The Swear Jar

The Swear Jar Podcast: Shut Up and Listen

August 11, 2020 Andrew Brown
The Swear Jar
The Swear Jar Podcast: Shut Up and Listen
Show Notes Transcript

Episode Summary

This week Andrew and Elizabeth talk about listening. Communicators and executives spend a lot of their time talking but many of us forget to listen or don’t do it as well as we should. 

Organizations need to listen to make sure their messages are getting through, and to get out ahead of misinformation and rumours, but more importantly to make sure they understand employees’ lived experiences

Done well, listening drives engagement and motivation so employees know why things are happening and to connect them to purpose. More practically it also supports enablement, which is giving employees the information they need to get stuff done. 

Before we fire up the survey software, however, we need to take the time to plan our listening; specifically, we want to ensure we are considering the voices we normally don’t hear and to focus less on what we want to hear and more on what employees want to say.

Key Topics

·       Why listening is important for organizations 1:25

·       The importance of agency 3:20

·       Planning to listen 4:00

·       Why survey fatigue is BS 6:30

·       Interviews and focus groups 09:15

·       Team meetings and anonymous feedback 10:10

·       Town halls, eavesdropping and observation 13:30

·       What to do with all that data 17:40

ABC Resources Highlighted in this Episode

·      Podcast: Facilitation with Michael Goldman of Facilitation First (psst – ask about the special ABC discount on Facilitation First workshops)

·      Podcast: Why Your Town Halls Suck

·      A Handy Reference Sheet about Listening tools

·      The Fearless Communicator’s Guide to COVID-19 on Amazon

Other Resources Highlighted in this Episode

Downloads

·      IPR-Leger Employee Communications Survey

Books

·       Essentialism by Greg McKeown

·       No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn

Shows

·       Succession on HBO

Join Our Community

●      Sign up to receive our news and tips  

●      Follow us on LinkedIn

●      Visit us at Academy of Business Communications

Elizabeth Williams:

Hi everyone. And welcome to the swear jar. The official podcast of the Academy of business communications, where we tell it like it is about corporate and employee communications and use occasionally colorful language to raise money for worthy causes. My name is Elizabeth Williams

Andrew Brown:

And, I'm Andrew Brown. Today we're talking about listening. Which is of course ironic in itself. Communicators are great at talking, but in our consulting work, we see that they struggle when it comes to actually listening. So today we're going to cover what we mean when we say listening, the show organizations put on when it comes to listening or we affectionately refer to as listening theater. How to plan your organizations, listening seven ways that an organization can listen. And of course, what to do with all those wonderful insights gathered from your listening.

Elizabeth Williams:

Yeah, I would, I would say listening is probably the top skill that most communicators really need to work on because that may be for measurement, but I think they're tied and, both at the personal level, in terms of active listening, which is probably a whole other podcast in itself, but, at the organizational level, the, the listening that has to go on all the time and I would argue, especially now,

Andrew Brown:

Agreed. I mean, we're recording this in early July, 2020. And that means we're living in COVID times. And organizations have been talking at their employees for both last four months now, but from what we've seen, we've got to ask how many have really taken the time to actually listen and sure. Many have surveyed their employees, which is a type of listening, but are we really finding out what we need to know and do to move forward?

Elizabeth Williams:

Well, that's so important. It's not so much about what we did or didn't do, right. It's about what we need to do to help people and the organization move ahead. Listening, I think is key to changing behaviors. It's important for understanding any shifts in the culture or perhaps lack of shift if that's what you're asking. Sure. It's really key for uncovering information gaps and by extension getting out ahead of rumors and, and certainly in, in our change communications work, we see that it's essential for making sure that okay, everyone is drinking the Koolaid and getting aligned. And quite honestly, it's the only way that we have as communicators to understand what people are feeling and living within our organizations.

Andrew Brown:

I just want to summarize your points because they are so essential for communicators, regardless of whether they're sitting in, in the employee communications function or HR, risk management, marketing, or even in the executive. Listening really drives three things: Engagement or energy. That is the motivation people need to get stuff done. Enablement, which is, figuring out how the information people need to get stuff done and agency that sense that we all hope people have a sense of ownership and influence.

Elizabeth Williams:

Yeah. I think that last point about agency is the really big one because, and I would point out that the only thing that matters more than listening is being seen to be listening. So there's this little bit of, of theater, listening theater involved here too. And that visibility really needs to be part of the planning. When we think about what we want to be listening for.

