👍 Buy-in for Org Changes, Comms in Decline?

The authority on mixternal comms

Mar 10, 2023

Heads up:

This webinar looks interesting: “Know Your Audience: Segmentation for Employee Comms Success” by Simpplr on March 14. Register.
- Pair it with “How Do You Categorize Your Employees? Try Psychographics.” (Mister Editorial, 🔒)
Pi Day is March 14. One of the best-performing company-wide emails I ever sent was on Pi Day. The subject line was,
“3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510…”

Moving Past Banalities

Getting organizational buy-in is crucial in moving “past resistance and stagnation, because your path forward will be shaped by realities rather than banalities.” That’s the takeaway in a recent HBR article by Andrea Belk Olson, CEO of Pragmadik, a “behavioral science-driven change agency.”

“Most advice about building internal support for organizational change reiterates perfunctory platitudes, reminding leaders to communicate reasons for the change, or even to be excited about the change themselves,” Olson says.

Citing research, Olson argues that this approach “often results in a wave of employee cynicism, doubt, distrust, and negativity, which can relegate change efforts to a slow and painful death.”

What’s needed is a “culture of change acceptance,” which consists of six components:

Legitimacy: Engage your organizational change influencers
Ownership: Provide everyone a table stake
Relevance: Focus on latent change
Attainability: Create a series of micro-changes
Authenticity: Embody behaviors that support the change
Impartiality: Establish a neutral change facilitator

Go deeper.

Survey Says

Last month I surveyed Mister Editorial’s paid members to understand what readers want to see more (and less) of and ways to improve this experience. I shared the results, as well as the actions I’ll take to make Mister Editorial an even better experience.

I even made a few 1:1 appointments to meet paid members. It’s so nice to make such connections.

One tidbit from the survey results (🔒):

96% of paid members say Mister Editorial’s “insider comms,” like the recent memos from the CEOs of Zoom (🔒) and YouTube (🔒), are useful for their job.

If you want to have a say in the crafting of Mister Editorial, become a paid member.

Become a member

Quick Hits

🙌 In praise of the press release. “It may stay around, but the formulaic dispatches increasingly will be written by bots.” (Wadds Inc.)

📞 Remote team communication is the new reality. Here are tips on how to communicate effectively with virtual teams. (Poppulo)

🤔 Neither “phone” nor “call” appears in the essay.

🐶 How storytelling at Petco strengthens internal comms. An interview with Diana Kowalsky, senior director & head of Internal Communications at the retail company. (PR News)

✒️ The Asian American Journalists Association has guidance on covering violence in Asian American communities: “Rather than using euphemisms like ‘anti-Asian sentiment’ or ‘anti-Asian hate,’ assess whether it is more accurate to use terms like ‘anti-Asian racism,’ ‘anti-Asian bias,’ ‘anti-Asian rhetoric,’ or ‘anti-Asian violence.’” (AAJA)

Thank You!

✔️ Not sure what this accolade means, other than getting a fancy checkmark next to Mister Editorial’s name. Thank you all for the checkmark!

“Let us…take stock of ourselves, to free ourselves from the dictatorship of heavy schedules, crowded agendas, and superficial needs, and choose the things that truly matter.”

—Pope Francis in his sermon on Ash Wednesday

File Under Marketing?

“Hope Builds” (☝️) is the name of The Home Depot’s first documentary, one that uses employees to show how the company helps communities recover from natural disasters.

Ragan spoke with The Home Depot’s Lou Dubois (whose job is unclear) about how to work with employees in making such a video. Among the tips:

Show, don’t tell, values
Get releases for employee footage as it’s collected
Balance storytelling and branding
Interview more employees than you need for the story
Show the video to employees first

Learn more.

Interesting Opportunities

Fanatics - Sr. Manager, Internal Communications (remote, U.S.A.)

Flashfood - Director of Comms (remote, U.S.A.)

ING - Internal Comms Expert (Australia)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Director of Comms (hybrid, Cambridge)

On - Head of Internal Comms (London)

RNHB - PR & Comms Manager (Utrecht)

Staffbase - Head of Content (Berlin, Chemnitz, or Dresden)

Lemme know if you need an intro.

Losing a Popularity Contest?

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams (e.g., string of words) found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2019 in Google's text corpora.

Public relations destroys peer professions in terms of how often it appears in the Viewer, but the frequency is dropping faster than confidence in democracy.

The chart above plots the frequency of “public relations,” “employee communications,” “internal communications,” and “corporate communications” in the Viewer between 1900 and 2019.

With PR removed, the chart looks like this:

Every string is in decline.

For comparison, here’s how the appearance of our profession compares to mentions of “vegetarian” and “civil war.” (Worrying!)

🙅‍♂️ “mixternal communications” returns zero results.

Have a great weekend! 😎

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Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I am the editor-in-chief of Digital Publications at Lam Research. The views in this newsletter are my own.

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