Less Chatter, More Matter: The Communications Podcast

#127 Communicating process and policy updates in a way that isn't boring

• Season 1 • Episode 127

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Not every message we share is exciting, but often, it’s the dull updates that matter most. In this episode of the Less Chatter, More Matter podcast, we dive into how we can turn dry topics like new policies, process changes, or compliance updates into messages that people actually notice, understand, and act on.

We explain why the temptation to send out an “FYI” isn’t enough and why failing to communicate the “boring stuff” well can create risks to operations, reputation, and even legal compliance. We share five practical ways to make sure critical information cuts through the noise, without overwhelming your audience.

You’ll also hear real examples (snake alerts at work, anyone?) and learn how legislation now recognises that poor communication can even pose a psychosocial risk in the workplace.

If you’ve ever struggled to get people to pay attention to policies, procedures, or other “dry” updates, this episode is your reminder that you can make the boring interesting and protect your business at the same time.

Tune in, take some notes, and find out how to turn your next dull update into something that sticks.

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New policies, process changes, updates to platform features. None of this stuff sounds terribly interesting, does it? And certainly the way we tend to communicate about these things isn't very interesting either. But the problem with that is while things may not be exciting, they can be very important. For example, new health and safety policies, financial delegations, or getting a customer process right, are critical to protecting the reputation of a business, and in some cases, protecting the business legally as well. So when faced with the seemingly mundane, how do we get it to cut through the noise? Well, friend, that's what today's episode is all about. Hi, friend, and welcome to another episode of Less Chatter More Matter, the Communication podcast. My name is Mel Loy and I'm recording this on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, Brisbane. And today's episode is a gentle reminder that even though the subject matter of what we communicate might be boring, it's often critical to things like compliance, business operations, and so on. So while it can be tempting to simply send out something as an FYI, or ask people to tick a box to say they agree to something like a new policy - it's important that we put more work into the comms than just that. Why, you may ask when it could just be operational in inverted commas. Because if people don't truly engage in your comms or understand the implications for their role or the importance of that to the business, then you increase risk to the business. For example, delegations of authority. They might align with the rules and expectations set by regulators of your industry. If people don't know what they're responsible for and what they're not responsible for, that could lead to all kinds of issues. Or if you're introducing a new policy or procedure or even updates to those existing documents, and they will mean changes for some people's roles and responsibilities, then they need to be properly consulted and communicated with effectively. If not, under Australian workplace health and safety legislation, you could be risking a breach of the psychosocial risk element. Basically, the law now recognises that poor change management is a psychosocial safety risk, and that includes things like having genuine and proper consultation and effective communication. So if there's risks to the business, our role is to help mitigate them, and that means we have to take our role as strategic communicators or change managers very seriously and avoid the temptation to drop something just in as an FYI. And that means we have to make sure our communication cuts through the noise and gets the reaction we want from our audiences. So how do we make boring things interesting. Well, I'm going to share five of my favorite tips, and if you've got any others that you've seen work, please let me know. All right, so tip one is. Boil it down to just three things, whether it's a new policy, a process, a procedure, whatever it might be. Find out what the three key things are that each audience segment needs to know. This is about making it super relevant to each audience, so it's not just, here's a new policy, it's great. You should read it. What it is is here's a new policy and what it means for you specifically. It's also about making it super short, because let's face it. People rarely read an entire policy or procedure until they need to. If we keep these three relevant points short and sharp, we can increase our chances of getting the message across, but you can also use them to pique people's curiosity and encourage them to read more of the boring bits. So for example, let's say you are introducing a new AI responsible use policy. You could say something like, here's three reasons why you should read this policy. Number one, find out what you can and can't do with AI at our company. Number two, learn what happens when you get it wrong. And number three, find out how to detect if AI generated content is telling a lie. So again, those are things that can really start to generate curiosity, or maybe you have a new accounts payable process, so you could say. We have a new accounts payable process. There's three big reasons why you need to read it. Number one, there's a significant difference between the old process and the new one. Can you pick it? Number two, you want to keep your vendors happy, but if you don't follow the process, they might not get paid on time. And number three, you team's reporting metrics are going to change. Find out how you'll be tracking payments from now on. Now, why do three things work so well? Apart from being short and helping us drive curiosity, it's because our brains love threes. Threes are where patterns start to emerge, and human brains, they love detecting patterns. Whether they're actually there or not, it's to do with how we process the world around us and make meaning of what we see. But it also has to do with what we know about cognitive load theory, which is essentially how many pieces of new information you can take in and remember at any one time. Now, some estimates are as high as seven pieces, but most are only around three or four. And of course it gets worse as we age. So three is a pretty good number of points to stick to. Tip number two is make it visual. I know I've harped on about this a fair bit over the years of doing this podcast and in both my books, so I won't spend too much more time on it here, but using a visual to simply highlight the key points of the boring stuff, especially the key points that are most critical and or most relevant, will absolutely grab the attention of your audience. The reason being that people are predominantly visual thinkers and learners, and that's because our brains make sense of images ridiculously fast. Just because they've made sense of something doesn't make