Episode #180: Getting Your Messaging Right In A Crisis

There are plenty of experts providing insight and recommendations for corporates with their messaging during this Covid-19 crisis, but not so much attention is being paid to our internal messaging. The public, customers and shareholders need to be fed updates and assurance by the company’s PR department. Funnily enough the PR department rarely gets involved in the internal messaging of the boss. Basically, the leaders are expected to work it out themselves. Usually they are pretty hopeless communicators at the best of times and now in the worst of times, this ragged assembly are exposed as gross underperformers.

Having people gathered around in the office or neatly arrayed at the town hall, makes communication relatively straightforward and easy. Having everyone dispersed and sitting at home in ignoble isolation is a different ask of the leader. The Covid-19 crisis is scary, from a physical health perspective but also from a financial health viewpoint.

Watching TV and reading the newspapers about rising numbers of people catching the virus and then seeing the associated mortality rates climb, tells you this is serious. Watching companies shut down, many going bankrupt, millions of workers out of jobs and the share markets plummeting, under the weight of the economic consequences of the virus spread, adds to everyone’s fear roster.

The team are worried about their family’s health, the overall lifestyle disruption, their job security and here you are, their leader. What are you telling them? How often are you telling them and what mediums are you using? There is a tricky balance required. We must be transparent, without triggering alarm and panic. We must provide hope, without being Pollyanna.

We also have to be well informed of what is happening because things change very quickly. Within a few short days, British PM Boris Johnson went from talking about building “herd immunity” and letting the virus spread, to locking down the whole country. One minute Tokyo Governor Koike is talking about the calling off of the Olympics being unthinkable, to having the whole shebang postponed. Within days, President Trump went from saying all the troops would be home for Easter, to instead chastising Governors for not locking down their states to stop the spread of Covid-19.

Most companies in Japan have a daily chorei or huddle, usually in the mornings, amongst the work group. If you don’t, then now is a good moment to create one. The leader must keep this chorei cadence going, even if everyone is now beaming in by video. Not everyone might make it, but do your best to insist that this is a priority. Continuity builds comfort that although things have changed, some normality, some stability can be assured. These are good opportunities to remind everyone of the strategy in place for dealing with this crisis. If you missed that bit of leadership fundamentals at the start, then put a strategy together pronto.

Update everyone on the company’s situation. The cash situation is the difference between survival and just becoming a memory of what once was. Tell people the truth. This must be coupled with reference to the plan to get everyone through this crisis. Hope and reality have to be doled out equally.

Follow up with regular written communication. If you are a foreigner speaking in Japanese, your range of vocabulary will rarely be equal to that of your mother tongue. More likely, you don’t speak fluent Japanese. In both cases get things down in writing as well. If you have internal resources who are now freed up, get the text into Japanese. Even if that isn’t possible, then send it out in English. Most Japanese read English much better than they can speak it. The live speech delivery may have presented some audio clarity issues, as well as linguistic challenges, so you can’t be satisfied that everyone got the message.

Try to increase the amount of one on one communication as much as possible. Reach out to your people sitting at home. Broken apart from their routine of 16 hours a day at work with colleagues, this new order can be disconcerting and lonely for many of the troops. Hearing your voice and knowing that you were thinking of them is much more important than the content of your Churchillian call to arms.

Create a coffee time for staff to join in on-line and shoot the breeze. Staff are constantly chatting, chatting, chatting throughout the day anyway. Now we can recreate that personal connection with our colleagues, although compressed, into a virtual coffee time every afternoon. You should join in as well and just chat. Don’t make it a rerun of the morning’s rousing call to crash through or crash. Keep it light, communal and interactive. Draw out those who are a bit quiet and have them speak up, so that they feel included and their colleagues can hear their voice.

Use video, text, phone calls and use them more frequently than you imagine is enough. We are serving the weakest links in our teams in these times of crisis. You might be independent, resilient, tough, a survivor, but you are also in the minority amongst your team. Don’t see their world, through your personal prism.