You’ll never believe what happens when you click this post!

 

OMG what the heck is this? Is this just clickbait or is this for real? What’s gonna happen when you view this post? Probably nothing but let’s just make sure… Ha! Gotcha! Ah well, you’re in now, might as well stay to see what on earth this is all about. Probably a load of junk but you never know, could be something interesting…

Once upon a time, there was this very big company, who liked to try and help make the world a better place. They hired lots of brilliant people, like Jill who was a whizz with computers and Jack who was really great at helping people use them. Jill and Jack made a great team, as they travelled all over the land, helping companies large and small to make better use of their computers. But there was a problem. While Jill and Jack were working with the companies, everything was really great and people loved their computers. But when they left to go to help another company, they quickly grew to hate them and started doing things the old way again.

Jill and Jack just couldn’t understand it. Everything had been so great while they were there. All they had left the companies to do was to tell everybody in the company about how to use their new computers. They had given them very detailed instructions on how they worked. So why did everything keep going wrong?

Are you not entertained?

Ok ok, I will get to the point! This post is all about engagement. One of the biggest challenges when it comes to delivering comms to your organisation – or even just your colleagues – isn’t about being able articulate the central message. It isn’t about nailing the grammar or the style or the voice used to deliver that message. It’s about getting the necessary level of engagement. Ensuring that people actually click on and read your message. You can have the perfect comm, immaculately written and presented – but if nobody reads it, you will have achieved nothing. In the case of Jill and Jack, they didn’t help the company sell the message needed to make the change stick and therefore, they ultimately failed in their endeavours.

So how do you generate engagement and make sure your message actually sticks? Well, as I allude to above, you have to take a cue from things like social media and draw upon certain psychological phenomena to hack into people’s attention. In this modern world where the attention market is so saturated, it is no longer enough to simply instruct people to pay attention. The assumption that the authority to control this is inherent in the employee/employer relationship is a fallacy. No longer are the personal and professional worlds of employees separated. Every distraction that is present in people’s private lives is equally as present in the professional one – and since these distractions have been weaponised by the social media and advertising giants, you are now at war with factions far better funded, far better equipped and far more determined than you to succeed in delivering them.

Pick me! Pick me!

Fundamentally, this is about acknowledging human nature and leveraging it to your own ends. If you want to ensure that a message is delivered and actually received you need to incentivise engaging with it. This isn’t about financial incentives though – it’s about dopamine. It’s about providing that little kick of pleasure to successfully draw someone in. There are many ways you can do this. You can use shock tactics in your headlines. You can use humour and sarcasm and wit. You can leverage the power of story-telling (as above). You can tap into a collective frustration by pointing out things that suck and then presenting your solution to bring employees on the change journey with you. There are a number of different fundamental devices that tap into our human psyche and influence whether or not we choose to act on things. When you’re competing with the wealth of information and entertainment that an employee has available at their fingertips in this day and age, you have to start playing the same games. It is not enough to expect people to engage with you just because they work for you – whether or not they fundamentally should.

The other aspect to successful engagement is in developing the formats and delivery vehicles. Again, the successful communication director will acknowledge the wealth of choice and level of experience that the consumer communication platforms employ to attract and engage their audiences. This means providing communications in multiple forms and types of media, to appeal to all of the different types of consumer in their preferred format. Email chains and newsletters are great for some, but will never be consumed by others, no matter how interesting you make them, simply due to the nature of the written format. Also, the delivery vehicle is vital to consider. A newsletter will quickly become buried in an overactive inbox, raising the amount of time and effort required for the recipient to engage with it – and of course, engagement falls off as time/effort goes up (and rapidly at that).

Leverage the “Doom Scrolling" epidemic

One great solution is to again steal inspiration from social media, who have this nailed already, and curate a personalised news feed for your employees where you share your communications. There are a number of advantages to this. The employee has a central location for company communications, pre-filtered for their role, that exists outside of other distractions. This central location persists – messages are not lost and are easily found. Messages can be associated with the relevant departments and functions, to consolidate message themes and increase impact and understanding. Employees can easily build this into their morning routines and it becomes just another social/news feed to catch up on. Psychologically, it also helps for those who are inclined to rebel, who feel forced into reading emails and then subsequently don’t, by presenting this as a choice – and a choice dressed up as an experience usually associated with bunking off work! Now even the rebels will read your messages because it feels non-conformist.

In summary, I suppose that the gist of my message is this – in order to drive change or provide meaningful updates through business comms, you have to be innovative and creative with them. Ultimately, you increase your chance of success by making them as pleasurable to consume and as low-friction as possible to access. Next time you're about to go and fire out that big boring email to your whole company, stop for a minute and think about how you might be able to make it better stick. It could save you an awful lot of work in the long run.