Chris Brennan (00:04)
Welcome to Modern Coms, the podcast series designed to help communication leaders navigate today's hyper speed demands and move forward with clarity, confidence, and impact.

podcast is brought to you by Co-fenster, the creators of AI video agents built specifically for communication professionals.

Our agents empower your teams to deliver high impact on brand video without needing any prior video experience.

So for today's episode, we're going to be talking about maintaining the human center in an increasingly digitized, IC world.

And joining me for the conversation is Sharon O'Day, the co-founder of Lithos Partners. Sharon,

how are you doing today?

Sharon (00:44)
I am very well thank you. Yeah all good here.

Chris Brennan (00:47)
Perfect, perfect. So today's topic is actually going to be on maintaining the human center in an increasingly digitized, icy world. But before we begin, I'd love to learn a little bit more about yourself and what you're focused on right now.

Sharon (01:02)
Sure. So I'm Sharon. I'm co-founder of Lithos Partners. We're a small consultancy that's specialized in the digital side of internal communications. So I've been working in this space for probably nearly 20 years now. It feels like far too long. But we particularly work with larger, more complex organizations to help them understand the right mix of platforms, but also processes and people and skills that you need to make sense of internal comms in a world where maybe things have got a little bit noisy.

So what I'm working on now, I've just wrapped up writing my first book called Digital Communications at Work. Hopefully I'll get to plug it again later, but that's out in July. But now I finished writing, it's sort of off with the publisher doing its thing and I'm back focused on client work. So at the moment that has two, yeah, two sides. The first is a client we've been working with for a while, of extending their existing channel mix beyond the intranet into...

Chris Brennan (01:32)
makes sense.

Sharon (01:58)
how they start to use things like digital signage ⁓ and apps to reach people on the frontline. And then with another organization, are looking at ⁓ getting the foundations in place to be able to use AI effectively. So they want to do AI first communication, but that means getting the sensible boring things like governance and content in place first. So no doubt we'll be covering both of those things over the next hour or so.

Chris Brennan (02:22)
That sounds perfect, yeah. And interestingly enough, the topic of your book, because when I went to your LinkedIn bio, I saw that it starts with, digital communication is broken. And I would love to see if we could elaborate on that and also understand where are most organizations going wrong with digital communication right now.

Sharon (02:43)
⁓ Classic consultant answer, it depends. But if I were to pick out a general trend, it's all just got too much. Like the world is really noisy. Work has got way more complicated than it used to be just because, you know, it's becoming more fragmented. People are moving in and out of organizations. We've got changes to employment patterns and then we've got all the digital things in the background. And against all of that, it's become easier and easier to publish. But that's resulted in us just having way too much going on.

So for a lot of organizations, what we find is not that there's not enough, but there's way too much. So how do we make sure that people get what they need and don't feel overwhelmed by what they've got going on? So the thing I'm seeing, every client is different, but the thing I'm seeing from a lot of organizations is how do we help people make sense of something that is getting much more complicated all the time? We need people to be able to understand and act on communication. Sometimes that gets a little bit lost in the attempt to just put more out there.

know, sending more to make sure.

Chris Brennan (03:41)
Yeah, that makes total sense because especially with AI, and again, sounds like a topic that you're covering quite extensively as well. It has this ability, especially with chat or these other AI text-based generators to create an abundance of competent but lengthy material that makes people think, look, I can just...

Sharon (03:58)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brennan (04:02)
I can just cover the breadth of this topic instantly, but they're actually forgetting about the audience of this topic. So what they have is an entire library of material that is not read. So I can see that being a consistent issue in this space at the time.

Sharon (04:06)
Hmm

Absolutely. I heard a word a couple of weeks ago, because was prepping for a workshop that I did last week, that you know when someone says something, it just resonates with you immediately. And we talking about information overload, and they talked about it as infobesity. As soon as they said it, I'm like, I get that. That sort of makes sense. It's actually almost reminds me of that environment we're living in. It's really easy to eat too much. It's really easy to live in an environment where you feel like you're being bombarded with information. So as soon as I heard that, I sort of started to think,

because of everything we've been hearing in the news and obviously because I'm a middle-aged woman I've been on diet forever. In a world that is infobesic, if that's a word, what's our infosympic? What are we doing to kind of cut that back and start to develop more sustainable, healthier information and communication habits? It's one of those things that just sort of stuck with me immediately and I started to play around with. But it does feel like it's a challenge for loads of organizations of,

constant noise and that the need to find ways to ⁓ find more kind of protein rich communication as it were.

