Phil Wilson (00:01)
Nick Kalm welcome back to the Left of Boom show. It’s great to see you.

Nick Kalm (00:05)
Phil, great to see you too. Thanks for having me again.

Phil Wilson (00:07)
Yeah, so if you haven’t seen other episodes with Nick, Nick is the leader and founder of Reputation Partners, a good friend and also work colleague. We do a lot of work together. So Nick, welcome back to the show.

Nick Kalm (00:24)
Appreciate it, good to be here.

Phil Wilson (00:25)
So today’s episode, we’re talking about communicating right of boom. And when I wrote the book Left of Boom, Left of Boom is really talking more like the boom event in Left of Boom is like a union election. The current series that we’re recording right now is around the next 52 weeks. And most of the people that are listening to this are in a situation where they’re trying to avoid a future election. So if you’re actually in that one year after a vote or

you just in general are trying to create a workplace where people don’t think a union is a good idea. And in those workplaces, there’s still boom events, right? There’s all kinds of things that can be boom events. so what I’d like you to, like, let’s just start right there as how do you think about and talk to your clients about dealing with these sort of, know, boom events, which is things that would create

Phil Wilson (01:24)
you know, animosity or negative PR things like dirt just during the regular course of business.

Nick Kalm (01:29)
Sure, no absolutely. I think, Phil and you know this and certainly the listeners know this as well. mean people are under a tremendous amount of stress these days. Financial stress, personal stress, all the political environment that we’re living in today has just created a tremendous amount of stress. The hangover around inflation, employment uncertainty because of AI and the return of layoffs that we’re seeing with companies as well. All of this is really having a big factor now on people

Phil Wilson (01:38)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (01:59)
stress and I think employers need to have a good baseline understanding that these are issues that are just sort of bubbling below the surface in every organization whether it is a great place to work or one of those places there where morale is terrible and people can’t wait to get out and so it doesn’t matter where you are on that continuum if you’re not aware of the stress that people are under the pressure that people are under that’s the baseline understanding you have to come into it understanding with on top of it, is the organization communicating well with the employees? Is it listening well? Does it have a good handle on employee sentiment and turnover and other very easily and important metrics like safety, attendance, turnover, how easy it is to recruit, how much you’re retaining people, know, morale, all of these things. These are all good canaries in the coal mine indicators of the fact that you are vulnerable.

So you put those two together, what’s going on specifically at your organization plus what’s going on in the country and the world and that gives you a good indicator of anything that you’re going to be doing that’s going to change the employees experience. Whether it’s scheduling, compensation, staffing, benefits, work location, AI integration, I mean the list goes on and on. There’s so many different things which you alluded to in your introductory comments still that can impact the dynamic but you have to understand the whole thing and so what we’re telling our clients is understand and appreciate where your employees are coming from in terms of what they’re dealing with on an everyday basis. Understand where you are as an organization in terms of employee sentiment, turnover, safety, productivity, all those other things and then think long and hard about either the changes that you’re putting in place as an organization, you know, if you’re deciding to change benefits or compensation structure or staffing or scheduling or any number of other things. And then there’s all the other things that are just happening just in your industry. What is your competitor doing? What is your plant neighbor doing down the road? they’re doing this? That means we should do this too. Well, we can’t do that. We told you three months ago we can’t do that. Yeah, but the company that’s across the street that’s offering two dollars more an hour for the same job, they are doing it. Those are the issues that are going on.

Phil Wilson (04:07)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (04:21)
Yeah. And that, and you you make a good point, like that’s just sort of table stakes, right? Like everyone is kind of experiencing, experiencing that and you have to be able to anticipate, okay, this, this is a change that’s going to occur. what are the likely, you know, neck, what’s the negative things that are going to be said about this change and, and anticipating those in advance, think is really important. Maybe, maybe talk a little bit about how, cause I do want to get to more kind of like crisis type events, but here we’re just talking about kind of regular day to day doing business. How, how do you get folks kind of in that mindset of, you know, always have that like extra chair in the room, so to speak of how are my employees, especially people that maybe, you know, not, not the people that are cheerleaders, but the people that are going to complain about pretty much whatever we do, like what are they going to say and how do we respond to that?

