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An example of crisis communications in practice

I recently had the opportunity to put into practice some crisis communication principles and I thought I'd share my experience with you.

"Crisis" communication is not just limited to big corporations facing a major incident, such as the recent Dell product recall or the Enron bankruptcy. These basic communication principles can be applied to any situation of any scale. Here, they are applied to project management in the IT sector.

Context
Complex fixed-price IT integration project; the timeline is very tight and delivery an imperative. Delay or mis-management of costs will directly impact the project's profitability.

Half way through a project phase, financial imperatives cause our client to review the overall project timeline and postpone many activities we are currently working on to 2007. The team management and myself learn this news during a conference call.

Situation one hour after client's announcement

The news has already spread amongst our teams by word of mouth. Many are talking of an immediate halt to all activities.

Communication objectives

• Correct and prevent rumours and false information from spreading.
• Reassure the teams and maintain focus and motivation on activities underway and upcoming delivery priorities.
• Inform of client's new strategy

Impact analysis for the different populations concerned

Communication needs are not the same across the team. Teams located in the central project offices will be heavily impacted by the changes. An uncertain number will need to leave the project. Those in remote locations are less impacted as they are in the final phase of their work.

Immediate action planned

Meeting with all team members as soon as possible. Conference call for managers not in central locations. Key messages (communication brief) provided to those managers for relaying locally.

Summary of key messages

1. "The facts" Factual elements relating to the client's change of strategy

• Strategy change for budgetary reasons: Capex / cash flow
• Completion of roll-outs currently underway
• Roll-out of next version (currently status: development finished, tests underway) postponed to July 2007
• Deployment next version +1 postponed to January 2008

Decision taken for budgetary reasons, not unhappy with our services. Read client feedback received by email.

2. "What is going to happen for me?" The impact of this change for the teams.

The team members are looking for some clear information about their personal future. For me, this is the most important part of the communication. It is currently too soon to communicate on what will change as a result of this decision. There is much uncertainty. Announce that the situation is very complex and not yet clear. We have contractual commitments that are still valid and require discussion and modification with client.

Be precise about what the Team management expects from the team members. This can be summarised as: "Do not change anything for the moment. Continue to work on what is underway. We will share more information as soon as the appropriate decisions have been taken."

• Much uncertainty.
• Any change to planned activities will depend on the modification of our contract.
• Prepare yourself for change but do not pack your bags to go home tomorrow.
• We will keep you informed.
  

Moving forward

• Associate key team members in workshops taking place (defining the change).
• Accelerate communication: make available decisions as their are taken.
• Make messages very simple and very clear.

(Translated from French.)

Quote: Crisis Communication

Crisis: a customer's view

On the same topic as the post above...

Here is one company's approach to communicating on a major business crisis. Skim-read the post (it's long!) and form your own opinion and then confront it with the customer feedback at the bottom.

DreamHost blog

What I noted is a considerable amount of admiration, praise and understanding. OK there are disgruntled customers but the balance is broadly positive. Most of us common mortels are incapable of judging the technical aspects of such problems. Accidents happen. No-one is perfect. However, it seems to me that our opinion of the company in question is heavily influenced by our perception of how the crisis is being handled, or not.

By the sound of it, this may even be a factor that distinguishes DreamHost from its competitors.

The man who wanted to change the world

Ever wondered why opportunities for change seem to fall into the laps of some people and not others? Ever tried really hard to change someone or something and not manage? Well, what if you took that energy to concentrate on being more yourself? Maybe then, change might just come to you....

This story I found might sound a little twee, but it illustrates this point well. After all, don't clichés contain a grain of truth?

In the Chinese folklore, there is the story of an ambitious young man who, on his twentieth birthday, became consumed with the desire to change the world. He spent the next 20 years trying to do that but couldn’t.

At age 40, he settled for trying to change China. He spent the next 20 years trying to do that but couldn’t.

At age 60, he settled for trying to change his village. For the next 20 years he strived to do that but failed.

