Microsoft 365 Community Maturity Model for Microsoft 365, 21 Sep 2021

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From YouTube: M365 Maturity Model - September 2021

Description

Recorded:
• September 21, 2021

Topic:
Communication Competency

Agenda:
• Practitioner & Maturity Model overview
• Artifacts and Updates
• Purpose
• How to get more involved
• Shout-out & Picture Time (Together Mode!)
• Discussion: Communication Competency

Hosts:
• ⭐ Guest star ⭐ Tara Saylor | @AnokheeTara
• Marc Anderson, Sympraxis Consulting | @sympmarc
• Simon Doy, iThink 365 | @simondoy
• Simon Hudson, Novia Consulting | @simonjhudson
• Sharon Weaver, Smarter Consulting | @sharoneweaver

A

Hi everybody thanks for joining hey paul nice to see you here. um So I'm going to uh kick things off just running you through the introductory slides, as we always do in this maturity model for microsoft. 365 practitioner session um this time around we're going to be taking a bit of a deep dive into the communication competency and to make sure that we can do that with some air of authority uh guests.

A

Our rock star today is uh tara sailor, uh we'll introduce tara, proper tara terra properly later on, but we'll just get through the introductory pieces. We usually do so.

A

This is the agenda, uh we'll just give the overview, as we always do just in case there are people that haven't attended previously and then we're going to uh try and grab a picture of all your lovely people who have attended today so be ready to turn your video on at that point and then at the end we tend to have a discussion. We do encourage people to chip in with thoughts, questions comments um during the session, so don't don't hesitate to do that. All you have to do is stick your hand up.

A

If you want to metaphorically digitally, stick your hand up if you want to interject, but our experience is that people don't do that so there'll be a session at the end where you can air, your grievances or otherwise. If you wish equally feel free to throw questions or comments into the chat and we tend to try and sort of curate those as we go along and pick up answers on the fly.

A

So that's what we're going to do, let's just remind ourselves where we are with all the different things that we've produced within the the model. So far, on the left hand, side we've got our purpose. You can read that while I go on about the other stuff on the right hand, side all the things which are kind of properly bold, I.e, not vaguely grayed out are artifacts which are already published on the um the docs site within the community area. So you can see, we've got most of, but all of the competencies are produced.

A

I'm afraid we haven't actually finished the last three and that's been the state of affairs for the last few months, but we will get them done at some point, but um just uh just about two months ago we did release two new uh artifacts, two new documents, which was around running the microsoft maturity model workshop and some different approaches to that, and we've published the majority of the recordings of all our previous sessions on there now as well.

A

So, on the left hand, side all the competencies in the middle, some of those have tools and, on the right hand, side supporting documents.

A

Just to remind you about the sort of the underpinnings of the maturity model, we plagiarized the the levels 100 through 500 from another organization, as all the best uh innovations do, but it's really important to us for people to understand when we talk about level 100 through to level 500 what that means, because it is not about how great is the technology just because you know sharepoint does version control or um or teams does collaboration doesn't mean that you should automatically have all of those things turn on level 100.

A

This is really thinking about what the business implications are level 100 being we're kind of making up as we go along, we haven't got much structure moving up through level 300, where mostly you've got a pretty good grip on a lot of your processes across the full set of competencies that communication collaboration business process, the stuff we saw on the previous slide and then moving into the challenging levels of level 400 and level 500, where you're probably doing it, because there are real regulatory or financial or other risk impacts for getting things wrong and on the right hand, side of this particular side.

A

You can see there's a set of useful keywords that help you think about any given department or team or process in your organization or your client organizations that help you think about. Actually, for that thing, what kind of level are they really working at or we working out? Have we got stuff documented?

A

Does it work most of the time all the time or actually has it got some kind of self-improvement process built in what we did do, though, in the last month, is think about a slightly different way of looking at that based off something that somebody said the last session, um so I've actually put together a set of uh like intents as it might be spoken by a member of staff or a manager or something I'm going to read a couple of these out to you.

