Employee Communication – Fundamentals & Proactive Strategies

Host: Phil Wilson

Guest: Nick Kalm

Transcript

Phil Wilson [00:00]**

Nick Kalm, welcome back to the Left of Boom show.

Nick Kalm (00:02)
Great to see you again, Phil. Thanks for having me.

Phil Wilson (00:04)
Right. And even though I did change my shirt, this is that we are seeing each other, you know, like 10 minutes apart. I well, so we’re continuing our conversation on employee communications. So we recorded these. ⁓ If you’re watching them in order, you don’t have to. But if you’re watching them in order, we talked about communicating right side of boom in the last episode. This episode is communicating left of boom. So.

Nick Kalm (00:12)
Exactly, yes.

Phil Wilson (00:30)
kind of proactive communication and different vehicles that you can use for communication and things like that when you don’t have a crisis. let’s just start with, that you advise a lot of companies about how to do communication with their employees and doing it proactively. What are some of the kind of key tips that you educate your clients on about communicating proactive?

Nick Kalm (00:53)
Yeah, I think it comes down to a few different things. One is, it’s not one size fits all.

You have to assume that employees are going to be consuming information that you’re putting out in different times, in different ways, in different settings, and so forth. So some of it is going to be, you know, good old fashioned, like company newsletters and bulletin boards. Those things seem like they’ve sort of fallen by the wayside, but people still read them. They want to read about themselves. They want to read about team members. They want to consume information when they’re not on the job, if they’re in a break room or something like that.

just good old fashioned stuff like that I think is a great great way to go. And certainly people they need to kind of stop looking down their nose at it going oh that’s sort of 90s technology or nobody looks at bulletin boards nobody looks at newsletters anymore. It still needs to be part of the mix. You know at the end of the day the most important thing and probably one of the ones that gets neglected the most I’m sure you would agree is supervisors right because employees want to whether it’s a department manager or a frontline supervisor

Phil Wilson (01:40)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (01:56)
or whoever it is, from an employee point of view, that’s management. Their supervisor is management. The department head is management. Equipping those folks with the information that you want put out as an organization is so key. And again, you can’t just assume that they’re going to pick it up by osmosis and know to do it. They need to have material that’s specifically developed for them, an expectation created that they will share it, frankly, some accountability on them even that they do share it properly and even feedback.

So I think the frontline supervisor, I think, ⁓ is a really important one. Wouldn’t you agree?

Phil Wilson (02:31)
Yeah, you’re just,

yeah, of course you just threw that giant stake and you know, in front of me. Yeah, that is absolutely the key I think is the most important vehicle that you have for the reasons that you said, but also like the when if you do this properly, right, you’re going to you’re going to be your first focus group on your messaging is those first level supervisors like if they if they don’t understand it, they can’t explain it.

And that means you haven’t communicated it well. Like you need to get it to where they understand it. They also will give you feedback. Like, Hey, I know I’m going to get this question. How am I supposed to answer it? And if you haven’t thought about the answer to the questions that they’re going to get, then you need to go back and do a better job of your own messaging. and they are the closest to your employees. Like they are going to receive the message pretty much like your employees are going to receive it.

And then the final thing I would say is that they are, you know, they’re yours. If your frontline leaders are weak, then the way that they’re going to answer questions is either going to be like, I don’t have any idea. I don’t know what those guys are doing. You know, ⁓ I, they’re going to throw you under the bus. You know, if you don’t make them responsible for actually, you know, owning the message, communicating the message, that helps them.

Nick Kalm (03:36)
Right?

Totally.

Phil Wilson (03:48)
Develop as leaders, the people that aren’t very good at that, that that tells you like maybe this is somebody who’s not cut out to be a leader. It’s a good way to test that proactively other than then things blow up because they don’t know how to do their job. So those are all additional reasons to have your one of your key focus points of communication to be this frontline supervisors. That said, all these other vehicles, you definitely should use. And by the way, they can use them too, right? Like

They can hand out the thing that you also post on the bulletin board. They could point people to a video that people can look out on their phones or even show the video in a standup meeting or whatever. You know, they, they could take advantage of all the, all the vehicles, but they still need to be, I feel like they’re the, the key messenger for a lot of your messages.

