In this episode, Jenni is joined by Katie Marlow, an expert in internal communications and many other things! They touch on the importance of the internal communications role when organisations feel chaotic, have too many priorities, or poor communication. Katie offers advice on how to reduce the chaos and find your calm.
Katie has been part of the collective team since the business started and has worked as retained support for clients for a number of years, helping them review and reshape their communication strategy. Katie also gets involved in our internal events and you find out more about the work we do here in this case study Setting our direction – a virtual event for LifeArc
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
‘Leaders now value internal comms’ – CIPR Inside report
Resources (cipr.co.uk) click on CEO RESEARCH REPORT for the ‘Making it count’ report
Avoiding the hurry habit: comms and leadership trends 2023 blog by Jenni Field
A model for internal communication strategy and planning blog by Jenni Field
Get in touch with Katie Marlow here LinkedIn
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be joined by Katie Marlowe, who specialises in internal communication. Katie has been a member of our collective team since we started Redefining Comms, so she’s been with me for a very long time. And I’ve known Katie for a number of years through our work with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
Now, Katie really focuses on taking an inside-out view of communication to help workplaces work better. And having worked with her over the years, I know that she has skills in helping people with events, content, channels, strategy. Everything to do with communication is something that Katie can help with. So she’s been a joy to work with over the years. And I’m chuffed that you’re here today. So thank you for coming on the podcast.
And we’re going to chat today about really, the fundamentals of internal communication and what happens in organisations when it’s not so good and the importance of it to help people go from chaos to calm.
So, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Now, in your experience, which goes, you know, over many years. Just a few.
What do you think is the biggest challenge for organisations when it comes to communication?
I think most of the time when you go in, everybody feels frantic. That can be said. They’re trying to do too much with too little and they’re not focused on what they really need to be doing. They’re trying to juggle too many plates and keep too many people happy. Yeah. Rather than focus on what the business really needs.
And that feels like a tricky balance, which is going to create chaos in itself. Because if you’re trying to please everybody and maybe not deliver what the business needs, but you’re trying to do almost too many things to too many people, that’s surely going to have some quite big disruption to the business.
Yeah. And obviously the business isn’t achieving what it needs to achieve. The rest of the operational teams, etcetera, may not know what the strategy is or understand their part in it. And it has quite serious implications for everybody across the organisation because they don’t understand the key drivers for the business.
And for the comms team, they just feel they’re perpetually running and never really achieving anything. So they feel a bit squashed by what’s going on, as it were. So they feel overwhelmed. They don’t feel that they’re delivering anything. It’s difficult for them to feel positive about the work they do. It’s kind of, we’re moving on to the next thing and never really seeing the benefit.
Do you think that has got worse on the back of the pandemic?
So in some of the conversations I’m having, I can really get a sense of teams saying, “We need to look at how we need to communicate.” We’re doing lots of field model audits around communication to help people look at how they get to the root cause of the issues. For me, it feels like it has shifted and has got worse since the pandemic. But what’s your experience?
Yeah, definitely. I’d agree. I think because the internal comms came under the spotlight through the pandemic, we all, if we weren’t already working in it, started to realise how important it was and put a bit more emphasis on it. Then, we’ve asked people to shift their working patterns and everything else has changed. The economy and everything else that’s going on around us, there’s so many things that we need to be aware of in our organisations and make an impact on sustainability, ED&I, cost of living. There’s all of these really big factors at play. So, it’s post-pandemic, a little bit, all of these other things playing on us as well.
Teams, I find, are possibly not upskilled enough to perhaps cope with some of all of the pressures on them, or there aren’t enough of them, or they haven’t got enough bandwidth, but also the demands on them are too great. And perhaps the ability and the confidence in those teams to push back as well, actually, and say to leaders and other business managers across the business, “That’s not appropriate. No, we shouldn’t be doing that. We’ve got other things that we need to be doing that are more important and using other resources as well.”
And one of the things that I was just thinking about as you were talking then about all the different elements that we have to balance as a communicator. And culture, I think, is starting to play such a bigger role in this sort of pushing back and being okay to say no. And years ago, when we were both involved more heavily with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. We did a report about the value and impact of internal communication.