A

So the level 100 it's like, let's just keep putting out the fires and keep the lights on and just you know, keep going with it guys and that's level 100. at level 200. You heart start hearing phrases like we should hit. We should ensure that everyone should know what they're doing we kind of think that people know what they're doing that's kind of level 200 at level 300.

A

You start to hear people talking about. Oh well, that's according to the policy and pretty much everybody follows those policies most of the time um and then, if someone challenges them and says, oh, how do you know that I go? We've got some metrics, we look at it occasionally um by the time you get to level 400.

A

You start hearing people saying: oh we're doing this analysis. We've got metrics we're doing the reporting. We know this stuff works really well all the time and we've got a sense of when we're getting exceptions and how we deal with that and then, by the time you get to 500, and you challenge somebody, you just see them green and go no. We've really got this under control.

A

We've put in all these processes and make sure that we're assured that things are working as intended and we've got proactive, alerting when things are out of bounds and actually most of our processes are self-correcting or trigger responses that correct them with action plans and executive or senior accountabilities.

A

So that's the kind of stuff you see in super regulated uh industries, and probably only in one or two departments in those industries, so that's kind of how we thought it might help you think about. Where are you in that? And thanks paul? Your comment was kind of instructive there as well.

A

So you can download these slides if you want to go and review what I've just uh told you, but let's moving on I'll, just tell you um a bit about the way we run these. We run a monthly practitioner session. This is for people who either want to become sort of professional maturity, model practitioners in their own business practice or want to introduce maturity, model thinking and processes into the organization that they work for and just to help. You get a set of skills and a set of perspectives around how to do that.

A

The idea is that we bring in people like tara, who will give us their perspective, and often people like tara are not deeply enured in the model, so we're trying to get a bit of an outsider's view to complement what uh the core team of people like sharon mark simon and I have come up with, as that gives real context and perspective about grab this and see what it means to you in the in the field, and then we try and make it a safe space, we're going to record most of this stuff and then towards the end.

A

We'll drop the recording out and if you want to say something provocative or slightly risky or whistleblower, or anything like that, you can be sure that we're not going to actually share that stuff with anybody.

A

So again, I invite you to have the conversations with us during this session um feel free to feed the questions in and by all means carry on the conversation after the sessions there's a number of ways you can continue to get involved. um There are other resources and and other stuff.

A

There's a lot of things that we do community docs sessions, first-time contributor sessions um within the the within the community. um We've got yet another maturity model call coming up this time next month uh and that one, I think we're planning to look at collaboration and mark. Do you want to do the rig reveal of who we've managed to get to come in to do this? One for us.

B

Yeah we're going to have sue hanley joining us for that, one which this is a great friend of mine and can't can't beat having her around.

A

Yeah, I'm very impressed I've learnt on sue's material a lot of times in the past, so that's going to be terribly exciting. um I want to thank everybody who came along to the august event. There's a nice list of thank you lists and then because we're rushing through this to leave as much time as possible. What we'd like to do is grab a video, and this is where we ask everyone to turn their videos on david.

A

Do you want to take control of the whole presentation thing, so you can do your magic on making this work, but again everyone who isn't shy and has probably got their clothes on, but you know that's optional, uh feel free to uh fire up your video. Let's see yeah quite different, get all 49 of us or whatever it is on the on the call and then and then david will uh grab us and save us for posterity david. You want to do the the countdown into the grin and wave. Oh nice shirt, absolutely.

C

Give me just one moment: everybody can see themselves anymore. We have a few see some recognizable faces there, all right. Let's give it a wave.

C

Just a few seconds, so we can capture everything.

B

I'm waving come on.

C

All right all right got it thanks. Everybody.

A

Terrific thanks david.

B

Right, you put your best, your best side forward. Didn't you.

A

I was impressed with that. I have exactly the same t-shirt and it took me a bit of effort to get it as well. So yeah join the club, excellent right and I think mark I'm going to hand over to you for the next slide and, if you'll uh take it through and pass pass the conversation into uh into terror mode right.

