Negotiating the wasteland: why Internal Comms is just like Fallout

Like coming across a Deathclaw without Power Armour, being an internal communicator without the knowledge behind you means you will face an inevitable and gory death (in a strictly professional sense).

I started thinking about this analogy after using a Fallout Agility perk in a presentation at the Intranet Now conference, and conversations with the awesome Shimrit Janes, who has blogged extensively of the need for gamification in careers and the equally awesome Jenni Field, who helped me develop the analogy.

Now, I’m not saying that the world of Internal Comms is like a nuclear wasteland (thought at times it can seem like it!), but there are certainly similarities to the world of role-playing games like Fallout.

I’ve started two internal comms functions from next to nothing as an in-house practitioner and had to come into roles with little knowledge, but the tools to succeed.

In many ways it’s like heading out into the DC wasteland for the first time.

You know the game mechanics, you know the tips and tricks which will help you to succeed, but you lack knowledge of the story and particular quirks of this particular game, you are underpowered, your small world of clarity is still surrounded by the huge foggy cloud meaning ‘unexplored’.

Getting called up before the CEO in the first week of your job and being asked how you’re going to ‘fix it’ is a little like turning a corner at Level 2 and being faced by a Deathclaw (see below).

You simply don’t have the XP. Now, it’s less likely to lead to a gory dismemberment, but it has that similar feeling of “nonononononononononRUNAWAAAAAAAY”

But, as you start to progress through the game you build your horizons, more of the map is explored, you start to play through the main story quest.

You could see the story quest as the big initiatives that you know you need to complete the game, the focus groups, the staff survey, the estates development comms plans, you start to build up your XP, and level up, each time collecting a new perk – CEO speechwriter, PR guru, the mythical ‘seat at the top table’.

Being distracted
But you will find yourself distracted by side quests, the awareness day that needs you to organise it, the event that no-one told you about until the last-minute, the well-meaning request from someone in your marketing team.

These have the tendency to be frustrating, and a distraction from the main quest (the main reason that with two small children it takes me an eon to complete these types of games now), but they all serve to increase your XP, to allow you to build your skills in areas you’re not familiar with.

And they contribute to your ‘levelling up’ by developing yourself in those areas that best suit your style of work. Your perception, your stamina, your stealth.

The mechanics of play reflect some of the things you go through in internal comms too.

You learn to choose the right conversation options with key stakeholders (or non playable characters), and though at times you might feel like you’re surrounded by ghouls or fire ants, you now have the armour (data) and weaponry (good comms channels) to defend yourself adequately.

You might even be lucky enough to find a mentor, the equivalent of the Mysterious Stranger perk, a shadowy figure who turns up to blow away high-powered enemies when you’re in trouble.

And if you’re really lucky, you’ll learn to use the Power Armour, which renders you impervious to all but the worst assaults.

So the next time you find yourself faced by your Deathclaw CEO, your knowledge and the respect that your good use of data has built you can feel almost like your very own Comms VATS system.

You simply slow time right down using your knowledge of the organisation, pick your targets, and blow them away with your comms awesomeness.

This post was first published on AllThingsIC, a fantastic resource for all Internal Communications professional.

That was the year that was

Coming to the end of the year, when things should be calming down, it’s worth reflecting on the year that was and thinking about goals for the next. For Internal Communications, which is an ever-moving feast it’s more important than ever to do that.

Achievements and highlights

Well there are plenty of things to be proud of this year. Being involved in my third Royal Visit from an organisational point of view, a few weeks of intense activity in order to prepare for a visit that lasted less than an hour, but the thousands of smiling faces and publicity that result are more than worth it.

A successful staff awards with more nominations than ever before and a ceremony hosted by childhood hero Maggie Philbin.

The event was fabulous, but what was even better was the preparation. Reading and writing about the incredible work that goes on at the University of Leicester, from the pathology team who helped identify the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster to an academic who worked with the National Trust to uncover the hidden LGBT history of our stately homes. It was especially rewarding to see a friend and colleague receive the top award of the night, and incredibly deserved it was too.

