On the Same Page

Are employees suffering from survey fatigue? The question is asked often, frequently because someone high up in the organization doesn’t want to hear what employees think. But if employees see change as a result of someone taking their feedback to heart, you can survey them all day long. If you’re sending emails, publishing articles, and posting videos, but not asking employees for their perspectives, you’re not communicating. You’re just messaging. In this episode of On The Same Page, Steve and Shel discuss how to ensure employees’ voices are heard in meaningful ways to drive engagement and business success — and to avoid crises, since employees’ voices can serve as the organization’s smoke alarm. Links from this episode: Return to Office 2025: The Corporate Mandate Wave Reshaping American Workplaces How CEO Satya Nadella Reset Culture at Microsoft Strategy Studio Transcript: Steve Crescenzo: Hey Shel, how are you? Shel Holtz: I’m great, Steve. How’s everything with you? Steve: Awesome. Friday, sunny. Got the boat this weekend. We’re heading out on the boat, so everything is good. We’re about an hour away from happy hour. Shel: Anything to keep your mind off what’s going on with the Cubs, huh? Steve: All right, enough is enough. Dodgers fan. Nothing’s worse than Dodgers fans with all your money. anyway, but you know, before we start, I know we’re gonna talk about the employee voice today and the importance of giving employees a voice. And before we start, you know, I’ve heard you talk about this, I’ve read what you’ve written about this, and I know in your communication model, which I really respect, you’ve got it as one of the four drivers of employee engagement, along with strategic narrative, engaging managers, which we talked about on our first podcast, employee voice and integrity. And I don’t argue with any of that. I agree with ninety five percent of everything you’ve ever written about this or said about this. Employee voice matters, I get that. Employees should be you know, communication should be a conversation, not a broadcast. Employees should be treated as part of the solution, not part of the problem. You know, all of that I get. No argument for me. But do you think maybe employees are getting tired of being asked about shit? And here’s why I ask. I mean, think about it. Surveys, pulse surveys, engagement surveys, stay interviews, focus groups, listening tours, town halls. The average employee’s been asked for their opinion so many times they’re ready to send the company an invoice. I mean, these employees have completed enough surveys to qualify for a minor in organizational psychology. And after all that voicing and talking, employees will still say in every company we work for, nobody listens. Which makes me wonder if we’re solving the wrong problem. Maybe companies don’t have a problem with employee voice. Maybe they have a leadership listening problem. I think most companies, I think, have plenty of ways for employees to speak up. It’s not whether they have a microphone; it’s that nobody on the other end is paying attention. So employees end up feeling like, you know, they’re yelling into a well. Which is why most face to face town halls when there’s Q&A time, nobody says anything. So the question is: Is it about giving employees a voice, or is it more about coaching leaders to listen? And that’s what I’d like to talk about. Shel: Yeah, I would frame that just a little differently. I agree with you a hundred percent. The way I usually talk about this is saying that you know, we constantly hear about survey fatigue. Employees have survey fatigue. And my answer to that is there’s no such thing as survey fatigue. What there is is bullshit fatigue. And that’s being asked for your opinion and then finding that nothing is being done with it once you share it. I once had a senior VP of HR, I reported to him. This was on the client side many years ago. And I wanted to do an environmental survey, find out what employees thought about the environment in which they worked. And he said no. And I said, But Rick, you wrote a book about employee surveys. Why don’t you want to do one? He says, Well, if you read my book, you’ll find that the only time you should do a survey is when the leadership has an appetite to make changes based on what they hear. And the leadership here has no appetite to make changes based on what employees say. So there’s no point in doing a survey. And I think that other companies should take that to heart. Steve: Ha ha. Bingo. You’re exactly right. Once again, I can’t disagree with you, Shel. I think the reason there is survey fatigue I think there is survey fatigue, but it’s not because they hate filling out surveys, it’s because nothing ever happens. Why waste your time? Shel: Right. I think employees will fill out surveys all day long if every time they do they hear about what’s changing as a result of that. Steve: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Shel: Sure Steve: So before we dive back into that, and I can’t wait for that conversation, I got a nice comment from a Carrie Knight on Substack, believe it or not. She put it on my Substack, which I didn’t even post this podcast on my Substack, but I’m going start doing that. It’s about episode two when we talked about this mythical knights of the round table, get-a-seat-at-the-table. And she said, Currently midway through listening to On the Same Page, second episode: There is no table. And she quotes us and says, There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. She said, Brilliant. I’ve been on the side of earning a seat at the table, but this conversation is shifting my perspective from what I thought that meant to what I actually believe in real time. Then she quotes us again and says, We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And how do you get those? You earn it. And she says, Carrie says, I don’t disagree with this at all. Perhaps it’s this concept of a table that’s broken. Leaders show up at every level of a business, which I love that line. Leaders show up at every level of a business. That’s brilliant, Carrie. In my honest opinion, leading from within is the biggest flex over having a seat or job title that demands leadership. And then she quotes us again and says, You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel. She said such an insightful episode that expands into the disconnect between leaders and employees’ cons and channel choices. And she closes it with another one of our quotes Leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. Fabulous episode. Thanks, Steve Crescenzo and Shel Holtz. Keep coming. And we sure will, Carrie. Thanks for the comment. love to hear feedback from our listeners. Shel: Absolutely, Carrie. Thanks for listening. We had a number of comments come in through LinkedIn as well.  one of them from Vincent Bruneau saying the seat at the table conversation has always been a proxy for the real question are you actually shaping decisions or just being informed of them afterwards? Consequential is the better word, and it’s available to more than one person at a time. referencing that notion that only one communicator in a company can have that seat at the table,  regardless of how many. Communicators work there. Louise Thompson said, Hmm, not sure I’m with you guys. Moaning about it? Agree, that needs to stop. We know what we need to do and how, but as someone who has been in the room and out of it, there is no doubt that being an active participant around that table, and yes, it does exist, is going to lead to better outcomes for the organization. And yeah. Steve: Right. I think that I don’t think we should read any comments that disagree with us. Shel: That’s not a good idea, Steve. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That’s true. We’re gonna listen. Communication is a two-way activity. And yeah, I understand what Louise is saying, but again, you know, there are organizations with hundreds of communicators, there are organizations with dozens, there are organizations like mine with a handful. But if there is a communicator at that table, it’s only one. Steve: That’s what most companies do. That’s what today’s all about. Employee voice. Our employee We are gonna listen. Shel: So for every communicator to say, I want that seat at the table, that doesn’t fly. But any communicator can start to wield influence and have consequence. So I think that was our point. Janet Hitchen said, Halle-flippin’-lujah. That was her comment. Love that. Kathleen, yeah, Kathleen Bell said, Ha, so 1990, totally agree. And then Jared Brough, you know Jared, in New Orleans. Steve: Love in Jared Brodkin. Shel: Yeah, he said, I remember that discussion. My response is if you wait for an invitation it never comes. You get your seat by walking in the room and taking it. Steve: I think he sa I think I actually had drinks with him in Orleans and he said, No, you don’t you know you know you kick down the doors, I think is what he said to me, which I was I always remember that. Shel: Yeah. But you have to have built that influence and have developed that consequence or they’re just gonna throw you out of the room or have you escorted out of the room and away from the table. Steve: Exactly. Or you’ll be or you’ll be a token. You’ll they’ll they’ll give you a seat, but you won’t have any influ I mean having a seat doesn’t give you influence. Influence being respected as a counselor gives you influence. You could have a seat at the table. I have a seat at my dinner table and I it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t no nobody listens to me. You can have a seat, but it doesn’t mean they’re gonna listen to you. Shel: Well, you have mostly cats in the house, so they don’t listen to anybody. Steve: Right, that’s true. That’s true. Shel: So today we’re talking about the employee voice,  which is, as you mentioned at the outset, one of the four enablers of engagement. you know, there are people out there who dismiss employee engagement in general, but I’ve I’ve made it one of the four inner circles of of my framework for internal communication. I do yeah if if you just do the Gallup survey and try to get to that final number, then it’s nonsense. But Steve: Yeah, I Shel: If you’re looking at the elements that contribute to engagement and take action b on each of those based on the results of the survey, then it can have a real positive impact. Steve: I think that’s I’m not a I’m not a big engagement guy because of the way it’s practiced with the Gallup stuff and the best friend at work stuff and all that nonsense. Employee engagement’s a very real thing, but it’s sh always shifting, right? If you could be fully engaged on Tuesday, you get a new boss on Wednesday and you’re disengaged. I mean it just shifts. It’s almost a it’s like nailing jelly to a wall, but go ahead. Shel: There’s an organization out of the UK called Engage for Success. It’s a chartered organization by the government or the Crown or whoever does the chartering in the UK. And they say that the employee voice is the smoke alarm in the organization. I kinda like that characterization. that works real well for me. But yeah, bottom line is the communication is a is a two-way thing. if y communication is the act of sharing. Steve: That’s cool. Shel: Knowledge and information. So it’s a two-way street. And a lot of organizational communication is not. It’s one way. We’re sending information to employees. We’re not listening to them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s messaging. That’s not communication. It has to be two way to fulfill that definition of communication. So finding the mechanisms to give employees that voice, I think, is important. Steve: Yeah, I do agree with that, but I don’t think it’s a channel thing. I don’t think it’s a mechanism thing. I think it’s an ego thing more than anything else. I really I think these leaders get into a position of leadership and they think that they’re more plugged in, they think that they’re more knowledgeable, they think that they’re smarter probably, they think that there’s a reason there’s a leader, they’re supposed to lead, they weren’t put in this place to let the employees lead. So you could have town halls and suggestion boxes electronically and slack and w you know, whatever. You can have all the employee voice channels in the world. If leadership has too much ego to listen to it, I mean you think they’d be smart enough to realize that guess what? The people closest to the work might have a good idea on how to improve things. The people closest to the clients, the customers, the products, the people that are creating all those things, you think they might have good advice about the company? Well, of course they do. But I think most leaders are either afraid to listen to employees because they think they’re just gonna bitch, or B, don’t respect their ideas. So I don’t think