Chris Brennan (05:23)
And do you think this is also connected to the issue of maintaining the human center as well? It's kind of an overabundance of material because I can imagine that by creating and curating this wealth of material, you're actually kind of losing out on the human heart in the middle of it, or even the kind of why of what the purpose is behind the communication.

Sharon (05:45)
Yeah.

So I think something that's happened in the space over the last 10, 15 years is products are sold on how they make it easier and easier to publish. ⁓ And unfashionably, we should in a lot of ways be making it harder, which is actually to put up those kind of guardrails to understand, okay, what's the purpose of this communication? What does it need to achieve? And then to start to apply basic standards to it. Like, could it be leaner?

Could it be better designed for the context in which people are actually working? And then to start to think about applying things like metadata and content standards and readability, but because it's become easy to publish or easy to produce, we're just putting more and more out there. And then if I were to take that back maybe one more level as well, what can we do to make the communications that we produce or publish or create better designed for the reality of how people work?

What we often find is we overly focus on whether someone has access to a channel and not whether the communication we put on that channel is designed for the reality of someone's working day. So they have access to what their skills are, what time they have in the day. And then finally, to take that one step further, what do they actually want and need just generally, but also at particular points in their working day? So we need much more detailed insight into what people are doing.

what they need, what their motivations are, ⁓ in order to maybe design our communication a bit more intentionally.

Chris Brennan (07:16)
And do you think there's value in reflecting on how people consume information and content in their ⁓ out of office time, in their free leisure time, and kind of try to adapt that for the work environment?

Sharon (07:29)
yeah.

So I think yes and no in that there is an assumption that just because people do things outside of they want to do exactly the same inside work. But it can point us to trends and preferences, certainly. So what we're starting to see is because of the attention economy, people's attention at work is shrinking too. So, you know, people are looking for things that they can absorb and understand quickly. And that's because there's so many more pressures on our time. There is a little analogy that I love to use for this, is...

When I was at university, I watched a lot of really bad TV because I did like an arts degree and I had a lot of spare time. But in any sort of crime drama, they try and establish three things, a jury or a detective. And that is means, motive and opportunity. And what we often ⁓ over focus on as organizations is that means, but actually what we don't focus on is the motive and the opportunity. And that opportunity window is often very, very small.

So the time that people on average depends on one to the next, but on average, people spend about just under six minutes a day interacting with their digital comms channels at work. That's really not a very big window. So that is a time that they not just want to get answers to questions, but they probably need to get something done. There's a task or two that they need to achieve, maybe looking for an answer. So actually we need to think very carefully about that attention window and use it.

intentionally, but with a lot of insight into what formats fit in that day. it, you know, and you can't just use all six minutes at once, you've probably got, you know, a couple of really quick 20 seconds, I can quickly understand that need to know, and then something that's much more in depth, that is more of an emotional message, actually thinking about what do people need? What are we trying to achieve as an organization? And how do the formats that people need kind of have to respond to that, but also, and then back to your earlier point,

Also, what are people's pre-existing expectations and preferences as well? So I guess if I were to summarize that, we need to understand our audiences a lot more than we currently do.

Chris Brennan (09:36)
Yeah, I absolutely love that ⁓ analogy with the crime dramas. That makes perfect sense. a screenwriter myself, I can really adapt to that. like looking at it going, you're having too much exposition, it's too much information you're throwing at the audience. We need a little bit more heart and understanding to kind of understand the character and to stay focused within it. ⁓ But yeah, look, I loved everything about that. That makes perfect sense, especially...

Sharon (09:41)
Aha.

I call it Jessica's

Law after Jessica Fletcher from Merlis-U-Rate, which was my crime genre of choice at university.

Chris Brennan (10:03)
Haha, what?

That is wonderful. Yeah, and it definitely resonates with folks on the audience because throughout this series ⁓ and really diving deep into internal comms.

teams and professionals. I see that there's a consistency of the requirement is I need to generate material. need to speak. I need to get the message out. And it's less about the message needs to be understood. And I think that one core difference will actually make the most impact possible.

Sharon (10:32)
Mm-hmm.

So it of resonates from there because we have the same problem, particularly on the HR side of enterprise software. In economics, they call it the principal agent problem, which is the person who buys the thing has different motivations for the person who ultimately uses it in the end. So I went to an HR tech conference maybe about a year and a half ago, and it was loads of little SaaS vendors who did little HR stuff that people use in the enterprise. But all of them bragged about how much time people were spending in their apps.

And I just came away thinking as someone with a job, the amount of time that I would want to spend on HR is somewhere close to zero. Like I just want to do the thing and get back to whatever it was that I went to work to do. So the motivations are different here. You know, if people buying HR software, it's they're the people who just want to get work off their plate versus people who just want to get on with their job. And those motivations can sometimes be a little bit different. We sometimes have the same problem in the enterprise software space and in cons, which is

I'm making it easier for me as a communicator to do my job and not necessarily making it resonate better with the audience or to have the impact that it should at the end of the day.

