Get rid of that smell in your next town hall

Workplaces can do internal communication better. Try these four interventions.

Cheers! Welcome to the Mode/Switch newsletter, a work-culture thingamabob with doable, vital counsels so you and your team can thrive. Glad you’ve stopped by.

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Wowza, the times, they are intense at work. So much fear about AI’s displacement of workers and its confused and tardy adoption. So much risk to company profits in the trade wars. So much detachment among employees.

Many of your coworkers are, in ordinary times, good-natured and reasonable people. But if you hand some of them a mic in a company-wide meeting these days, their tears and strained voices make clear how difficult work culture has become.

The company town hall reference in this newsletter’s title is a cheap shot at a communication event that’s actually quite difficult to pull off well. But let our dysfunctional town halls stand in for all the ways our organizations miscommunicate. When your manager replies-all and lets everyone know you missed a deadline. When the company leaders offer conflicting explanations for a budget deficit. When a coworker announces a poorly judged opinion on Viva Engage. When the email says, “Not my monkey, not my circus.”

How can we do internal communication that doesn’t suck? I’ve got some ideas.

What even is internal communication?

Internal communication’s not just a personal interaction on the job. If you look over the shoulder of any personal message, you’ll glimpse a larger organizational conversation as well. That’s internal communication, and its effectiveness determines what it feels like to work in your company, what it feels like to problem-solve with your team, what it feels like to be there. Think of internal comms as the processes and the tools by which your company builds and shares what everybody needs to know and feel to do their work.

You already know, even without reading the recent Gallagher Report, that internal communication doesn’t feel so good these days. Experts like Rachel Miller, Jenni Field, Sue Dewhurst, and Liam Fitzpatrick point to conspicuous mistakes:

• Bombarding meetings with endless PowerPoint decks.

• Cascading policy changes without listening to workers.

• Switching communication channels without bringing the community along.

• Neglecting to measure what’s actually working communicatively and what’s not.

One vital way to correct these problems is to develop sharper communication strategies: identifying problems, naming outcomes, selecting tools, using metrics.

But for all sorts of reasons, such strategies aren’t working—yet. Although companies are investing hugely in comms, their work cultures still haven’t built trust or improved engagement enough. I know from my own conversations with org leaders that they complain about the naiveté of their employees, but I also hear coworkers and colleagues blaming leaders for mission drift or for being out of touch.

In the gaps between leaders and their people, gloom abounds and cynicism circulates.

Four interventions on poor communication framing

This newsletter usually recommends a mode/switch, though this week I’m gonna call it a frame switch instead. Frames become palpable in the wording we regularly resort to and the stories we turn to in order to make sense of chaos. Here’s a quartet of bad framing habits—and some ways to reframe them, too.

1. The Scapegoat. When your organization’s threatened, it’s very hard to resist looking for a villain. Kenneth Burke called this vilification: you spin a story that implies a simpler causality and clearer culpability than the universe allows. If you’re like me, it feels briefly good to have someone to blame. I enjoy feeling even briefly smart.

Try reframing the scapegoating by asking What Else Is True? Here’s a script: The easy story here is that he’s to blame. But—help me complicate that narrative! What’s it missing?

2. The Binary. When you’re feeling uncertain, it’s strangely consoling to resort to the dualism of either/or thinking. It makes the world feel explicable again. And so you fall into questions like, “Are we going to make—or not?”

Try reframing your question with curiosity about multiple futures: What are two or three possibilities you’re worried about? What are three futures that make you excited?

3. The Ultimatum. This one’s especially tempting for leaders who have spent more time thinking about the particulars of a situation than their employees have. Instead of doing the persuasive work of bringing everybody else along, it’s tempting to say, “Just trust me on this one. It’s my way or the highway.”

Instead, try Them-There-Then perspective shifting. This re-frame approaches a choice from the perspective of some other “them” (other colleagues or divisions or sectors). Or it thinks from the standpoint of another “there” (another building, another state, another neighborhood). Or it shifts to another “then”—perhaps the distant future or even the recent past. For example, you might say, How we might look back on this moment twenty-five years from now? or What advice would we give, if we could talk to our organization three years ago?

4. The Doomerism If you’re good at modeling, if you’re good at prognosticating persuasively, you can fall into a doomerism fallacy: If we don’t make this change or that policy by such and such a year, we’re in hopeless trouble. But then, like usual, your company blows past that deadline—and your team understandably asks, “Well, what’s the use of anything now?” As my colleague Debra Rienstra has pointed out, there’s an equal and opposite fallacy called “hopium.” But both pessimism and optimism forget that all models of the future are wrong. Some, however, are more useful than others.

Try reframing with trade-off language. Our predictions all assume that this set of limitations will always be our only set of limitations. But can we trade these limits for others? The goal isn’t to eliminate limits; it is instead to be limited more functionally. Your org is stuck. But it might be stuck better than it is now.

Here’s what internal communications need most

It’s a wonder you’re still reading this newsletter, given everything else in your inbox. My friend Elan Babchuck likes to say that there’s something about digital communication that tends towards Dumping on Others. We all have so much to deal with that all we can think to do is push digital objects towards other people. (For the record, I don’t mind if you dump, I mean, share, this newsletter with someone else!)

But we can do better than dumping and running. Our working and wellbeing depend on seemingly small communicative moves. Be not deceived.

So, before you move on to your next thing, stand for a moment on the shore of your work and look around. Your curiosity gives others room to exhale. And because every giver’s also a receiver, you get to enjoy the grace as well.