☎️ Answers to your Questions from The Switchboard Operators

14 Questions from our Community

Dec 01, 2022

In November, I sent out a call for your questions about communications at work — convening a gracious group of Switchboard Operators to answer what was top of mind. This December, I’m sharing the answers to your questions about analytics, leadership, meeting management, strategy, remote work and more.

The responses from the Switchboard Operators draw upon their experiences leading teams at Disney, Google, Goldman Sachs, LinkedIn, Bain and Company, and more places. They’ve worked in Employee Engagement, Public Relations, Human Resources, Executive Communications, Internal Communications, Marketing, Journalism and additional fields. Thank you to these leaders for sharing their knowledge with this community.

The Switchboard Operators

Here are the 14 questions that we’ve answered with the full responses below:

📲 How are leaders leveraging communications to create meaningful connections in a hybrid environment?
📩 Have you seen an employee question submission process that works well for employees (who want answers), leaders (sourcing the answers) and the team (usually IC) who manages the submitted questions?
📊 How do you answer the often-asked question from executives and clients about metrics and accountability within communications?
🎙️ Do you have advice for how to “show up” as a leader as an individual contributor?
📝 How do you go about creating internal communication guidelines for fellow team members in an organization?
✏️ How do you encourage individual ownership when there's no dedicated internal communications role and everyone is at capacity?
☕ My company is looking to revamp our TGIF/Friday company meetings. What advice do you have for building community for hybrid events with leaders and employees?
📥 What are ways to go about creating an always-on internal comment, suggestion, and question box in a hybrid work environment?
📺 What are the recommendations you emphasize while coaching executives for media training?
🧰 What are the best practices for identifying the appropriate mode of communication for certain message types?
✨ What are best practices to launch an integrated employee engagement communications campaign to increase employees' understanding of a new desired workplace culture and their motivation to change their behaviors based on the selected cultural traits?
🗺️ Do you have any tips to best handle internal communications with significant timezone differences?
🎤 What advice do you have for hosting compelling All Hands meetings?
⏳ How do you balance your day job while building The Switchboard and not lose your mind in the process?

📲 #1 How are leaders leveraging communications to create meaningful connections in a hybrid environment?

Answered by Tracy Van Grack

The move towards hybrid work requires that leadership go beyond traditional strategies to engage employees and facilitate meaningful connections. First, employees need to feel connected. In a hybrid world, the number of opportunities for organic connections diminishes. As a result, leaders must focus on facilitating relationships through one-on-one or small group gatherings—coffees, lunches, and brainstorming sessions can be extremely valuable. Tools that invite asynchronous communications like Slack or Teams are also a necessity.
Second, fostering a team environment is particularly challenging in a hybrid world. Leaders can address this in several ways: consider team off sites or gatherings, take meaningful time to recognize wins or failures and examine them as a team vs. moving on to the next project, and recognize positive team contributions publicly. Third, make sure you have a well-developed library of materials for team members to access. In the office, it was easy to ask co-workers nearby if they had X or had seen something like Y before—employees will be more productive (and less frustrated) if they have an easy-to-access content library.
Finally, even before the pandemic created a dramatic shift to a more hybrid or remote workforce, leaders recognized the need to engage employees with shared purpose and inspiration. With a more dispersed employee base, that need has only increased. Leaders should ensure employees understand and embrace the company’s mission and key short-term and long-term goals through regular updates from company and team leadership via newsletters, e-mails, and streamed town-hall conversations. These communications should invite feedback via polls, e-mail invitations, or AMAs.

📩 #2 Have you seen an employee question submission process that works well for employees (who want answers), leaders (sourcing the answers) and the team (usually IC) who manages the submitted questions?

Answered by Eric Gonzalez

Great question! There's no exact science to Q&As, but here are a few tips that can help increase participation and improve efficiency.
Build a compelling agenda and work with speakers to craft remarks that will prompt questions from the audience. A clear focus, punchy slides and energetic speakers creates a strong dynamic in the room. Also, have speakers remind the audience that they want to take their questions. Repetition doesn't spoil the prayer!
For hot topics or areas where you expect to get a lot of questions, flag these with your leaders ahead of time and make sure they’re prepared. Have them on standby to avoid a situation where you have to scramble to find someone at the last minute (always designate backups as well in case of scheduling conflicts). And avoid corp speak or jargon.
Consider a cutoff time for questions, but don't forget to remind employees so they have time to submit. And always build in enough time for Q&A - squeezing it into the last few minutes almost never works, plus running over makes people late for their next meeting. If you have a voting system, you can also commit to answering only the top 5 or 10 questions depending on how much time is available.
Lastly, end with a call to action: "if you didn't get to submit a question or we ran out of time, please raise it at our next town hall." That's a great way for leaders to show they care.
Internal comms can only do so much to prepare for Q&A's, which is why they can feel so difficult to manage at times. All we can do is be flexible, understanding and patient with everyone involved in the process. Focus on what you can control and more often than not, things should pan out ok.