Chris Brennan (11:46)
And do we have any insights or do you have any advice in particular on how to make that a bit more inviting, easier to engage with, or even more human when it comes to communicating with the audience and making sure they understand it? The end recipient of these messages.

Sharon (12:04)
It's very much a question of test and learn, isn't it? Find what works because audiences are very different and that can be because of their skills and expectations, their preferences, the type of work they do, all the things I referred to before. But ultimately, it's a little bit of suck it and see. Find stuff that works in your organization and do more of it better or less of it better, suppose. But yeah, think about understanding formats that land or communications are particularly successful and try and assess what was good about them.

So it's very difficult for me to just hand out blanket advice and say, more of this, because things can vary widely depending on the culture that you're embedded in, the country where you're based and so many other factors. But what I would suggest is get that deep insight into your organization. Find out what resonates with people and what works.

Chris Brennan (12:54)
That makes total sense. No, I think that is even really good advice because a lot of companies, when people come into the team or they've been there for a while, they get into this, this is how things are done around here mindset, regardless of, it actually effective? So it's just like, this is, this is our guidelines. This is the way we do things without realizing you can also change that. you also, like if somebody decided that may not have even been you, the person who, who set that up, that format, that structure might.

Sharon (13:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Chris Brennan (13:24)
not even be here anymore and you're still adhering to this old-fashioned traditional construction of how you communicate information to your team and your organizations.

Sharon (13:35)
And people are really bad at telling you what they want. I mean, they think they know what they want, but actually sometimes they're telling you what they think you want to hear. it often with internal comms surveys will go, what would you like to see more of? If you will go, that sounds good in theory, but actually, this is why historically I think we over invested in things like social and forums when actually, unless there was something in it for people, they're not going to use them. So people tell you that they like these things in principle, but actually, unless they have some sort of value and utility to them.

they're just going to be sort of other spaces that are abandoned by people. So actually it's much better to follow the energy, know, find out there's a, we have to, in a world where it's easier to create content than it's ever been, there is much more space for experimentation. So what we don't do enough is almost play and learn and see what lands with people. There is a, we've got stuck formats and we kind of repeat them over and over, but then it means that they also become quite tired, a lot of the time.

Chris Brennan (14:35)
I love that. And also one thing as well is a lot of times people don't know how to tell you what they want, but they can tell you what they don't want after they've seen it. And so your advice for ⁓ experimenting, playing and kind of finding new angles, it gives people the opportunity to gauge whether or not that was effective for them. But if you don't give them that opportunity, it's tough to ask them how best.

Sharon (14:43)
Absolutely.

Chris Brennan (15:00)
or what is your preference of communication? Because they'll probably just go, what is the simplest way for you to get that message to me that actually matters to me and it isn't just a nice to know organization wide? So that's really fantastic.

Sharon (15:02)
Yeah.

⁓ So

a phrase I use a lot, again, there's a lot of phrases I try out a lot, is utility is the number one driver of adoption. So people will use stuff that has value for them personally, helps them to get something done or gives them something they actually need in their day. Otherwise, communication should broadly be about removing friction out of my day. We're taking up people's time, generally speaking, on something they're not getting paid for. So we do that to connect into organizational context.

But we don't automatically earn that time. We ought to do it by giving people something that is useful to them, valuable to them, or even just entertaining to them. But if it's not some sort of value exchange, we're ultimately just adding friction to a working day.

Chris Brennan (15:57)
Yeah, it's actually, have a similar phrase whenever I work in content and I say like, your content should have the three E's and it should have two of these three E's. Educational, ⁓ entertaining, and engaging. So you can have, it's difficult to get all three, for sure, but if you can get two out of those three, then it does have value. If you only have one, I'm thinking that the concept behind it probably matters, but.

Sharon (15:59)
Thank you.

Yeah.

Chris Brennan (16:22)
how you've constructed it just won't resonate with your audience. So it's the two out of the three E's for content to make sure that the message has land, not just that it looked nice or the motivation behind creating the message was there, but you just didn't really figure it out for the audience's perspective of it.

Sharon (16:41)
And actually there's a long heritage to that particular thinking, there? So Lord Reath, who was the, what, 1920s director of the BBC, used to say that everything should inform educator entertainment.

Chris Brennan (16:52)
That's excellent. That's Yeah. So in your time though, to actually see if we can get a little specific, have you seen in recent times, like even the past year or so, if there are some unique formats or touch points that have been able to create real connection even within these digital environments?