B

Well, I I wanted to just say a word or two about tara sailor and why she's here um we we didn't know each other and and as until we started talking about having her join this session. uh Sharon weaver recommended that we we invite her in tara, has a deep, deep background in communications and has all kinds of great thoughts about how the communications discipline can fit into the maturity model, and vice versa.

B

um I I was very impressed terry you you took took to this like a duck to water um and- and I think you've got some great thoughts to share with the with the group here. I also did want to reiterate something that I typed in the in the chat: we're going to record this up through the slides that um the tara is going to go through and we'll. Let you know when we're going to turn off the recording.

B

We know we want to have a safe space in this and um we'll we'll make sure to you know, ring the bell when we're turning off the recording. If that bothers anyone, just let us know in the chat we'll we'll take it under advisement. So, tara, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and take it away?

B

D

And um I actually do not have the slides open in desktop mode. If somebody else wants to share um that, that would help very.

A

Well, yeah, sorry that I didn't restart.

B

It I figured he'd do that while I was going on and rambling and.

A

Yeah I was looking at it. I was looking at the conversations here. We go. Oh no, we don't want me in there. Let me just kill that and start that again.

D

Oh, that's, okay, we can do it while I ramble, um so I am someone who did not mean to end up in the is world or the the software world.

D

I actually started out as in advertising, but as I started to work in advertising and work in communication, I got more and more interested in how does information get around and the systems that we use to do it, which led me to working on enterprise, software and intranets, and really studying things like um how does email work more effectively and how do we measure the effectiveness of internal communication?

D

So I am, um I have a master's degree in communication studies. I love that stuff, so much that I went and got extra degrees on it and then I'm also very much a. um I am a lifelong mac user who has been won over by office 365 and I'm actually kind of uh office. 365 advocate at this part at this point so did not see that coming, but I'm very excited about it.

D

um So what I wanted to walk through today and we can just go ahead and jump um into the meat and potatoes of things- is a little bit of what communication is, um and I don't know if I can advance these or.

B

Simon move forward.

D

Okay, oh yep, so at the heart of the uh at the heart of what communication is is communication is a matter of this? Is the 101 there's somebody with a message they take that message. They format it. Somehow. We often think about it as email or um you know something we post out on our intranets or something, but it could be meetings, it could be phone calls, it could be chats and then that message is sent over to recipients and um what this model does not talk about.

D

Is communication has to be understood by those recipients before it's effective, so the model really is designed to talk about. Okay communication is here is our message. We package it up. We deliver it to people, but we all know that just sending out an email does not mean that people will do what we want.

D

So that piece is very much hidden in this discussion um and if you jump ahead to the next one, there's another layer that you really start to see on communication in bigger organizations or as we think about it in modern time and that's the feedback loop back to the sender and that can be more formal feedback or if you want to very ripped from the headlines real world example.

D

We sent out an email on friday um friday morning telling people that we were shutting down the system and I got to spend the rest of friday responding to people who emailed back with questions about what was happening on the system. So communication is really kind of this two-way back and forth. That is happening and when I'm talking about communication for for the maturity model, I'm really talking about it in terms of more formal messaging, there's, also, obviously, a lot of interpersonal back and forth.

D

There's always a lot of collaboration that we're getting done, and that is you know, you're talking to people you're typing you're working together. That's that's definitely communication, um but it's because of the focus and and how you go about it. This is more focused on more formal enterprise communication than that collaboration work, and, if you get into the next slide, I think it is actually really looking a little bit at how communication can vary in complexity, and we really wanted to make sure to call out in this that everything is.

D

It can vary across levels. You know you can have tactical messages as a level 5 organization or 500 level. You can have strategic messages as a 100 level organization. It's really not something that is mutually exclusive.