At age 80, he decided to focus on changing his family. He spent the next 20 years trying to do that but couldn’t.

At age 100, he decided to focus on changing himself.

But the next day, he died.

The lesson? If you want to change the world, you better start with yourself.

So the question to ask ourselves is: In what ways can I become the change I seek to see happening around me?

(c) 2006 F. Basili, President, HumaNext. From the workshop on change and transformation. All rights reserved.

Another post on this subject...

Suceeding in a complex working environment

Good communication is a must for complex working environments.

According to the report, Succeeding in Complexity, published by training consultancy Ashridge, high-performing teams have a clear communications strategy plus focused and developed communication skills that aren’t dependent on meetings, as well as a high degree of trust among team members.

Good communication is among the top five characteristics needed by teams and leaders to succeed in a complex working environment across a geographical or organizational spread. Recent research has identified it along with:

• strong organizational support,
  
• high levels of leadership competence,
  
• team coaching and
  
• clear objectives
  

Ashridge training consultancy

The French love blogging!

According to an article in the International Herald Tribune on 27 July 2006, the French are now some of the world's most intensive bloggers.

"Sixty percent of French Internet users visited a blog in May, ahead of Britain with 40 percent and little more than a third in the United States, according to Comscore, an Internet ratings service. Likewise, French bloggers spent more than an hour in June visiting France's top-rated blog site, far ahead of the 12 minutes spent by Americans doing the same and less than 3 minutes for Germans, according to Nielsen/NetRatings."

From a cultural point of view it is interesting to note the following comment made by Laurent Florès, chief executive of CRM Metrix, a company that monitors blogs and other online conversations on behalf of companies seeking feedback on their brands: "Bloggers in the United States listen to each other and incorporate rival ideas in the discussion [whereas] French bloggers never compromise their opinions."

Original article:
France's mysterious embrace of blogs
By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune
Published: July 27, 2006

Insecurity Breeds Complexity

Below is an extract from an article that I recently came across on communitelligence.com and I couldn't agree more. This not only applies to media/presentation skills but I would say communications in general.

Original article on Communitelligence

Extract:

"The easiest way to spot an insecure public speaker is to look for someone who is dumping an endless supply of facts and details, but without the context of real examples and stories. Insecure speakers are afraid of looking stupid, so they always overcompensate by larding excessive facts into their presentation.

The insecure speaker uses the sea of facts as a protective covering to mask his or her insecurities. Only it doesn’t work. "

Les sciences molles?

Ever wondered what I meant when referring to sciences molles? Here's the explanation...

The Hard Stuff Is Easy and the Soft Stuff Is Hard
There exists more than ample evidence that when all is said and done, “the hard stuff is easy and the soft stuff is hard.” Developing a great technical solution may not be easy. But, ensuring that the solution engages learners, motivates managers, and energizes the organization—the softer, less technical people issues—is really hard, and critical.

More information in French here...

It's good to talk

This small phrase, "It's good to talk", often crops up in my mind.

It was used by British Telecom as an advertisement when I was growing up and it really has stuck since.

It can apply to so many situations and, not least, in a professional context...

Check out the advert online

Engaging with team members to improve performance

October 11, 2005: Bad leadership is cited most often as cause of poor performance, writes CIO Update columnist Theresa Wellbourne of eePulse.

On my current job working for an IT service provider, I am concerned with what measures can be taken to improve IT team perfomances in order to deliver on time and within budget.

This has brought me to question the role and impact of leadership (essentially project managers) on team performance and I have discovered quite a few articles on this topic in a "corporate" context. In the jargon, it is referred to as "Employee engagement". What does this mean?

A definition offered by Melcrum Publishing is: creating an emotional connection with employees that releases discretionary effort.

And surely this is what we need in the tough, constraint-filled world of IT projects. That pzang that will motivate team members to go the extra mile and deliver top quality on time. And the only way to create an emotional connection is to understand where your people are - and where their heads are - at any given time.