Sharon (16:53)
The principles haven't changed at all,

Mmm.

Classic it depends answer but it's ultimately about adapting what you do to the reality of people's day. So maybe if I give a very specific example, one organization we worked with, had, they've got people who are working out, you know, in cars generally speaking, they're out at very mobile workforce, lot of them out on the road literally. They created this new internet and then they've issued tablet devices to each of the vehicles.

And then they were wondering, why are people not engaging with any of this material? And it's because they hadn't stepped back and actually thought about the reality of working in that kind of way. So actually, if you're in the car, then legally you cannot be on this device because you're driving. And even when you're stopped in the car, you can't be on it in the car. So actually, what they hadn't considered is the mismatch between the reality of people's working day.

and the context they're working in. So the only time you could really access it is when you, you know, pulled up at the end of your shift. So it was like, well, we spoke to them about what their gap was. And of course, audio was a brilliant format for them because you can listen to a podcast while you're driving, no problem. So actually thinking about formats that land with people, it's actually what can align with the reality of your working day. And for some people that will be, ⁓ I really need a short video based format because the thing I'm referring to is visual.

For me, it's much more around, I've seen some really great kind of short form video in that respect. I'm like, here, I'm just introducing you to our new product range. Here are the key features in a minute or so, because that's the time that people have available and that's the easiest way of getting the message across. So thinking is about being responsive to people's or to individual audience groups, ⁓ actual needs.

Chris Brennan (19:00)
What I love is it just constantly keeps coming back to, you have to understand your audience. Like it's just this recurring theme. Because what we're seeing as well, particularly from our perspective with video and AI video agents, is we have this agent that helps comms teams generate text to video. So they take static text and convert it into a dynamic branded video. But they're actually using that to connect with frontline workers in specific ways. So putting a video that has text on it,

Sharon (19:11)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Chris Brennan (19:28)
in very succinct manner and putting it in the factory floor, in the canteen, even on the coffee machine. So many coffee machines have a screen that's like, that has a video on it. It's like, well, where you know for certain they will be a few times a day, you can put a specific message there. So the holiday season just went through. This is where you can actually tell people that there's additional shifts and how you can actually book them in that you can get that message across in such a fast, specific

Sharon (19:31)
Mmm. Yeah.

Chris Brennan (19:58)
and direct way with that ideal audience, with that exact target, if you know where they're gonna be. And like you say, if they're gonna be on the road all the time, then expecting them to keep up to date with the notion or intranet pages that are full of information, that's probably not gonna be as ideal as if you could just give them a 20 second video at the top to go, this just summarizes the rest. We want you to read it.

Sharon (20:22)
Yeah.

Chris Brennan (20:27)
But in case you don't, it's really important that you get the need to knows out of this topic rather than the I forget to reads completely.

Sharon (20:35)
Yeah, and almost it's about kind of, you know, the full policy is there, but here's the TLDR. These are the three things that you need to know. And if you're able to summarize that with a QR code at the end and say, look, you, you for whatever reason need to complete the action or look up the full policy, here's where you can go get it and that canonical source, but actually being able to use other formats of smart ways to package up to make it fit around those opportunity windows that I spoke about.

It's hugely valuable. I've seen it, as you say, work really, really well in environments that rely a lot on digital signage because there's heavy footfall, you've got people's attention, but you only have it briefly. So you've got to use that intentionally and wisely.

Chris Brennan (21:15)
Yeah, absolutely. No, it's really exciting too. and I, I, what we also see, especially with the experimentation, like video up until now hasn't really been in the, in IC department. They would come to marketing or content and then be at the behest of our schedule, ⁓ to, figure it out. But now what I love to see is they, experimentations with it, like even creating internal podcasts and having more of a conversational format to understand.

let's

say what the plans of the quarter will be. And then putting that out there that actually feels like it's more easy and human to actually listen to rather than being spoke at and kind of told about this gigantic.

⁓ pitch document with way too much text and you're not reading the text, you're speaking. So the audience is going, am I reading it or am I listening to you? Maybe I'll just go on a different tab and wait until my name is called. And I love the idea that they're now going, we can play with these contemporary formats in a new way. And it actually shows that, or there's finding that is resonating more with the audience. Again, I think it kind of comes back to your matching how they consume on an off.

Sharon (22:16)
Mm.

Chris Brennan (22:27)
site out on a out of office scenario and you're kind of bridging that gap in a way that makes it in a way that's contextual and make sense.

Sharon (22:28)
Yeah.

