This is part of an ongoing series about the subtle ways leaders unintentionally kill morale in their workforce, the impact on organizational success and specifics around what can be done about it.
69% of organizational leaders report feeling uncomfortable communicating with their employees.
Employees who believe leadership has acted on their feedback are 75% more likely to trust that leader.
Employees report that leadership respect for their individual contributions as the most important predictor of job satisfaction…twice as likely as any other factor.
One-sided conversations are easy to spot when you are talking face-to-face. Even the most casual observer can recognize signs of someone’s interest fading…the monosyllabic answers, eyes glazing over and darting away, that restless energy. Failure to participate in the back-and-forth cadence in a conversation communicates a lack of respect for the other person (or people) involved and ensures eventual social isolation.
So, why is this common practice within internal corporate communications?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course.
It’s much more difficult to see disengagement in conversations that don’t happen face-to-face.
There are so very many potential voices in a corporation that opening that door feels daunting.
Even in the unlikely event that you understand the problem with this dynamic, education in how to manage the full communication cycle is incredibly difficult to find.
It’s the way corporate communications have always been done.
The truth is that corporate communications aren’t generally seen as conversations. Our state of inertia around this began long ago when the only tolerable leadership style was command and control. The world has changed. The most common leadership structure has become flatter and workers are bolder about demanding transparency. Truth be told, an unresponsive communication strategy has never been a good one, but it is now becoming an invisible threat to worker morale and is at least partially responsible for drops in creative problem solving, innovation and commitment to the company.
If I don’t matter to you…you don’t matter to me.
Since we started this discussion with Mark* and his team…let’s continue with him.
One of Mark’s teams sent out a survey to the intended users of the application they were designing. The team wanted to collect the actual needs of the business and identify common issues with existing tools so that they wouldn’t recreate them. The survey was sent to all of their key stakeholders (around 10,000). The response rate was around 15%, which was disappointing to the team. So, they added a few design workshops with some high influencers to ask them questions directly. Both approaches yielded great information, albeit limited to a smaller group than they'd planned. The feedback instigated a return to the drawing board as the team worked to accommodate all they had learned. The resulting redesign responded directly to much of the feedback they gathered.
The team was unaware that there was an issue until months later. Mark was in an unrelated meeting with one of the influential design group participants.
“Are you still collecting feedback?”
The design sessions had been months earlier, so it took Mark a minute to understand the context of the question.
“Oh, right! The team finished our formal discovery months ago. But we are, of course, always soliciting feedback.”
“Are you? Did your team actually use any of it or did we waste our time…again.”
The participant was visibly annoyed that no one had ever gotten back to him to tell him what had happened with his input and made it clear that some confidence in the project team had been lost. Had they gotten back to any of the participants? Was their input so inconsequential?
Mark was caught by surprise (never a pleasant experience for a leader). He knew that changes had been made to the program based on the input received. What was not immediately integrated into the program was being scheduled for the first yearly update or placed on another list of items that could not be incorporated for various reasons. It had never occurred to him, or anyone on his team for that matter, that communicating the results of feedback collection would be important aside from the changes in their project, which they would surely note once the implementations began.
So, what went wrong?
First, the organization was in “survey fatigue.” This brand-new project team was not responsible for how the organization felt about surveys. However, they certainly contributed to it when they received feedback and did not share the results and actions being taken with the respondents, if not the organization as a whole. Studies show that low response rate to employee surveys is a symptom on a cultural belief that it’s a waste of time and nothing will be done with the results. Interestingly, the same surveys indicate that management also feels that surveys are useless and often don't even read the results.
The project team did the same thing with their design workshop groups…collected feedback and then failed to follow through with a response to the feedback gathered.
The team had failed to honor the “conversation” they opened with a response to the feedback given. And this created problems.
When people provide feedback, they do so because they feel like the questions are important and that their responses are equally important. The lack of a follow-up response from the team was seen as an indication that the survey was a waste of time.
A large contingent of any population considers their “opinion” a universal one, as if they speak for many who did not respond. Therefore, they feel assured their input will be actioned. The application did not release for another year and half. The original respondents had long forgotten the detail around their feedback, but they had not forgotten feeling like their feedback was inconsequential.
The design workshop groups of influential stakeholders were held in a way that felt more like a collaborative workshop than input gathering similar to the survey. This opened the program team up to the eventuality that those influential stakeholders would be noting “failures to comply with input” and visible complaints on those project details.
The team missed the opportunity to solidify support of the design through the communication of their well-thought through review of the feedback provided and rationale for all feedback that could not be immediately actioned.
Closing the Communication Loop
Mark’s team had the best intentions and actually used as much of the collected feedback as they could to refine the design of the product. Their mistake of soliciting feedback without a plan to respond to that feedback is incredible common. In conversation circles this is sometimes called Active Listening, a term I find lacking. Listening is crucial, but not enough to let me know I’m heard and that you are engaged with what I’m saying, and it doesn’t account for active participation in a two-way exchange. It's not enough to tell them you heard them. You asked for their input and they will want to know what you are doing with it. Mark’s failure to close the loop on the open “conversation” initiated by the survey and design workshops led to confusion and ultimately, distrust that the time spent responding was of any value at all. A distrust that eventually shifted to the delivery of the entire project.
This is just one of many examples of how work-place conversations are frequently left incomplete. Best practice for business communications, bot internal and external, has changed. The more closely your communications resemble a back and forth conversation, the more support, and less resistance, you will feel from your audience. There are as many ways to do this as there are ways to have any kind of conversation, but here are a few ideas for shifting your team's perceptions on connecting with your stakeholders:
Whenever your teams solicit feedback, and determine how it will be used, check in with them to make sure they are reconnecting with those stakeholders with how the feedback is being used and why.
Have someone monitoring internal communication channels, including internal (and/or external in cases of business to consumer communication) blogs and social media channels, to ensure that all questions and requests for more information are acknowledged and get a response. (There are some particular guidelines around external channels and responding to negative input. Let me know if you are interested in a post on that.)
For bonus points, have your teams forge an informal sub-group of stakeholders who can help surface any issues that arise connected to your delivery and ensure that those issues are responded to publicly (without identifying the original source, naturally).
Be sure to include in your regular team check-ins questions concerning closing the loop in all communications so that your team knows that this is a priority for you and that you are holding them accountable for making those connections.
What are you and/or your teams doing to ensure you aren’t just “monologuing” into the organization? How are you ensuring that people know that they are heard? Let me know in the comments below. And be sure to comment or email me if you think of additional areas you’d like to see covered here or you'd like to see more ideas on how you and your teams can ensure that you close the loop on your communications.
Are you ready for what's next?
*Individual’s name and all specifics related to the engagement have been significantly altered to ensure privacy and sanctity of confidentiality in the coaching arrangement.