Andrew Brown:

Exactly. And so it really makes sense to spend some time on the planning. And one of the big self deceptions among communicators is that they are already listening-again well intentioned, but after all they're cranking out slides and updates and blogs, all sorts of communication sitting in on endless calls and meetings. I kind of have the voice of the employee nailed. Right. But the question is which voice whose voice, like everyone else, communicators are really only hearing the loud voices. And, even the best intentioned communicators, at times of stress in particular are more likely to hear those voices opinions, pains that actually reinforce their own biases and those of the supervisors who they have to report into. So a big part of the systematically planning, a good listener has to be around who is already loud and which voices are actually absent.

Elizabeth Williams:

Oh, yeah. You know what you're so right. I used to joke in this one big company I worked in the employees signal fell off by the square of the distance from their desk to head office. And, and I would add to your excellent points that the planning needs to balance, not just what we say as an organization with what our employees need to say. For example, as we start crawling out of the COVID foxholes organizations are asking employees to tell them, what do you want and return to workplace safety, or tell us how great a job we did during the lockdown. But I think employees want to talk about how stressed they felt or how anxious they may still feel. And so once we have a sense of who we need to hear and what needs to be discussed, only then can we start figuring out how to go and do that listening.

Andrew Brown:

Hey listeners out there. If you stop listening to this episode right now, and by the way, don't that last point Elizabeth made is the one I'd love for you to take away. I know trite but effective listening, even at an organizational level really needs to be part of a dialogue. That is, it's not just about what you want to hear. It's giving voice to what employees needs to say. So., yes, it's frustrating when chances to listen are undercut by a lack of good planning. Unfortunately, another big mistake in developing an effective listening strategy is over-reliance on surveys. And, you know, we love surveys and we use them all the time, but they aren't the beginning and end of listening and they're actually pretty lousy for some goals. So they're just one of seven listening tools we like to have in our toolkit. And so why don't we start working through the different ways of listening and which ones work for different goals. So today listen tool number one: surveys And Elizabeth, I know you hear this a lot:"Employees are done with surveys and have survey fatigue. So we don't want to do surveys".

Elizabeth Williams:

I know I hear that all the time too. And I think that survey fatigue is bullshit, but I would argue that bullshit fatigue is real. And by that, I mean that people we'll talk all day long about what they think and feel, but when the result of that survey and that input is a variably, nothing, then they become a lot less willing to engage. And so the first thing that we have to remember regardless of the listening tool is that employees can and will eventually connect some kind of change to their comments. And surveys are, are I think great for several things, particularly for surfacing things really, really quickly. We light them for understanding top concerns, things employees like, or dislike, understanding what their intentions are. Surveys are wonderfully fast and they're cheap and they're easy to do now and, and getting people to fill them in as it is a fair bit of work. And you have some issues with verifying, whether people are telling you the truth or just what they think you want to hear, or if they're on some kind of strange vendetta and they're using survey to get even, you know, it's, it's really, really, difficult to verify. And it's also hard to work with open comments. If you leave those open comment fields, that can be kind of difficult to muck through. but you know, if you can get a decent sample size and you can write good quantitative questions and surveys certainly have their place. And we usually recommend that you go for a high quality, random sample rather than trying to get everyone, because you will spend all of your time and much of your sanity, just badgering people into taking the survey. And with today's technologies like internet and mobile devices, you can even do micro-surveys little one or two questions. Polls that you can spread over a period of time some people call them,"pulse surveys" or micro-surveys. And when you post them, you can see how people engage with the content. Do they share it? Do they comment on it? Do they ignore it and trash it? Do they add to it? But, keep in mind that you still have to have a goal behind micro-surveys otherwise they're just annoying. So our advice with surveys is, get some help with your survey design. That's probably a good topic for a future podcast actually, but one of the things that surveys kind of suck at is the softer stuff. So understanding a lived experience or kicking around ideas, you know, that stuff is really better captured in a conversational format.

Andrew Brown:

Right. And that, and that leads us to listening tool number two: interviews And we're big fans of interviews for that kind of thing. In fact, one of the first things we do when we are consulting on a big organizational change or trying to understand an engagement issue is to conduct one-on-one interviews with several stakeholders. This really lets us tease out the fears and concerns, the lived experiences, and other very subjective issues in essence, getting a greater sense of the organizational context. Let's just switch quickly to listening tool number three: Focus groups. Focus groups are also pretty good for these sorts of discussions. Plus, they're great for kicking around ideas. They're good for digging deep into what people like and what they don't like. But to be honest, it can be time consuming and it takes time to analyze as well. And they should have great facilitators. And while I say facilitation, I'm going to do a quick shout out to Michael Goldman at Facilitation First who was a recent guest of ours and will be highlighted in an upcoming episode of The Swear Jar. Watch for that. And by all means, check him out at Facilitation First. By the way, The Swear Jar listeners get a special discount on his amazing workshops.