Nick Kalm (04:34)
I completely agree. I you could do everything else right. You could do everything else award-winningly right. And if you don’t do that…

Phil Wilson (04:40)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (04:41)
decently to write and the whole thing falls apart. It’s it’s it’s absolutely the linchpin of it the whole thing as you said that’s the key and again, it’s it’s sometimes too hard of a battle for us to fight with employers like ⁓ these supervisors They’re just trying to make their numbers and they’re like, you know They don’t have time to do that communication stuff and like that’s not an acceptable answer You’re anything you do is going to be doomed to failure unless you get your supervisors on board and it’s tougher and you and I’ve talked about this before

Phil Wilson (04:44)
Yeah.

Nick Kalm (05:10)
As you well know, companies have been thinning their supervisor ranks dramatically. So you have these huge spans of control, whereas some supervisor in the past might have 10 or 15 or 20 employees, now you have supervisors with 100 employees. And it becomes much harder to do this communication because of it, but it makes it even more essential. Because if they’re not talking to their 100 or so direct reports, those employees, God knows what they’re thinking about the supervisor, about the organization, or

Phil Wilson (05:25)
Yeah, right.

Nick Kalm (05:40)
whatever. So I think that’s one point. Another one is more again in the sort of thing to avoid. I’ve talked about this before and we’ve laughed about it together. You know I come into an organization and I say okay well tell me about your employee population. Well we’ve got about 5,000 employees. Okay that’s a good size mid-size company. How many of them are production like out on the floor working in like a manufacturing setting. Oh that’s the vast majority. That’s like 4,200 of our 5,000 employees. Wow that’s great. So they’re basically out on

the floor, making sure that the widgets are being produced well and the equipment is running well and the trucks are leaving with the parts. Yes, that’s what they’re doing. Excellent. What is your primary method of communicating with them? Email. Do they read email? No, they really don’t read email. that we never see. Wait, most of your employees, majority, more than 80 % of your employees are production employees who don’t read email and that’s your main vehicle. So again, we all, all of us in

Phil Wilson (06:21)
Right.

Nick Kalm (06:37)
office settings, we use email quite a bit, we use other collaboration tools quite a bit, but you have to make it fit whoever it is you’re trying to reach. And if your employees are not on email, for God’s sake, don’t have email be your primary source of communication. That’s not the way to do it, right?

Phil Wilson (06:52)
Yeah. And I

would, yes. And I would add, you know, the reason that you have multiple channels is the same reason that, you know, you’re like when you’re in a political campaign, they don’t like just advertise on ESPN or if you’re trying to sell cars, right? You don’t just pick ABC to sell, you know, you’re picking all of the stations, right? You advertise everywhere because

Nick Kalm (07:07)
Right. Right.

Phil Wilson (07:17)
Our attention span is very, very limited now. I have no idea where you’re going to be actually paying attention at any particular time. And so, and your communication in your company has got to be the exact same way. I need to hit that. Yeah. Some people do read email. Some people, they just delete all their emails. Some people do look at the bulletin board. A lot of people walk right by and, and you could put like a hundred dollar bill on there and no one would grab it. Like there’s,

Nick Kalm (07:35)
Ha!

Phil Wilson (07:44)
A lot of, know, so you need to be everywhere so that when that one second happens that someone actually is paying attention, like there’s an opportunity for them to like catch your message. Um, and, then going back to supervisors though, that’s the one that is sort of the least avoidable, right? Like you’re probably going to have to talk to your supervisor at some point. You know, you’re going to go to the standup meeting, you know, before your shift starts, if you’re supposed to be there before your shifts.

Nick Kalm (08:07)
Right.

Phil Wilson (08:13)
That is a pretty solid vehicle that’s always there if you take advantage of.