So our expectations for digital at work are inevitably driven by our expectations of the digital we use all the time outside of work. And we are an entire generation that have been raised on TikTok. So actually the quality of video production that people can do all by themselves and that they expect from others is a lot higher than it used to be. When I was in house 10 years ago, you'd hire an entire camera crew who would follow a leader around the do 50 intakes of some leader talking head video. But now,

You wouldn't do that one because it's badness, but also it comes across as inauthentic. When people are used to being able to whip their phones out, make a 30 second video and have, it's got more kind of, it's more believable and more honest and transparent, right? But also you've got a whole generation of communications professionals screw up making their own videos. So actually you know what good looks like and you know how you can make it.

Chris Brennan (23:30)
Yeah, and the authentic part is really important. There's lots of different technologies out there that are providing avatars and synthetic versions of people. And there is scenarios where that does help, but like for Co-fenster, we have a specific agent that uses AI to help create authentic videos. it could...

Sharon (23:50)
Yeah.

Chris Brennan (23:52)
It can edit it for you after you've recorded, but let's say if you were a comms leader sending a request to somebody, it can help you formulate how to ask for the video, and then it can help you create the bullet points or the tele-prompted script for them, however best they are on camera. So it just kind of helps facilitate the development and the creation of that authentic video, which is something that I really like because we're barreling into this new era, and we're just trying to figure out

Sharon (23:59)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brennan (24:22)
what works. There's lots of people with very ⁓ confident opinions, but that's all they have at the moment is opinions. So I love looking at kind of how you can kind of balance it all out and kind of give the best of each scenario.

Sharon (24:23)
Mm.

Yeah.

And to go back to the point we were making just a moment ago, I was talking about making it harder to produce. Actually, that point you made there about process. Actually, if you can define upfront, what is this for? What are we trying to achieve? What key messages do we need to get across? And then build that into the way that you're producing the content. You'll get a more impactful piece of content at the end of it, rather than just like, let's just get something out there ⁓ and add to the noise.

So I like that idea about creating process.

Chris Brennan (25:00)
That's something as well.

Sharon (25:03)
Sorry.

Chris Brennan (25:03)
Yeah, it's

even something with the leadership that we see time and time again where they'll go to a comms team and say, we need something, but they actually don't even know what their request is. So it's very difficult to accomplish it when the person requested it hasn't really given that much insight. They kind of hope that the other person will fill in the blanks. And again, it'll come back to I'll know what I don't want when I see it. But since I didn't really give the time and space to actually consider it. So in order to really

you'd want to have that early concept ready to go, the insights of it. To go back to film terminology, you want to have your script ready before you go into production because otherwise you'll just be rewriting it and reshooting it as the days go because you didn't really know what you were setting yourself up for to begin with.

Sharon (25:51)
No, I think that comes back to the point I was making earlier, I understand the opportunity, but not everything can or should be a video. It's quite a needy content format. It's demanding my full attention on one tab. So it better be worth it, especially if you want that for a minute, two minutes. So there are some things that video is absolutely brilliant for, and there are some things that definitely shouldn't be useful because there are more effective ways of communicating ⁓ to achieve that same outcome. So what we should be doing is using it sparingly, but really effectively.

⁓ And it's about having some of that governance in place and some of those, be able to answer the right questions to say, look, you might be a senior leader, you might want to produce a video, but why and what are you trying to achieve? And actually be prepared to knock back occasionally and go, maybe this isn't the right time or the right format.

Chris Brennan (26:38)
Yeah, we noticed that even with our early discussions with comms leaders, where it's like they'll go, so I'm replacing the email. We're not referring to replacing anything. It's like we're providing an additional format in circumstances where the engagement will be higher or the retainment of information will be higher. But we shouldn't be thinking of either or. It's and.

Like what we see is, I was mentioning this in a previous ⁓ episode with Preston Lewis. We were talking about the impact of three, like how it's direct, like two person, even digital, but direct by text and by video. So a lot of times it takes three.

Sharon (27:18)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brennan (27:23)
touch points of the same information for it to resonate. And you can kind of apply that with the types of formats you're actually delivering for critical information. So it isn't like, which is the best way to get this across? Probably all three, making sure that person

hears it, give them the contextual material in the text-based intranet documentation, and then a summarized version of it in kind of video format so that you've just covered all your bases. And this isn't for every single piece of communication. It's just an

Sharon (27:38)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brennan (27:53)
good mindset for when you're deciding what is the type you should be going with.