And I remember part of the sort of themes in that was around communication and culture being very, very linked together and almost where communication was responsible for culture, which I know many people felt very passionate about, either positively or negatively.
There were some quite strong views on that. But it feels like communication and culture really is coming together for organisations and they are becoming more entwined as things move on.
Yeah, definitely. And I find in recent audits, there’s still been a little bit of turf war, should we say, about who owns culture and how that works. And you kind of, well, it’s here.
It’s all around us. We’re all part of it. And again, with the comms as well, the comms isn’t just what your small team of communications professionals does. It’s what we’re all doing. So there is a bit of an education piece, but most of the time I’m seeing a bit more of a blend, which is good, and people realising that actually we have a part to play in how the culture shapes up and how we show up at work and how we do our work and everything else.
What’s your view on, because you talked about that sort of turf war piece, which I think has been going on for such a long time, hasn’t it? I mean, it’s just slightly boring now, but it goes on and on. But there’s also this sort of blurring between employee engagement, employee experience, internal communications, chief happiness. There’s all these sort of different things. For me, that’s contributing to chaos in organisations because it’s just getting too bogged down in different labels or buckets or things. Do you see much of that?
Yeah, I agree. I think there’s quite a lot of labels that are used and then people trying to take ownership of that label. And at the end of the day, if you come to work, no matter whether you’re the widget maker, the delivery guy, or whatever it is that you do, you experience work. You don’t think, “I’ve had a great employee experience today. I’ve gone in, I’ve said hello to Sandra on reception and I’ve, you know, done whatever else I needed to do as part of my job. And I’ve had the information I needed to do my job as well as my line manager looking after me and helping me grow.”
These are all part of what makes work life good.
And they see the social element as well. And we in comms, employee experience, culture, HR, talent, it’s all involved in it. It’s just not owning it. It’s just mine. It’s not just only comms does this or only talent does this. We all should be working together, bringing our expertise for the individuals that come to work.
Do you see a better or worse alignment between communications teams and leadership?
And in the work that you’ve done recently with the audits and the things that you’re looking at with communicators, do you see a better or worse alignment between communications teams and leadership?
Oh, gosh. I don’t know. It could change from like nine o’clock in the morning to the 11. Some are good. Yeah. Some are just like, whoa, how did you even get here? I think actually there is a desire. You can sometimes go into a board meeting and think they just don’t really care. And I find that really dispiriting, especially for the people that are working in the teams that are trying to do work. And they’ve been saying this isn’t working, but they’re still not really listening. So, yeah, I think it’s a bad answer for me.
It’s balanced. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s better. Yeah, it really depends on the organisation and how mature they are, I think, as a leadership team as well. Some leaders can be still quite traditional in their approach.
How do you help the comms team get better engagement from the leadership team?
Yeah. And I suppose that almost sort of brings us over to sort of the calm element and the moving away from what makes it chaotic is how do we, how do you help organisations shift in that way? So, how do you help the comms team get better engagement from the leadership team? Or how do you help them navigate through this sort of land grabbing turf war of who’s doing what?
Because there’s a lot of different things that are contributing to how chaotic an organisation can be through the communication. And some of that isn’t even just the communication itself. It’s actually the people that are involved in doing it. Yeah, you’re right. And it is a lot about
The characters and how people want to play out their roles. And it all comes down to relationships. So, for me, the first thing is listening, getting in there and understanding how everything works, how people work, how they like to do their work, what’s getting in the way, what’s the noise. Everybody will say, so we’ll often say, for example, it’s just so noisy, there’s too many channels, I can’t cope with it all. And it’s kind of, there probably aren’t too many channels per se. It’s just, we don’t know which channel to go to for what, what on earth is going on.
And the comms team, in their bid to make sure that everybody knows everything, splurges everything across everything, like a spray gun effect. And everybody’s like, feeling the shock of it. So, that’s. The first thing is
Listening. And that audit piece is, it doesn’t even need to be as grand as an audit. It can be just spending time if you’re in house and talking to people and understanding what the challenges are and leaders and what their aspirations are. And then that bit of business insights, the strategy, the culture piece, any data that’s already there in the business, what they’re trying to achieve and how they’re trying to shift. And then giving them the strategic guidance to help them build on it.