Nick Kalm (08:18)
Absolutely. Well, exactly right. And then the other thing too is, mean, companies will sit there and say, well, how should we communicate with our employees? And I’ll sit there for them and say, well, how do you like to consume information yourself? Not as an employee of your organization, but how do you like to consume information? Well, it’s on my phone. look at, that’s my primary communication vehicle is on my phone. I text my friends, I get friends texting me. My wife texts me. I look at social media there. And what are you looking at on social media? I look at a lot of videos.

Okay, great. So you just talked about three important things that would be directly relevant to the best way to communicate with employees. They have phones. Every one of them has got a smartphone. Every single one of them. And then they’ll sometimes say, well, you know, we don’t want them looking at their phones while they’re at work. It’s like, that’s fine. Then don’t. But then don’t expect them to look at a work sponsored email outside of work or you’re going to have a wage and hour claim. But have it be something that they can consume on their phone. Social media. We’re all looking at Twitter and

Phil Wilson (09:09)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (09:17)
Blue Sky and Instagram and Pinterest and LinkedIn, use those vehicles to communicate with your employees. Don’t just use your own captive vehicles like newsletters and stuff like that. Use social media to do it. And then video. Video, the reason video is dominating social media in general in society is because that’s how we like to consume information. If we get words, we get very few words. We get little 140 character tweets or we get a two line

People don’t have time to read long emails, long articles, all that other stuff. It’s got to be tight. It’s got to be directly relevant to employees and presented in a way that they like to consume information. That’s going to increase the chances of them receiving it. So that’s another way to do it for sure with video, on phones, use social media as well. Avoid email generally if you can for sure. We talked about supervisors. Another one, and you don’t want to overuse it, but town halls. People want

They want to be together with their employees, fellow employees. They want to hear from management, whether it’s plant management, division management, senior-most management. What’s going on? How is the organization doing? What are the challenges we’re facing? How is the business performing today? How do we expect it to perform in the future? What kind of change is coming as well? That’s a great way to communicate that and even a way to foster some of that is to go, you have whoever it is that’s presenting, some of you may be wondering,

even if people are afraid to raise a question, ProAct, as we talked about in the other episode, proactively raising concerns in order to be able to address them is another one. And then another thing I would add to all of this is, and again you don’t do it, you want to use it sparingly, but there’s two different things. Back to phones again. Texts. Again you don’t want to have it be something where employees are tuning it out or annoyed by it, but if you have important information that you want employees to see, this is again the thing I’m smiling about with organizations is

Phil Wilson (10:55)
Yeah.

Nick Kalm (11:14)
because

well I’ll sit there and say well you have your employees cell phone numbers. Well of course we need to tell them if there’s like you know a snow related closure or weather event or something like that. Like great well then you have the ability to text them. Oh we don’t want to text them. Well why not? Why not? Again you don’t want to overuse it and again employees will always have the opportunity to opt out but if you’re selective about the information that you really want to make sure they see, better than anything else, better than supervisor, better than email, better than bulletin board, better than

Phil Wilson (11:28)
Yeah.

Nick Kalm (11:43)
social media, better than town hall meeting, is to text them. Important news on blah blah blah, see internet for more details, whatever it is. That way you know that they’re going to see it. And then the last piece I would say, again also to be used selectively but an important one, you know, many people have significant others or families that care about where we work. And how do we reach them? there, is there kind of information that we want the families to know about? We’re opening a new facility.

We’re adding a new benefit. We’re introducing a new product that people are going to have available in the company store at a discount. There’s something that would be of interest there. We’re increasing tuition reimbursement or we’re setting up a hardship fund for employees, whatever it is. Anything like that, that’s a good thing to then make sure you’re communicating directly with your employees. Every employer should have, does have or should have employee cell phones for the reasons we talked about a moment ago.