The pitfall

The common tendency in management circles is to assume greater knowledge than is the case - the false consensus effect. Studies confirm this. The University of Chicago showed that when passing on a simple piece of information, nearly half of the test group (46%) were confident they had been understood by the listener when, in reality, they hadn't been.

Survey tools are therefore a great way of cutting through all this a getting an honest image or benchmark of the current situation and then opening up honest communication about how people really are based on their verbatim comments.

Tapping into the corporate "energy"

I have discovered an exciting company and a promising tool, eePulse Inc, and it looks like (because I've only read articles about them, I haven't got "hands-on") they give corporate line management the tools to connect with their personnel.

A recent Melcrum case study of BT Wholesale describes the eePulse tool as having been "critical" in bringing leadership towards understanding employee attitudes and concerns. In a basic format, the tool assesses where employee's "energy" is, based on research showing that trends in energy levels are a good indicator of levels of motivation and thereby performance.

"If we can understand what is driving people's energy - not follow the absolute level but follow the trend - then we can start to indentify what are the key things to tackle to get barriers out of the way, so that employees can give that bit of extra discretionary effort because they feel consulted, heard and that they have a part to play.'"

The following are three standard questions used every week:

1. What is your individual energy levek? Scale of 1-10, with 10 as "burnt out".
2. What worked well for you this week?
3. What obstacles got in your way this week? What could you do about them?

Taking action

The feedback and indicators collected can be used to shape leadership behaviour. According to Theresa Wellbourne, founder, president and CEO of eePulse and an adjunct professor of Executive Education at the University of Michigan Business School, "energy" is “catchy,” and if the senior leadership team is starting to become de-energized and lose confidence, those attitudes trickle down to the rest of the employee population. In fact, immediate attention to the leadership and management teams is warranted.

Steps for Change

To create higher energy and confidence levels in your organization, Wellbourne recommends trying these simple steps:

• Start an open communication process. Specific discussions to diagnose energy, confidence and what’s affecting all employees will help any organization thrive. Give people a venue to voice their opinions, concerns and suggestions without fear of retribution for negative comments.
• Get current data. Collect data through communication efforts, online surveys or other processes. If you have a pulse on what is really going on within your organization, you’ll be able to solve small issues before they become major problems. This can save you time, money and a lot of aggravation.
• Take action. Once you have open dialogue and current data, actually use this information to make change happen. Take action and let all members of the organization know current issues and activities on a regular basis. Then, get feedback and use that data to fine tune your strategy execution.

The BT Wholesale experience

Andrea Wyatt-Budd, leader of engagement and internal communication for BT Wholesale, explains that it has enabled the leadership team to say "We are not really in touch with where our people are. This is what we think the environment of the organisation is. But look at what they are telling us we have created."

Some of the successes seen at BT Wholesale:

• Changing the climate of responsibility: at first question number three was met with the familiar "It's everyone else's fault" or "Senior management should be doing more"... to more reflective responses that show employees taking more responsibility for change, such as "I disagree with the new pay review because I don't think the communication plan is good enough. I am going to initiate a round of briefings with the head of communications to discuss this."
• Progress on the difficulties being indentified by employees: during the first trials, "the barriers this week" most commonly raised were around: workload, teamwork and resource levels. By concentrating on these issues, they had moved into "what was working well" within six months. Wyatt-Budd explains this by "taking the comments from eePulse", putting action plans in place to address these things, and that fed into us turning around our results on those topics".
• Other parts of the organization are expressing interest in running the same kind of initiative in their units.

My experience

Before I had learnt about "employee engagement", I called this "creating a dialogue" or "creating a conversation" within our team. Like any human endeavour how can you expect a team to succeed without information circulating in all directions? In my humble experience, I would use surveys to "take the temperature" and use it as a form of dialogue for talking to teams about their concerns in their own words.

Below are a couple of examples of how this can be applied to a project environment, taken from my most recent mission:




My personal conclusion is that this process works well. The results above form part of an in-depth audit; a snapshot at one particular point in time. However, this was a heavy process to manage and a lighter and shorter set of questions would be more efficient on a more frequent basis.