Sharon (27:57)
And one of the things I'm more excited about about AI is the ability to deliver kind of hyper personalization of scale. Some of that is about allowing us to choose to receive the communication that isn't in the way that is most appropriate for us based on what we need. So historically in internal comms, we've gone back and forth with leadership teams to sign off particular phrases. know, are we going to describe this as poised for growth or promising gains? It doesn't matter. In an AI first world, that

content will be remixed, reformatted, regenerated. Someone, we might write it as five paragraphs of text, but someone receive it as you know, ⁓ podcast digest in Spanish, because that's what's appropriate for them, maybe as someone who is working on a factory floor, who doesn't have English as their first language. So we need to be much less attached to specific phrases and much more to what is the meaning, what is the message, recognizing that we may not be able to control the individual words.

Chris Brennan (28:58)
That is so true. And it also, there's a lot of context there as well for when somebody will take the giant piece of information, drop it into AI and go, summarize this for me. So that means all of those strategically surgically imported words aren't gonna actually land because they didn't actually listen. They actually just went, look, summarize this for me. I don't have the time. What is it they want me to know? Okay, that's great. And I've got a lot. Yeah.

Sharon (29:09)
Yeah.

Yep.

Do I need to do anything with this? Okay, ignore,

move on.

Chris Brennan (29:25)
I have a whole history of that where we're trying to organize an event and I say, yeah, we're at stand L 16. And someone was like, hang on. Don't put that out. Isn't it a booth? It's like, guys, guys, honestly, like, do you think that they wouldn't have figured it out? Like, it's like, how about this? Next time we'll call it a booth, but this time we'll call it a stand just so we don't miss the deadline. But we're just kind of built that way. I totally have empathy for that, but

Sharon (29:39)
No one cares.

Chris Brennan (29:54)
Being another recipient of that, is just funny going like, I know it seems like it matters, but the main thing is the core of the message, not the intricacies that we've of assembled the message into. And that delays so much communication for us, just debating and trying to figure out how we would do

Sharon (30:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, we do have a tendency to kind of try and reinvent the wheel in this kind of space. And actually, there's a lot to be said from, although I've made the, we should learn from what works in our own organizations. We'll also see what works elsewhere and try and borrow some of that as well within our own organizations.

Chris Brennan (30:30)
And then probably

have some empathy for the digital overwhelm as well that people have. And for that though, would you have particular advice or an example of how people or teams can navigate this digital overwhelm that we can feel with the abundance of communication coming our way on a pretty much daily basis?

Sharon (30:34)
Yeah.

I know I'm going to keep going back to understand your audience, but one way is actually understand it from the audience's perspective. So where I've seen it work really well is we call it inbox diaries, heard it called receiver diaries. What does that look like for any individual in your organization? What we often find is comms have quite a narrow view of what has gone out. We forget that people are being bombarded with stuff from elsewhere as well. I...

All of our communication is not just competing with other communications, but from random system notifications and stuff you're getting from IT and HR. So actually it's almost to get a sense of how do we understand what that looks like from our employees perspective and then start to maybe try and get our arms around that a little bit more as well to try and pull some of those other noises in. The other thing that I'm finding is this is not just where I talked about the infobesity thing earlier and infosempic.

is also give people a lot more agency to choose themselves. So I might think I know what's best for you, but if I have something available in four different formats, maybe the same method, let people choose the one that is right for their own context and add it to that one. You know, so if I've got five minutes and I'm having a cup of tea before lunch, then I've got time to engage with the depth of something or sit down and watch the video. But if I do only have 20 seconds and I'm in the elevator, give me that version. ⁓ And then maybe I can follow up if I find it interesting.

So give people a more agency. Adding to that a little bit is let people take control in as far as possible. So as communicators, absolutely, it's stuff we have to tell people, compliance messaging, really important, but also give people much more control over subscribing, opting in, unsubscribing if they possibly can. Use that prescription layer of stuff I have to send you sparingly and only when it genuinely is important. But also...

teach people that they can turn off the notifications, get less of it. If you're getting stuck all of these notifications and they're adding to your sense of overwhelm, let people turn them off if it's not important. So we've got much more, if we feel in control, we're more accepting of the environment that we're in. And encourage people to use things like do not disturb windows, to turn their slack off outside of hours or whatever that might be to help people feel less overwhelmed. So some of that is in our house of control, but we've got...

kind of corporate FOMO that if I don't immediately read and respond to things, I will be seen as a less effective employee. And we should be teaching people the opposite, use communications as far as you can on your own terms.

Chris Brennan (33:17)
That's wonderful. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I totally understand that from the audiences, from the listener or the reader's perspective. And it kind of creates more anxiety than it actually creates benefit. ⁓

Before we move on to the next section, I wanted to actually ask you little bit about this book that you're writing. Is there any kind of particular talking points or moments that you discovered in writing this book that excited you more than others? So is there any particular point in the book where you go, is so exciting, I can't wait for people to read this?

Sharon (33:38)
yeah!