Elizabeth Williams:

Yeah, that was a great conversation with Michael. And we'll put a link to that in the show notes Coincidentally, about a week after we taped that. podcast, I attended a webinar and their facilitator was Michael. So, I actually got to watch him in action and I think he picked on me. Speaking of getting picked on let's listen, let's look at listening tool number four, which is of course the team meetin. And your communicators often think that they are the chief listening officers, but we often preach that it's frontline managers who play a really big role in both listening and being seen to be listening. And it's not just team meetings. I would say one of the things that the managers should be doing is listening all the time as they have their daily interactions with their teams. In fact, I just saw this quite disturbing stat from an, IPR, Institute of public relations and Leger did a poll very recently where they asked workers in Canada and the U S: How much direct contact they had with their manager on a daily basis before the COVID lockdown and during. There was a 10% decline from 36% of workers who said they had a direct daily conversation with their manager down to 26% when everybody went home. And, it's a little better in the sSates: it's down 7%. That is a really disturbing trend because one-on-ones are, are really a key place for these frontline managers to start listening. We like team meetings too, because they're a very safe place. They're a lot safer than a focus group say, or, or a town hall. And they're a particularly good forum in which to do that ideation and kicking around of ideas. The problem is you need the manager to be a fairly decent facilitator and they have to have a way to collect that feedback. and get it back to us which is why we say, ideally, if you were going to use a team meeting for some feedback see if you can send someone to that meeting from the Comms team or HR who can sitin and take notes and it takes the load off the manager. To do that. we also like it, particularly if we want listening on a particular thing to offer these frontline managers a little bit of a toolkit that can help them facilitate these meetings and, and then we want to make sure of course that we are debriefing with them as soon as we can so that we can find out what they heard. Listening tool, number five comes out of that because we're thinking about safe places and other very, very safe place for employees of course, is anonymous feedback. And, in fact, one of our clients uses the Slido platform we'll put a link to that Slido platform to collect anonymous input ahead of their town hall meetings. So of course the quality of the input is, is one way and it's smetimes questionable because it's anonymous and people do really weird stuff when they don't think anybody knows who they are. We would say that if you go this route, make sure you limit how long you leave that gathering tool open like Slido. And, one of the reasons we also like it was, it limits the number of characters. So you don't get people doing those pages of long diatribes on, on everything that's wrong, what their chair. and, they tend to just focus on what it is that you need to hear. And, and these are really ideal, especially when you have something emotional that nobody really wants to talk about or where engagement and dysfunction is really high. And you've got a lot of blaming going on. So, it's good for that. And we like it when you've got a very specific question you want an answer for, rather than a,"Hey, how's it going?" kind of thing.

Andrew Brown:

Right. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm glad you mentioned town halls, which is our listening tool number six. They sit at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of being confidential. And we just did a great podcast on how Comms folks can get their town halls to suck a little less. In fact, one of the reasons they suck is how bad the feedback heard is. Because usually it's 10 minutes at the end of the town hall.when nobody really wants to stick up their hand and be the first to say anything. So of course Comms folks are told to prime the pump, put people into the audience or float softball questions themselves. And of course, in that town hall with inhibited participant, it's a good idea to have a good facilitator who can ask specific questions and guide that discussion. It's a,great way to do some"listening theater", of course. But once again, if the employees don't see visible action and direct follow-up, they tend to relegate it to, yes, the bullshit pile. So having said that let's tap into the final listing tool that we like to use. And that's good old eavesdropping. Yup. That includes listening in on what employees and ex-employees are saying in lunchrooms, Slack channels, Facebook, Glassdoor, Google. This is particularly useful because it's easy to get. It uncovers stuff that might not come up otherwise. And of course it's scalable. It is easy to manipulate however because particularly where the feedback is anonymous. So be aware of that and having the right tools is important here so you can do your listening at scale. And of course, bigger clients often outsource this. I'd also point out that this activity is part of an other kinds of listening that we all do which. unfortunately makes us believe we all do it that's observing behavior. Another one of our unfortunate communications fallacies. Observation is fraught with complexity because it can be difficult to understand the reasoning and emotions behind when someone, let's say, storms into a room and shouts at someone, for example. But observerving behavior and following up with the right questions is also part of organizational listening. And having said that Elizabeth, I wonder before we recap our seven listing tools, do you wanna play devil's advocate and address that big whopping elephant in the podcast? That is, there is in fact a downside to listening.