I also gave my second ever presentation at a conference, this one solely focused on creating a digital organisation. The University of Leicester has been a trailblazer for this in many ways. We’re by no means the most advanced technological organisation in the world, but what we’re doing with the digital campus is much more interesting. Making changes based on real academic research and aiming to bring every member of staff along for the ride.

Making improvements

Then of course there are the personal projects, driven solely from Internal Communications. The long-gestating intranet project, which I have been working on for the previous year finally launched in May and so far the response has been fantastic.

No project is without its issues and this had many. Completely changing the architecture and interface of staff facing information while attempting to integrate new interactive tools is no mean feat and there are plenty of people, especially my IT colleagues, without whom this simply would not have happened.

We’ve seen the benefit in increased engagement with not only Yammer, but the stories that we put out and highlight on our homepage.

Dealing with change

Of course no year is without its challenges. Dealing with a month of strikes which affect teaching while you attempt to keep staff and students informed and happy is a challenge and it raises questions about who and what it is you support.

Internal Comms cannot simply be the mouthpiece of management, but needs to reflect the views of all staff. But it also needs to be a source of truth in the organisation, people should be able to trust what you put out so at times like these it’s more important than ever to check, check again and double check everything you’re putting out.

The future

Of course I’m already planning for next year. From the wellbeing campaigns and all-staff talks to thinking about how we can make the most of our collaborative digital environment, I’m going to be taking part in the Digital Workplace Group’s DWG24 in February on that very subject. And there’s the small matter of the completion of two major building projects, and all the associated comms that come with that.

#TimesUp for standing still

Yesterday saw the start of something. Or, should we say, the continuation of something. Now this does relate to my work and to the work of the University of Leicester, who have been one of the key partners of the UN’s HeForShe campaign.

And last night at the Golden Globes a number of powerful actresses stood up and made their statements about the #MeToo phenomenon which has brought powerful men in Hollywood tumbling to the ground amid allegations of rape and sexual harassment and begun the dismantling of power structures that have entrenched inequality not just within Hollywood, but across the world.

I’m a big fan of Game of Thrones and I saw on Instagram the posts by Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner, two young actresses who are using their platforms to speak out about inequality by reposting the #timesup letter. Now I can only applaud these two young actresses who have grown up in the full spotlight of fame for standing up for what they believe in, but the comments on these posts simply illustrate how far there is still to go.

We see the predictable comments to try and deflect attention from these important thoughts…

“What about men, they are abused too?”

“It’s all well and good to stand up for millionaires”

“Women in Iraq are being killed, shouldn’t you focus on them instead?”

All of which completely miss the point. This is an idea whose time has come, it has ‘gone viral’, and as any good marketer or PR person knows, when that happens you have to make the most of it. So yes, the focus at the moment is on Me Too and Times Up, and good thing too. As someone else commenting pointed out… “Just because you say ‘Save the whales’ you’re not saying ‘Screw the sharks and eagles’.”

Men still hold the power in society. As Natalie Portman pointed out as she introduced the best director shortlist with the great Ron Howard… “Here are the all-male nominees”. This is despite Patty Jenkins helming Wonderwoman (which received no nominations at all) and Greta Gerwig directing Lady Bird, which received four nominations and won two, including the best supporting actress and best comedy/musical film.

As in art, so in life. Women are still underrepresented in senior positions, the gender pay gap is still there in many different industries, the BBC’s China editor Carrie Grice has just resigned due to the secretive and unequal culture of pay at the BBC. And of course, in America people voted for a lying, racist charlatan over an immensely qualified ex-Secretary of State.

So where possible I will be HeForShe. I will support those powerful women who choose to speak out and I will use my privileged position as a man in society to support them.

Not because I’m a social justice warrior or snowflake, but because it is the right thing to do. This affects everyone. It affects my partner, my friends, my daughter (and my son, because I want him to grow up with respect and admiration for strong women) and my co-workers. Because as strong and powerful as the women leading this campaign are, this affects everyone, and there will always be those men who seek to hold onto that power. That will not be me.

You can read more about the University of Leicester’s HeForShe campaign here.

What brand are you?

A conversation this morning got me thinking.

A colleague had an interview in which they were asked the question: “If you were a brand, which brand would you be?”