D

In general, though, as you look at these things are going to move from the tactical, simple informal over to the more strategic, complex and regulated and global, and so you know, a technical message is something like hey system's going to be down for well system outage gets gets complex a little bit. You know that. That's probably a bad example, but tactical comes up with um something like you know. Parking garage is closed, um whereas strategic is something much more.

D

If you're announcing a corporate acquisition and you're talking about the company's business strategy- um simple, you know here, we said it's something like a system outage, hey it's down, hey it's back up complex would be really understanding. What are the redundancy plans if something is down and how do we manage it? And it's not that you know it's still pretty operational stuff, but there's a lot of it.

D

You've got to be thinking about um informal, that's very much, hey, let's send an email out and tell everybody to hey: we've got tacos for lunch today come down and get some versus. We thought about just saying formal or proofread, but we realized that the other side is really things that are regulated anytime. You start talking about hr.

D

You start talking about employment messages. You start talking about company earnings. All of that gets in anytime that you'll um someone will care. If you don't do it a certain way that is really where regulation comes in and then finally, you get from this local aspect where it's you know a small group of people to something that's global and I I realize, as we work remote, you know, your team that you work with may be in a whole bunch of different places. So it's really kind of a small scale to mass in complexity.

B

I want to if I could just jump in for a second tara. I mean, I think, one of the reasons that understanding these dimensions is important is we have a whole portfolio of options? Right I mean we, uh you know we could. We could uh be posting news in a sharepoint site to meet some of these needs and for other of these needs, you actually may even need to be sitting down in person with a person right uh that the classic you know we're going to fire you.

B

You don't want to do that over text right and for those of you who are dating don't do that over over text either. um So so you really have to think about which, which port, which of the options in your portfolio make the most sense for each kind of communication that you're doing- and this is this- is something that tara knows backwards and forwards, but a lot of people, especially on the technical side. Just don't think enough about.

B

You know we think oh well, no big deal, you know we'll just send out an email and everyone will see it. Maybe.

D

And yeah this, um I think you can kind of jump through and go ahead and load all of these up. This is one of susan's slides that talks a little bit more on that point, which is really saying that there's a lot of different channels and different channels really match different types of conversation.

D

um So we're not in this one necessarily trying to advocate for advocate for this is when you use yammer versus this, is when you use teams versus when you. This is when you use outlook, but all of those together. um Communication can happen across a lot of channels and the reason it's good to call that out is actually the point on the next slide, which is to say that communication is the technology.

D

Is here communications technology across the past I would say: office 365 is just a game changer when it comes to the capabilities for communication, the ease of how you can do a lot of these things, the systems that are available, the choices of teams versus outlook versus yammer versus email versus. You know there is a lot there, um but the technology is here. The problem is the processes behind the technology and the people, um just because you have a lot of tools and a lot of ways.

D

You can do things that doesn't always mean that you've got a full full structure in place to support what the technology can do, and I I understand that is a recurring theme for all of you in this meeting.

D

um So here is a look at how communication could look at level 100, and this again is I none of this is bad. You know if you've got a three-person consultancy or a 50-person company that has, you know really consistent ways of working. You may never need to get. um You may never need to get more advanced than this and a lot of times. This is you know, messages are created when they're needed they're sent out. um As you know, hey head of hr says: oh gotta send this message.

D

They write up the message they hit, send head of product development, put something together and just hit, send it's coming by the leaders. It's coming from uh the voices of authority. You know like a lead programmer might be somebody sending things out, there's not really a lot of of audience.

D

Segmentation needed um you're, pretty much telling hey everybody on this project here it is, and you don't really have to worry about you're, usually not talking about things with complexity that you don't have to worry about the project manager, saying one thing and the program manager saying another thing. um So it's really. It's really kind of a hey. I, this is my area.

D

I know, what's going on I'll shoot out an update good to go and that's not a bad place to be it's a very simple, simple place to be, and if it's working don't break it. um I think a lot on these when they talk about sending out a whole company having a whole company teens channel.