Elizabeth Williams:

Well, of course the downside to listening and especially being seen to be listening is that you now create an expectation that you're going to do something with all the information you've picked up. And, I would say that is probably when we propose some kind of listening is often the reason that executives and managers push back because, and they come up with dumb excuses like"people get too many surveys and people are too busy and we know what we're doing". And, and I almost always interpret that as, AND you don't really want to know what people are going to say, because it will then obligate you to do something about the crappy culture or the, you know, the, the lousy benefits or whatever it is that you don't particularly want to address. So I think that that's probably, maybe another podcast is actually how to sell the idea of listening in your organization. So let's just recap our seven techniques before we move on. So we've got surveys, we've got interviews, focus groups and team meetings annonymous gathering town halls, eavesdropping, and then with that, that observational behavior. And in fact, we've put a handy reference sheet up on our site, which you can link from the show notes that shows you the pros and cons of each of these different listening platforms. So let's move on to what happens next. We've done all that listening. And now what do we do?

Andrew Brown:

That's the other big question, isn't it. We need to make sure we are actually doing something with all that input. No, you've got straight up quantitative stuff, which is great. It's easy to analyze. And for the qualitative stuff we recommend going through and identifying key themes, And then of course, within each of those, those themes you want to flag the prevailing sentiment, maybe look for trends by particular stakeholder groups. See if those qualitative insights line up with the quantitative. And, we often use a SWOT strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats tool, by which to help organize that. And, you know, it's important to map these themes to behaviors. We are always talking about communications leads to behavior. So, what behaviors do we want based on this input? And of course, then this forms the basis of your planning and your future listening.

Elizabeth Williams:

Yeah. And, and we, we need to raise the listening theater curtain once again, because it's important to make sure that our leaders and our managers are closing the loop on what has changed as a result of the feedback. Even if not much has changed, we still need to acknowledge that people gave us feedback and that the organization heard it. And did something with it. So, let's take a second to shamelessly promote some material from The Academy of Business Communications.

Andrew Brown:

Everyone, our book for Fearless Communicators, dealing with crises such as COVID is available at Amazon. Having said that let's wrap up by taking a look at what's caught our eye in the past few days. Elizabeth, where are you reading or bingeing on thinking about?

Elizabeth Williams:

I'm actually rereading a boo that I read maybe five years ago that I found very helpful and it's called Essentialism by Greg McKeown. And it is a really wonderful book for people, like me, who have a terrible time focusing, who take on a million projects and never get anything done and then get overwhelmed and then stop. So,Essentialism proposes that we do fewer things everyday and move them further along rather than doing manythings and get nowhere. And it's a wonderful read. It's an easy read. I will put a link in the show notes. I recommend Greg. He has some great Ted talks and videos. An, I think there's even a community where you can go get the helpful tips on staying focused on things. Then I would say the other thing I'm reading is that IPR laissez poll about communications effectiveness during COVID for, any corporate communications professional. I think that is essential reading for the summer of 2020. So we will link to that as well. What are you, what are you watching or reading?

Andrew Brown:

Well, first I want to say I hadn't heard about Essentialism. I'm going to dig into that right away. As far as what I'm reading and watching: I've recently found myself, bingeing on Succession, which is, a show about business that is crumbling because they don't have a strong succession plan. You get to see some of the dynamics of very flawed individuals dealing with the organization inside and out. So, really fascinating, and entertaining. I am re-reading, Alfie Kohn's The Case Against Competition subtitled, Why We Lose In Our Race to Win. Kohn is a psychologist and behavioral psychologist, and he talks about, why when we are actually working against one another, we're undermining what we're setting out to do. So really fascinating. It's a fast read, insightful and grounded in a lot of research.

Elizabeth Williams:

Wow. Okay. So we'll make sure that there's links in the show notes to all of our reading and watching. I think that's it for us. Thank you so much, everyone for joining. If you like this podcast, do us a favor and leave a rating or better still subscribe.

Andrew Brown:

And of course, check out the show notes and our resources at The Academy of Business Communications dot com. A quick shout-out and thanks to Peter Linseman, our intrepid audio editor and to Simon Gladstone who helps us with our website. See you all next time.