it’s a matter of setting up the channels as much. I mean, you have to do that, I agree, show. But I think you also have to work closely with leadership to say, you gotta listen to people. You gotta listen to your employees. These people are way closer to the work than you. You may be up here in the stratosphere driving strategy and dealing with Wall Street and numbers and EBITDA and all the other crap that they do, which they’re very good at. But these people are down here doing the work. And A, they might be able to help the company. And B, if you want them to be engaged and have a good culture, then it has to be a two-way street. And I think unfortunately, a lot of especially the older leaders don’t let don’t have don’t don’t let that happen. I think a lot of younger leaders coming up today that grew up with social media, digital natives, so to speak, I think they’re I think things are gonna get better in this area. I think people are gonna start paying attention more to employees. I hope. I mean that’s my not my hope. But I agree. Set up the channels, but work the other end of it as well. Work the leadership end of it because a lot of those people just don’t listen. Shel: Yeah, I think getting them attuned to paying attention to what employees are saying is one thing, but I think where communicators have a role to play here is in presenting what employees are saying in a way that is digestible and understandable for the leader. So they’re not getting hit by messaging of different types from all sides and not understanding what they’re supposed to do with it. I think if we can give them here’s the daily summary or the weekly summary of what we have heard. And put it in categories and make it something that they can actually get through and make decisions based on or factor into discussions that they’re going to have.  that makes it easier for them to do exactly what you’re talking about. But if we’re not there coordinating this as an activity, then it’s just overload for them. Steve: Yeah, yeah. I no, I agree. You know, I in some of my workshops I show a model that says, you know, it’s up to leadership with the help of communications to communicate the what and the why down to employees. And you do it very clearly. Here’s what we’re gonna do, here’s the initiative, here’s what it is, here’s why it’s very important to both us and the company, and then communicate the how up. And you do that through helping managers get the how and you c opening up these channels. Most companies just aren’t willing to do it. They’re more than willing to do the what and the why down and then forget about the how. And that’s the problem. But if you can tap into that how at that work level, at that employee level, I mean you’re unleashing a dragon there. I mean, you are unleashing a lot of power. But let me ask you a question, Shel. And you kind of alluded to this with your HR story to start the podcast. What’s worse? Not asking employees their opinion at all, or asking them and not doing anything about it? Shel: I think asking and not doing anything about it is going to create tremendous cynicism and dissatisfaction. I think if employees understand that the culture is one where leadership makes the decision and you just do your job, I don’t like it. I wouldn’t want to work in that organization. And there may be people who decide that they’re not going to work in that organization, but at least they understand what the deal is. Steve: Yeah. Shel: But to have that say do gap, right? We are interested in your opinion and we’re going to ignore it. I mean, there’s a great example of this. I’m trying to remember the company that did this. I think it might have been Amazon Web Services. it may have been JP Morgan Chase, but they had an employee feedback mechanism. And when they told employees that they had to come back from COVID after telling everybody it was okay to work remote, they shut off. The mechanism that allowed employees to share their opinion. When they said 99% of employees agree that coming back to the office is a good thing, they got a massive petition signed by a huge number of employees saying that’s nonsense. That’s just not true. So there are organizations that say we want to hear from you, and then when they hear from employees, they shut off the channel, they ignore what they’re hearing. It’s not good. Steve: Yeah, no, no, no. No, I agree. I agree. And no th that l that leads me to another thing I was I was thinking about when I was thinking about this topic. You know, there’s an old theory out there that out of a hundred percent employees, you have you have the ten percent of the Kool-Aid drinkers, right? They’re the ones that wear the company windbreaker and the company hat and they love everything about the company.  they love where they’re working, everything’s great. Then you have the ten percent of, you know, the lunatic fringe I call that are very, very discontent. They’re just unhappy. Shel: Cheerleaders. Steve: You they’re just unhappy in mind, no matter what you do. They’re unhappy in life. They’re alcoholics, they go home and kick the dog at night. They’re just not happy people. And the eighty percent is the people we need to communicate to. I do you think that there’s a factor that le with leaders that they’re worried that when they open it up for conversation in a town hall, a Slack, online channel, they’re only gonna hear from the ten percent because the other eighty percent are, you know, they’re fine, they’re just going along doing their job, they’re fine. The ten percent Shel: No matter what. Steve: I love where they’re working, so they’re pr they’re probably not gonna go out there and say how much I love where they work. They’re just happy. So you’re gonna hear from the cry babies, the people that are unhappy, and it’s gonna give make the whole place look naked. Do you think that’s a thing or? Shel: I think that’s a cultural thing. I think there are organizations where the 80% feel just fine about sharing their ideas or their opinions because they’re taken seriously. There’s a history in the organization of listening to those things. I think it’s the organizations that don’t give that shrift to those 80%, where they just shrug and say, What’s the point? Steve: Yeah, yeah. Shel: You know, and the ten percent at the bottom, yeah, they’re the ones who are gonnare gonna whine and that’s why these leaders don’t want to engage with employees at all. Steve: Yep, I agree. I agree, unfortunately. And let me a let me ask Shel: But I mean if you yeah, if if you look at organizations that have made a point of soliciting the employee voice, you get a sense of what you can get out of that. I mean, you know, look at look at Microsoft. When Steve Ballmer left, Satya Nadella was anointed the CEO. he inherited this culture of siloed departments waging internal political battles. Microsoft was falling behind on some pretty important Categories, mobile, gaming, social. And the turnaround was built on employee voice. He solicited honest feedback through surveys and meetings. He made an open show of being ready to listen. He bypassed hierarchy so low-level employees could be heard. He invited junior staff to meetings, brainstorming meetings that previously only senior people went to. And the mechanisms that they implemented, they were they were concrete, they were they were comms adjacent. they created employee hackathons to generate employee input on the culture change. Yeah, you remember that? even the leadership framework of model coach care was developed over two years using employee feedback surveys. And the outcome was improved sentiment scores, better, better customer feedback. And of course the market cap story everybody knows.  it wasn’t a soft initiative running alongside their strategy. I mean, it was the strategy at Microsoft, yeah. Steve: I heard about those, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was as strategic right. Well, you know, let me let me let it brings me to another topic, not another topic, another angle on this thing. Do you do employees really want a voice? And here’s why I ask.  just in the last couple of years, Cindy and I worked for a large, very large healthcare institution, and they were going through hell. They were going through hell. They were losing money after COVID, they were ha gonna have to downsize, they were gonna have to cut funds, they were gonna have to cut funding to certain programs that people loved, people were being shifted into different positions. I mean it was like a you know the big Chop consultants got involved the at the at the big level it’s the business consultants and it was ugly. But they had a fantastic CEO and when he brought us in we got it we h we had him start doing town halls, right? And they were not regular town halls. We said we outlawed PowerPoint. We worked with him and his executive team there was four of them that sat up there as a panel for the town hall And we said it’s gonna be 30 minutes of you guys having a conversation,  talking about what’s happening, what’s what’s being decided, what’s you know, all the good stuff, and then 30 minutes of Q&A, guaranteed. And the town halls were fantastic. And the people that were there and the chat, which I don’t know if they would have the nerve to stand up live and do this. That’s why I love virtual town halls. I don’t even want to do live town halls anymore because virtual, they get to that chat and you can vote questions up and down, and so. We would run that chat and we would feed the leaders the questions and it was a fantastic system. We did two a month for four months. And even then, with all the change that was happening, with all the turmoil, with all the angst, with all the fear, we still got like thirty-five to forty percent of people to show up to these town halls. And it was it wasn’t mandatory, obviously, but anybody could come. All you had to do was log in. Now Granted, it’s healthcare, so a lot of people are working. But even the recordings weren’t weren’t that great. I mean, what do you do when you’re doing everything right and you’re opening up the channels and they did everything right? They begged for the employee voice. They took their they hard dealt with hard questions. They  you know, all they did everything right. And they still had a minority of the people showing up to participate. I mean, what’s that all about? Shel: Well, yeah, I mean I don’t know. my answer would be to ask, to go out to employees and say, hey, you know, we’re giving you this opportunity. Why aren’t you taking advantage of it? And you know, find out. Are they too busy?  are they intimidated? do they not care? there is data that shows that employees increasingly don’t want to be involved in, say, extracurricular stuff at work. I mean, there have always been employees who don’t care, right? They just want to come in. Do their work, get paid and go home. They’re not going to get involved in volunteering for a task force or a committee.  they’re not going to do volunteer activities after work. They’re not going to go out with people for a beer after work. they just they just wanna do their job for eight hours, pull their lever for eight hours and then and then go home. which is fine. You have to respect those people and what they want out of work. But a lot of people, you know, work is their purpose. Steve: Yeah. Shel: Work is what gets them up in the morning. And that’s frankly the majority, from everything I’ve seen. I have seen data that says the number of people who don’t want to do things that are extracurricular is growing. And I don’t know what is behind that. But it I’ll find that. I have that report somewhere saved. But yeah, you have to ask. And again, that’s giving employees a voice, right? Asking them why. Steve: Really, I’d love I’d love to see I’d love to see that. Shel: Don’t you want to take advantage of these opportunities to share your voice? One thing that we do where I work, when there’s going to be a town hall, is about a month before the town hall, because they’re quarterly,  we’ll open up an anonymous comment line. Yeah, it’s it we use a tool, it’s on the web called Free Suggestion Box. It’s absolutely anonymous. It’s a third party thing. So Employees know that it’s anonymous and we’ll get questions through that from people. Maybe they know that they can’t be there at that meeting, but they still want their question asked and they can watch the video later or read the transcript. maybe they’re just not wanting to share their name with the question that they’re asking. But I mean, even having a card on the seat, if people are coming into an actual room that says, write your question down, no need to put your name on it, we’ll collect these. Steve: Yeah, we’d I’ve done that. I’ve done that. Shel: Right. I mean that takes a lot of the intimidation out of asking a question of the senior leaders. I mean, a smaller company, most employees know the