D

That would be great for a company, that's in level 100 that wants to have you know, here's a quick ad hoc update and you can have some quick clarifying conversation about it or you know more detailed conversation about it, but you don't need a lot of process around it.

A

And just to sort of reiterate one of the themes that I keep reinforcing is you know you might have an organization that should be operating at level, 300 or so on average. But if level 100 communication works for you, then there's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't mean the organization is terrible or even the organization is not operating at the appropriate level. It just means that for that organization, lower levels are all they need.

D

Yeah- and you know you may, depending on what what industry or you are in, you may may need very complex systems in other places, but communication can be simple, so so don't make it harder than it needs to be um so level. Two is, then, adding a little bit more structure around it, and these are going to be things where you probably have shared inboxes start to show up. So this comes from the development, or this comes from.

D

I I pick on hr a lot just because they do send out lots of messages in many companies, um or you know, and you'll have a shared inbox that that is sending things. You probably have some processes where you know. um If I want a message sent, I go to the person who can send it for me. I tell them what I need to have sent they package it up and they hit send.

D

um This is still probably going to be more uh pushing out information to people versus necessarily having a lot of back and forth and discussion, um and you probably are going to start um looking for vanity metrics here. How many people went to the pa and we um vanity metrics, is something that we would talk about a lot in communications because they're, not business metrics, they they're the ones that make you feel good. Like oh people read my email. People looked at my website. People looked at my pages, but they're not looking into things like.

D

Did this get associate or get the people who work at the company to take the action we needed? um Did we get people installing this new software upgrade because of the email, or did they just open it? And so you know that's usually going to be things hey, let's send it from the shared inbox on tuesday, so that we know that this is happening.

D

um Then stepping ahead to level three, um I hope this is you're starting to see how this is coming together. um Level three is really starting to get standardized around communications and honestly. This is where I I see a lot of larger companies.

D

um Communications will be something that you might have one or two people doing full-time, but there are a lot of communicators who are working on specific areas only or looking at a specific audience. You might have a communicator who looks at all your people in the uk and one who looks at all your people in germany.

D

um You start to use things like surveys. You start to look for feedback mechanisms. um You start to have some rules of thumb across what the company uses. Oh yeah, for things like this, we always send an email, oh for things like this. We would uh post it to our intranet here is where you're probably going to start seeing some some checks and gates around communication, um for example.

D

This is where you might see. Okay, we lock down our main distribution list. So everybody you know everybody, not just anybody can send a message. It has to be someone who has some approval um and you can't just email the whole company.

D

You might start to see some calendaring happening here where people say okay, we know that um there's a priority happening in this department in february and then we know there's an initiative happening in march, so let's just kind of break up our schedule, so we're not trying to do it all at once or communicate it all at once um and you'll start to see some high-level governance docs coming together, where you might say: okay, this is our style guide for the internet.

D

This is what we expect um so here it is really um you start to see policies you start to see processes and procedures, but there's still a lot of flexibility where um you know, there's a lot of reacting still to the needs of the business where, if something's kind of coming up you you respond to what that need, is and there's still a lot of people who are going to be more focused on okay. How do I support the people in my country or in my business unit or in my my program and oh yeah?

D

I don't care about the stuff that other parts of the company are doing. I'm really focused on just my program and the rest can go away and you might see a lot of variants between those different communication group.

D

A

Your experience for the organization to get to this level as opposed to the lower levels, which are a bit ad hoc uh by the time you get to more mature organizations running at this kind of level. What benefits do you see those organizations getting from their various communication processes.

D

It really benefits the people getting hit with the messages.

D

So, when you're hitting this level, 300 you're starting to worry about, overload messages where you've, you get five messages in the same day and nothing for two weeks or you're starting to worry about how do we have a coordinated voice across messages so that what the cto is saying doesn't contradict what the cfo is saying.

D

So really when you start to put these processes together, it's not being driven so much by communicating. Yes, I mean communications is exciting. Communicators will be excited to have a plan and a schedule. We love those, but it's more being driven by the end result.

