Welcome to the Workplace Chameleon, my name Dr. Celina Peerman.

 Thank you for joining us. This podcast is all about change at work. All of the ways we experience change at the individual, team, and organizational level. As well as how we navigate this all together. 

For this episode I wanna focus on communication. More so effective communication, because if you really think about it, I can talk allll day long doesn’t make it effective and likely so can you. Also, in our teams and in our organizations, I can email allll day long doesn’t necessarily make it effective communication. Well, I’m pretty sure that humans have been challenged by communications since the beginning of humans I don’t think this is a new topic what does this mean for is in our teams and companies today as we navigate the unknown as we deal with more methods of communication then we’ve ever had before and yet still seem to be so challenged by it. I’m concerned that five years from now we all can meet back up and we’re still gonna have communication challenges. I would just like them to evolve into new challenges, new opportunities new ways of learning how we share information together how we support each other through difficult and uncertain and unknown change and thrive. And a key component to that is this effective communication whatever it is that we are doing how we transmit information to somebody else in a way that they’ll receive it, understand and do what we need them to do with it. 

Today I wanna look at organizational communication team level communication and individual communication so were gonna look at this in three ways as a personal interpersonal or systems wide approach. First organization communication, well alone this can be multiple episodes by itself I’m gonna cut to the chase and share with you a couple of key tools that I look for in organizations when I’m in working with a client and were working on communications across systems, there are somethings I want us to think about, 

#1- your org chart does not tell anybody who to communicate with. Your organizational chart was initially crafted to be able to show division of labor. Who reports to who in a system so that we understand where work resides? It doesn’t tell us anything about who to talk to it doesn’t map it out that these people need this kind of information on an ongoing basis and these people over here need information only as updates on that topic. One of the things that organizational charts and that traditional hierarchy did for us was really put us in silos it doesn’t explain how you have to be able to cross the silos in order to move information or in other words get it to flow from person to person, team to team, department to department, division to division not to mention across 1st shift, 2nd shift, or 3rd shift. So, I want you to consider for just a couple of moments today from a bird’s eye view looking over your organization, if it’s one location or multiple locations, if it is one country or multiple countries, if it’s one team or multiple teams. What does it look like and where does information need to flow and to what are the pathways that information flows most often and how do we as organization need to understand communicating to the individual, to the team or to the department or division and of course across shifts at all different times of business hours whether that’s during the week or the weekends we also need to consider how important the information is? Is this standard so is this something we communicate to all team members on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis? And what’s the best way for us to reach them. So, I always start with the org chart and ask some questions about how information moves. Because the org chart doesn’t give us communication strategies, but it does help us understand where the work is. Because then I’m lookin at flow, one of my favorite practices is literally mapping out for an organization what information needs to be sent out from what level, so this would be doing for example a meeting audit. If you list out all of the meetings that organization has you really should be able to clearly delineate it on a spread sheet what’s the meeting title, who’s involved, what’s the purpose of the meeting, when, how often do they meet, right? How long does that need to be what is the work accomplished there. And you should be able to map that out so you might be able to do that at a board level, at a company update level, then you’ll probably have some department or division or shift meetings, then probably some team meetings and we should be able to list all of those so that we can see who meets on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, a quarterly basis, and a yearly basis. I also advocate for updating that every year and you might have to do it more frequently, but we need to do a meeting audit so that we know that meetings at when we’re talking about organizational communication meetings are one of our best ways to get information through an organization, but we need to be protective of the resources used in that time right? Meetings are expensive, if were in a meeting that means were not doing something else so there’s opportunity lost, or performance lost which means we need to make meetings one of our best most useful communication methods. 

Now I could dig a whole lot deeper on meetings and maybe we’ll do that for a future episode but for right now I want you to think about communication practices at the organizational level transforming your organizational chart to a flow map and then listing out how do we communicate here what updates go to who and when and how often and tie that to your meetings When do we meet with who what’s the purpose how often and once you can do an assessment like that and really map it out, make it visual, put it in writing then you start seeing where maybe the gaps are or maybe what we’re not doing enough of. Well, there are many organizational practices we could adopt I find those to be pretty pragmatic and something you can immediately do maybe not for your whole company but start with your team. You can map out all of that same information just for team, your shift, or your department. We also need to understand effective communication at the team level so while I just mentioned you can take some of those organizational practices and can apply them to your team let’s talk about a couple of other things you can also do at the team level.