Nick Kalm (05:23)
Absolutely. Well, yeah, and I think that’s you’re exactly right to point that out because that is you know, and your listeners I’m sure intuitively know that you know, there’s every employee base is a bell curve. You’ve got the ones that bleed the company colors. They’re like they’re so loyal. They’re all the way at the one extreme. You’ve got the people at the other extreme who the company can do no right. They are the complainers, the rabble rousers, the agitators, and then there’s that giant persuadable middle in the group. And that’s always when we work with clients we talk about trying to reach that for persuadable middle and anticipate to your point what are the critics going to say? How are they going to characterize what’s going on? And again the lens that we try to encourage everybody to think through and I’ve mentioned this many times before, human nature is such that change is not viewed as a positive term. Any kind of change unless you’re talking about somebody who is in a constant state of pain or discomfort or dissatisfaction. And again you’re talking about that persuadable middle. You tell somebody in that persuadable middle, hey there’s going

Phil Wilson (05:58)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (06:23)
to be a change in your job responsibilities. Your boss says that to you. Nobody’s going, oh, goody, I’m getting a promotion. I’m getting a company car. I’m getting a bigger bus. Your human nature is that it’s going to be something worse. You think about it, the analogy I use too is like, you go home and your spouse says, I want to talk about a change in our relationship. Your mind doesn’t go to, great, more romance. We’re going to have more laughs together. You don’t think that way. You think, oh my god, she wants a divorce.

Phil Wilson (06:38)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (06:53)
to separate, know, concerned I’m spending too much time on the golf court, whatever it is, right? Human nature, you have to understand that that’s what it is. So what do you do about that? You have to always condition your employees back to the employee dynamic. You have to condition them to, I know change is uncomfortable. I know there’s uncertainty. I know this is going to be perhaps concerning to you. I’m going to give you the answers I can, and there’s answers I can’t give. But here’s why change is important. Here’s why being nimble

Phil Wilson (06:54)
Yeah.

Nick Kalm (07:23)
is important. Here’s why being flexible is important. And the assurance that any kind of change that’s done is going to be done, to your point a moment ago, with consideration for the employee. Not just consideration for the customer, not just consideration for the shareholder, not just consideration for the regulator or others, but for the employee. And that’s not, I think, one of the challenges in which why you and I have very busy practices, because it’s not necessarily the natural inclination of

Nick Kalm (07:52)
a lot of organizations to think about the employee needs and concerns first.

Phil Wilson (07:57)
Yeah, obviously. if you don’t, you know, if you, that’s not really like top of mind, then you’re going to stumble in this area anyway. and I think the, the, the, the other part of that is almost like you should be thankful for the folks that are the naysayers that are going to throw rocks at whatever you do because anticipating what they’re going to say and already knowing, you know, the answer to that shows that you did think about how is this going to impact employees and what are the things that you think people might complain about this move. And here’s the reason that we, even though we knew that was part of the reaction, we made the decision anyway because it’s the right thing to do. you explain, I think it’s a couple of pieces there. It’s really important that when you make decisions, all of your decisions, but particularly ones that you think are going to be responded to, you know, negatively or at least lukewarmly, you know, why did you make this decision? And it should be based on like the foundational principles of your business, right? We don’t make decisions. Yeah, we don’t make decisions to make our customers mad. We don’t make decisions to make our employees mad. We don’t make decisions because we’re mean. We make decisions because we believe this is the right thing to do to run our business profitably and safely.

Nick Kalm (09:08)
Absolutely. Right.

Phil Wilson (09:25)
and they have high quality and like that’s why. And sometimes those decisions are hard and sometimes those decisions negatively impact people that we care about. But we have this kind of higher, you know, motive that we have. Like we have to take care of our customers or none of us have a job.