leaders. in a bigger company, I mean, you know, if Jamie Dimon is your is your CEO and he’s doing a town hall standing up and asking him a tough question, I th that can intimidate a lot of frontline workers, you know. Steve: Yeah it sure could. It sure could. You know, one of the other things is I think a lot of I think a lot of leaders confuse voice with venting. they think that employees are only going to complain. If we if we open up the channels, they’re gonna complain because employees complain about a lot of stuff. how do I’ve always struggled with this. How do we coach leaders into understanding that voice isn’t e i Well, it’s a venting. I mean some people might vent. Sure, there’s always gonna be people who vent. But voice is more about constructive conversations. And I think if leaders could understand that, that yes, there’s gonna be some venting, don’t let it kill ya. I mean that case study I was talking about, you should have heard some of the questions that came in through the chat. It was pure out venting. Leadership of this company has never demanded accountability from leadership, and that’s why we have a bad culture. I that kind of stuff came in and we fed it to the leaders and they answered it. So there was venting. But I would say 85% of the comments were A, I really appreciate you taking the time to communicate to us this way. And B, here’s what we need to do about this and that and the other thing. Here’s my suggestion. I mean, it was mostly positive. And I think the leaders in that organization, I don’t know if they expected that, but I know they got we got resistance about allowing people to just ask questions like that. So I think leaders are always afraid. Shel: Yeah. I think it’s a I think it’s a matter of tying this to a strategy. rather than, you know, we’re just gonna have this free for all where people can s say whatever they want through these channels that we’ve set up. But yeah, I think there’s a number of ways to approach this. First of all, there are initiatives. You know, we are going to be developing this program, we’re gonna be developing this process. We would like your input to make sure we’re doing something that is going to meet your needs. satisfy your expectations. Please participate in this. There is feedback on things that have been said and done. I mean this is as simple as having a comment section on your intranet for every article that gets posted, things like that. then there’s just the ongoing stuff. I mean there are companies that have had these, companies like Volkswagen for example and Boeing, where you know they said these are channels where you can tell us what’s going on,  so that we can be aware. And then employees at Volkswagen said, Well, you know, this debt on the diesel emissions is not right. This is going to cause problems. Boeing, people said, you know, the safety culture here is really deteriorating. There are problems down here. We need to address these. I think it was Boeing.  I’m not sure, but one of them actually had a process for finding a way. To get rid of these employees. You know, monitor the ones who are raising these concerns. And you know, if we see them coming in two minutes late, we have cause to to terminate them. Yeah. So I mean, you know,  but companies that want to take this seriously can have these mechanisms, and like Engage for Success says, this becomes a smoke alarm for something that could cause you real grief down the line. I mean, look at what happened to Boeing, look at what happened to Volkswagen when Steve: And look and look at Boeing now. Yeah. Shel: The arrogance at the senior level saying this is what we’re doing and yeah. Yeah. I mean, a Boeing, it was all about profit. It was the people who came in and said, you know, we have to cut costs so that we can return greater amounts of money to shareholders. At Volkswagen, it was, well, our emission numbers have to look good, so we’re gonna we’re gonna game those numbers. this if they had listened to what the issues were, they might have taken action and prevented Steve: Right, ego goes back to that. Shel: The consequences of those things. And I and I think this is what we counsel them on. Yeah, there are going to be people who whine. Why don’t we have a larger share in our 401k plan coming from the company match? thing things like that. But I think counseling them to say, look, there are some real issues that might surface that you’re not aware of, or a decision that you made is backfiring. And you need to know that. as the communicator who is going to help you process this two way communication, we’ll we’ll filter all that and give you summaries. Yeah, we if twenty employees are saying the same thing, we’re not gonna make you read twenty comments. We’re gonna give you a summary of what they’re what they’re saying. Make this all something that you can manage. Yeah. Steve: Yeah, we’ll help. And you know what, Shely? You just you stole my idea like you often do because you’re smarter than me. that’s the key, what you just said. Structured voice, structured feedback. You don’t have to open it up and say, Here, if you want to complain that your coworker has body odor, this is the place to do it. If you want to complain that you have to work on Fridays or you gotta come back and then No, you structure the input, you structure the feedback around certain initiatives and that’s A great way, we’ve done that at companies where they didn’t have any feedback, you weren’t allowed to comment on articles on the intranet. The way to kind of break the ice a little bit with leaders who are either you know s suspect or they’re just suspicious about the whole idea of listening to employees, you structure it by tying it to initiatives. Here’s what we’re doing, it’s incredibly important that we do this right, and we’d love to hear your feedback on on this on this particular initiative or this particular project or this particular something. And if you tie it to actual things in the workforce and not just open it up to say, hey, it’s the wild west, say whatever you want about anybody you want and whatever, it’s in you know, I don’t know where you stand on this, but I don’t like anonymous comments on intranets. I love having your anonymous suggestion box. That’s perfect. And you can filter out the nut cases and the nut jobs and everything else and take the real ones. But when you allow anonymous comments on the intranet, not sure how you stand, I think it opens up it’s a bad it’s a bad I think it sets a bad precedent. Shel: Yeah, I agree with a caveat. my general view is you should have the strength of your conviction when you say something. And if you’re not going to stand behind it and be identified, don’t say it. in organizations where there where the culture has been one where people are not comfortable sharing and you’re trying to change that culture, I think having an anonymous intranet input. Steve: Right. Shel: Functionality can be a temporary benefit to the organization. People say, look, they listened to that comment. maybe next time I’ll put my name on it. So yeah, I think as a transition thing, it might be helpful. Yeah, but generally, no, I agree with you. I don’t I don’t like it. I think people should stand behind their you know, the interesting thing is that Zoom, if you’re doing your webinars or your feedback sessions on Zoom, there is the ability to share a Steve: Yeah, could be, could be. Shel: A question anonymously if you if you’ve got the q and i’m pretty sure it’s the default i may be wrong about that but i notice a lot of employees are anonymous and i don’t think they mean to be it’s just the way it’s set up but let me share two stories with you real quick you know the first one this was when i was consulting i had a client it was a big company in the consumer package goods space Steve: Is it really? I didn’t know that. Shel: And they brought me in because employees weren’t paying any attention to the intranet. Their analytics sucked. And I took a look at their intranet before I came out and met with them. And you know, by God, the intranet was great. I mean, this was a great intranet. The articles were short and concise and relevant and useful and aligned with strategy and values. They did a lot of short videos that were very consumable. I was really impressed. So why weren’t employees paying attention to this? I really wanted to know. And we started off by interviewing the executives and they said, the intranet is great. We really want employees paying attention to it. This is the official source of truth in the organization. And then we did focus groups. And the focus groups from the middle managers and the focus groups from the frontline employees told us the same thing. The frontline employees say, I can’t be looking at the intranet. My boss is gonna see me doing that and give me a hard time. And the middle managers say if my employees are looking at a video on the intranet, they don’t have enough work to do. So that’s where the problem was. And you know, if you didn’t go out and surface that employee voice, the leaders would have never known that middle managers were undermining their approach to getting the word out to employees. Yeah. But where I work,  we have an annual survey. This is nothing that my department Steve: Yeah, I heard that. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. Shel: Is responsible for. We do the communication on it, but this comes out of HR. And it’s a leadership survey. And you will get the survey specifically, will identify the leader you’re being asked to evaluate. It’s the person who runs your project or your department or your team. We’re not talking about the senior leadership unless you report to somebody in senior leadership. And every leader gets the results of that survey and has a meeting with an HR business partner to develop a plan. To make things better based on the results of the survey. And I did an article for the intranet with one of those people who was the subject of the survey. And he said, were one of the lowest rated projects last year. My light went off. We were one of the Lowest rated projects last year. did the survey. I got the results. I made some changes. This year were the top-rated project. So employees notice this when they give feedback and things change. You know, they do notice that. And I think that leads that leads to engagement, that leads to commitment, that leads to all good things from employees in the organization. Steve: Yeah, without a doubt. I couldn’t agree more. I just don’t think it happens very often where leaders actually listen. My close would be: I think you need three things. And I think very few companies have all three things. One, you have to have the channels and the mechanisms to listen. you have to have those set up. Two, you have to have leaders who actually give a damn, who will actually listen to constructive feedback. And three, you have to have employees who feel enough trust in leadership that they feel trusted enough to speak up and they feel engaged enough to speak up. So if you have engaged, responsible, professional employees, leadership who can check the ego at the door and actually listen to those employees, and the communications people have set up easy to manage channels, it would be nirvana. But getting all three of those things lined up is very, very hard. Shel: And that’s where our counsel comes in. I think we need to explain to leaders and we share examples, right? And if you can share examples from the same industry that you’re in, so much the better of what happens when leaders listen to employees, what happens when they don’t. And you know, take baby steps. try something that is not that consequential initially. Steve: Exactly. Yep, yep. Yep, try to hook it to an initiative. Yeah. Yeah, I’m a big fan of taking baby steps. They need the baby steps. They’re not gonna run into this thing. So start small, let it build, let it but realize that, my God, the sky’s not falling because we let people talk and offer opinions and ideas and surface problems. The sky didn’t fall. And once they realize that then it can kind of build and build and then you get to the kind of culture where people feel empowered to use a really bad buzzword. They feel confident that they can be heard and they will speak up. Shel: And then we get two way communication. Steve: Which is the end goal. Shel: Yeah, praise be. See you next time, Steve. Steve: All right, Shel, I’m off to happy hour. The post Episode 3: If It’s Not Two-Way, It’s Not Communication appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Communicators long for “a seat at the table.” In this episode of “On the Same Page,” the internal communications podcast, Shel and Steve share their perspectives on this age-old aspiration and discuss the real ways to be consequential and wield influence with senior executives. Links from this episode: 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals Trust is In Peril As Society Slides from Grievance into Insularity Why Trust Matters More in 2026 (PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025) Employees Prioritize Organizational Stability Over Feeling Valued at Work for the First Time in a Decade, Perceptyx Research Finds How To Reverse New Record Decline in Employee Trust Employees seek hope, trust from workplace leaders, Gallup finds Raw Transcript Shel Holtz: So Steve, I have a request. This is something that really rubs me the wrong way. I want the internal communications community to stop asking for the seat at the freaking table. Steve Crescenzo: Hey, preach, brother, preach. Shel Holtz: Yeah, you know what they sound like? They sound like the older kids at Thanksgiving. You know, the 13-year-old who says, “Why do I have to sit at the kids’ table? I want to sit at the grown-up table.” You know what? There is no table. There’s never been a table. There’s no one in the C-suite sitting around this polished mahogany slab thinking, “You know what would really make this strategic discussion complete? Having the person who runs the intranet here.” The table has become a metaphor for a participation trophy, and chasing it has made us sound needier than an MBA candidate at a networking happy hour. What we should be asking for isn’t proximity to power, it’s consequence. It’s doing work that’s so useful that the leaders come find you because they can’t make the decision without getting your input first. That’s more important than a seat in a chair that, let’s face it, isn’t all that comfortable and that can be taken away as quickly as it was given to you. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. You know, this table, they treat it like it’s the Knights of the Round Table and Camelot, King Arthur. There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. Everyone’s yanking chairs out for everybody. It just bothers me so much, Shel. And you’re right, it makes us sound pathetic—whiny, little, needy people, like we sit here in the basement and write our newsletters and ask why we can’t get up there and sit at the big table. We don’t need a table. We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And you know how you get those? You earn it. You don’t earn it by doing a good newsletter, even. You don’t do it by having great tactics. You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel—that you can tell them their baby’s ugly. “You know what? Your blog is too stiff, it’s too formal, your messages aren’t landing. Why are you doing a nine-minute video when nobody’s watching a nine-minute video?” That’s how you get respect and access and influence. You don’t do it by whining for it or mooching around for it. So yeah, let’s be done with the table. Shel Holtz: So, Steve, today we’re going to look at how communicators can become consequential and influential. This fits neatly in the consultation segment of the outer ring of the On the Same Page framework. The items in the outer ring are the things that we do every day, all the time, and providing counsel is one of those things. We can provide counsel to departments, to teams, to business units. I have great examples of all of these things, but today let’s hone in on providing counsel to the company’s leadership, the C-suite. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, well, you know, Shel, that’s how you get a seat at the table—just kidding. But it is how you can get influence and access and all the stuff we’re talking about. Be a counselor, which means it’s hard work, Shel. Everyone thinks it’s easy, but it means telling people hard truths sometimes. It means being a reality check for leaders, which they don’t always like. They don’t always like being told stuff, but that’s what we have to be if we want to have that respect. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I mean, helping CEOs and leaders build trust should be at the top of the list that we’re counseling them about. Here’s a data point. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 70% of respondents saying that CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but only 44% actually do it well. That’s a 29-point leadership credibility gap. And according to a leadership presence report from Ketchum, executives are two and a half times more likely than frontline employees to trust their CEO to tell the truth about what’s happening within their organizations. So Steve, how do you counsel a CEO who wants to build trust? And how do you counsel a CEO who doesn’t think he needs to? Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, you know what, Shel, it’s a great topic, and I’m glad we’re talking about it. I think one of the biggest mistakes communicators and leadership make is assuming trust is a communications problem. Most trust problems are behavior problems, right? There are very few CEOs—or any kind of leader—who are being as transparent as possible, acting ethically, treating employees the right way, telling them the truth all the time, and explaining why when they can’t say something, and doing all the right things, and still have a trust problem because they sent the wrong email or because their blog isn’t that interesting. If they don’t have trust, it usually comes down to missteps or something that’s happened. So I would say to leaders, and I would say to communicators: where is the trust issue coming from? If the CEO or the leadership are building a culture and paying attention to their values and doing everything they should be doing, trust will flow naturally. If they’re not, it doesn’t matter how much you communicate. You’re just yelling into a well. So I would look back at behaviors—maybe do some focus groups with employees. Not a survey; I think focus groups would be much more effective. Find out where this lack of trust is coming from. It usually doesn’t come down to communication issues. It comes down to missteps, to things they’ve done in the past. It comes down to: you put out these values and this mission statement, and then everything doesn’t align with what you’re doing. You’re not walking the talk, to use a bad cliché. I just don’t think you can communicate your way out of a credibility problem. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think one of those data points that really provides some insight into where trust might come from is the fact that executives trust the leaders in the C-suite more than the front line does. And yeah, if you think about the executives in a company, they have more visibility with those leaders. They’re meeting with them all the time. They’re seeing them in the C-suite, which is a physical place where the leadership sits. There are a lot of leaders who don’t get out and meet face-to-face with employees very often. I remember—this was years and years ago, maybe 35 or 40 years ago—it was a Ragan conference at the Fairmont in Chicago, where they all used to be in those days. They had, I think it was the CEO of Avon, the cosmetics company, as one of the keynote speakers. And he said— Steve Crescenzo: Those were a time. I remember this. Shel Holtz: You remember him? Yeah, he said that he used to get out to the factory floor at least once a month to remind himself that these folks were all grown-ups. He would chat with them, and, you know, somebody operating a film machine was also the scoutmaster of a Boy Scout troop, or ran a side business with his spouse, or was the treasurer for the local Elks organization, or whatever it might be. These are smart people, and you didn’t need to treat them like children, which was a habit executives got into. He didn’t mention this, but at the same time, employees were seeing him come out there and talk to them. You’re bound to trust somebody that you see more often than somebody who’s just up there in the C-suite, maybe doing a quarterly video or something like that. That visibility is really important. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think—a tale of two leaders, I can do that. We worked about 20 years ago for a huge defense company, maybe the largest, for one of their divisions. And I interviewed all their executives for the audit, and they were all on the seventh floor, in what the employees called “rug row.” And they never left the seventh floor. Their food was up there; they never left. And employees hated them—no trust, never saw them. Saw them maybe at a town hall once a quarter or once a year, I forget what it was. And morale, we did focus groups, was in the toilet—no trust, bad culture, all that stuff. The other tale is Schreiber Foods up in Wisconsin. It’s the biggest company nobody’s ever heard of. They’re a dairy company. They make all the cheese for McDonald’s and Burger King. They are global. They’ve got manufacturing plants everywhere. The CEO there was such a fantastic guy. He was on the same floor that we were meeting with the communicators on. And every time I walked out to go to the bathroom, he was never at his desk or in his office. He was sitting at somebody else’s desk talking to them. He knew everybody. And he said to me when I interviewed him, “I try not to answer any work emails till I get home at seven o’clock. My time here in the office should be spent talking to my people. I’ve got to be in meetings, I’ve got to do strategic work, I’ve got to do all that.” But communication wasn’t an effort for him. It wasn’t a checklist item; it was just a constant part of his job. To him, the CEO not worrying about communication was like a CEO saying, “I’m not going to worry about finances.” And it made a huge difference. End of the story, Shel: we took an Uber to the airport, and the Uber driver was a retired former Schreiber employee. He talked about the CEO and how much he liked him. We get into this little airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and we go up to the bar, of course, because that’s what we do. And the bartender’s this 60-year-old woman who’s a Schreiber retiree. We say who we’re working with, and she goes, “Mike! Mike’s my buddy. How’s my buddy doing?” First of all, she worked at Schreiber. Secondly, every time the CEO walked through the airport, he made a point of going to the airport bar to say hi to her. I don’t know if that’s inbred, if you have that skill or not. But even if you don’t, even if you’re an introvert, you’ve got to find the middle ground somewhere. You’ve got to be out there meeting with your employees, talking to them a little bit at least. Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are definitely introvert CEOs out there. I’ve met a CEO who said his worst nightmare is having to work a room. But you’ve got to work a room. And if you just can’t—if that just terrifies you—then your number two should be somebody who can do that in your place. I remember I did some work, this has to be 20 years ago, for the International Monetary Fund. So nobody who was in leadership at that time is still there; the directors are all appointed. Steve Crescenzo: Exactly. Yeah. Shel Holtz: And they never came down and met with employees. The employees really resented this and had a very cynical view of the leadership—except for one, who ate in the lunchroom with everyone else. I was talking to a group at lunch and they were explaining this to me, and they said, “except him,” and they pointed at the guy with his tray. He was at the cashier, chatting with her. And they said, “Not only is he chatting with her, but he knows her by name. And he’ll come here and just sit down with a random group of people who work here and chat with them. Everyone in this organization would follow him into battle. The rest of them? Nah, forget it.” Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think most leaders think communication is something they do. Employees think communication is something leaders are. They see real people. They don’t say, “My God, he’s a great communicator.” They see him and say, “What a great guy. What a great woman.” And I’m seeing the same thing with our work with PG&E—Patti Poppe’s the CEO there. Same way: just accessible, transparent as all get-out, honest, and people would run through fire for her. And I don’t think you have to be Johnny Carson. I don’t think you have to be a huge extrovert. Be yourself, whoever that is, and make an effort to get out a little bit. Shel Holtz: Yeah, find your strength and leverage it. I mean, PwC’s Trust in US Business Survey found 53% of business executives say they trust the senior leadership team to a great extent. Only 38% of entry-level staff say the same. Entry-level staff don’t know the leadership. I’ll tell you a great story. This was at Mattel, somewhere between 1985 and 1986, when I was doing communication there. The CEO at the time led sort of a town hall. It was in the cafeteria, but the cafeteria wasn’t big enough to accommodate everyone at headquarters, so it was manager-and-above who came to this meeting. Everyone else was excluded. And I kept pushing. I said, “We need to get everybody in. I know it’s not big enough, so let’s just do two of them and invite half the people to one and half to the other.” Finally they decided to do this, but he said, “We’re not just going to make it half and half. We’re going to have managers and above at one and everybody below at the other.” So we held the one with everybody below. The CEO gets up, makes his remarks, they do the presentations, and afterwards a group of admins comes up to him. He says, “So what did you all think?” And they said, “This was wonderful. It was great hearing what’s going on. It explains so much of the work that we’re doing that we didn’t understand. We just have one question: who are you?” He didn’t introduce himself. He just assumed that everybody knew who he was. He was the CEO, but they had no clue at that level. Steve Crescenzo: That’s fantastic. That is great. What I would tell executives is that a lot of them say they have no time for visibility—no time to be out there. But visibility doesn’t mean being everywhere. It just means being somewhere consistently. Employees don’t expect omnipresence. What they do expect is evidence that this guy’s around, this woman’s around, that they care about us—that he’s not sitting up in a suite somewhere making decisions that are unrelated to what we do down here, where we’re doing all the work. They just want evidence of that. They don’t expect him to be at all places at all times, and they don’t expect him to be Mike from Green Bay, going through the airport asking about people’s vacations. The fact that that guy did it was fantastic. But that’s not what they expect. Shel Holtz: Yeah. John Chambers, who used to be the CEO at Cisco, did a couple of things. First of all, they wanted him to do a CEO blog on the intranet. He was dyslexic, and writing was torture for him. You may remember that Cisco acquired the Flip cam—that little camera that had the USB that flipped out of it. You’d shoot your video and then just plug the camera right in. Steve Crescenzo: I remember I used to use that little Flip cam, yeah. Shel Holtz: Because they acquired that company, he would take that Flip cam and do selfie videos before the word “selfie” was even out there. Anything that popped into his mind—it was unscripted, top of his head—he would put on his blog. And people loved it. It was like he was looking them in the eye and talking about what was on his mind, what he was hoping they would do, what he was looking for feedback on. The other thing he did was everybody having a birthday that month would get together—I can’t remember if it was breakfast or lunch—with him. He would just wander around and chat with everybody. He couldn’t do this worldwide, but still the stories got around about him doing this. Steve Crescenzo: That’s funny. You know, Shel, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We’re counseling all of our executives right now to do selfies with an iPhone, just like this. Thirty seconds, check in. And I always counsel them to just have one point—say one thing. It’s 45 seconds, it’s a minute, stick to one thing, do it once a week, once a month, twice a month, twice a week—whatever you’re comfortable with. But we don’t need a film crew, we don’t need a script, we don’t need a teleprompter, we don’t need lighting, we don’t need any of that. We just need a little bit of effort. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think the authenticity of doing that is a big deal. And, you know, the 45-second, the 60-second clip—we know the younger audience is going to look at that. On my other podcast, For Immediate Release, we talked about the clipping economy and the fact that all of these clips people are doing are what people are watching, not the full-length video. So I’ve started doing clips of this podcast. If you want to reach that younger audience, do those 45-second videos. Steve Crescenzo: Without a doubt. My son Zach, the third partner of Crescenzo Communications, just did a half-hour presentation in our master class about the younger generation. All that data is there. They’re a TikTok generation. They do reels, they do clips—30 seconds, 45 seconds. Shel Holtz: Clips, yeah. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikToks. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. And that takes some coaching, though, Shel, if we’re being honest. That’s way out of people’s comfort zones. They’re used to a script, they’re used to perfect lighting, perfect everything. You know what? If there’s no evidence that an actual human being was involved, they’d rather hear the guy stutter and say, “Well, I don’t know about that—let me get back to you.” They want a human being, and that’s becoming more and more important than any kind of polish or corporateness or formality or slickness. Shel Holtz: Yeah. Now, if you talk to executives, they’ll tell you that the number one thing they want from internal communications—the reason they fund internal communications—is alignment. They’re looking for alignment between employees and executives, between the employee population and the company’s business plan, its strategic plan, its goals, its values. Yet Axios did an annual report and found only 27% of leaders think their staff are entirely aligned with the business goals. And worse, only 9% of employees agree that they’re aligned. Eighty percent of leaders think their internal communications are helpful and relevant and provide the context teams need to do their jobs. Only 53% of employees agree. And that’s because executives are saying, “Here’s what you need to tell employees,” and nobody’s asking employees, “What do we need to know? What do we need to hear? What do we need to be exposed to in order to be aligned with what the organization’s doing?” Steve Crescenzo: Well, first of all, I’ve got to ask you, Shel—as the buzzword hunter—when did “alignment” become the dominant buzzword of corporate communications and leadership communications? Shel Holtz: I can’t pick a timeline for that, but I know that Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland out of Australia have done a ton of research on this. There’s a body of research from them that’s pretty good. Steve Crescenzo: Is it really? I’ll have to take a look at that. I just taught a workshop out on the East Coast, a live writing workshop. When I do my writing workshops, I get all their data, all their information—newsletters, executive comms—and I thought I was at a chiropractors’ convention. Everything was about alignment: getting aligned, aligned, aligned, alignment. At some point, when you beat a word to death like that, it loses all power and it starts to just mean everything. So let me ask you, Shel—you’re the smartest guy I know—does alignment mean agreement? Is that the same thing? Shel Holtz: I think it means that we’re in sync, that we’re working toward the goals that you’ve established. Steve Crescenzo: So you could say, “I understand exactly where we’re going. I may not agree with it, but I understand it and I’ll help make it happen.” That’s the difference. You’re not going to get everybody in agreement, but you can get them aligned on the direction of the business. I think there’s a misunderstanding between alignment and agreement, and that’s something we need to discuss. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I think that’s important. I’ve always said it’s not our job to make employees happy. I’ll tell you a great CEO-counsel story—another experience that I had. I won’t name the company, because this guy’s still kicking around and I don’t want to hear from him. I’ll tell you when we’re done recording. He was the president of the company, and the company was laying off 10% of its headquarters staff. If you look at layoffs today, by and large they’re done pretty horribly, but they’re not sprung on employees. It’s not that employees wake up, go to work, and suddenly there’s a layoff. The companies are signaling this—a week in advance, two weeks in advance. “We’re going to be cutting…” Even Zuckerberg and Facebook will signal that they’re going to cut 10% of their staff at the beginning of the fall, or whatever. But this guy didn’t want to tell anybody. He just wanted everybody to show up, and somebody would come to the desk of the affected employee, take them to HR, explain what was happening, and then have them escorted out of the building. And the employees sitting next to them—they’re friends, they’ve been colleagues for all these years—they’d be watching and wondering what’s going on, and this person wouldn’t come back. What would that do to morale? And what would that do to trust? Everybody would be waiting for the other shoe to drop: “When’s this going to happen to me?” Productivity would tank after that. So I made the case that we needed to explain to employees what was coming. He didn’t want to do that. He said, “If we do that, it’s going to get into the press.” And I said, “Well, this is a Fortune 500 company in a metropolitan area. You think this is going to escape the notice of the press somehow?” So we finally convinced him to do a desk-drop memo. This was before email, before employees had computers on their desks, so it was printed in the print shop and distributed desk to desk. It was waiting for employees when they came in that morning, so at least everybody knew what was about to come down in the next few minutes. And of course, the local newspaper got their hands on it and ran a story. The president came into my office, slammed the newspaper down on my desk, and said, “I told you this was going to get into the press.” I said, “I told you I knew it was going to, but look what it says in the lead. It says what we said in that memo. If we hadn’t distributed that, if the press hadn’t had that, they would have called somebody who’d been laid off, or they would have called the CEO who retired three years ago, or the senior VP who’s now running a turquoise shop in a strip mall. It’s not like they’re going to say, ‘We don’t have an official announcement from the president of the company, so we won’t write about this.’ Information abhors a vacuum. They’re going to go after those secondary and tertiary sources of information and write the story.” Steve Crescenzo: They’re going to get their information, and they’re going to be right. It’s just a lack of common sense. It really is. It’s a fear of the story getting out. You know, “Don’t communicate anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.” That phrase has done more damage to employee communications, I think, than almost any other phrase. It’s going to get out, especially with social media now. Things are going to happen. Shel Holtz: Yeah, you can’t control the narrative. Press releases were this fantasy that we were controlling the narrative, as though the reporters weren’t going to get their hands on the press release and write whatever they wanted to. Steve Crescenzo: God, yeah. You know, is it just me, Shel, or has there just been a rash of horrible, horrible layoff announcements lately? What was the one that was done accidentally—somebody in HR sent it out before she was supposed to? That was just recently in the news. Nike’s message was just awful. I’m seeing layoffs happen everywhere. Layoffs are a part of life. Get out in front of them, communicate them well, and whatever story does come out won’t make you look bad. But when you communicate it horribly—people hear about an email that morning and everyone’s out the door by noon—it just makes the company look bad. Shel Holtz: Yeah, transparency is just a given these days. The fact that the leaders of the organization aren’t saying something, or they say something that makes employees roll their eyes—what do they do? They go to Reddit, they go to Glassdoor, they talk to their fellow employees on Slack or Teams. If the job of communication used to be crafting the message, today it’s really pressure-testing whether the message is going to survive contact with employees’ actual day-to-day experiences. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I think the old job was crafting messages. The new job is sort of helping leaders survive contact with reality. One of our clients is doing a fun thing: before every major announcement, they try to assign somebody to play Reddit. Somebody’s going to play Reddit. “You’re an employee on Reddit right now. Here’s the message. What are they going to be talking about out there?” Or Facebook, or whatever—pick your social media channel. Somebody should be playing the employee on social media. We spend so much time asking, “How should we say this?” instead of, “Should we say it at all? Does it need to be said? Who does it need to be said to?” We’re so worried about crafting the perfect message. You know what? You can’t dodge it anymore. You can’t dodge reality. People are going to take it, they might misconstrue it, they’re still going to talk about it. That’s the way of life these days. Shel Holtz: Yeah, there are a lot of other things we can talk about when it comes to counseling leadership. One that I want to cover before we wrap up here is the channels that they use to communicate, because there are a number of studies that find executives gravitate to the channels they feel comfortable with or think are efficient for them. They’ll do email blasts or all-staff memos, or the really polished, scripted, rehearsed town halls. But employees, especially frontline employees, want something more human. Executives tend to default to email, the intranet article their internal comms people write for them. Employees want face-to-face. They want those short, unpolished videos we were talking about. Anything two-way—an ask-me-anything, or text if they prefer it—would work really well. Steve Crescenzo: Yep, absolutely. You know what? I’ve always found that leaders choose channels based on convenience, and employees choose channels based on trust. It’s easy for a leader to have the communicator craft an email, have it come from his office, approve it, and hit send. It’s the old saying, Shel: the biggest danger of communication is the illusion that it happened, right? These leaders need to be told that. Just because you’re the CEO and you hit send on an email because it’s convenient for you doesn’t mean you’ve communicated. Don’t pick the most convenient channel. Pick the channel that employees will respond to the most, that they’ll trust the most. Shel Holtz: Pick the one that works. There’s a thought. So, Steve, when you walk into a CEO’s office to provide counsel to them for a client, what’s the one thing you’ve found they’re most resistant to hearing about their own communication style? And how do you get them past that? Steve Crescenzo: Well, that’s a great question, Shel. I think the thing they’re most resistant to is, unfortunately, adjusting to the fact that times have changed. And this is more true with older leaders, but attention spans have changed. Expectations of leadership have changed. This is not 1960 or 1970, where you went to work, you worked 50 years, you got a gold watch, and you went home. People want more information; they want more transparency. The good side of that is they want less corporate polish. Nobody’s ever said, “You know, I wish our CEO communicated less often but with better lighting,” or, “I wish she used a teleprompter.” The hardest part is getting them to understand that authenticity and being human matter more than being scripted and polished. We were working with a client—I won’t say the name because he’s still there—and this was a guy you’d sit in the room with and he was fantastic. Then he’d do his video and it was like he got paralyzed somehow. So we videotaped him one way with a script and a teleprompter, and the other way just talking, with the ums and the ahs and the stutters and the imperfections. And I said, “Which one do you like better?” And he goes, “Go with yours. Go with that one.” And he did, and it was a huge success. So it’s hard to get them to understand that they don’t have to be perfect. Employees don’t want perfect. They want human. Nobody’s perfect. Imperfection is perfection—I guess that’s one way to say it. I just made that up. Shel Holtz: Yeah, they shouldn’t be perfect. So, like I say, there are all kinds of other things we can provide counsel on. We touched on some of them at the beginning. If they’re telling you to communicate something, don’t just go out and communicate it. Tell them, “This is not going to land with employees. I don’t know why you made this decision, but no one’s going to get behind this.” Steve Crescenzo: That’s what I said in the beginning—that’s why communicators don’t have that seat at the table: because they don’t speak truth to power enough. They take the message from the CEO and they don’t go in there and say, “This is not going to land.” What we should be is their pipeline into the workforce, and we should be willing to bring harsh truths back to them. “Hey, that last town hall: too much PowerPoint, not enough dialogue. People didn’t get their questions answered.” “Hey, that last email you sent out—wow, you took three paragraphs to get to the point.” We need to be the pipeline, and we need to be an ongoing focus group for leadership into the workforce, so that we can constantly give them good advice. And not enough communicators do that, in my opinion. Shel Holtz: Yeah. The listening element is in the outer ring of the framework model. But the point of listening isn’t just so you know—you have to do something with that. Mark Schumann used to run this great program when he was at Sabre, the software company that does the ticket reservation system. He called it the Culture Club. He had hundreds of volunteers around the company, around the world, and once a month—I think it was once a month—he would pull them together in a focus group, usually over Zoom, because it was a global company, but occasionally in person in Texas, where it was headquartered. He would pick one element of the culture and talk to them about it, and then he would record about a three-minute audio file summarizing what he heard and send that to the executive team. So on a regular basis, all they had to do was click play, and in three minutes—sometimes what they heard made them very uncomfortable. Steve Crescenzo: That is a brilliant idea. Of course, Schumann is brilliant. Love Mark Schumann. Schumann is great. Shel Holtz: Yeah, he definitely is. But that listening—and feeding back what you’ve heard from employees to leaders so they know how their decisions are going to land—I think is vital. Steve Crescenzo: Exactly. That is exactly what a communicator should be doing. But you know what? That takes guts, and it takes work, and you just have to do it. Could it be, Shel—sort of a closing thought—that maybe leadership communication isn’t really that complicated? Less performance, more presence. Less messaging, more conversation. Less talking, more listening. Less acting like a CEO and more acting like a human being. I don’t think employees want perfect leaders. They want believable leaders. And that takes some coaching, because these people are hardwired to think they have to be perfect and have all the answers, because otherwise they’ll lose confidence and credibility. No—you have credibility when you admit you don’t have all the answers and when you’re a human being about it. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and trust employees to act like adults. If you treat people like adults, they tend to act like it. If you treat them like children, they’ll act like that. So we would love to hear from you, listeners—any examples you have of providing counsel to leadership, or your effort to get that seat at the table. Whatever you want to share with us, share with us. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, a hundred percent, Shel. Shel Holtz: Send email to [email protected]. Leave a comment in the show notes on the FIR Podcast Network website, or on LinkedIn or Facebook, or wherever you found out about this podcast. Send us a note. Tell us how counseling executives in your organization has been going, or any great stories you have to share. We’ll share those on the next episode. Steve Crescenzo: Shel, I always feel a little bit smarter after talking to you. Shel Holtz: I feel the same way after talking to you, Steve. Look forward to the next one. Steve Crescenzo: All right, well, I’m off to happy hour. My God, it’s 2:36 my time. I’m late. Shel Holtz: It’s wine time now. Okay, I’ll talk to you next time. Steve Crescenzo: All right, talk to you, Shel. The post Episode #2: There Is No Table appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page, the new employee communication podcast from communication veterans Shel Holtz and Steve Crescenzo. In this first episode, Shel and Steve tell their origin story, recount how this podcast came to be, what listeners can expect, and riff on how to tap into managers to help support communication to their team members. We hope you’ll participate in the show by sharing your comments, questions, experiences, and anecdotes by sending an email to [email protected] (include an audio clip; we’ll play it), or commenting on this page or on the announcement posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, or BlueSky. As you can see below, you can also watch the YouTube video version of the show. Raw Transcript: Shel Holtz: If your managers are improvising messages, you don’t have a communication strategy, you have a rumor pipeline. Steve Crescenzo: Manager communications — one of the most misunderstood and ignored parts of employee communications, but one we need to pay attention to. But before we get there, welcome to the first-ever episode of On the Same Page. Shel Holtz: Now, factoring managers into communication is the kind of challenge, Steve, you and I are going to be talking about here on this brand spanking new internal comms podcast. Steve Crescenzo: I prefer to say employee comms podcast show, but we’ll be sure to be talking about that as we go. Yeah, we’ve obviously launched this podcast for communicators primarily, but we’re also hoping some managers listen in, some executives, some leaders, some CEOs — they could all benefit from what we’re going to be talking about, right? Shel Holtz: Absolutely. This is for anybody who’s engaged in communication inside the organization, whether it’s the formal communication that is the work of we employee communicators, or just people who know that they have to do it, whether that’s senior executives or department managers or whomever. But we’ll cover one dimension of employee comms, internal comms, whatever you want to call it — EC/IC — in each episode. Steve Crescenzo: Yep, exactly right. And yeah, you know, if you work in an organization, you have to communicate. You may not do it for a living, but you have to communicate. So why don’t we tell the gang where — you and I have known each other for 30 years, 32 years, something like that. And we’ve talked about this before, and we always say we’re going to do it. We never do it. You’re already doing podcasts, and I’m lazy. I’m like, this is extra work. I never give myself extra work. But this is the right time to do it. Why do you think I finally caved and you finally said, you know, we need to carve out time for this. Why now? Shel Holtz: Well, there’s a couple of reasons. Some are based on what’s going on in the world right now, and some are based on the fact that I’m working on a book that covers all this. And it has the same title as this podcast. The topics we’re going to cover come from the framework from this book. The book is a framework for internal comms — employee… I call it employee communications in the book, by the way. And I do that for a very specific reason. I got some pushback on that from one of the internal communications experts, thought leaders out there, whom I asked to review it. And he said, call it internal comms, don’t call it employee comms because there are other audiences that are internal besides employees. And I said, yeah, but this book is just for communicating with employees because they are, as Roger D’Aprix called them, informed insiders. Those other people, the contractors that come in and are embedded in the organization — yeah, they’re there, they’re getting a lot of that internal messaging, but they’re accountable to the values and the purpose of the company that they work for, the one that pays them. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, they have their own mission and values and everything. Yeah, I’m glad you stuck to your guns on that, Shel. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I do think internal communicators need to factor in those audiences, those stakeholders, but not for the purposes of the book that I wrote. That’s really aimed at employees. The framework came when I was an independent consultant. I haven’t been one of those for — it’ll be nine years in October. It really is. The older you get, the faster that time goes by. But when I was doing independent consulting, I found myself sort of reinventing this on every engagement, particularly on internal communication audits. And I said, this is ridiculous. If I just had the framework fleshed out, I could just pull it out and I could do the audit report much more quickly. So I sat down and I came up with it, and I worked with a few other people to get their thoughts. And finally I had it in front of me and I said, it looks like there’s about 28 elements of this. I ought to flesh these out. So I did a blog post for each of them. And about halfway through, somebody said, you are going to turn this into a book, aren’t you? And I said, well, I hadn’t thought about that. But now that I have, yeah, I will. So that took — yeah, all of this has taken 15, 16 years since I first sat down and hammered out the framework. And I mean, I had some great help. Brian O’Mara-Croft actually did the visuals to take my terrible graphic and turn it into something that looked nice. Steve Crescenzo: Hello, Brian. Hello, Brian. Well, I’m very lucky in that I’m one of the rare people who’ve read the book and really, really love the book. And when you said you wanted to start a podcast to further explore the topics in that book, I was all over it. Now, there’s so much to cover, but we’ve got the rest of our lives, Shel, right? Well, I’m not going anywhere. You got at least five years left, right? Shel Holtz: My dog has at least five years left and I don’t want to leave her alone. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, when he goes, you go, probably. But we’re gonna try to stick to, what, about 20 minutes? I mean, that’s hard for me and you. I think that’s gonna be hard. That’s gonna be our biggest challenge. I’ll tell you that right now. I got a lot to say, and I want a lot to learn from you, and I got a lot of opinions, so it’ll be tough to stick to 20 minutes, but we can. Shel Holtz: It will. We’ll try. My view on the length of podcasts — and anybody who’s listened to FIR already knows this — is that they should be as long as it takes to say what you wanted to say, as long as it remains interesting for the people who are listening. If people are going, my God, they’re just droning on and on, I’m going to go listen to something else, then… Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I always get the question in my writing workshops about how long can an online article be? And I said, as short as humanly possible without leaving anything important out. That’s it. Not an extra word after that. Shel Holtz: I think that’s a great answer. So we’re going to shoot for 20 minutes. If we go over, we’ll go over. If during the editing process I think I can make it shorter without leaving out anything that needed to be said, I’ll edit mercilessly. But the point here is to be entertaining and informative at the same time. And that’s why I wanted to do this with you, Steve — besides your experience with employee communications, all the various companies you’ve worked with, everything you’ve learned. I figure you and I are gonna host an entertaining show. Steve Crescenzo: Have some fun. We’ll have fun. These things aren’t worth it. We’re not getting paid, Shel. I don’t know if you realize that, but we’re not getting paid. Well, you gotta have fun. We’re love. So we’re gonna do one every other week, right? Shel Holtz: No, this is a labor of love. And speaking of that, we’re going to bring your wife into this every now and then. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, we’re gonna — that sounds kind of weird. All right, let’s just take… but yeah. We’re gonna bring Cindy in once in a while. We’re not gonna have a lot of guests though, right? Do we agree to that? Shel Holtz: Now, the goal here is not to do another interview podcast. This is two people who have been doing internal comms for their entire careers and sharing what we have learned and what we know around each of these topics that we will introduce. And these topics — we’re not going to do a topic just once. We’ll come back to them as there are new things to talk about. But when we get to measurement, that’s Cindy’s area of expertise. She works with you at Crescenzo Communications. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, she runs our audits. She’s a measurement queen — dashboards, measuring behavior, not outcomes, outputs. I mean, she lives and breathes that stuff. So yeah, you know, there’s open marriages where they introduce somebody else into the marriage. And this is an open podcast. Once in a while, we’ll bring Cindy in. Shel Holtz: And once in a while, we’ll bring in another communicator, presumably somebody who is doing this in an organization, but not to interview them — just to have the conversation with them because they have expertise or experience around the topic that we’re discussing. Steve Crescenzo: So, you know, people know you and people know me, but they may not know us and how long we’ve known each other. So I remember the first time I met you. It was in New Orleans, and I had just almost pretty much just started at Ragan Communications. I was a nobody, you were already well known. And it was the days of CompuServe. And I went out to CompuServe and I met you and Pete Shinbach and Charles Pizzo and Craig Jolly. And you guys were doing like a barnstorming tour all over the place. And Charles Pizzo invited me down to New Orleans, which is where he lives, to be the lunch speaker. So you guys are going to handle all the heavy hitting, all the big topics, and I’m going to come in and be the lunch speaker — my first speech ever, except for college. I threw up right before I got on the stage and it went great. I said, you know what? I don’t know how else to do this but to be myself. And I’m a little unfiltered. I’m a little irreverent. I’m a little — whatever you want to call it — unprofessional, maybe. But I got up there and I did what I did. I just do what I do. And it was a huge hit. And it basically launched my career. And then we went on to have one of the most epic weekends of all time at Jazz Fest. Shel Holtz: I remember this well enough to know that you were physically sick at the idea of getting up and speaking in front of people. Not to mention an epic dinner at Emeril’s. Steve Crescenzo: Oh, that 12 courses in his wine cellar at Emeril’s. God, I’ll never forget that meal. And then since then, we’ve been on vacation together. You and I did a barnstorming tour with our wives up and down the East Coast, from Boston all the way down to D.C. Shel Holtz: Yeah, we did. We stopped and saw a concert in Hartford, Connecticut on the way. We had many good meals. And yeah, you spoke the first day, I spoke the second day. And the wives hung out with whichever of us was not presenting. We went out and did stuff. And then we were all together for our drives between locations. We didn’t fly from place to place. We rented a car and we drove. But we vacationed. Steve Crescenzo: That’s right, you’re Dead. Dead. Yeah, no, we drove. We drove. You know, the reason we’ve never done that again, because every time I was speaking, Michele would try to get Cindy to spend money shopping, and we couldn’t afford it at the time. I was barely making any money. Shel Holtz: I remember that well. I think you had more money when we spent a week together in Hawaii. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, we were doing a little better then. It helps that it was free for us because of your kindness. You know, we promised we would talk about managers as communicators. Shel Holtz: Yes, we did. Steve Crescenzo: So, what I’d like to tell you is what’s happening in Crescenzo Communications. And this is a really good thing. I want to say this is a good thing. We are getting at least eight to 10 requests every year now to directly address managers on how to be more effective communicators, how to carry the water, how to explain complicated business initiatives to your teams. People — I used to say, you know, we speak to the communicators about how to galvanize managers, and how to — don’t give them a big toolkit, don’t give them some big obnoxious thing they’re never gonna pay attention to, but you can help them communicate. I would always go to the communicator. Lately now, the communicators are bringing us in and saying, we just want to talk to our managers directly. And that’s happening more and more. I think people are finally kind of starting to get it a little bit, that — yeah, channels are important, yes, messaging is important, our vehicles are important, what we do as corporate communicators is important, but where the rubber hits the road is down there at the work level, and the frontline supervisors and the managers. Shel Holtz: I used to resist this like crazy. I understand that managers are important in the communication mix. If you look at research, you ask employees, what is your preferred source of information on these 10 things? And five of them will be my manager. And the reason for that is that those five things are going… my phone is ringing. Steve Crescenzo: Oh, okay. Shel Holtz: It’s my cable company trying to upsell me. Okay, let me go back to that. Steve Crescenzo: Okay. Shel Holtz: If you look at surveys that ask employees what is their preferred source of information, you give them a list of 10 things, five of them will be my immediate supervisor. And the reason for that is those five things are going to have an impact on the way they do their work, on what their outputs are supposed to be, what’s expected of them in that department, on that team. And the manager is the one they expect to know — what are we supposed to do different here? You’re not going to ask your manager to explain a new benefit or the strategic plan; those things you expect to hear from the benefits department or the executive team. But if it has to do with what you are expected to do differently — this change that we’re making is going to drive some kind of change in your team — the manager is the one who’s going to talk about that at the ground level. My issue has always been that managers are never held accountable for communication. And every one of them does it differently. I mean, let’s face it, most managers were not promoted into their position because of their great management style. They were promoted because of what they were doing as an individual contributor, and they kept getting promoted and promoted, and to get promoted again and to get more money, now they have to be a manager because that’s the hierarchy of the organization. So because they did this great work as an individual contributor, they now have people reporting to them. Most companies will put them through some kind of training. My company does. It’s called management essentials. There is a communication module. But again, they’re not held accountable. And you ask them to communicate, and some of them will forward the email to their employees, some of them will mention it at a meeting, some of them won’t do anything, some of them will do a great job, some of them will do a terrible job. But manager communication, to me, was always like that children’s party game of telephone, where you whisper something into the ear of the first kid, then they whisper it into the ear of the next. By the time it gets to the last kid, the message has been corrupted so much it doesn’t sound anything like what was whispered into the ear of the first kid. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I’m the living embodiment of that. When I came out of college — and I had like 85 jobs in college and leading up to college — I’ve only had two jobs since college: Ragan Communications and Crescenzo Communications. But I started at Ragan as an editor and I was good at what I did, I guess. Next thing I knew, I had six people reporting to me, and I couldn’t stand it. I was a terrible manager. I wasn’t relaying information. I would just do the work myself. I hated all the people that worked for me after a while because I just — I wasn’t a good manager. I’d skip them. I didn’t do them sometimes. Here’s a great example. One of the guys that we worked with had such bad body odor. And everybody came to me and said, you gotta tell him he can’t ride his bike to work, he’s gonna stink up the office. And I was like, I’m not telling him that. They said, it’s your job, you’re his manager. I’m like, no, I’m not doing it. You want to tell him? I was just terrible. But that’s exactly… You remember this guy, what was his name? Grunig, Grunig… Shel Holtz: I bet you hated doing performance evaluations. Jim Grunig. Steve Crescenzo: Grunig, that was his name. Grunig. Jim Grunig. He wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review about how companies shouldn’t even have communications departments. They should just pour all their money into helping managers communicate. Forget about a newsletter, forget about this, forget about that, town halls — forget all about it. Pour everything into the managers. And I was asked to debate him once in Toronto. And I’ll never forget, I went up to him before the debate and I said, hey, let’s do a real debate. I said, because I really disagree with you. Don’t be one of these conference debates where we basically just agree with each other the whole time and we’re nice to each other. I vehemently disagree with you. So let’s have it out. And we had a slugfest up there. And I just disagreed with him. I think that — truth be told, now with a little more wisdom — I was young then, we probably had to meet in the middle somewhere. Communicators should put more emphasis on managers and help them communicate. Help them localize the corporate news for their teams, make it relevant to their teams, start conversations, gather questions from employees. We should be helping managers do all that. In the meantime, we also need enterprise-wide communications and all the good stuff that we’re good at. Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I’m really glad that communication teams are recognizing the importance of this to the degree that they’re asking you to come out and talk to managers. And I’m glad you’re getting that work. But it’s like anything else that we’re doing right now — it’s a one-shot thing. And in a year, managers will have moved on. The pressures of the job, the expectations for their teams, the numbers they need to produce. And the simple fact is, if you’re looking at your performance review, and 90% of what you are scored on is all about productivity, and 3% is communication, you’re going to blow off the communication. So what we need to do is find ways to make sure that we have an ongoing dialogue with managers where they understand what it is that they need to communicate without putting extra pressure on them. For example, where I work, we do a monthly email newsletter called Manager Talking Points. And the first thing is four bullets, right? We want you to remind your employees of this. We want you to tell your employees this. If it’s a big deal, we’ll also put out something we call Manager Briefing, which is an FAQ on the topic so that they can answer specific questions. We’re not trying to get them to become communicators, but we are trying to promote consistency of… Steve Crescenzo: But it’s still short, it’s tight, right? Shel Holtz: …the primary message, while leaving them the room to say, here’s what this means to us here in this team, this department, this location. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. I’ve never, in all my years of building the companies and helping managers communicate all over the world, I’ve never seen a manager’s toolkit, for lack of a better word, work if it’s extensive — if there’s “watch this video, do this, do that.” Every time we do focus groups with managers, and Cindy does a hundred a year, maybe 50 a year for our audience, they all start off by saying, I don’t have any time to communicate. I don’t have time to communicate. After Cindy digs in a little bit, as you do in a focus group, she gets to the bottom — they say, well, you know what? They do have time to communicate. They communicate every day to their teams. They’re talking to their teams every day. They just don’t know what to communicate. They don’t know what’s for their ears only, what they should pass on. That’s why one of the things we do whenever we do a newsletter for managers, we always do Know, Do, and Share. Put them in categories. Here’s stuff we need you to know — this is just for the managers’ ears. Here’s stuff we need you to do as a manager. And here’s what we want you to share with your employees. It makes it very easy for them to share that information. And lately what we’ve been doing is including conversation starters where they can actually talk — that way they can facilitate that two-way up and down communication. And you know what, managers appreciate it. They appreciate the help. They don’t want to be bad communicators. You know, I was just out at PG&E, in your neck of the woods, Shel — San Francisco. And I was addressing 600 people leaders at PG&E. And I got there and I said, how many people here have miscommunicated? How many people here have screwed up a communication to their teams? Every hand went up. I said, how many people did it out of malice? How many people did it because you wanted to sow confusion? You wanted to irritate? You wanted to bring productivity to a halt? You’re just a bad, lousy, rotten person. Every hand went down, of course. I said, no, we just — we have bad habits. We write too long. Our emails aren’t clear. We don’t like to get negative feedback. I mean, we got bad habits, and communications can help managers get rid of some of those habits. Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. And I think they appreciate learning how to do something that is going to advance their own careers, which, by the way, is something that we can also impress upon them — is if you do a good job of communication, you’re going to get better outcomes from your teams. You’re going to get more promotions and more money and more prestige within the organization. But we’re not trying to turn them into communicators. We’re not trying to make them do what we do. Steve Crescenzo: No, no, they have a job! They have a job! Shel Holtz: They do, but we are trying to make them better managers. And in my framework, under employee engagement, one of the four topics listed there is engaging managers. And if you want to be an engaging manager and boost the engagement of your employees, being a better manager who communicates well is a big part of that. Steve Crescenzo: Shel, I like that. That’s for our first podcast — that’s a keeper right there. We are not trying to turn managers into communicators. We’re trying to help them be better managers using communication. No, I didn’t say that right. I agree — we are not… I like that. Close enough, Shel, come on, for God’s sake, edit that out. No, no, I like that. You said it. It was really good. We’re not trying to turn managers into communicators. We’re trying to help them be better managers using communication tactics. Shel Holtz: Exactly. Close enough. I can pull it out of the transcript later. Exactly what I said. Yeah. So, and by the way, I’m sure that when you implemented those newsletters for managers, you had a mechanism for measuring how effective they were. Steve Crescenzo: I didn’t implement them, Shel. I started them. We don’t implement over here. Yes, we launched, and we started. We didn’t facilitate them. We didn’t implement them. We didn’t utilize them. Yes, we did. Yes, we did. And you know what? One of the companies we did that for was the Mayo Clinic. I know we have to get to the end here, but we did it at the Mayo Clinic. And now Cindy and I just finished a project where we interviewed 50 Mayo Clinic nurses, leaders, nurse leaders. Shel Holtz: Got it. The client did it. But you provided the client with the means of measuring how effective they were. Steve Crescenzo: We built a whole 41-course curriculum for them. And we heard in our interviews that they love the manager newsletter — it’s called Supervisor Update — because it has that Know, Share, Do. They love them. People said it without knowing that we were the ones that created it, that we gave them the format. They just talked about, yeah, this was really effective. I like doing this. I like getting that newsletter because it’s quick. Tells me what I need to pass on to my team. So yeah, the measurement’s there. If we can help them communicate without taking up a lot of their time, that’s the silver bullet. Shel Holtz: Yeah. Yeah, for my Talking Points newsletter, the measure is real easy. I get a list of 50 random employees who are frontline workers. I send them a survey. It’s four questions. Did your manager in the last week or two talk to you about this? How about this? What about that? All four of those points. And we can find out if these messages are getting passed along. Steve Crescenzo: Oh wait, so you bypass the managers, you go right to the people, and you can figure out if the managers are using your bullet points? That is smart. That’s something — every time I talk to you, that’s smart. Shel Holtz: Yes. Yeah. And I’m able to detect trends — which kinds of talking points they are inclined to share, and which ones, I guess, bore them and they don’t share. Steve Crescenzo: Now if there’s one manager who’s particularly not doing anything, do you snitch on them? Do you rat them out? Shel Holtz: We don’t know who’s answering. It’s an anonymous survey. But what it tells us is that we need to find a different channel to communicate these messages because managers aren’t passing them along. While at the same time working with managers to get them to understand the importance of sharing this information. Steve Crescenzo: Well, I hope this isn’t going to be the last time we talk about manager communications. Shel Holtz: I can’t imagine that it is. We are going to talk about other things, though, like the elements of culture where employees can have an impact. The other enablers of employee engagement, like organizational integrity, closing the say-do gap between what leaders say and what they actually do. Strategic narratives, elevating the employee voice. Steve Crescenzo: Love it. There’s so much on my mind, and luckily it all does fit into your framework. You know, the employee experience, how they can influence the customer experience, how can you turn them into ambassadors? And obviously we’re going to talk a little bit about AI, Shel — I mean, you’re Shel Holtz. But I’m hoping to learn from you about AI. Shel Holtz: Yeah, we’ll definitely talk about technology. I can’t imagine that we could do this whole podcast without talking tech. But we’ll get down to some of the fundamentals too, like delivering the news to employees. I’ve talked to some communicators who are so into the strategy, they don’t think they need to share news anymore, but the news is how we create a shared reality in the organization. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, yeah, I love that. We got to have the two C’s — crisis and change communications — both of which are often butchered. Well, it’s just going to be fun, Shel. I can’t wait. Can’t forget those. Are we doing it every other week, right? Shel Holtz: Every other week. I can’t swear what day it’ll be. I’m not going to promise the first and the 15th or every other Thursday, but twice a month. And you’ll be able to get this wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe. And it’ll also be on YouTube on the FIR Podcast Network. That’s also where this one will live — on the FIR Podcast Network at FIRpodcastnetwork.com. That’s where Neville Hobson and I have been doing For Immediate Release for 21 years. Steve Crescenzo: I know. Shel Holtz: So you have to look forward to, Steve, will be doing this when I am in my nineties. Steve Crescenzo: Well, I want to end with one more anecdote about you and your podcast and your ability and your forethinking. Is that a word? Forethinking? Your thinking forward, your forward thinking. My wedding to Cindy was 20 years ago. And you’d pretty much almost just started the podcast. And you showed up, came into my house, like the day before the wedding, with your suitcase — your podcast suitcase. Remember that? And you had all this equipment. Shel Holtz: It is now. I do. Steve Crescenzo: Run it all over the dining room table, and you did your podcast from my house. Probably that was the first year you were doing it, right? Shel Holtz: Yeah, it would have been. I had a travel mixer and a travel mic. I don’t use a mixer anymore. I don’t need that stuff anymore because of what’s available online. But yeah, I absolutely remember that. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, yeah, I remember all that. I remember — what kind of nerd brings podcast stuff to a wedding? But you’re dedicated, man. You are dedicated. Shel Holtz: Well, we did them on a regular cadence and had to get it done. So, yeah. And I think I came to your place because the Wi-Fi in the hotel wasn’t cutting it. Steve Crescenzo: That’s awesome. That’s great. Yes, that’s right. That’s right. You couldn’t do it in a Starbucks, you told me. I remember that very clearly. Shel Holtz: Yeah, well, a little too much ambient noise in a Starbucks. But anyway, we’re recording this first episode for two reasons. One, you have to do a first episode that tells people what it’s all about. But two, you can’t get listed in the podcast directories until you actually have an episode in the RSS feed. So this will be an episode that will get us listed in the directories so that you’ll be able to find us there, everybody. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. Is that why we did this? I don’t even know. Okay. Now, can people comment on the podcast — like ask us questions? Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. We will let people know when there’s a new episode up. We’ll share some information about it through the social channels, primarily LinkedIn, Facebook, Bluesky, and Threads. And we’ll also have the post on the FIR Podcast Network. You can comment there. You can comment where we leave the announcements on the social feeds. We’ll check them all, and we will use those as launching points for additional conversations. Steve Crescenzo: All right, my friend. Well, I want to thank you for asking me to do this. I’m looking forward to it every other week. Plan on learning a lot, plan on laughing a lot, and I will see you in a couple of weeks. Shel Holtz: I’ll see you then. It’s going to be a blast. The post Managers As A Communication Channel appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.