D

We are creating a better experience for the employees, we're emailing or contacting, or communicating with.

A

Okay, so that's that's an interesting perspective for me, so this is more about sort of driving organizational culture and less about sort of risk, management and data loss prevention, or you know mr musk saying the wrong thing that will upset the investors. So this is more about that. You know, let's make sure that our people are getting a good experience and communicating well and we're reinforcing the messages internally.

D

I feel very sorry for mr musk's communicators that don't be a tough job for sure um yeah and the reason it becomes a virtuous circle cycle right. So um when you are having messages get to people in a better way in a way that they want them in a way that causes the actions you need in a way that they they're able to take those actions that is then going to support whatever it is that the business is needing.

D

So you know, if you need everybody to do an upgrade and the message gets lost in the email. That's bad for the business. If you need everybody to you, know log into this system and more people do it, because it's clearly communicated that's better for the program that the business is running, so it kind of is um yeah a virtuous cycle that starts to build.

D

um You might to your point about some of the regulatory things um if you're communicating about earnings at this point part you are going to be following lots and lots of very highly regulated pieces um same for again. If you get into some of the hr benefits things or or even a strategic acquisition, you're really going to have to be watching regulatory requirements there, but um you'll probably have people who are more aware of how to do that kind of communication within the regulatory environment.

D

um You know if you, if you wanted me to rattle off employment laws in the us. I could not because I worked in hr, but because I communicated about acquisitions enough that that that's something that I had experience with.

B

One of the other sort of lenses you could use for this because communication happens at all different levels. You know, and some of the stuff that tara is talking about is communicating from you know, sort of a corporate communications perspective, but one of the things that that we do. We spend a lot of time on when we're building intranets is you know the site owners have to know how to dedicate they need to be able to communicate what they actually need to tell the organization.

B

So the hr person talking about benefits or the the finance person telling people how to fill out time sheets. So there are. There are some sort of corollary things that you end up doing around collaboration to support good communication.

B

For example, we often will create a team for all of the site owners to talk to each other, so they're, communicating well and they're, helping each other figure out how to do things, and that makes them all better communicators. So sometimes the levers that you're pulling are not. You know, communication per se they're. You know, oh, let's, let's edge a little collaboration in here. So the communication improves- and I think I think this level 300 is about where we start to see that kind of activity.

B

You know it's not just hey all the site owners can just say whatever they want to the organization which is more like a 100 that organically grown internet. That is nonsensical. Nobody understands everybody's communicating differently here.

C

B

Starting to see a lot more of that consistency, a lot more of that common training for messaging.

D

Yeah- and I would say that's the level 300 is definitely where I start to see: communicators as a developer, see a community of practice or kind of a best practices that they want to share among themselves. uh For the organization, then jumping up to level four um level or 400 um level. 400 really starts to get into you.

D

You would need a larger organization or a more mature organization that really focuses on communication to start hitting this level, and it's not that um it's not that that there's something magical about size, but it's more a matter of really for internal communications. You need to have a certain employee base to to start justifying these larger programmatic changes, um internal communications, it's it's notoriously difficult to show the roi on communications, because you know they're not out selling things. This is very much more.

D

The enterprise, communications versus marketing or or something like that, um but this is where you're starting to get into a pretty sophisticated.

D

um This is a pretty sophisticated model where the communications inside the company are being run with best practices that you would see in the marketing world or the pr world, or external social media advertising, for example, um but this is where you're really starting to think about communications as campaigns.

D

So if level 100 is an ad hoc, oh crap, I need to tell somebody this quick I'll, get that up there level 400 might be where you're starting to engage people all right. We've got a year-long ambition to deliver this project. How are we going to run this across that year-long period?

D

This is where you're also going to start seeing some really sophisticated change management programs running because change management obviously involves a lot of talking about communication. It involves much much more, but this is this is where you start to see. Okay, we have something to tell people, let's think about how we tell it across multiple channels.