Nick Kalm (09:43)
Absolutely. No, exactly to your point. Leaning into the why is so important in all of this too.

Phil Wilson (09:47)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (09:49)
And even back to your first comment about understanding how the naysayers are giving you a gift, you’re absolutely right. I that’s certainly what we try to do when we work with clients. But even just for any organization that’s out there, understanding what their toughest internal critic is going to say before they make any kind of change or contemplate making a change, it’s similar to we were talking before we started recording. You’re a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer. But you see, the reason trial lawyers will sit there and they will introduce something that they know is negative with one of their witnesses so they can’t be gotcha’d by the other side. You bring up the negative, address it in the way you want to address it, it makes it less powerful as a weapon for the other side to use against you. That’s why it’s such a time-honored tradition in court, similar to enacting change initiatives and getting the naysayers and understanding what it is. But by speaking to them directly, again, even just acknowledging any kind of missteps that the company has had. This is another area that organizations struggle. They feel like they I’m sure you’ve seen this probably way more than I have even. Companies struggle with admitting that they missed the boat on something or made a mistake. But just the ability to do that engenders so much trust and goodwill and disarms to a large degree the naysayers. Because what else are they going to say? If the CEO says, look, we should have done a better job of anticipating this market change or this increase in our benefit cost or whatever it is, or we should have done a better job of providing the right content.

Phil Wilson (10:55)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (11:19)
for where we were six months ago or a year ago so that the change we’re implementing now doesn’t come as quite of a shock and we’ll own that. I imagine the power of saying a statement like that. The credibility that you then get as a leadership team by saying something like that is hard to measure. It’s so powerful.

Phil Wilson (11:37)
Yeah. Chris Matthews, you know, who had the show hard ball, had a book called hard ball before that. And that book, he has a chapter in there that I talk about in left a boom, but I think is really good advice to always kind of have in mind about this sort of stuff. But it’s called hang a flag on your problems. You know, so if you, like you just said, if you’re the one that brings up the, the, the negative thing and you’re like, I’m sure a lot of people are thinking X and it’s like that worst case.

Phil Wilson (12:05)
thing that you think could be thrown at you. You know, it shows first of all that you considered it. It also shows that you’re not afraid of that. Like, yep, this is something people might say about this. And it gives you a chance to then really frame the response as opposed to like reacting. You’re really kind of setting the playing field for that conversation which is a lot, which is way better than letting someone else frame that. And then now you’re on your heels, like defending. So I liked that idea of like, hang a flag on your problems.

Nick Kalm (12:41)
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it’s look, if you know there’s going to be a problem, you kick it into the open. You don’t sit there. And again, this is something we are often challenged with with our clients, you know, they’ll come to us and they’ll say, you know, we have this real problem. We’re really concerned that this is going to become public. We don’t know what we need to do to be ready for it and all of that. like, part of the time we’ll say, listen, it’s going to come out sooner or later. And frankly, these days, I mean, as we’ve learned from WikiLeaks and, and all kinds of whistleblowers over the years, I mean, there’s there’s too much money in whistleblowing and there’s too much unhappiness within employers, for people who, you know, are disgruntled, that stuff is going to come out. If something might come out, why not put it out there exactly to your point, on your terms, in the context that works for you, whatever mitigates it to the maximum extent possible. That’s, it’s a really key thing to do rather than just sit there and hope that something will not see the light of day and then be scrambling in a defensive posture if it does.

Phil Wilson (13:38)
Yeah. So, so I think that that’s like a good approach to the things that are where you, you know, in advance, like this is potentially an issue, you know, those are some really good practical ways to think about how, do we, how do we get ahead of that? How do we communicate around that? How do we message around that?

Let’s switch gears for a minute to things that you didn’t anticipate. Right. So like a, you know, a safety accident or, you know, a policy change that like was forced on you either like maybe the, you know, the administration changed rules or change, you the law changed. And so you have to do something kind of to respond to that that you couldn’t really have anticipated in advance. What kind of advice do you give to clients that are in that situation?