Nick Kalm (12:43)
home addresses. So you would take an old-fashioned letter or postcard or something that you would send literally to people’s homes. People go, US mail that’s just for junk. No, no, but if you want to make sure employees, families, or significant others see something like that, you do that. Don’t depend on the employee to communicate that because they may or may not do it. And all of that contributes to a feeling of goodwill. All of it contributes to a feeling that the employee is valued by the organization.

Phil Wilson (13:11)
Yeah.

So good. So good. all right. That’s a great segue into, would say, we’ve, you know, we’ve talked a lot about vehicles, but like what kind of stuff should I be talking about? So what, what would be, what are, you know, when you’re advising clients and they’re looking at not, you know, I’m not trying to respond to like a particular, you know, situation, but just like in general, when I want to, you know, just kind of like keep in touch with employees and update them on just general things in the business, what are the, what are some of those key topics?

that you coach clients to communicate about.

Nick Kalm (13:43)
Yeah, it’s how the company is doing.

How is the company performing? What are some of the big achievements that they have marked? What are some obstacles that they’ve overcome with teamwork and with individual contributions, which all of which should be celebrated as part of it? What are some of the challenges that they still have coming up ahead of them? And what do they need to be able to do, both that employees can directly impact, and that should be spelled out too. What the employees can and need to do. Is it watching expenses?

Phil Wilson (13:54)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (14:13)
know, cross-selling different products to customers. Is it responding to customer inquiries in a timely manner? Is it making sure that product quality as it’s coming out of the factory floor is, you know, at least at 99 percent? Whatever it is specifically that they can do, that’s a big piece of it. And then just what’s going on in the economy more broadly? Because we’re all consuming information again from either social media or traditional media, and we have perceptions that are created about that.

everything from the economy to inflation to tariffs to political unrest to social unrest to immigration and for I mean you know if the list goes on and on providing the company lens on those things not necessarily on society more broadly but for the organization as a whole and for the employees within it what does it mean what what is this uncertainty around tariffs and the fact that the Supreme Court is looking at them as we’re taping this and deciding

whether they should stand or not. What does that mean for the company? And then therefore what does it mean for employees? Well, if the tariffs are not upheld, we may have to go back and refund a significant amount of money to our customers. And if we do that, the good news is that we set aside a certain number of reserves to be able to, again, that’s just one example of it, but context in terms of relating what’s going on in the world that people may be getting little snippets of from family members, from social media, from traditional media, and helping them put into context in terms of

Phil Wilson (15:30)
Yeah.

Nick Kalm (15:43)
how it’s going to impact them.

Phil Wilson (15:44)
And we live in a world where a lot of times you’ve posted about this a lot on speaking of social media on LinkedIn, which you’re a great follow on LinkedIn. But like the, ⁓ I love your takes on some of these things where it’s like, you know, companies, a lot of times they lose the thread, right? Instead of talking about something that’s really core to the business or something that the business should react to, like they instead feel the need to go and there, and this is not really communicating even necessarily to their employees. It’s like they’re,

They’re kind of, you know, posturing publicly on stuff that’s not really core to the business. And that can create a crisis versus, ⁓ you know, doing something proactively. So speak a little bit to that, but, but the, the other part I want to bring up is that I think, or I want you to comment on is the, you know, an employer. Regularly communicating about how these other forces that people are reading about and hearing about.

Nick Kalm (16:16)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

Phil Wilson (16:37)
and how they think about it as a business also really illustrates how thoughtful they are about the economy and about how the business is competing. that I think gives employees, employees want to feel like they’re working for a winning team, right? And so like what, this is another way to just sort of get across without just patting yourself on the back about like, these are the kinds of things that we’re thinking about to make sure that all of us have.

Nick Kalm (16:52)
Absolutely.

Phil Wilson (17:04)
have opportunities. So I’d be curious your thoughts about both of those.