D

Instead of just putting a video out on the internet, you think, okay, I have a video I'll use it in the town hall meeting I'll use it here, I'll use it here, I'll cut a clip and drop it in an email.

D

um You start to look at more sophisticated targeting of employees, so at level 300, you're, probably thinking all right.

D

Let's hit everybody who has reports up through the cfo, let's hit everybody in the com, the com company who has works in germany level 400, you start to get more sophisticated where you're looking at things like um you know: oh hey, maybe we have opt-in or maybe we run a program that is really focused on our new joiners, and this entire program is going to focus on helping them feel like they're, welcome to the company and part of it um you're, going to start under using analytics to plan your future strategies.

D

So that's where you might say: okay, great stories about this topic. um For example, stories about our customers generate a lot of comments. Let's run more of those because we're trying to get people interested in this topic or oh, if we send an email at 5, 00 pm. um Strangely, we get a ton of ton of action on that, because people are like looking for something things simple to close the day.

D

Let's make sure we do a follow-up email at 5 pm um here is where you also start getting into more management of out-of-date content, um level, level, 300 and below there's a lot of just okay. What's in front of us, let's respond to it. What's in front of us, what's respond to it level, 400, you start to have kind of the the maturity to think about. Okay. What is the whole life cycle of this communication?

D

When do I pull this content down? When is it no longer useful? um And it's really really starting to make communications.

D

Integrated very directly to the business objectives: you're, not just thinking, let's get people to sign up for our wellness program or we need people to be aware of this system. That's going to be changing, and this is where you're starting to think about things like how do we make sure that people understand the strategy behind this launch um and and doing it in a programmatic way?.

A

D

My observation.

A

Is you said at the beginning, so level 400 tends to be like an enterprise type of approach to communication. I totally agree with that. My observation is that, even if you are a non-enterprise scale organization, if you're carrying out some communication activities- and that might be a a client-facing activity- or it might be a major change program internally, even if you're not up at level 300, even you might still choose to adopt level 400 communication for that high impact or strategically important activity.

A

Everything else can still be at low level, but this thing you adopt these higher level processes. You want to get the impact and measure the impact and feed the impact back into the into the the creation process and go around around that loop because because getting it wrong has him has consequences so yeah. So for me it's really important. You know you can just cherry pick sometimes and go hey, we're just going to do really good stuff for this one strategic activity and then go back to day-to-day work with everything else.

E

um Just so talk about analytics, but you know in sort of organizations that you've worked in, do they measure actually say you talked about signing up to the wellness program. Do they? Actually, you know, do you measure how many people have signed up to the wellness program to see see? Actually, if the active you know, the actions being asked for happens, is that something as well.

D

Yeah, so there's um a lot of different there's a lot of different methodologies and best practices around communication measurement. But usually, when you send out a communication, you can see a corresponding bump within a like. If that the action you want people to take is sign up for wellness program. Usually what you see is an email or a message or a push will happen and there's a corresponding spike in that activity, and if you, if you want to get very academic about it, you can't necessarily prove that it was that email that caused it.

D

But this is where you know business analytics has a little flexibility that um academia may not where you can say all right. If every time I see it send an email out, I see a corresponding bump. I can feel pretty confident that another email is going to cause that bump and yeah. You have to look beyond just did that email get open. Did that email get read, you start to look for what are those other numbers that you can look at to help define that it's doing what the objective is.

D

The objective is: get people to sign up for wellness or support this change or install this software. It's not get them to read the email.

A

Yeah I was listening to a cautionary tales podcast just on my drive over here today, and that was talking about an actual study. They did um about hand washers. um You know these antimicrobial dispensers and we were in in hospitals, and some were saying you know you, doctors, nurses, you need to wash your hands more often and above others they said because it's good for you and others. It said you need to wash your hands more often because it's good for the patients and the patients one had far more impact on changing.