Nick Kalm (14:28)
Yeah, it’s as quickly as possible, provide as much context as you can. And ideally in those situations too as well, make it clear that it’s not because of something that the employer did or didn’t do that they should have done or not done, but to talk about something being a common industry practice if it is, number one. Number two, if it’s something else that the company is experiencing for the first time, lean into the company’s track record. Has the company been around for 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, 80 years, whatever? Because again, people tend to magnify. You think about, mean, even again, our friends in the media, they like,

Nick Kalm (15:03)
take individual examples and then basically paint a broad picture. You see an employer, a company has an accident. You know they’re going to be like, well clearly there’s unsafe conditions at XYZ Corporation. So what should XYZ Corporation do? They should say this is the first time we have had an accident like this in at least the last 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, 10 years, whatever. It’s that context or any other kind of you know complaint or issue like that or a regulatory change or anything else like that. We’re not alone

There’s studies show again data is your friend here. You can use data to show that something that’s happening to this organization is something that’s happening to hundreds or thousands of others or how common it is for something like this to happen. It tends to make it more everybody’s problem rather than just your employer’s problem and the people who employ you if you’re an employee problem. It’s like okay all right yeah it’s bad it’s too bad they didn’t see it coming but wow.

Phil Wilson (15:56)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (16:02)
So there’s that many health systems that are impacted by this new Medicaid or Medicaid CMS rule. Okay. All right. Or this new reimbursement. Okay. So how many of us are struggling with it? All right. That helps to know that. And it helps to make it more palatable when things like that can happen. And it helps to talk about whatever the company or the employer has done beforehand that seemed like they were generally trying to anticipate these kinds of things. We’re very active in our trade association. We’re monitoring.

Phil Wilson (16:06)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (16:32)
the what’s going on in Washington and in the state capitals. You know, we’re talking to others in our industry, going to industry conferences and stuff. So it’s like, because people go, how could you not see this coming? How could you, you know, these kind of acts of God or unanticipated events, people are going, my God, how does this happen? Are we being singled out? And what I just talked about addresses the no, we’re not being singled out. Does this happen all the time at your organization? No, that’s where you lean into the data and the years that this hasn’t happened or the infrequency of these things happening. And you talk about how the organization is engaged so that person would go well shouldn’t you have seen this coming well if they’re talking you know they’re talking to their elected officials and they’re active in their trade associations and they’re monitoring developments they’re kind of doing everything that a reasonable person would want them to do.

Phil Wilson (17:18)
Yeah. And I think there’s also some proactive things getting back to the sort of left of boom idea pro there’s some proactive steps that you can be taking even around things that might ultimately, you know, be a surprise. Like the event is a surprise, but the fact that you’re going to have to talk about your safety record or the fact that you’re going to have to talk about rule changes or policy changes or things that are happening in the industry. Like those are not surprises. you so, kind of having your story figured out ahead of that, that really helps you in the moment because when the crisis happens, you know, don’t have a lot of time to respond. there’s a lot of, a lot of people want to, you know, you know, weigh in on what we’re going to say and, you know, where the commas go and, you know, all, all that sort of stuff.

Maybe talk a little bit about what are some things proactively that you can do? And you’ve already mentioned a couple, but like, what can you proactively do to be as ready as you can for when the negative boom event does happen?

Nick Kalm (18:28)
Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I mean, as long as I’ve been in this business, and it’s a long time now, it shocks me how few employers spend the time to educate their employees about how their business works. You go to work at a big company or medium-sized company and you know, I have this job in this company, whatever it is, and it’s basically, and maybe I know the people who are providing me with either information or requests and I know where my output goes, but that’s as far as people understand. If you’re below the senior-most management level at a company, most people in that employer don’t know how their business works.

