plan your HR communication. It’s well designed. It’s interesting. And it’s timely. The only rub? Your employees pay more attention to something different that you would have never guessed they would care about.
I take a lot of photographs. I think some are pretty good. Some of the better shots get viewed anywhere from 50 to 100 times. So guess what photo of mine just got viewed 1,111 times in the last 24 hours? I would have never guessed.
It’s reasons like this that I tell people who are doing HR communication that a single piece of communication can be inconsequential. It’s the composite of communication that matters, not individual words on an individual piece of paper. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your best work, get the most feedback you can, and write to excite. You should. And when you do it well, your HR communication breaks through the clutter and really gets attention.
Free communication lesson for today: If your HR communication is super boring, you could always put a skull and crossbones on the cover. You can guarantee people will read it.
UPDATE: Additional free communication lesson for the day: Spell “communication” correctly in the title. LOL. I’m sorry to those who read the first pass, uncorrected version that went out in RSS and by email this morning. I need sunlight to write, and it’s pretty darned dark at 5:30 am these days.
Michele Malay Carter
Oct 1st, 2007
Misspellings can draw the eye too. Intentional on your part or subliminal? Either way, it worked for me.
Frank Roche
Oct 1st, 2007
Michele, I wish I was that clever. Actually, it was 5:30 in the morning and I pushed “publish” before I spell checked. Sorry about that. Thanks for catching it! Corrected now. Ugh.
Scott McArthur
Oct 1st, 2007
Ha! As you know, I really like using images to communicate so provide meaning (my friend Julian has convinced me on the importance of symbols).
I was talking to a client today who told me he has stores where there are up to 100 languages spoken. The workforce average reading age was 10 -not because they have learning difficulties but because they don’t speak English as a 1st or even 2nd language. In this context the images can provide a critical communication tool. I love it!
http://mcarthursrant.blogspot.com/2007/09/hr-and-the-business-delusion.html
Bill Strahan
Oct 2nd, 2007
Pictures that are created either in words or images help trigger emotions quicker. Sometimes they are the perfect draw to get the reader to the longer narrative where the action is really taking place.
Rob Robson
Oct 3rd, 2007
You make reference to communication being “interesting” and what employees care about. I think this is one of the mistakes that is made most often in communication. Pictures or not, management communicate what they think is interesting (for example, creating shareholder value), not what interests their people (why should I care if those bastards get richer?). Basically, they don’t really know what their people care about, and they probably don’t care all that much either.
Frank Roche
Oct 4th, 2007
Rob, good point. “Interesting” is in the eye of the beholder. I do think there are ways to make uninteresting topics interesting. Freakanomics comes to mind. Gladwell does the same with social theory. Clarence Dick Hardt did it with online identity. Not everything is interesting…but important sometimes. I suggest that getting people to pay attention to important things is critical. Long-term disability comes to mind. Know why a lot of people go bankrupt? Lack of long-term financial security. So, important but perhaps not “interesting”?
Bill, I like pictures. They sure can move a story along. It’s why I liked Fun With Dick and Jane when I was a kid. Picture books worked then, and they still work now.
Scott, we’ve done communication rollouts for companies who were in 100+ countries. We translated….but we also did pictures. Lots of them. It works.