Feeling the FOG?

You walk to the front of the room.  The screen with your title slide is behind you, and in front of you are 350 people--and two cameras representing 1,500 more.  They have stopped their schedule to listen to you.  Some have their arms folded; some are whispering to each other; some are texting others using the company's messaging platform.

It could be a great time to be brief.

Two recent articles point out the value of candor and of brevity.  The first is a description of the work of Laura Rittenhouse, who wages an ongoing campaign against what she calls FOG: "fact-deficient, obfuscating generalities."  In one of her business services, she analyzes the corporate communications of leaders and publishes her Rittenhouse Rankings as a measure specifically of the candor she finds in them--or doesn't find.  For most professionals in corporate communications, the editing of FOGgy prose is all in a day's work; what's remarkable about the Rankings is how much content-free writing some of the country's largest companies are comfortable putting out there for view.

One on side: jargon, imprecision, loss of credibility, eye-rolling and disengagement.  On the other: candor, specificity, clarity, trust and motivation.  And one of those tends to take less time to deliver than the other.

The second article is by Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute, a think-tank for journalistic excellence.  Clark talks about the disproportional impact of the short sentence.  We all learned in high school comp class to "vary sentence length" as a matter of stylistic power, but it's a hard value to find in corporate America.  Tragically, one of the typical reactions to a difficult business situation or a tough choice is to grind out more and more words in the hope of talking someone's anxiety out of existence.  It rarely works.  More often, it looks like what it is: buying time and establishing dominance.  Because when you really know what you're talking about, and really have a strong leadership idea, and are more confident than fearful, you find it more compelling to use fewer words.

Which, of course, brings us back to . . . candor.  Plain speaking sounds true and commands attention.  Are you good at it?

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Human Racehorses

I was at a professional event last month where I swear I heard one of the panelists describe herself as an executive in human racehorses.

It was some quirk of regional accent, I'm sure, but how perfect is that perceived malaprop?  One of the hallmarks of the evolution from "personnel" back in the day to "human resources" (and then, for others, on to "human capital" or just "people") was a movement away from placating and monitoring and toward increased productivity and professional development.  Along the way, things definitely got strident and sweaty.

I can't resist.  Here are some tips I found online for how to train racehorses.

• "Train them for races by daily jogging.  Increase the speed and distance as the horse becomes conditioned and starts to improve its fitness level" . . . keep moving the cheese.
• "The horse must be able to meet or exceed the minimum speed prescribed by the track the owner wishes it to compete at" . . . because racehorses have "owners."
• "Have the horse practice running the track with other horses to increase speed through the internal competitive nature to be first" . . . pitting them against everyone else as a measure of success.

Communications that support those types of HR values will fall into patterns of top-down, comply-or-else, propagandistic cheering and saluting.  These are delivered with strong assumptions that employees have all the time and interest in the world to be fascinated by professional development and performance management and team dynamics and recruiting and onboarding and benefits management and cross-functional teaming.

But, really?  Have you taken a tour lately through the brain of today's worker?  It's a landscape of various elevations of anxiety.  Most people are uncertain their jobs are going to exist in a three-to-five year window of time, and they are unengaged because they cannot imagine how anything they could do on the job could increase their chance of remaining employed.  Turns out they're not really behaving like racehorses.

There's a New Employment Deal out there.  It's more crowd-sourced than hierarchical, it's got more realism and less loyalty, and it's smart about what workers today really want and need.  Frankly, it's fairer and much more adult (less equine).  Communicating in that new-deal environment is different in important ways: notably in content, style and channel.

Do your employees believe you're part of the New Employment Deal?  Do you know how to communicate differently in the new business landscape?

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Why read it when I can forward it?

An enterprising writer at Slate commissioned Chartbeat to do an analysis of how--and whether--site visitors read articles on his site.  Look at the good graphs that accompany the article to get your own sense of the results.

It wasn't very surprising to learn that people skim online content.  People have been skimming content ever since there was too much content; in a business, a whole lot of content can be continually provided by a matrix of leaders, managers, corporate communicators and thorough HR specialists.  Those explanatory memos you spend days circulating for review and revising?  Nobody's reading them--not all of them, anyway.  It's why experienced communicators help you drive your most important points into top-level content or summaries.  You don't thin out a forest by planting more trees.

The surprise was that, in social media at least, people are forwarding or linking to articles they haven't read in their entirety, or in some cases haven't read at all.  The headline or the concept alone seem to be enough to get people to click Share.  For this cohort, people seem to want to be seen as contributors more than they want to be seen as actually knowledgeable.

This may be (yet another) cause for hand-wringing among people of a certain generation.  My view is that businesses should understand it and put it to use.  Sharing is good.  It's that third-party endorsement that is still a precept of good marketing.  Here's the question: How can you provide Sharers with the type of content they need to be both knowledgeable enough and excited to Share?  Hint: It doesn't look like From / To memos with the Subject underlined.

At least start by thinking single screen, above the fold.  It isn't that people are too lazy to scroll; it's that you've made them too busy to scroll with all of the stuff you're sending them.

Have you taken a minute to think of concrete ways to analyze your cluttersphere and create measurably effective communications vehicles?

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I didn't read your e-mail

Got an internal e-mail blast in your upcoming employee communication campaign?  Hold that thought.

The death of e-mail has been hoped for and reported more than it has actually occurred; but if current trends continue, next-gen employees are going to continue to turn in the direction of platforms they find more efficient, more effective and less likely to fill an overflowing e-box.

This brief recent item from the Boston Globe is anecdotal but revealing.  Among the trends?  Declining to put e-mail addresses on business cards.  And—surprise—a plea to use the phone, instead.  Part of this is natural selection for technology: e-mail was far too skinny a horse to load up with all of the uses to which it's been put.

Here's the question: As the trend to personalize technology continues, what technology platforms will employees trust and expect to deliver executive communications?  You probably won't want a 4-minute video of the CEO pushed to your cell phone.  Will you mind if it's a link from your Twitter feed pulled from your mobile app, instead?

Corporate communicators use internal media and platforms because they are there, controllable and measurable.  But personal messaging from relevant individuals (managers, team members, liaisons in other departments) seems to be rising in favor and credibility, so much so that some of the other channels are being actively ignored or deleted.

Which leaves you where?  How will you test for and determine communications methods that have the highest value for employees?

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