Phil Wilson (19:00)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (19:09)
fundamental things they can do is to educate their employees from top to bottom and from side to side. Here is how our business works. If you’re a hospital or a health system, okay, we care for patients. You know we care for patients. Who are our patients? Some of them are private pay, some of them are paid, their care is paid by the government. And then there’s other people that we pay to care for through charity care, even to something as simple as that health care example, do most employees in the health system know that? I think they don’t. I don’t think they do. And, you know, if we get money from a private payer, chances are it’s going to be more than the negotiated amount that government, federal, or state pays us. And then, of course, we don’t really get anything for the charity care we do. We’re just expected to do that, and then we claim it as a tax deduction. I’m oversimplifying it and using that one industry as an example, but again, it’s widget manufacturing.

Phil Wilson (19:40)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Nick Kalm (20:09)
Who are we making widgets for? Where do we buy the products? Are we getting them from China? guess what? Tariffs, China. So we used to get a ton of widgets for $500. And now, because of tariffs, those are $800. And we can either pass them along to our, again, just that basic business education so that when stuff happens that’s outside of the employer’s control, employees have context for understanding it. But what we’ve seen happen too often, and certainly in labor,

Nick Kalm (20:39)
issues and other issues that you and I have both seen, they try to kind of cram through a crash course in educating about, well we can’t do this because our costs would do this, and know, employees are like, wait a minute, okay, I need to understand this conflict that you’re dealing with. They don’t.

Phil Wilson (20:48)
Right and they don’t really care about it. I’d like, yeah, until they really like, until they really understand how the business makes money, they, you know, don’t tell me about how much it costs you. guys, you guys have millions of revenue and, millions of profit, you know, and that’s cause that’s the other thing that I think is really important. Cause you know, company, especially today, like companies just get hammered for being successful, right? If you make money, like you are evil and part of the problem and

Nick Kalm (21:06)
Right. Exactly.

Phil Wilson (21:22)
And the things that companies a lot of times don’t explain is, okay, yes, we had a billion dollars of profit last year, like the biggest companies do make, you know, billions of profit. But what like, what does that? So that’s profit. But that’s not like suitcases of money. Like, you know, walking to the beach, right? Like that profit gets invested back into the business.

Nick Kalm (21:34)
Billions, yeah.

Phil Wilson (21:50)
And so there’s a lot of that sort of explanation that people also just don’t understand. And if we don’t have profit, then we are out of business. So there’s a lot of those basics that just people don’t, and they see revenue, but they don’t know what the costs are and what the margins are. All of those points are really important.

Nick Kalm (22:03)
Totally.

Nick Kalm (22:15)
Hope I mean, can be exactly right. mean, and again, these days I’m seeing surveys and I’ve talked about it at a number of conferences. You heard me talk about it as well is, know, capitalism does not have an advocate these days and capitalism has public support that is lower than it’s been in years. Whereas socialism, the idea of socialism has eclipsed it, especially among younger people because to your exact point, profits, capitalism, business as a black eye, it’s had a, it has a, had a long-term image problem and ever

Phil Wilson (22:25)
Right.

Nick Kalm (22:45)
Everybody keeps ignoring this for year upon year at their peril. And I put it on, I mean I think it’s on government that needs to do a better job of educating people about that. It’s certainly industries, people like, I don’t want to, I’m not calling them out specifically, but people like US Chamber or Business Roundtable or National Association of Manufacturers and then certainly companies that are within those sectors need to be doing a much better job of explaining and defending the point you just made as perfectly as you did. I mean that’s it, it’s like, well so what do we do with profits?

So it’s great. We made a billion dollars in profits. That allows us to stay in business, to invest in increases of salary, to improve benefits, to upgrade our plants, to deal with higher costs from tariffs, to acquire other companies so that we have more economies of, I mean, all that stuff. just, again, they assume that, people are paying attention to that, which they’re not. They assume that people understand it innately, which they don’t. And they assume that people would agree with it if they did, and they won’t. So it’s like, all of these things that you can’t, you abdicate and then you sit there go, my god, why are employees so upset about this? Because of those things that you’ve taken for granted or just assume they’re with you and they’re not. Those are the things, and again, I’m sure people listening are going, well, it sounds good, Nick, I get it, but we don’t have time to do that, we don’t have money to do that. I’m like, okay, well, you know what, then the consequences of not doing that are what a lot of employers are now feeling when they approach boom.