📊 #3 How do you answer the often-asked question from executives and clients about metrics and accountability within communications?

Answered by Julie Inouye

I think the most important question to answer before any metrics are discussed is to get alignment on what the business is trying to solve. Say your company is a new player in a well-established industry and customer growth is the number one focus for the company. It’s easy to bucket everything under brand awareness and reputation metrics, which should be tracked and considered a longer-term goal. However, these metrics are hard to move week to week and make conversations about the impact of communications with executives particularly challenging when the rest of the organization is held accountable to monthly and quarterly KPIs.
This is where strategic shorter-term goals come in. In the example above, you might recommend tracking share of voice or how often your company shows up alongside key industry players in press coverage, across social conversations, and at industry events as a more digestible and immediate way to show impact quarter to quarter. This balance of both long-term and short-term goals that directly ladder up to business priorities also opens up a healthy dialogue about the role communications can play (and does not play). If nothing else, having clarity on what you’re solving for should empower you to prioritize and focus your plans, which is always half the battle.

🎙️# 4. Do you have advice for how to “show up” as a leader as an individual contributor?

Answered by Farrah Mitra

In my mind, leadership happens at all levels. Showing up as a leader at the individual contributor level could involve supporting the growth and development of those around you, contributing to the company more broadly, and bringing your company culture and values to life.
In essence, I think of leadership as supporting the empowerment of those around you and the business. Tactical examples of what this could look like include: mentoring someone on your team (e.g., sharing how someone can transition a role like yours), teaching a colleague a new skill, providing clear and kind feedback to help someone grow and develop, being a team member on or leading a cross-functional or cultural initiative, and role modeling your company values.

📝 #5 How do you go about creating internal communication guidelines for fellow team members in an organization?

What needs to have more formality vs what can be fluid and organic?

Answered by Diane Tate

Overall communications is a strong reflection of the culture; one org's culture (including the language used) may differ greatly from another's within the same company To retain authenticity and impact in larger enterprises, it's important to create a framework that aligns and reinforces the overall values of the company, while offering flexibility for smaller groups to customize as it makes sense.
A few specific considerations include:
1. Using words intentionally: Guidelines can include preferred titles and even words for a specific organization or executive.
2. Tailoring by channel: Length, style and calls to action may vary by channel (e.g. more copy in email vs. Slack), or even by organization (e.g. emoji types and use in Marketing vs. Engineering).
3. Creating templates: Org changes, major announcements, and crisis communications are universal; we use a template that breaks these down into an actionable outline, which can help with these sensitive communications.
Importantly, if you do adopt any guidelines, be sure to test them out and evolve them as your organization evolves.

✏️ #6 How do you encourage individual ownership when there's no dedicated internal communications role and everyone is at capacity?

We've made a RACI, but we're still struggling with whether Marketing or HR should drive (and ultimately be accountable for) major internal initiatives like All-Hands and holiday parties.

Answered by Chase Warner

For events and other big initiatives, one thing I've seen work well is assembling a sort of "Culture Committee" - a diverse mix of representatives from various departments/stakeholder groups at the company. In this scenario, Comms (or any other department) can serve as a Facilitator for the full meeting, send an agenda/end goal ahead of time, gather thoughts and impressions from others, and then ask who is willing to take on ownership for that role.
And then, of course, the next time around ideally someone else volunteers / "takes the ball." Operating this way not only serves as a testing ground for ideas and initiatives, but it also gets your "champions" for event promotion/enlisting others already in place.

☕ #7 My company is looking to revamp our TGIF/Friday company meetings. What advice do you have for building community for hybrid events with leaders and employees?

Answered by Rachel Miller

Look at its purpose, why does it exist? Once you’re clear how it earns its place in your channels mix, you can focus on revamping through building community. They’re often informal channels, that can feel formal when presented in a hybrid format. If the meeting exists to unite leaders and employees, encourage active participation through polls, asking questions, sending reactions and having cameras on.
Practical tips include having a camera on the audience, so those watching remotely can see their peers and leaders. Invite people watching in-person or online to put your leaders in the hot seat and have informal conversations with them.

