It's good to talk: communication strategy - an essential part of your COVID recovery playbook
- marc21078
- Aug 6, 2020
- 4 min read
It's been heartening to hear some great examples and positive commentary from both senior leaders and employees championing their communication and engagement during lockdown. Finding new and innovative ways to extend their high performing culture remotely has been tackled head on. Those with a great employer brand have worked hard on transparency, clarity, authenticity, visibility, frequency, fairness and technology to extend their communication strategy into lockdown. This is massively helping guide employees through uncertain business conditions as well as overcoming their personal fears and anxieties.
There are some great examples you will agree. However in some cases communication and stakeholder strategy has been incomplete. Difficult conversations with suppliers avoided, meetings with banks delayed and information to the board and investors disrupted and incomplete. Communication strategy should stretch way beyond the section labelled 'employees' and include the entire stakeholder ecosystem.
To control your narrative and seek new solutions to new challenges across all stakeholders is not only important just to get you through the crisis day-to-day, but is essential in creating new opportunities, commercial arrangements, revenue streams and relationships. To mismanage it and go AWOL from your stakeholders can be downright damaging. Your absence will not make the heart grow fonder.
Go walk the talk
For each of your stakeholders you should have a living and breathing comms strategy, establishing:
Key messages
Message alignment across the stakeholder portfolio
Desired comms and media formats - new channels
Frequency
Feedback loop, testing understanding and landing
Outcome required from comms - impact / value created
Additional innovation and opportunity sought
Measureable value outcome (including financial gains, ecosystem resilience, sustainability and reputational stock)
Don't see communication as just airing your bad news. Unfortunately some businesses have looked for the quickest and dirtiest ways to get messages out. For example job losses via text, the news or an e-mail and then washed their hands of it. I hear some managers saying that they are just too busy to spend time on crafting the right messaging strategy - "I'm too busy to talk!". They don't care whether the recipient has heard or understood, only that they have got the message off their to-do list. But now is exactly the time when you need to communicate, communicate, communicate! It could save your business and reputation.
We are not an island
This media slogan should be a mantra for any business and its ecosystem. There are businesses that have suffered terribly from Ostrich syndrome sticking their heads in the sand, avoiding facing the crisis head on with their network. So how do we go from just surviving to engaging gainfully and thriving with our stakeholders?
Equity investors and debt financiers
The traditional metrics that you share with your board, equity investors and debt financiers and their usual timing may be completely inappropriate and misleading during a crisis. You know the business better than anyone. You need to be on the front foot. Granularity of calls on cash, reserves, debtor and creditor profiles - reworking terms and scenarios over short, mid and long term - credible flexing plans - supply chain capital - delivery on the new terms. Whatever the new rules, be transparent about trading strengths, weaknesses, knowns and unknowns. Work through short-, mid-, long term opportunities that may be outside the norm. Recalibrate information, sharing that which is useful and drives the right level of intervention from investors, rather than leaving them confused and asking for more. Leverage their network for support in crisis management.
Board
If the board can be open and transparent amongst itself about the real health of the business, then the management response can target the right areas and recalibrate accordingly. KPIs, risk appetite, agility, governance and business assumptions in the short term may need to adjust and keep adjusting to be able to react to the changing economic landscape.
By reaching out to your board you may be able to leverage their network by being clear about what you need. Your NEDs will often be on other boards and scanning industry meaning they are able to share observations of best practice.
The worst thing that can happen is that the executive team covers over cracks that continue to widen.
Customers
Keep them up to date with the impact of service delivery and products. Strengthen consumer and societal confidence in your values through both word and deed. It's a great time for product innovation and gathering intelligence. Do your customers want the same or different products? Are they happy or intrigued to receive them in new and different ways? Are there complimentary services that now have value?
Find new channels and ways to communicate, test ideas and gather intel that you can respond to quickly.
Supply chain
View the supply chain as one entity and take a collective approach to secure its long term resilience. Who has financial strength, operational resilience, expertise and capacity in the supply chain? Re-evaluate terms and reward behaviours that optimise the chain as a whole. Crisis term agreements and longer term supply chain architecture will likely change and this is an opportunity for the collective to build a chain that can react flexibly to future crises.
Peer networks and competitors
Is it more important that you survive even if your competitors drown? Or will that destroy the sector as a whole? Reach out to your peer network and pool your expertise. Take a collaborative approach to protect and recover the industry as a whole as much as personal market share. Share common best practice that yields consumer confidence in the industry (e.g. airports, travel, destination economy, leisure). Be transparent and clear at which point collaboration ends and competition resumes.
Schools have done this particularly well in parts to ensure that education across a district and between different schools protects pupils and limits the impact of the education gap. It would be more costly and damaging to repair this sector and bridge a widening gap.
... and so on. Your stakeholders are broader than you think. Your community, HMRC, your professional services network (what best practice are your lawyers, accountants and network providers seeing?), local Business Improvement Districts (your return to the office impacts other businesses - many have disappeared already), local government, LEPs and so on.
So let's walk and talk
I cannot over emphasise the power of good communication, constructive conversation and exploration with your stakeholders. It's certainly been central and core to every turnaround that I've been a part of. Employees have been energised, performance has been transformed, customers have loved new products, innovation has thrived and relationships in the industry have formed more resilient and supportive ecosystems. Make communication an essential part of your COVID recovery playbook.
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