 One of my favorites is developing what your standards of communication are gonna be for your team. What does that look like to be able to come up with a list of how will we communicate here, when do you meet face to face or video, when do you pick up a phone call, when do you email, when do you text right? Because in some teams texting is okay and some teams texting is not okay and some environments instant messaging is better than emailing, and some environments emailing is better. Every team is gonna be different. so, what you have to decide for your team to perform for whoever it is you serve how will we communicate here for example you’ve all experienced somewhere along the way if you put ASAP in an email get back to me as soon as possible we know the reality your as soon as possible may not be my as soon as possible. Which means then we have a different definition. So what I love about a standards set of uh uh a set of standards within organizations within teams is to say how on this team how will we respond to email is that on this team because of the type of work we do we have to be immediately tuned into it which means were checking it constantly all day long well even if you’re checking it constantly all day long that doesn’t tell me when you expect a response so we wanna think about in this team we check email on an ongoing regular basis because of type we do the type of work we do. For others of you it might be we check the beginning of the day, the middle of the day, the end of the day and if you might be one of those teams that maybe have team members who check it three days later then you might wanna bring them into the conversation of is that okay and well take that to the individual style in just a moment. 

But some people just have different definitions of how often I need to share information communicate it out or even respond to somebody. We know that in some team’s response means you’re responding with in the next 20 minutes or you’re responding within the next hour or if it’s in the beginning of the day you can expect to be acknowledged by me by the end of the day your definition matters. So, at that team level what makes sense for you if you have to come up with a top 10, a top 10 ways that you communicate together what would be on your top 10 list?  How would you decide and getting your teams input into that right? How we will communicate here what does ASAP mean, and if we set that standard for our team, oooh not only can we bring people along in our team but think about what a difference that makes when you onboarded new team member. And you say, “hey welcome and for our team to be the most successful we understand effective communication is critical.”

 In order to do this better here are the top 10  and I’m saying that just for ease of memory but you could have 5 you could have 15 I would suggest to you, you couldn’t have too many, but if you had a standards document that said here are the ways we approach phone calls, here are the ways we approach zoom calls, here are the ways we approach email, here is when to IM each other or text each other and that way people know because here’s the challenge we got, just because we have more methods of communication today does not make us better at it. I might text you when I should email you, I might email you when I should meet with you. I do them because of my personal preference and what I think will be effective in this situation, but your team knows your business best. You know what you need to do for patients, customers, clients, you know what you need to do to take care of your body of work.

 So as a team have that conversation at your next staff meeting put it out there in this team how will we share information and break it out by the methodologies you can also include with that some rules of engagement how you’re gonna treat each other when you’re using those methods right? So, find out before you freak out listen thoroughly don’t email everybody right? Reply all, we know the sins of reply all but have that conversation put some standards in place then if you do have a team member that is in that category of three days later on email who might not check it as frequently then you’ll have to decide for that individual is that okay? And we all just know that that’s not their specialty and we appreciate them for many other strengths just not email maybe and we’re okay with that, but everybody knows if they need to communicate with that person if something’s more urgent, they’re not gonna email that person. those are the things that we need to think about today now another way to approach that if you develop a team’s standard communication uh list then and the team buys into this and you decide its important of, you’re that team leader or you can do this as a peer too. You could pose question to your collogues, “hey I think it would be helpful if,” is this something you think we should put together and once you come up with it if you can get people to say I agree this important enough we wanna improve at what we do, we’re gonna stick to this and everybody’s gonna do their best with it. Of course, it takes us some time to adjust to new ways and you have to want to, and so if everybody is on board give them a little bit of space and grace to put those new practices or maybe some homed practices in place. I believe as I look at organizations and I watch how teams perform and when they make it up its not usually best-case scenario woo hoo, I think everything goings really well.