Nick Kalm (17:07)
Absolutely. Well, yeah, I think a lot of companies have gotten slapped down for wading into political issues that they shouldn’t have waded into. And again, they were encouraged to do that by a vocal minority of their employees or maybe some activist groups or maybe the CEO or his or her spouse encouraged them to do it. And it’s problematic. And meanwhile, they really weren’t talking about the issues that directly related to what’s happening in society, what’s happening with the U.S. government or state governments.

or foreign governments and the business. So talking about how societal factors, political factors impact the business, every organization should be doing. Absolutely for the reasons you just talked about so that again it helps employees to feel like the company that they work for is a responsible company, is looking out for them, is savvy about these issues, is looking out for how things are going to impact the business and so forth. And that’s a big part of what they

need to absolutely do more of for sure and doing that kind of education and monitoring of these issues and then communicating what it would be like for the employees depending on this scenario or that scenario. Just gaming it out. again, they don’t they don’t want to be surprised and shocked by things that happen, but again being candid about some of this stuff could, you know, just being very open and honest about it. I mean this is we’re seeing a lot of companies doing it now and it’d be interesting to look under the hood and

how they’re doing it, know, companies are leaning in in a big way as we’ve talked about before into AI, right? And they’re talking about how AI is something that they’re using to justify keeping employment levels where they are or reducing them. And in fact, the companies like Chase and Amazon and others are leaning in heavily in terms of saying, yeah, we’re going to use AI and it’s going to replace a lot of the people that we have in this organization. Even just those kind of statements, whether they’re delivered on an earnings call,

or however they’re delivered internally, you know, if you don’t have context for that, if you’re not showing that you’re trying to be mindful of the impact that this is having on people and maybe you’re looking at ways to retrain people to do different jobs within the organization or whatnot, it ends up demoralizing people so much and then it ends up impacting the enterprise in significant ways. So that’s something else that you, I think that’s probably the biggest area that employers

really need to lean into and do now in a much more meaningful way is talk very candidly about AI and say yeah you know some of the functions that are shared services, back office, whatever you want to call it.

areas are being done now those are going to be done more with the use of AI. What does that mean for an employee in shared services? Let’s talk about what we’re doing. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You got to do that. You have to do that because everybody else in shared services that is going to be, my God, I’m going lose my job. I’m demoralized. I’m upset. I’m going to start drinking heavily. I’m going to start calling in sick, whatever. mean, there’s all kinds of

consequences that come from that and you can’t necessarily stop all the negative things from happening because there is going to be disruption for sure that’s coming in probably a lot but again you can talk about how you’re doing it thoughtfully how you’re doing it compassionately how you’re doing it in a way that tries to take care of the employees that have worked for you all of that stuff the goodwill that that can engender and the loyalty and the maintaining focus is something that’s so important and a huge opportunity

and risk for organizations today. ⁓

Phil Wilson (20:52)
Yeah.

I think, you know, in an earlier episode, I was talking with Evelyn about the, you know, what motivates people to, you know, either, you know, either it be engaged and kind of connected to their employer, or if those motivators aren’t being met, you know, you sometimes will seek answers like outside of the organization. And a lot of people seek out unions because they don’t feel like they have any control. They don’t feel like they’re

getting anywhere there. They don’t really feel like they’re working for a winning company. And I think that like what you’re talking about, those types of proactive communications, even when the news isn’t always necessarily great, those proactive communications are, a way to regularly show that, we are thinking about. So, so first of all, you are working for a winning team. Like here’s how we are taking advantage of this situation.

to make sure that we are ahead of our competitors, that we are going to be a successful company. And that helps us provide as many jobs as we possibly can. So there’s that. There’s, you know, need for achievement. So this is how we’re going to respond in a way that our team, yes, your job is probably going to be impacted by this. But how are we going to help you learn and grow so that you can continue to contribute at an even higher level, you know, taking advantage of the tools, you know,

versus the tool means you’re dispensable, right? There’s different ways to communicate this that lean into these things that are motivators. it’s also just a regular drumbeat of this is how we think about it and the way that we are taking advantage, not just like we’re at the mercy of these forces.