Phil Wilson (24:14)
Yeah. Well, we’re getting kind of close to time. What I would like to ask you to end with is, give, give our listeners. I mean, you’re doing this and advising companies on this, you know, day in and day out and you do a terrific job of it. So you’re, you you’re, you’re talking to a client that hasn’t really like done much around communications, internal communications, and then potentially even external communications. So like, What do I start with? What are the three or four most important things for me to be thinking about and doing as I think about this idea of communicating around potential boom events?

Nick Kalm (24:56)
Yeah, I’d say it’s really two key things which we’ve already talked about on this call. One is what we were just talking about, which is educate your employees about how your business works. You can do it in fun ways. You can do it through town hall meetings. You can do it as something that pops up when people log into the intranet site. You can have it in break rooms. There’s all kinds of fun and creative ways you can do that. But educate your employees about how your business works is one. And two is the thing we talked about earlier in our call. Understand what your vulnerabilities are.

Phil Wilson (25:21)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Kalm (25:26)
what your critics are going to say. If you’re not doing employee surveys, do employee surveys. If you’re not doing employee focus groups, do employee focus groups. Create channels for employees to not only raise ideas, which hopefully they will, that are going to be productive money-making ideas for you, but concerns so that you can address them. Don’t wait till those things bubble up. If you do the, if anybody listening to this does those two things, just those two things, they will be so far ahead of the game in my opinion.

Phil Wilson (25:55)
Yeah. I’ll add the bonus tip that we also already discussed, but that’s the, you know, fight the urge to avoid talking about the negative thing, right? Go run to that negative thing and you know, it’s hang a flag on it, right? It’s going to get talked about. Like you said, people are going to assume the worst. So, so, you they, and they want to know, like they want to hear from the company, like even

Nick Kalm (26:03)
Yes. Yes. Hang a flag on it like you said, yeah.

Phil Wilson (26:22)
a company that’s been demonized during a union organizing campaign or whatever. people want to feel like their company like knows what they’re doing, that they’re thinking carefully about decisions that they make and changes that they make, that they are trying to be as successful as possible because that’s what provides me my job. And that’s what, you know, and then going back to like, it’s not even just explaining the, the, the,

how the business works because that’s super important. But it’s also like this is how we win in the marketplace. This is our strategy is to do these sorts of things better than anyone else that we compete with so that it’s both you know, we need to make money and here’s how we do that. But like here’s the things that we’ve got to do better than anyone else because that becomes the foundation that whenever the bad thing happens, you’re falling back on these are our core values. This is the way that we win in the market.

Nick Kalm (26:57)
Right. Absolutely.

Phil Wilson (27:20)
this is how our business works. And these are things that it’s not the first time you’ve ever heard.

Nick Kalm (27:25)
Exactly, you’re exactly right. Yeah, it is all three of those things for sure. No question about it.

Phil Wilson (27:30)
Yeah. Well, Nick, I think we’ve covered, I mean, this is obviously a topic that you can go very, very deep on and you and I have both spent decades dealing with. But I do think this is a really good kind of quick foundation. If any of our listeners are interested in how to do a better job, both proactively communicating, because we have another episode.

Phil Wilson (27:57)
on communicating sort of the left side of Boom around employee relations, or for sure, if you are involved in crisis communications, be sure to reach out to Nick. They do amazing work. So Nick, I just really appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us again on Left of Boom.

Nick Kalm (28:12)
Always a pleasure, Phil. Thank you. Yep.

Phil Wilson (28:14)
Yeah, talk to you soon.