A

They had a 50 increase in consumption of the consumable in the uh in the dispenser. So I think the other point is that you did exactly about that. What is your strategy? Is it just to have people look at the thing, or does it get to get people to take an action? What action you're seeking and then crafting the message appropriately and delivering it in the appropriate way, whether that's sticky, uh things above hand, dispensers or something else, yeah and measuring is important.

A

You know that's a level 400 activity they did because they went on to continue to measure the impact of this around around the hospital.

D

Yeah and it's funny that the small things that you think every single organization I've been in everyone says: please don't send me email, but if you look at what gets them to take action boy, is it email?

D

So you know what people say and what people actually respond to something like a sign over the bathroom sink saying: wash your hands for 30 seconds, still encourages people and makes a difference.

A

I think yeah ralph's just making an interesting observation about there are, you know there are thousands of places where communications are delivered within a large organization and and you've got to think really carefully. I guess about what is the hierarchy of of impact, as you say, maybe in an organization, email is still the one that people respond to in my organizations. Actually, we've switched over to teams messages. Those are the ones that have the most immediate impact for us and maybe text messages as well yeah.

A

They grab my attention because it's not part of the background noise, whereas email has a very low priority in my organization, and so it's about understanding what that you know what that impact of any given message is, and how do you get through to people this one's high priority.

D

And um to the microsoft specific analytics, I I have a strong stance on that, one, where microsoft really delivers great better system. How is it working are people using it? They don't quite get communications metrics.

D

You might need to be working with a third party vendor to get more more sophisticated communication metrics and that's actually a fantastic transition into number five or the 500 level, um which is really when you're at the level 500. Your internal best practices are really mirroring communications, best practices, and it's a it's really looking at measures. Message: delivery systems that reflect user preferences.

D

So that's where you can start getting into okay, people like text messages. Well, we'll send them text messages, or you might even be at a point. You can let them sign up where they can decide. Do I want this sent to me an email. Do I want this sent to me in teams? Do I want this sent to me by text message?

D

um This is where communicators are starting to serve as smes on company initiative teams and that's kind of with the idea that companies may not be wanting to bring everything up to this level because it may not all need to be at this level. But this is where, when you're planning a big change, you say: okay, I need you, know finance.

D

I t communications and legal, all at the table um analytics become real-time and pretty um they really drive your tactics you're, not just waiting until after the fact to see what happens but you're you're, looking at how do wow. Okay, nobody looked at this. Let me revise how I approach it or that slack message got. um Nobody noticed it. Let me try putting a gif at the bottom of it to draw some attention.

D

It can be very simple but you're looking at it in real time and reacting course correcting. um This is where you're, usually starting to get into you know. You've got a um this is the look of our companies in communications. This is our voice. This is all that brand kind of stuff that um marketing tends to have in place, and this is where you've got really close.

D

Partnerships between the people who own different tools like sharepoint, like office, 365, like teams and the people who are creating and you're, basically working together to figure out okay, here's this thing that teams does now: is it relevant? How do I put? How do we adopt it? How do we make it really good for um for our company and again, this might be something that you are doing for a specific strategic change program or initiative, and other pieces could be much lower, which is just fine.

B

Ralph has made ralph has made a couple of points about. You know how the platform you know does all of these things and tara made that point right up front. You know. Yes, it does all those things, but that doesn't mean that people are using it that way, and I think I think that there there's always a lot of talk about adoption. Let's get people to use all the things, but we're talking about it from a different perspective.

B

Let's, let's get people to accomplish what they need to accomplish, using the things that make sense, and so you know adoption is important but sort of is it driving the communication? You want the collaboration, you want, the whatever you want. uh You know whatever, whichever of the competencies you're you're, focusing on at the time. Sorry to interrupt here.

D

No, I think, that's always good to reinforce, and yet there are so many cool functions that that may not be support. The company just doesn't have the processes to support using them consistently, um or I saw someone mention that yammer you know had that bad reputation for him long long ago, and you know that's where culture comes in, you may never have a company want to use yammer, no matter how great the functionality is, because it just has left a bad taste in their mouth.