Nick Kalm (22:20)
Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah, two things I would add. agree with everything you just said. Two things I would add. One that is not union related necessarily and one that is. The one that’s not union related, especially with the Gen Z demographic in particular that gets a lot of attention appropriately enough because they’re already a third of the workforce and it’s growing rapidly every day, is they want to feel like they work for an organization that’s providing some societal benefit, right? That there’s some, that they can believe in what the organization is doing. Not just see them as a winner, to your point, which is absolutely important.

and important across all age demographics but specifically for the Gen Z people, know, feeling am I doing something good? Am I working for an organization that has a positive societal benefit? I mean, again, I don’t care if you’re, you know, beer and liquor manufacturer. There’s societal benefits to that in terms of supporting growers and supporting social interaction and avoiding social isolation. I mean, there’s lots of different things

that you can talk about there or if you’re know ExxonMobil and you’re you know or Shell or some other big you know extractive industry there’s still obviously some societal benefit that you can create there again don’t just assume it’s going to be known if you don’t highlight it that’s the one piece on the union side where the vulnerability is is not only the things that you talked about but the sense of belonging right feeling like you belong with your fellow employees feeling like you belong with the organization the organization

can’t take that stuff for granted because it’s not going to be known and then the unions nice way to kind of create that is like listen don’t you want to join with your fellow employees and advocate for more of a voice more compensation more flexibility whatever the real or perceived pain point is in a way an employer can neutralize a lot of that not necessarily completely but neutralize or minimize it is to foster that sense of belonging

celebrating individual team achievement, celebrating team achievement, talking about other kinds of recognition, public, both internal within the organization and external, using social media, using local trade groups and civic groups and stuff like that. The more that they can do that to foster that sense of belonging, bringing in the family as we talked about, open houses, Having a tour and a picnic and,

Phil Wilson (25:01)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (25:02)
deciding on summer Fridays, invite your kids and family on Friday afternoon, we’re gonna have hot dogs and popcorn and ice cream. You know, I mean it’s a few thousand bucks you spend something like that, but the goodwill in a lot of communities if you do that with the family and if you invite the actual community in too, it’s huge. It’s huge. Again, it’s and I’m not talking about this like, my god these are so revolutionary creative ideas, but it’s like it’s building block stuff, but it’s shocking to me how often it does not happen.

Phil Wilson (25:20)
Yeah.

Nick Kalm (25:31)
you

Phil Wilson (25:32)
so true. I, and I think that’s a, yeah, I want to bring up one other thing about grapevine, but, but I think this is a really important point to emphasize this. It does. It sounds, you know, like if, if you were going to predict what we were going to talk about on this episode about proactive communications, like pretty much everybody that got here could have written the, you know, the script for the things that we would talk about. It’s obvious. It’s not hard to do.

Nick Kalm (25:39)
Hmm.

Phil Wilson (25:58)
but most people don’t do it. And, um, yeah, it’s like me and exercise, but it’s a, but like that’s your, you know, you have to do it. And we, we have, we have here, we have like a very, just as it’s a very consistent communication rhythm. It’s part of, you know, the orange binder over my shoulder. That’s our, you EOS playbook, but the, um, but you know, every quarter we do a state of the company, right? I do a little presentation.

Nick Kalm (26:00)
They don’t. It’s amazing.

Phil Wilson (26:27)
where I talk about, we emphasize these are our core values. This is like what, this is what we do. This is how we do it. So that’s, we do that. I mean, we talk about it a lot more than just every quarter, but like there’s this, every quarter, you know you’re gonna hear about that. Every quarter we go over, what did we do last quarter? What were our results last quarter? What are our goals for this quarter? What are our key priorities for this quarter?

And then I usually tell some dumb story to try to emphasize what our theme is for the upcoming quarter. But that is a rhythm. And everyone knows it’s going to happen. it’s a point. And it’s not hard to do. But would it be easy to skip that in a quarter? It would be. So you have to just stay.

Nick Kalm (27:06)
Sure.

Phil Wilson (27:09)
you know, committed to that. And it doesn’t have to be, again, it’s not fancy, right? It’s just, doesn’t have to be fancy. It is as simple as can be, but it’s just, you have to have that discipline to do it.