The strategic guidance bit is, I think, the bit that’s often lacking somewhere for communication, because I think we can get quite stuck in channels, not even so much in content. I think there’s a lot of focus on channels, certainly in the conversations we’re having. Is, you know, we always get people to complete a channel matrix so we can see what’s going on. But we seem to get quite stuck there. And even when I’m talking to leaders, they’re stuck. They’re just talking about the channels. And I’m like, well, there’s a lot more to this than just this. And I don’t know whether that’s an education piece or a skills piece or, but you think similar?
Yeah. And I think it is a bit of an education piece. I think it’s, we’ve sort of got comfortable, we’ve built these channels, we look after these channels. This is what we do. Yeah. And then actually, if you’re going to tell me I need to change that or turn off one of them, heavens forbid. Yeah. Well, that’s part of my world. I spend every Friday morning writing that email to the business. And I used to come in and say, nobody’s reading the email because it doesn’t help. Yeah. And that’s hard, isn’t it?
That’s a hard, it’s a hard job to have to be the person to come in and say that actually this isn’t doing what you think it does. But when it’s become so almost part of your identity, I suppose, for some people that I’m, I’m known as the person that does that.
Yeah. So if I don’t do that, what am I going to be known for?
Yeah. What happens next? What’s going to fill that for me? Where’s my place to hang my hat on and say, this is what I do? So there is that piece. And from a leadership perspective, not wanting to let go sometimes of those things that they feel, well, that ticks the box because it’s easier for me to do that and rely on Jo to do the thing that she does every Friday than it is for me to be the more human, put myself out there leader and face people when I know they’re going to give me a little flat because what I’ve asked them to do is quite difficult and challenging for them.
So it’s interesting. And I hope, you know, for the people that are listening, it’s understanding that breadth of what communication covers, because it is, you know, the way leaders communicate, it is the channels, it is the content and the importance of listening, which you’ve mentioned.
What else is there for you in terms of helping people be less chaotic?
So we’ve talked about listening and the importance of that from the audit and the business intelligence. What else could people look at?
I suppose using, well, you’ve already mentioned a channel matrix and getting a bit more planned about what you’re doing and why, but obviously your strategy is going to underpin all of that and bring it all together. I love to see a bit more of a grid or a roadmap in terms of what’s actually happening in the business. What are the things that we need to prioritise, which seems to be really difficult for people to come up with? I fail to understand why, but it’s true, because then they just end up with all of these like balls being thrown at them and we want to campaign on this new charity thing we’re doing.
Well, why don’t we know about what? Nobody knew about it until it’s urgent. It’s this constant thing. So, a bit more planning in place. And then you know how much time you’ve got to have to come sort of plan for each piece of content and go forward. And then what’s really working? I mean, what’s the point in any of us doing things that are not cutting through?
Because they make us feel better. It’s like you just said, that’s my, that’s part of what I do. So I’m just going to carry on. Well, yeah, I know. But the logic. Yeah. It’s baffling, isn’t it? Yeah, but we all do it. We get caught in it, don’t we? Get caught in that trap. Yeah.
And also I think we do like to be busy, don’t we? We like, we’re comms people generally, very capable, creative doers. They love a challenge. They want to find the challenge and overcome it with a beautiful comms solution. And it’s that activity that excites us. So, I think we can also sometimes be a little bit of our own worst enemies.
And it’s interesting. I wrote a blog recently about not rushing to fix things because we, we, we see the symptoms and we want to move so quickly to a solution, but we don’t take the time to do the listening and the understanding to then fix the root cause. We just go straight in with that because it is nice to feel busy.
I always remember my sister talking about being stuck in a traffic jam and how she’d rather drive, you know, an extra 10 miles to go around it just to feel like she was still moving because it just felt better than just being sat there for just sort of five minutes. And I, and I can see how that works, but it is like, it doesn’t really make sense.