Their answer (which was excellent) was Marks & Spencer, because they are elegant, classic but with a hint of mischief. So it got us thinking in the office, how to summarise yourself using the very precise idea of a ‘brand’.

Now I’ve seen posts on personal branding, that impression you leave on people, and how you’d try and define it for a ‘jack of all trades’ comms person. This great post by Rachel Miller of All Things IC talks about the need to present yourself in the outside world and build a personal brand for you and your business.

I thought long and hard about the brand I am, and came to the conclusion that I would probably be an Android phone.

First-off, adaptability. An Android is adaptable and offers access to a huge range of apps that make your life easier. The very nature of my job means that I need to turn my hand to a great number of things, from writing, to planning, to photography, to advising, to filming, interviewing, and everything in between.

Why Android and not iPhone? Well, I’m an Android user, but the difference between the two hinges on the ability to break out of the mould and try new things. iPhones, for all their ease of use are pretty ‘locked down’, where Android gives you freedom to experiment, something that I have made a point of trying to do at all points in my career.

And finally support. Mobile phones these days are like a mini-computer in your pocket, a gateway to the wider world and a way of organising your life. And I see my job as being very similar. I’m a source of knowledge, a sounding board, an adviser and a producer. I probably need to work on my maths skills to really live up to sounding like a human computer though.

It would be interesting to hear other people’s ideas about what brand they would use to summarise their professional profile.

Presenting at the Intranet Now conference

Last week I attended the Intranet Now conference in London, ostensibly to find out the latest goings on in the digital world, but also to help build a bit of profile for the work that the University of Leicester is doing on our Digital Campus.

When I was asked to give a nine minute ‘lightning’ presentation at the conference by the wonderful Wedge, I thought hard about the insights I could give from a learning institution to a conference mostly based upon what’s going on in the corporate world.

I based the presentation on the concept of providing a front door to the wealth of tools available through our digital campus with the cunning use of football teams and computer games. More on that is available in the presentation itself.

Using the Fallout ‘Agility’ perk to demonstrate our approach

 

As to the conference itself, for me there were a number of key lessons to be learnt from all the digital knowledge and internal communications expertise in the room. While there is no one way to approach creating and maintaining an intranet (after all, don’t they reflect the organisation itself?) there are a number of approaches and themes that we can follow.

Information architecture

Zzzzzzzz….* Sorry, those words usually provoke an outbreak of narcolepsy, but this is the bread and butter (or jam and peanut butter) of the intranet game, and Alan Tanner talked brilliantly on the need to align your content based on the way people look for information, much like the way supermarket shelves are organised. They will make assumptions based on previous experience, like knowing that peanut butter lives with the jam, despite the lack of signage for the delicious nut-based spread.

This need to take your content seriously was hammered home by Martin White, whose quick and easy formula allowed me to calculate that the University of Leicester has paid people across the organisation something to the tune of some £50 million over the last year to create online content, so what we do online really matters to the bottom line (this is a very vague estimate, based on an average of 40 minutes per day content creation per person, so please nice Finance team, don’t hammer down my door).

Consult, change, consult again

A few speakers, Kelly Freeman and Lisa Riemers in particular, discussed the need to talk and listen. Indeed, this was the closing point in my talk, but it bears repeating. If you don’t listen to your users or ask the right questions at the right times, then you are doomed to fail, as Laura Jones from the Co-op illustrated so brilliantly with her analogy of a beautifully designed car that met the brief of a four wheeled vehicle with an engine.

They just forgot to ask the additional question which would have elicited the response “it needs to cut the grass too”.

I was very pleased to hear so many people making points that I make myself on a daily basis regarding intranet development. The need to listen, to really understand what your minimum viable product is, the importance of task-based navigation, making sure your values permeate in a useful way, using champions in the organisation to back your work up, and managing based on use, not technology.

Wider insight

What was also great about the day was the chance to hear a wider perspective on internal comms. Firstly from Rita Zonius, who talked of the power of the wirearchy, the early adopters who are proving that the size and shape of your networks is far more important than your pay grade in a digitally enabled business.