Nick Kalm (27:20)
Absolutely. Yeah, no question. mean, again, and people would say, know, Phil, your work.

your organization is not a huge organization, Nick, your organization is not a huge organization, it’s easier for you to do that. I call BS on that. I mean, again, it may be easier to just gather our people because we have a smaller team, but it doesn’t, it’s not hard to do. You just have to prioritize. Like you were talking about exercise. It’s like prioritizing eating well or reading instead of watching TV or whatever it is that you know you should do or that a doctor tells you you should do for a whole host of reasons. It’s just a matter of prioritizing. That’s what it is. And, but the benefit

Phil Wilson (27:52)
Right.

Nick Kalm (27:54)
are so huge and the costs of not doing so are also huge.

Phil Wilson (27:59)
Yeah, it’s

the employee relations version of eat your vegetables. All right, so, so, well, we’ll, go from vegetables to fruit. the grapevine, let’s talk a little bit about your, yeah. So, you know, the grapevine exists. It’s in every single organization, right? Like humans, we gossip like that is it’s built into the hard wiring. talk a little bit about sort of how, like, how do you.

Nick Kalm (28:01)
Exactly, exactly.

Yes, that was good. ⁓

Phil Wilson (28:24)
Because a lot of times a grapevine takes the one thing that they hear and turn it into this whole catastrophe. Is there a way that companies can take advantage of the grapevine?

Nick Kalm (28:33)
Absolutely, yes. And you’re absolutely right. It’s again, it’s one of those things to you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist because it exists. So since you know it exists, you should take advantage of it. So what we’ve found with companies, what we’ll do, especially if they’re undertaking some significant new initiative, or there’s something else going on, we will talk to them and go, what we need to do is identify your internal ambassadors. You can call them ambassadors, you can call them champions of change, you can do it. And again, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a 10 person

employment place or you’re a plant with 2,000 employees. The people who are running those operations, if you said to them, forget title, I don’t care title, I don’t care tenure, tell me who you would say, if I had to make you, you make a list right now of five or ten of the most influential people in the organization at this location, can you give me their names? yeah, there’s this one, this one, this one, this great. Okay, of those ten names, how many

of them do you think are at least open to communicating factual to positive information about the organization and what’s going on. I would say these six. The last four, just, they’re very influential, but they’re influential in a negative way. Okay, forget them. Let’s at least be aware, as we talked about on the other episode, of what they may say negatively. We should be aware and be prepared to proactively deal with those things. But the six that would say positive things, let’s bring them together. Let’s make them feel special.

share some of the information that we are hoping is going to get out there and get amplified. It may be communicated through some of the other channels we’ve talked about on this episode, but specifically giving them, we’re looking to you because you’re a leader in this organization. We want to make sure that if people have questions, you have the answers and that you know what we’re trying to achieve here. So let us talk to you because you’re so influential. First of all, ⁓ you know, it’s like the Borat, King of the castle, King of the castle. You feel, you feel important because you’ve been brought together to do this, but you

Phil Wilson (30:26)
That’s it.

Nick Kalm (30:30)
lean into that influencer, that internal influencer, and have them feed the grapevine the information you want them to feed.

Phil Wilson (30:38)
Yeah.

People are going to go and ask them what do they think anyway? So like help make sure that they have the facts that they have, you know, a good understanding. mean, on top of that, again, it’s just like going to your supervisors and educating them with the message first. If they don’t get it or if you’re, you know, if the informal leaders don’t get the message or have questions or don’t understand it or don’t think it’s, you know,

Nick Kalm (30:42)
Exactly.

Phil Wilson (31:05)
don’t like the way it’s being communicated. Wouldn’t you like to know that first before you communicate it and then you find out that key influencers in your organization hate this thing maybe because you’ve just communicated it poorly. Like they have questions that you haven’t answered. And then, yeah, so I think there’s that. also, I’m not saying you’re wrong about don’t talk to the.