I think we’re all as well, quite impatient, aren’t we? We want a solution. And actually some of the things that we’re talking about in business now, big transformation, culture, leadership, they take a long time. And, you know, we’re, we’re looking at, you’re looking at least a year sometimes for these things to actually start to make an impact. And that could be a little bit of a turnoff, can’t it? For some people that, oh, I don’t think I’ve got the staying power for that piece of work.
Yeah, it is that you’re right. And staying power, I think is such a good phrase because it is, that feels like such a long time. I don’t know that I’ve got the energy to kind of keep going with that, which is why we often talk about 90 day plans and breaking it down and doing, You know, let’s have some nice achievable milestones and celebrate those wins.
But realistically, if you are going through a big change, it is going to take, you’re right, yeah, at least a year really.
And to your point, chunking it into manageable bite-sized pieces that we can all cut our heads around and see that progress and remind ourselves and everybody else in the business of that progress and celebrate and recognise people will help us. But we all know that’s the way we should do it. We just slip sometimes, don’t we, to go into that more sort of like chaotic reactive state.
Have you got any advice for people that are stuck in that?
Because I talk to a lot of people who are stuck in this sort of – I call it like the hamster wheel of doing – where you’re just sort of in this chaos. And you’ve talked about that, being better at planning and doing those things. Anything that you’ve talked to with clients recently where you’ve said anything that’s been really helpful for them in terms of stuff they’ve implemented and gone, actually, this has allowed us to change how we work and get out of this hamster wheel?
Yes, putting some structures in around things. So, for example, leadership comms is a prime example on how that whole sort of cascade works throughout the organisation is a good example from recent work where it wasn’t much of a process. The senior team would feed in to their monthlies at the board and then something may drop out of that then is communicated to teams depending on the team leader and whether he thought it was worthwhile or not. And everything’s a bit kind of like, well, no wonder nobody, you’re not a very big organisation, but no wonder people don’t know consistently.
And then somebody gets annoyed because they don’t know about something that another team does know about. And before you know it, you’ve created your own chaos.
So, by putting in a framework to help the board put in, the exec put in the right kind of information to the board that then is, okay, what from this can we communicate to teams and we can expect our team leaders to carry that message forward? What do we want people to do? How do we want them to report back, feed back into the system as it were? And just putting that sort of planning and framework in place has helped them take a bit of control over, which was essentially quite a simple process, but was being missed.
Yeah. And that’s nice. I like the, I talk a lot about freedom in a framework and it’s that same sort of approach. It’s just sort of putting your arms around it a bit and making sure there’s a little bit of cohesion to make it a better experience for everybody.
We can make assumptions, can’t we, that everyone’s thinking the same way that we do. And that, well, of course they’ll think about what they want the team to know about this piece of work, but they don’t. We need to ask that question and be explicit about it. And I think as well, there’s a word for me at the minute is about intentionality and being really clear about what we’re trying to achieve and intentional in our comms rather than it just kind of happening by osmosis, which we’ve relied upon for years in a lot of ways.
It’s always a slightly terrifying conversation when I talk to people about culture and being intentional. And I remember somebody senior saying to me once, “Oh, we’re just going to just sort of let it happen and just see how it goes.” And I was like, “No, we’re not. No. You know what happens when you get a group of humans together. Yeah. This isn’t going to go well for anybody.” Well, listen, thank you very much for joining us today. I think there’s been some really good tips in there to help people be less chaotic about their communication.
And it’s obviously something for both of us that I know is so important and close to our hearts to help get right for organisations. So, I really appreciate you joining me.
Thank you for listening!
If people want to get in touch, what’s the best way for them to do that with you?
Probably just look me up on LinkedIn would be perfect. Perfect. Just connect. I’m always happy to offer my advice. I just want the world to be a better place for when we go to work. Please. Thank you very much. That’s it. I can die happy if everybody just spends most of their working life relatively happy. That would be great.
Lovely. Well, we’ll put a link in the show notes for your LinkedIn as well. So, thank you so much. Thank you.
In the next episode, I’m going to be talking about corporate reputation with Eva McLean. So, we will talk about the risk of not looking after your reputation as an organisation.
We’re going to look at the role of PR and communication and how that is so important when it comes to going from chaos to calm. Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation. So, please do join our community and mailing list from the link in the show notes.