Ironically, right at the end. but so the book, let me briefly, I'll keep it short, describe it. So the book's called Digital Communications at Work, and it is helping people understand the platforms and process that you need to get digital communications working effectively in your organization. So that's not about developing the content, but all of the infrastructure around it. How do you understand your audience needs? How do you decide the right stack of channels and platforms that you need? Because most of us will never be able to just use one, you need different.

places to publish and also to distribute and to measure and to allow people to communicate, to discuss. So thinking about what the right channel mix for you is and how to help decide that. And then we move into some of the management. So how to get the right team around it, ⁓ what to consider when you look at messaging, sorry, measurements and governance. But anyway, the bit I got excited about was the one at the end, which is what's the future of digital communications at work? And I think this is

Obviously everyone is talking about generative AI and that is a huge piece of it. But actually it's also that the future of work is actually just a reflection of the future of society and lots of things around us are changing really, really fast. And we can't really very easily predict what that is. So it's actually much more about becoming as communicators, people who understand what the range of possibilities for the future are, what's coming down the road or what might be coming down the road and designing our channels.

to be able to adapt to that. So no one knew that COVID was coming, but when it did, the organizations that thrive best were those that had some sort of digital comms infrastructure in place to be able to respond quickly. We don't know what's happening with geopolitics or the climate or any of these other things, but actually if we build flexibility and resilience into our communication structures and processes and channel mix, we're much more able to cope.

whatever comes our way. So there's two sides to that for me. One is kind of having some sort of eye as communicators on what might be coming down the road and building an infrastructure that has the ability to respond, even if we can't predict what that future might specifically look like.

Chris Brennan (36:02)
Wow, that's very exciting. And when did you say this book is planned to come out?

Sharon (36:08)
It is out in July, it's published by Kogan Page, but if you find your favourite set of terms in there, just look for Digital Communications at Work book, you can pre-order it now as I understand it and get it pumping up the charts, which would be lovely.

Chris Brennan (36:21)
That's fantastic. And where

can people find you? ⁓ If they watch this, they want to learn more about what you're doing, what you're up to.

Sharon (36:28)
I am extremely online and I've got a relatively uncommon name, which is great for SEO. But you can find me all over the internet and specifically on my website, which is sharonodea.com. ⁓ But yeah, you can look me up all over the place. Best place to find me is LinkedIn or via my website.

Chris Brennan (36:46)
And now there's another section ⁓ that I want to invite you into and it's called the comms role play Q &A. And

Sharon (36:53)
yeah.

Chris Brennan (36:54)
I play the role of a skeptical executive. And then I ask you as the

leader in the organization, some tough but fair questions on this topic. One of the reasons we do this is because a lot of times people will say like, how does it work and how do

Sharon (37:04)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brennan (37:13)
back up or validate?

these arguments to the other decision makers. I thought, well, why don't we just ask people on the podcast and see what the answer is going to be. Now, I will say some of these are contextually, ⁓ have a bit of context to them. So we can just try to have fun with it and see where we go. Does that make sense? Okay. Question one, why are we talking about keeping it human at all? We're a business. What does human centered comms actually change for performance, safety or

Sharon (37:23)
No pressure.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

Well, work, ultimately, we're not managing a bunch of robots. is ultimately people, humans at the center of all of this. And communication at work, why do we communicate? We want people to know something different, to feel something different, or to do something different. So if we want humans to act, react to what we say, then we need to design it for the reality of human work and for human emotion. So that means recognizing the limits on human cognition, on emotion, on context, on cognitive load.

on the background of change that people are experiencing and adapting what we do to reflect that.

Chris Brennan (38:22)
Fantastic. Yeah, great. next

how work gets done. If people feel disconnected, isn't that just the reality of scale and hybrid work? What makes you think that comms can actually fix that?

Sharon (38:28)
Mm-hmm.

Comps can't fix everything. We've got to be honest about what we can fix and what we can't. It shouldn't pretend that it can. Most connection in organizations is at a human scale. It's our own team, the people we work with every day. But what comms can do is it can help people feel more connected to the wider organization, its mission, its purpose. So we should be honest with ourselves about the limits of what we can achieve, but we can also create the right background to improve those day-to-day working relationships. So that's about getting messaging.

You know, most messaging and most trusted messaging comes from your own manager. Digital can get it to the manager. So actually it is about using those things in concert with one another. So organizational comms, it can help people understand what the organization is doing, why it's doing it, the background of change it might be operating against and help people understand where they fit maybe in the bigger picture as well. So comms, it will never replace management or bad management or good management, or it won't fix broken teams, but it will.

It can help to prevent fragmentation at scale, create that kind of, connection is local, but coherence is organization wide and that's where comms comes in, right?