 It’s usually oh my goodness what is going on. It’s so important that we utilize methods of communication all these tools we have whether its Microsoft teams, whether it is uh different kinds of slack or collaboration tools we’ve got so many great tools out there we need to make sure they actually do what we need them to do. We need to use effectively to drive performance, we need to look at that at a team level and an organizational level and if it’s not helping you drive performance, we don’t have the right mix involved. Of course, this all comes back to individual style and skills. Your method for effectively communicating what you need to send to somebody else this is all about awareness and choices. Communication skills don’t just happen not effective ones anyways so as individuals we need to own our own stuff, we need to know what our style is we need to continue to increase our skill set we need to be able to select the best method to get our message across so that it’s that received and understood and acted upon. Those are choices we make almost every moment of everyday we do it in our personal lives we absolutely do it in our professional lives your individual choices, your style, your skills, your methods, flow they cascade into team level, to organizational practices, to communication with external customers as well as internal customers. there’s always something we can work on, again I know 5 years from now when we’re sitting down hopefully having a delightful cup pf coffee somewhere talking about how things are going in your work life and my work life and were sharing information were learning and growing and hopefully 5 years from now that does not have to include face masks right. When we’re having that conversation, I suspect we’re still gonna be working on communication skills. I just want us to continue to evolve into new challenges. How do we create an experience for our customers, our patients, our clients? How do we continue to be a better organization and finding those next steps because of new challenges that come up with communication? As we think about takeaways, as we think about what could you do with this investment of about 20 time – 20 minutes of your time for this podcast. Consider how your information is shared within your organizational system. That organizational practice, the flow, look at your team standards what do we expect here how does this team work together and then you gotta take it across so if our team works this way and that team works that way is that okay? 

There are certainly some communication standards that can be issued for an entire company. This is how we do things here and depending on your company depending on the size and lots of factors that may work. I love having some company standards in place where you just know, everybody here knows this is how we communicate this is how long it takes us to respond to email this is when you can expect us to return your phone call organizational practices on that can be very effective what we do know that different parts of your organization have different needs and different expectation which is why I mention it at the team level. 

Where it all starts, we need to keep working on those individual styles, skills, and choice of methods what you pay attention to changes. If you wanna be more effective in your communication, be more intentional. One hit your pause button, in that moment can you choose what is the best method for me to convey this message, should I instant message someone. Should I send them an email? do I need to pick up the phone? Hitting that pause button can help you be more intentional about what comes next. 

Number two always analyze your audience when you hit that pause button and you’re choosing which method you have to analyze your audience to think like them, what do they need from you. You can talk, you can type, you can send we’re not even talking about body language today that be another episode stay tuned, but you can share that information with someone else but if you don’t meet them where they’re at the communication is is incomplete. So, you have to analyze your audience what do they know already? What is the best way to reach them in a way that they will receive it, understand it, and do what needs to be done with it? 

Three practice your effective listening. The feedback loop is critical to that communication process if you don’t get what you need from that other party or parties, then communication effect communication is not happening. And what I find is listening is one of the most powerful communication tools we have immediately available to us that we are not fully tected into. Being present really being present, not jumping to conclusions what they’re gonna say before you finish speaking or they finish speaking not multitasking 3 conversations over because you’re thinking about that instead of the conversation in front of you. Really being present, practicing engaged, active, effective listening. Manage your own emotion, this is really important so that you know how your emotion right now is shaping your communication. 

Number 4 manage your emotion. Recognize how that emotion is changing the message you’re sending; we’ll dig deeper into that in other episodes because I am absolute advocate for understanding and building our emotional intelligence in teams are some great research coming out on how we do this more effectively but for today I want you to consider how this impacts your communication.

 And number five seek feedback. How are you doing check ins with teammates, check in with your manager, seek feedback you don’t even, they don’t even have to tell you right? Was what you communicated received, acted, and under and and the goal was accomplished. How effective are you? 

Where are those gaps? I know in my own world right? When I know I’ve not been effective I hit more gaps, I hit more misunderstandings, and if I pause long enough to look at those, I typically detect what was going on with me what I didn’t well and what I wanna fix for the future. It’s so important during times of nonstop relentless change, that we articulate what has not changed. Your to customers your commitment to quality your commitment to safety whatever that is you do acknowledge it, communicate, fill in the blank, share it while there a lot of changes going on, on our teams right now that are shifting some of the ways we communicate, of course articulate what has not changed. During times of relentless change, I want you to be able to share information with people multiple ways, multiple times you can do this within the role you hold making sure you’re communicating with coworkers make sure communicating with the people you interact with whether that’s customers or your boss if you’re a leader, you have more responsibility with this. 

We understand that it takes time for people to adjust to change, to give them time to see the new. There are so many great things that can happen in our organizations I believe we can continue to do this better. Effective communication is at the very heart of that. Today, see how information flows as a system, as a team and your role in that so you can make today better than it was yesterday and tomorrow better than it is today. 

Thank you for listening well see you again soon. Take care.