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Validation

It’s important to recognise good work. We know this and yet we stubbornly persist at not being very good at it. Too often we prefer to draw up totally bland recognition awards like this classic example I observed last year.  At the time, Peter Hros suggested that ‘You could use them all instead of wallpaper in the room where you go every time you feel worthless.’ Ahhh, the room of worthlessness, we’ve all been there eh?

On recognition David Goddin notes that ‘the recognition that people respond most positively to is immediate and authentic. It’s akin to the reflex praise we received as a children when we ate food, took our first steps, etc. At it’s heart is a true appreciation of what it took for the individual to achieve.’ I love the way David has described this and I’m clearly biased, based on this observation of recognition from Jonathan Wilson.

Jonathan and I were with a customer yesterday meeting their new Marketing Director, Sheila. During the conversation Sheila explained to us that when she started work with the company our report on how the company engages with and could improve engagement with its stakeholders was one of the first things she was given to read. ‘Your work continues to inform our decision making’ Sheila told us, and went on to explain how. We had a useful conversation and I look forward to more in the future. Our report is not brand new, but it was the first time Sheila had the opportunity to give us feedback and she chose to do so.

In the next few days you will observe someone doing good work for you and others. It may be a colleague, it may be a friend, someone serving you in a restaurant, it may be a supplier. It would be lovely if you could find just a few seconds to acknowledge that work. No need to nominate someone for an award or get a certificate printed. Simply observe, approach and recognise their contribution. Trust me, as a recent recipient I can tell you it’s a motivating thing when it happens.

picture credit

What a Gas

I’ve recently taken over responsibility for the supply of gas to Dad’s property. The supplier, British Gas had confirmed they would send me a final bill for Dad’s account. In my initial dealings with British Gas I’d been liaising with a bereavement team who were spot on throughout. Based on my previous experiences with service providers, my heart sank a little when the bereavement team told me they were passing my dealings onto the usual billing team. So how’s it going?

Over the weekend I received a threatening letter demanding £380.73. The threats included additional charges to the bill if I don’t pay, passing the account to a debt collection agency, taking me to court and trashing my credit history. As you can imagine, this letter didn’t put me in the best of moods.

I called British Gas today to give them a meter reading for the property. Yeah I know, they didn’t have a meter reading yet somehow they managed to bypass the final bill and go straight to threats, you figure it out.

I dialled the number, and the machine asked for my 12 digit customer reference. I entered it then pushed several more choices before dropping into a queue. The guy who answered, we’ll call him Gassy, committed a classic call centre faux pas as he asked ‘Can I have your customer reference please?’ ‘You’ve already got it, I entered it when I dialled in’ I replied. I politely and firmly refused to give Gassy the number and he agreed that yep – he had it in front of him alright. Whuh?

Gassy then asked me to confirm the supply address (my Dad’s place) which I did and then we were off. I explained I was in receipt of this letter and I didn’t understand why. Gassy and I muddled about a bit, he got confused about addresses, ‘your address on the bill doesn’t match the one you gave me’ so I explained he’d asked me for the supply address not my home address. I could go on, and on, but you get the dull, tedious, boring, mechanical gist of things. Eventually I gave Gassy the meter reading, he reckoned that information would produce a much lower final bill and I should hear further in about two weeks. So much for the threatening letter eh?

After each one of these crappy service experiences in relation to sorting out Dad’s affairs, I keep hoping it’s the last and I keep being proved wrong. To be honest I feel a little awkward keeping writing about them but the truth is, the vast majority of these businesses I’m interacting with seem to be incapable of delivering a timely, accurate, and dare I say it sensitive service. They clearly don’t talk with and listen to customers when designing these experiences and the end results speak for themselves.

I wish I’d had the foresight to ask Gassy how he felt about the whole thing, after all it must be pretty crap being trained to deliver something so unhelpful and unsatisfying, no? I expect he may have exploded.

 

The Future of Internal Communication

The future of internal communication, that’s quite a grand title for a blog post huh? It was a subject that came up for discussion when I facilitated an afternoon of conversation for the Institute of Internal Communication recently. There were around 100 of us in the room and the conversation took place as part of the IoIC Annual Conference. I’d been asked to come in and facilitate something a little different so I figured it would be useful to get the delegates talking with each other in among a day and a half of presentations. It certainly felt very useful though I expect our snap decision to hold part of the session outdoors in the sunshine helped.

People talked about what they wanted the future of internal communication to be, and perhaps more importantly, how could they make that future come about? Here are a few things people talked about that interested me:

Future

  • Increase communication skills of the workforce – decentralise
  • The impact of social depends on the culture – autocrats should be worried
  • Social risks and opportunities – lose control, gain understanding

Bold thinking being demonstrated here. I was pleasantly surprised to read this as I sometimes work with internal comms teams and I find their desire to control very limiting. Expressing a desire to let go more feels very useful to me.

  • Facilitate, coach and enable
  • Move from craft to coach, doing to enabling – more informality
  • Anarchy

Coming from a background of facilitation I guess you’d expect me to highlight these. There was lots of talk of developing a coaching culture and even a a murmur of anarchy! It’ll never catch on, surely? 😉

There were a couple of things I was less comfortable with, including:

  • Communications as part of engagement scores
  • How do we get others to adopt communication principles?

Resist the temptation to measure everything I say, and if you are serious about coaching as part of the role of internal communications, that has to be the answer to the adoption question, no?

There was also some talk about being a part of HR and/or merging internal and external communication. I’d be interested to know what HR practitioners think about that.

Making it Happen

I like it that people were willing to give this next conversation a try. It’s easy to think about what might be, less so to start to plan how to make it happen. There was some discomfort borne out of ‘we’re not the decision makers’ coming from a few voices but hey – if the IoIC can’t decide how to make it happen – who can?! Here are a few things that stood out for me, and I’d be keen to be a fly on the wall in 2013 to learn how much of this has begun to happen.

  • Build bridges. At the top level to improve our understanding of decision making processes and at the front line to understand what is needed there. Then connect the two.
  • Get out there – be seen
  • Invest in digital – HR and IT as delivery partners
  • Learn from listening. Trust and openness, don’t shoot people down the first time they make a mistake, we all make them
  • Define guidelines – ask the audience
  • Social media restrictions come from a place of fear, re-educate

I enjoyed this session very much. It’s useful fun to spend time with different people and gather different perspectives, that’s definitely a big plus about my line of work.