President of Livewire, a strategic employee communications agency with offices in Toronto and Chicago. 2020 IABC Global Agency of the Year.
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It’s gratifying to look back at your predictions for the year and feel you did okay. 2020 did see HR continue its rise in profile and digitization remained a priority and a driving force of workforce transformation. Employee experience rose in importance, and employee communicators proved their value by getting critical messages where they were needed most — all while managing the precious and scarce resource of employee attention.
We didn’t expect that a major global crisis would take all these predictions and accelerate them, compressing years of work into months.
A year ago, a strong HR function was seen as a strategic advantage to forward-looking organizations. By April, HR was the dominant function in practically every organization everywhere. The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly shown that organizations are powered by people. Companies rebuilding their business models, workplaces and supply chains overnight highlighted the central role of Internal Communicators (IC) — coordinating and aligning the messages to the organization from HR, IT and Operations.
Compounding this was a crisis in culture, as systemic racism burst into focus with the brutal impact of the pandemic on communities of color and mass public outrage at police violence toward members of those same communities. The shockwaves were felt in the streets and throughout organizations, as leaders began the long-overdue reckoning of our collective role in not addressing issues of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in and by the workplace.
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Throughout, companies needed to regain their footing and ensure continuity for their customers, yet they still had to deal with their regular, industry-specific crises, from food safety to cybersecurity to a disruptive competitor. All this against the looming backdrop of an economy that had just taken a major hit — and the impact was still landing in new ways, with some sectors unexpectedly surging and others collapsing overnight.
Employees craved communication. Everything from the most detailed questions about working safely and effectively in the new environment to needing clarity around who we are, what we stand for and the reasons to believe our organization will survive this. Workers needed to hear from leaders and from subject matter experts to help them understand what was happening, connect with and support each other, have trust and confidence in leaders, and get aligned immediately to the new way forward.
Communicators wrestled with overwhelming challenges — reaching frontline workforces that were inundated with difficult working environments and nearly total demand on their attention, coupled with the anxiety of going to work and putting their families at risk. Whole sections of the workforce were isolated or at home with their kids, sometimes with a tenuous digital connection to their workplace. Communicators also needed to support leaders, some of whom struggled to be communicative at the best of times and who suddenly needed to be there, be visible and be strong for their teams.
As a change communications agency, we saw an immediate burst of calls from clients in March and April. Managing the crisis became their priority and other projects and initiatives were put on hold for months as the pandemic consumed all senior attention and resources.
Throughout this, we kept in contact and grew increasingly inspired by what we saw.
Tens of millions of workers rallied to keep society running. Leaders reached to their values and their purpose as compass points, grounding and guiding their people. And, perhaps because their minds were so attuned, they made strong commitments to DEI in their organizations, even as governments struggled to voice a coherent response.
2020 is a year none of us will forget. For those who work in HR and IC — the “People” business — we went from being the “soft stuff” to being mission-critical functions. The material side of transformation in Operations and IT was revealed to only be possible with the partnership of the HR and employee communication functions.
2021 is showing optimistic signs on the horizon, but ongoing challenges will require our close attention.
With the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, the threat to health will diminish. Culturally and economically, we are likely to see a surge in activity like that experienced in the Roaring ’20s following WWI and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.
Here are my predictions for 2021 from a communications perspective:
1. Expect to see DEI remain a major theme. Recent events have energized and grown the membership of activists in their communities, connecting them online and in the streets; they will not let organizations forget their commitments. Neither will employees. Communicators need to become experts on these issues. More than this, they need to fix the ways their communication practices reinforce biases and prejudice in culture.
2. Customer experience (CX) will remain important, and marketers will increasingly recognize that employee experience (EX) is critical to making this effective. Communications will be integral to informing, engaging and inspiring employees toward delivering a differentiating and loyalty-generating CX.
3. EX and sustaining culture will be more dependent than ever on communications. Despite the short-term challenge of returning to the workplace, many organizations will transition to permanent hybrid models of in-office and work-from-home. For many, communications will be the primary way they encounter the culture beyond their immediate colleagues.
4. HR and employee communications must get aligned at the highest levels. Workplace change is about people and, after 2020, HR will likely be the undisputed leader of change. HR will rely even more heavily on the value of employee communications and the need to connect people to the foundation of purpose and to the most relevant details of the moment. If change is to be successful, it must be successfully communicated with context, clarity, consistency and continuity.
5. Nothing is going to slow down. Organizations still need to absorb and adopt the changes of the last year — of their ongoing digital and business model transformations, and of evolving competitive threats and customer and employee needs. Change will keep changing. We need to stay connected more than ever. We need to communicate.
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Author: Mark Attard, Forbes Councils Member