#8 📥 What are ways to go about creating an always-on internal comment, suggestion, and question box in a hybrid work environment?

Answered by Michelle Lyons Dandridge

Use your enterprise internal social networking platforms such as Yammer and Slack. Create a “Suggestion Box” account and promote it as the go-to place to submit feedback. Spark two-way conversation by posting questions after big company announcements and events like organization changes, new programs and initiatives, and town halls to prompt comments, suggestions, and questions from employees.

#9 📺 What are the recommendations you emphasize while coaching executives for media training?

Question from Varun Puri. Answered by Christine Alabastro.

1. Lean into stories. Messaging documents can be filled with cliche corporate expressions and you don’t want to sound like you’re reciting your company newsroom. Bring your key takeaways to life through anecdotes. Show, not tell.

2. Pacing and pauses. A common tendency when we’re put on the spot is to overshare and talk quickly. Remember: slow it down. There’s power in pauses.
3. Nonverbal communication. Landing a message is one thing, but how you deliver it also matters. Take inventory of things like your hand gestures, facial expressions, and head movement.

#10 🧰 What are the best practices for identifying the appropriate mode of communication for certain message types?

Considerations may include audience demographic and/or size, urgency, sender, etc.

Question from Kim Brescia. Answered by Toby Frankenstein.

Download this chart to keep as a helpful reference on your desktop:

Comms Channels For Messages Crc | Toby Frankenstein

133KB ∙ PDF file

Download

✨ #12 What are the best practices to launch an integrated employee engagement communications campaign to increase employees' understanding of a new desired workplace culture and their motivation to change their behaviors based on the selected cultural traits?

I would love to hear about any great internal comms campaign communicating cultural change.

Answered by Jared Taylor

Let's talk about content and process. Campaign content should 1) clearly communicate who and where the new desired culture comes from and most importantly, the why. Employees will need to know why the company is trying to change its culture. Ground the desired culture in specific behaviors with examples that employees can use in their day-to-day life.
Regarding process, changing culture is not a "one and done" thing. The campaign should span a year at a minimum, ideally longer, and integrate into existing comms, channels, rituals, meetings, etc. A steady drumbeat of content will help bring the desired culture to life, along with leadership buy in. I recommend a separate campaign just for managers and leaders. If they're not on board, chances are the new culture will not stick.

🗺️ #13 Do you have any tips to best handle internal communications with significant timezone differences?

For example, our team is based in California and Europe, so we only have one precious hour of overlapping work hours and want to use it as effectively as possible.

Question from Jacob Bank. Answered by Holly Nicola.

Determine what's the best time for the majority of your company to be online at a reasonable time and reserve it for collaboration or company announcements. Partner with your HR Ops team to see where all of your people are located and share the time(s) with the company so that people can figure out how to collaborate or plan to communicate asynchronously if they have to.
If you have employees in more than 2 regions/continents, you are bound to miss connection points so that's why it's important to figure out a plan to share replays and notes immediately after meetings in a consistent way. For a US-based company like mine, we reserve early AM for US and Europe and afternoon for US and APAC. It's good to also survey managers and those who are culture champions in those regions to understand working norms in that location.

#13 🎤 What advice do you have for hosting compelling All Hands meetings?

Answered by Julia Levy

I published an article on this topic one year ago. It’s a resource with 11 tips drawing from my experiences as well as featured leaders on The Switchboard. Here are the top suggestions with more details outlined in the article:
1. Set a Purpose: Ensure your employees know why you gather and the goals
2. Draft the Agenda: Share what will be presented to prepare everyone
3. Practice with the Presenters: Polish the presentations and prepare the speakers for success
4. Review with Leadership: Ensure your Executive team is on board with what’s on the agenda
5. Partner with Design and Tech: Enhance your presentation style with branding
6. Timing is Everything: Find the best time of the day to gather
7. Organize a Pre-Party: Create community when everyone is together
8. Host with Heart: Welcome everyone as if they are coming over for dinner
9. Celebrate Culture and Values: Highlight your DEI stories
10. Make Time for Live Q&A with Audience Engagement: Answer questions
11. Follow-Up and Measure Impact: Evaluate how you are spending employees time

#14 ⏳ How do you balance your day job while building The Switchboard and not lose your mind in the process :) ?