The National Weather Service reminded us this week that we’re still months away from clearing hurricane season, which runs through the end of November. The agency announced Monday it is monitoring a tropical wave over a section of the Atlantic ocean (between the western coast of Africa and the Caribbean) with an 80% chance of forming into a tropical storm, which would be named Gabrielle.
Don’t worry, it’s not “Threat Level Midnight.” But natural disasters and severe weather events cause multibillions in damages each year and were responsible for “568 direct or indirect fatalities” last year alone, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Ahead of, and during, these events, HR teams and leaders could maximize internal comms tools and strategy to support both employees and the business.
“I think that transparency, honesty, integrity, even vulnerability, are really important for HR leaders and communicators together in these times, because it’s what creates or breaks the trust between the employee and that business,” said David Maffei, VP and GM at employee communications and experience platform Staffbase.
Over-communication is key? Yep. If you’re worried you’re sending out too much information, chances are you’re not.
“In these times of crisis, over-communication is accepted, and it’s actually required,” Maffei said “I think sometimes organizations fear over-communication, but the lack of communication leads to assumptions…and if you’re making assumptions around what’s happening and what it means for you, you are more often than not going to choose the wrong thing.”
If you’re not over-communicating with your employees, then you’re putting them in a situation where they need to guess the right choice, according to Maffei. He said this is true both for information communicated leading up to a potential crisis and during one.
“There are two things that are critical,” he said. “One, you need to have done the things ahead of time to prepare for the crisis, and it’s over-communicating ahead when it’s a thing that could happen but hopefully won’t. Then, you need to be able to communicate in that moment of where people are supposed to turn right, where they’re supposed to turn left…in terms of how to attack the problem head on.”
Communicate what employees need to know. And just that. But over-communication is not the same as blanket communications to everyone.
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Internal communication must be personalized for employees in order to add value. “If it’s not personalized, then it’s not going to land, and the less personalized that the experience is, the more trust erosion will exist over time,” Maffei said.
An organization with offices in Florida and Kansas, for example, needs to communicate different preparedness plans with different levels of detail to the employees in those locations. He said evacuation plans or contingency plans for working without power, for example, lack the “context and relevancy” for Kansas employees who likely won’t be impacted by an emergency weather event in the same way as Floridians.
“The same thing happens once you get into the crisis,” he said. “If you’re not using the technology at your fingertips to personalize the output, then now you’re spewing a lot of information that’s not relevant for the user, and the less relevant it is the more disconnected they become, which starts to affect your culture.”
It’s about them, not the business. Maffei and the Staffbase platform suggest HR pros value personalized and relevant content in their internal comms plans. It’s a shift in understanding the purpose for the function, he added, because “people typically in HR and comms are conditioned by the business” to create content because “it’s important to the business.”
But if you create content because it’s important to the employee, then you can actually have a dramatically different impact on employee-employer trust and company culture, he said.
Of course a potential hurricane is an important factor to consider in the course of business. But Maffei suggests that in a moment of preparing for an emergency, signal to employees that the business is providing them information to address their own needs.
Rather than broadcasting messages about why a potential hurricane may negatively impact the business itself, HR could provide employees with the relevant information and allow them to use that information to support the business, and their own careers.
“Don’t talk about the business. Talk about the employee. Solve that problem, and it will serve your business back in reverse,” he said.