This tallied with the ‘Working out loud’ culture of sharing your insights online and among your networks that Rachel Miller (who it was a joy to share a table with) has talked about and championed at some length.

And secondly from Scott McArthur who freewheeled through some fantastic insights, which I’ll summarise with two quotes. The first comes from the late, great Douglas Adams “We’re stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works”.

His second quote dates back more than 2000 years, something of an anomaly in a conference about the digital workplace, but more relevant than ever when trying to win hearts and minds “Opinions are like nails, the harder you hit them, the deeper inside they go.”

Final thoughts

I’d like to thank the organisers, Brian and Wedge who made Intranet Now a pleasure to attend and be a part of, and the many lovely people I met as part of the day. Here’s to awesome digital workplaces. May your Sharepoint be full and fruitful and your Yammer never stop yammering.

Check out the hashtag on Twitter for loads of awesome people sharing their insights.

How to communicate with students

A lot has been written about internal comms and the importance of employee engagement, but very little about university internal comms. This seems strange, but is possibly because the field is a relatively new one, and because the people doing it tend to be too busy for anything else!

Reach out

At a university, not only are you doing the usual Internal Comms job of staff engagement, working with multiple partners to improve the experience of thousands of staff, you must also communicate with around 15-20,000 students. I’m going to focus on student comms in this post as staff comms have been covered at length elsewhere.

These are students who are focused on gaining the best possible grade in their degree. They aren’t particularly engaged with comms messaging, so you have to work hard to create content that speaks to and engages with them on their level.

Don’t stop me now, I’m having such a good time…

Student experience. Everything comes back to these two words. As a university internal comms professional you have think about how to keep your students happy. The introduction of £9,000 a year fees means that while they may not see themselves as customers, students certainly have customer expectations.

This is reflected in the number of surveys students are asked to complete. Between January and April you have the National Student Survey (which feeds into national university league tables), Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey, Postgraduate Research Experience Survey and course level surveys. And students are quick to make their satisfaction or dissatisfaction clear.

Blurred lines

This is where the blurring of lines comes. More so than anywhere else I’ve seen, university internal comms blend into external comms. If you ask staff to keep things confidential, they generally will as they’re bound by contract and confidentiality clauses. You tell students something, you can pretty much guarantee that if it’s difficult or controversial it’ll be on Twitter in ten minutes flat.

Welcome to the house of fun

The calls for your time in university internal comms are never-ending. In one week I’ve been asked to promote eight separate events; send six all-user emails; create digital signage screens in powerpoint; write and upload 26 news stories; promote five separate themed days; remind students of policies around plagiarism, good academic practice and smoking on campus. This is on top of daily updates to the student and staff webpages and the launch of a staff awards scheme.

You have to work with departments who prior to the introduction of internal comms rarely co-ordinated their activities. I have regular contact with student services, careers and employability teams, the students’ union, health and safety, HR, estates, three colleges, the events team, the IT department, and our news and marketing teams. All will expect their work to be a priority, so stakeholder engagement and management is absolutely vital.

Sir Mixalot

Then you have to bear in mind that students don’t have a ‘go to’ place for their information.

Staff will know there’s an intranet, or a web page or an email. Students need to be led to the water, and then you can’t guarantee they’ll drink. You need a broad mix of channels, all pointing to content that’s freely available on the web or targeted to them.

We use a mix of web content, emails, digital signage screens, posters, direct engagement, and social media, covering Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. Obviously we can’t do all this ourselves, so working with a wider comms team (and partners across the university, including a student experience team who run the events and engagement activities that help keep students happy) is essential.

Lean on me

Planning for a campaign is where staff partnerships become vital. You need help to get those messages out there so you need a network of comms champions, particularly among academics, who can get your messages directly to students with no middle man. They are hard to find, so when you do, nurture and treasure them.

The staff comms, while focusing on ensuring they talk to each other and work together well, again comes back to student experience.

Happy, engaged staff means happy engaged students.

Bring it on home

So what is the objective? The desired outcome is an improvement in student experience and employability, which can be measured through national surveys such as the NSS and the Destination of Leavers of Higher Education. You need a focus on quality teaching, and to reassure students that you are listening to them and acting on their feedback.