This blog is authored by guest contributor Paul Jones, Head of Insight at Sequel Group.
Paul leads Sequel’s Insight team, spending his time devising and delivering award-winning strategic campaigns, running audit and measurement projects for multinational clients, facilitating training sessions and producing our quarterly IC Trends reports. Having been part of the Sequel team for 25 years, he has seen measurement move from the bottom of most IC teams’ priority lists to the middle and believes emerging digital technologies will help push it even higher in the coming years.
Time – and employees bemoaning the lack of it – is a consistent factor in whether today’s internal comms are read, scanned or ignored. Sequel’s Head of Insight, Paul Jones, outlines why communicators need to take this growing challenge seriously.
The Comfort, Challenge and Surprise of Focus Groups
One of the things I most love about my job is running focus groups as part of internal communication audits. Facilitating these sessions provides the ideal mix of comfort, challenge and surprise.
There’s some comfort because I’ve run a lot of them in the last 15 years or so. And in that time I’ve learned how to oversee them through a mix of Market Research Society training, guidance from mentors, and real-world practice.
They’re also challenging. As a facilitator you need to do multiple things at once. It’s a bit like being a drummer: your left hand is asking questions; your right hand is actively listening; your left foot is assessing whether the detour the conversation has taken is digging up gold or just old bits of tin; and your right foot is making sure the extroverts don’t dominate the discussion.
And while all of this is happening, I’m also doing my level best to make sure we don’t over-run.
But even though I must have facilitated 100+ sessions over the years, they can still surprise me. I always do my research beforehand, but you never really know what you’re going to find once you peek behind the curtain. You’re dealing with human beings, who can throw a curveball at any moment.
There are certainly a few comments that have stuck in my mind from these sessions.
- “I was driving in to work this morning and I heard on the local radio news that my site is about to be closed. Why did I have to learn this from the media, and not from my manager or the CEO?”
- “I don’t really know why I’m here. I joined a focus group a couple of years ago and nothing ever happened, so it was a waste of time. Are you going to waste my time as well?”
- “Can you bring back the printed magazine that got cancelled last year? I used to love reading that on the toilet.”
And here’s a more tasteful comment from a recent session:
“You can send me as many emails as you like. But unless it’s saying ‘our company has gone bust’, then I don’t care.”
That comment really grabbed my attention. Often I hear from people who reluctantly admit that they might sometimes delete an IC newsletter without looking at it, but it’s rare for an attendee to be so direct.
The reason behind this guy’s attitude was even more interesting. He initially said he didn’t care, but that wasn’t really true. If he happened to see a story that Jane in the Finance team had won a prestigious industry award, then he was pleased for her.
But at the root of his statement was a simple fact: he was so incredibly busy every day that he simply didn’t have the headspace to think about anything that wasn’t directly related to his job.
As a result, he had chosen to block out anything he deemed as ‘noise’. All he cared about was information that directly helped him to do his job. Everything else would be ignored.
And while this might be an extreme example, in our recent research projects we’ve been hearing similar things from people in all kinds of roles, particularly on the front line. There’s a consistent story: I have so little time, that I have to be selective about what I choose to engage with.
This is why every second counts.
Why Every Second Counts
My co-host Nick Andrews and I will be exploring this topic in the next Sequel/VMA webinar. Join us on Wednesday 6 May when we’ll share findings from some of our latest IC research projects:
- How much time do employees typically have to engage with IC materials?
- What are they saying about the challenge of keeping up to date?
- How does that make them feel?
- What are the risks for businesses?
- What do employees want to see done differently as a result?
- How can we tackle this challenge from a Comms perspective?
We’d be delighted to see you there.
Get your tickets here: Why Every Second Counts: Insight From Employee Audits to Improve Engagement Tickets, Wednesday, May 6 • 1 PM – 2 PM GMT+1 | Eventbrite
Looking to improve how your people engage with internal comms?
Get in touch with Sequel here.