Chris Brennan (39:45)
that answer. And also, there's a personality ⁓ clash that can happen when a comms leader has to push back on the premise of a question. And if you do that more often, like strategically, of course, I think that it can help leadership and C-suite actually understand. So instead of looking for the answer that you think they want to hear, just highlighting like it's probably not even the right question, which is great.

Sharon (39:53)
⁓

Yeah.

Sometimes,

the big one for me is around engagement. Like, comms can help to improve engagement, but engagement broadly is defined by all manner of things. know, pay, management, the background of the organization, how worried we feel about life generally. Your engagement can be absolutely dumped because the aircon is broken. That's not something that comms can fix. If I'm still cold, you know, no amount of putting a sweater on is going to help.

Chris Brennan (40:39)
That makes perfect sense. Okay, next question. How will we know that we've succeeded at keeping this human center? Like, what would you measure or look at that tells us that this is more than just a nice idea?

Sharon (40:51)
Commons ultimately is about achieving an outcome, isn't it? So where I said they're about knowing something different, feeling something different or doing something different, those are the things you need to measure. Do people feel something different? If so, we've probably succeeded in communicating effectively with humans. And the big one for me is did people do what we needed them to do? Did they click on the button? Did they complete the action? That's the sort of thing we should be measuring. Now, in reality, as communicators, we also measure lots of throughputs. You did people view the communication? Did they read it?

That will help us understand that they went towards acting, but ultimately it is about if we successfully and effectively communicate with humans, it's because we were able to achieve that change in mindset or to drive an action, right?

Chris Brennan (41:36)
Makes sense. Okay, next question.

help us keep

human?

Sharon (41:42)
⁓ People connect with people. So we like video because we can hear the emotion of someone's voice. We can see the whites of their eyes. We can see the expressions they're making. And in certain contexts, that's way more powerful than anything we're ever going to read. So ⁓ we use well, we use sparingly. Video can humanize leaders. It can build trust. It can promote transparency. So it's particularly effective when we're trying to carry that emotional weight.

you know, when there's uncertainty or complexity, or on a really basic point, when it's just easier to show something than it is to try and explain it. One of the most effective videos I ever came across at work back in the day was how to use the stapler function on the printer. And someone just made a little video when it's that button. Like it is so much easier than trying to explain it by by actually trying to do a step by step guide. Actually, sometimes we can point at something safety equipment, things on the production line.

some things are just much more visual and they lend themselves to that. So actually it's about being able to create that connection or to be able to communicate in a way that is designed for the message.

Chris Brennan (42:52)
Wonderful. And final question.

the employee's responsibility to read our updates in the manner that we send them. So how do you think that this is actually going to help us?

Sharon (43:02)
⁓ It is the employees responsibility, but it may not be the right thing for them at the time they're designed. So ultimately it's about creating things that fit with the reality of someone's working day. So it might be their responsibility, but if people don't have time because they're on a production line, then actually it is our responsibility as communicators to adapt what we do to the reality of that. So, you you might say, yeah, you have to read it, but if people don't, if they can't because they don't have access or they're in a different context, then it's on us really.

Chris Brennan (43:30)
Wonderful. And that's it. That's all the questions of our Comms Roleplay Q &A. Sharon, thank you so much for playing the game.

Sharon (43:37)
Thank you.

Chris Brennan (43:41)
Yeah, it's just we have a little fun and sometimes we try to even that last one is kind of that comes from more of the frustrated stubborn ⁓ Executive who's just like I don't want to deal with this. Can we just not change the way we do things?

Sharon (43:43)
Yeah, yeah.

Also,

as a side note, I'm finding that's also quite contextual. So there is a difference for me between ⁓ US and European companies, partly because of ⁓ legal background. So in Europe, there is much more of an obligation to consult, and therefore people are much more... There is much more responsibility on the employer side to adapt what you do to the other way around than in a more higher-and-fier culture that you might find in the US or in other parts of the world.

where it's just like, we told you to read it if you didn't and it's your fault. So actually it's understanding the context of the area and maybe adapting accordingly.

Chris Brennan (44:24)
So true.

Yeah, yeah,

of course, of course. Yeah. And yeah, Sharon, that's it. That's the end of our episode.

Sharon (44:34)
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Chris Brennan (44:38)
It was a pleasure, thank you so much. And for all the listeners and the viewers, thank you for watching. If you have any other questions, let us know on YouTube in the comments or you can reach out to us directly through LinkedIn as well.

please follow Sharon and keep up to date with her news and when the book comes out, definitely go grab it. Sounds very exciting. Okay, take care guys. Bye bye.

Sharon (44:57)
Thank you.