This morning I joined Hannah Sardar from Workplace by Facebook for a webinar hosted by the team (Graham Mackay and Jack Paine) at Generation Digital. Between the three of us we covered some of the themes around communications in a crisis, how Workplace can be the tool to help connect your teams and how to deploy tech in 5 days instead of 5 weeks.
The recording and slides will be available later but here are the main things we covered:
The importance of line managers and relevance
Based on the questions we received in advance I covered some of the research in Remotely Interested into the importance of line managers. This was talked about in more detail as we looked at the different stages of the crisis and how to get messages out around loss and local changes in-country. Now is the time to engage with line managers more than ever.
Relevance is really important, especially at times of crisis where people feel anxious and the world is ambiguous. Make sure the content they are getting is relevant and they are getting everything they need to do their job well. We don’t want people to feel they are missing out on some critical information.
Community, culture and failure
If your culture wasn’t social, fun and super connected before it won’t change overnight. We talked about hosting lunch and learns with employees sharing skills in 30 minute sessions, coffee mornings with purpose to nudge those who aren’t used to this sort of activity and the need to be ok with failure. You will try things and they won’t work – and that’s ok.
5 things Workplace can help you achieve in a crisis situation
- Informing employees – single source of truth
- Showing care – encouraging open conversations
- Understanding sentiment – measure reactions over clicks
- Planning and response – create spaces for discussions and quick decision making
- Enabling collaboration – what does that look like in the new business as usual?
Deploying tech: 5 weeks to 5 days
These are the steps Generation Digital go through to deploy – the same rules apply but consider how you shrink the time to get it done in a week:
- Executive sponsorship
- Technical setup
- Workflow migration and communities
- Communications strategy
- Early champions and training
Remember that it’s about getting the basics out there. Focus on one key use case such as crisis comms – the other features and depth of use can all come once the crisis is over
We will be back with another webinar on 15 April and you can find out more/book your place here: https://connectedcompanyapril.splashthat.com/