Nick Kalm (31:23)
Absolutely.

Phil Wilson (31:29)
to the negative folks, but if they truly are influential, also benefit by kind of getting their, like what is their pushback gonna be? Cause that also helps you, I mean, first of all, you might convince them that this is a good idea, right? So it’s like, have that opportunity and if they think it’s a good idea, you’re never gonna have, you won’t have any bumpiness because, know, wow, even that guy thinks this is a good idea, that it must be a great idea.

Nick Kalm (31:44)
Right, yeah.

That’s No, you’re right.

Phil Wilson (31:55)
But they’re also going to help educate you about, don’t think this is a good idea for reason A, B, and C. Well, now those are the things you need to have in your communications to hang your flag on,

Nick Kalm (32:04)
You’re absolutely right. Yes. No,

you should. You should try to surface from them whatever is their concerns are and address them as much as you can. Again, part of it is, you know, a lot of the stuff that we just talked about, all this good kind of hygiene stuff that we were talking about is hard enough to convince companies to do. It’s like it’s even harder to go and have them try to go talk to their known critics, but all of it would be smart to do. No, it would all be smart to do for sure.

Phil Wilson (32:24)

Nick, ⁓ if this isn’t something that you’re good at, one thing we didn’t bring up that we, we’ve talked a little bit on earlier episodes, but you know, in particular in that next 52 weeks group, like the people that have been through a union election, there’s a tendency.

at the end of that election to just go want to take a breath. You’ve been communicating, communicating, communicating, communicating. you really want to get back and just focus on the business. There is a tendency to just create this vacuum where there was a lot of communication happening and now like nothing is being said. So, ⁓ yeah. So talk, talk just briefly about that and then give me just like what, you know, if I, this isn’t something that I’m good at and I haven’t spent a lot of time on, what are two or three things that I should start doing now just to like,

Nick Kalm (32:46)
yeah.

it’s terrible. Yeah.

Phil Wilson (33:11)
get going in the right direction.

Nick Kalm (33:12)
Yep, no, absolutely.

The thing we talked about a little bit before it’s like the organizations that do minimal communications in ordinary times then they have a union election and they go bananas and communicate like crazy then the election is over they go back to doing nothing. What is that doing that’s operant conditioning the psychologists talk about that and the conditioning there is okay if you want to have the company pay attention to you threaten organizing a union and then they will pay a lot of attention to you but then they’ll go right back to not so the only way to stop them from

going back to not is to be nonstop organizing. I mean is that really the message that you want to be communicating to your employees? Of course it’s not. So that’s that piece. For the just what to do generally it’s again you know how do you just look at all of the different ways that you know your employees consume information and use all of them to some degree. Now the people who are coming up with that stuff and disseminating it are gonna feel like my god there’s so much.

But as we’ve talked about on this episode, people, it’s like sampling. It’s like when I go to Costco on a Saturday, right? It’s like, ⁓ I’m going to sample this. I’m going to sample that. Then you go through and you sample stuff. You’re not just sitting down and waiting to be served a 10 course dinner of information. People are consuming stuff on social media. They’re consuming stuff via text. They’re consuming stuff via billboards, by bulletin boards, by whatever it is. Think about all of that stuff. Use all.

Phil Wilson (34:18)
You

Nick Kalm (34:40)
of it. Don’t bombard everything all at once, one Tuesday it’s this, Wednesday it’s that, Thursday it’s this, and do that all the time, ordinary time, so that when you have to communicate more intensively because you’ve got a potentially a union election, then you’re just in that rhythm and you’re already communicating a lot so employees expect to be hearing from you in a lot of different ways.

Phil Wilson (35:04)
great, super practical advice. Well, Nick, thanks again so much for ⁓ joining us on the show. It’s always ⁓ delightful and you always have a lot of great insights. So thanks again for joining us.

Nick Kalm (35:16)
Thanks for having me, Phil. Great to see you. Okay.

Phil Wilson (35:19)
See you soon.