it true. But that's a story for another day. So how could you put a visual in place to communicate something boring, but in a visual way that grabs attention? So you could use things like icons that represent the key points. You could create an infographic or a basic animation in PowerPoint or Canva. Even a short video of a screen recording highlighting key things in a document or a system can be really effective. It doesn't have to take a huge amount of time or effort, and nor do you need to be a qualified graphic designer. It's all about how you take the core, Most relevant and most important details and distill them down into simple graphics and short phrases that get the point across as quickly and effectively as possible. And if there are parts of the boring stuff that are more relevant or more critical than others, consider the hierarchy of those elements in your visual. So for example, the critical stuff might be right up the top in much bigger text with a big fat red alert icon next to it. That hierarchy of information is really important to how you create your visuals as well. All right. Tip number three, use a story. Now, like you've heard on previous episodes of the podcast, our brains are wired for stories, and stories are typically about change because we were also wired to detect changes in our environment, though that's what kept us safe. So think about how you could bring storytelling into the mix to bring your boring topic to life for your audience. So. Maybe it's a day in the life of a character who represents a particular audience segment. So for example, finance Freddy gets to work and has to pay three vendors using the new accounts payable process. Here's what he does, and then Freddy runs into an issue. So here's the conflict in your story, and this is what he does to resolve it. It is even better if you have a real life example to bring that criticality to life. So for instance, the change management psychosocial risk I was talking about earlier, that was only brought into legislation in the last 18 months. And many businesses may not know about it or may not be taking it seriously, but we are now starting to see a few organisations be investigated under this legislation. So use their stories to provide a compelling reason why people should pay attention. A story can also be drawn from your own staff or customers. People have engaged with the new boring stuff and they can share their own experiences or people who are challenged or had issues under the old ways of doing things and demonstrate why the new way is so critical. Like all stories, the key is to have a moral to it. What is the point you want to prove and then craft the story that suits that. Tip number four, make it interactive. It's one thing to get people's attention, It's quite another to keep it. So this is where making your communication interactive can really help. This is something that news sites in particular do really well. So for instance, around federal budget time here in Australia, the ABC News does a really great job online of creating interactive articles where you can click on specific images and text will appear. But the brilliant part of this is that each image relates to a specific audience or group. So the introductory paragraph might be something like, here's the big winners and losers from this year's budget, and then below that are a series of images. Now they're either in green for good or red for bad. So you've got that visual element to it as well. But for different groups, like what the budget will mean for sports clubs, women, aged care, allied health, all those things, they are super short synopsis of how the budget will impact those groups. Now imagine applying something like that to your comms about a new policy, interactive elements where people could click on an image that's relevant to them and find out what this new policy means for them specifically. If they're curious, they'll probably click on the other groups as well. That's just one idea. You could have one big image with different elements a person can click on to get more information. You could have a choose your own adventure kind of storyline. Or even a quiz. None of these things cost a lot to make, if at all. Tools like Canva and Adobe are making this kind of thing more possible and so much easier to do. And even on a SharePoint page, you can make this thing work. These are just a few ideas, but the beauty of this kind of approach is that it spikes that curiosity bias that we all had, that I mentioned earlier. And not only does it grab attention, but it holds it. And in a world where there's so many things trying to get our attention at any one time, this is so much more important than ever before. All right. Final tip, tip number five is use humor appropriately. Humor is a great way to break the ice, especially if you're talking about something that's a little dry, repetitive, tedious, or just plain dull. And it's especially useful when it's not expected. So for example, if you talk about the importance of safety a lot at work and people are using the same old reminders and safety alerts, then injecting a bit of humor can act as a bit of a circuit breaker and get people's attention. Many moons ago, I worked in an organisation where our headquarters was across the road from a swamp, basically, which meant we had all sorts of wildlife running and slithering around the grounds. And as part of the internal comms team, it was my job to alert people to any dangerous critters. So for example, a snake was spotted in the warehouse, so don't go in there. Or there's a magpie swooping people out the front of the building take an umbrella when you go outside, whatever. Side note, for those of you listening outside Australia, this is not particularly common. Also, if you are from North America, I dunno what you are worried about. I can outrun a snake or a spider. I cannot outrun a bear or a coyote. So you guys have bigger problems. But anyway, these kind of notices were an opportunity to bring a bit of levity into people's days. So we started to make them more fun and humorous. So for example, we would write a poem about the snake or use alliteration, create funny images, et cetera. And not only did they cut through the noise, but they put a smile on people's faces, which made those messages more memorable. Funny visuals can be great. So for example, a cartoon showing a situation that people find themselves in constantly that they can relate to. And then you can talk about how your topic addresses that problem. A funny meme, a pun, can also be simple ways to bring humor in. I've also seen some great examples of using humor in other safety communication. And if you don't already, actually, I highly recommend you follow Steven Harvey on Instagram or LinkedIn. We might even get him on to chat in a future episode. But humor can also be used by leaders when they're explaining something important that they want people to pay attention to. A funny personal story, for example, can not only break the ice, but they'll make that message so much more memorable. So let's say you're implementing a new accounts payable system and perhaps this leader has a story from a previous workplace or even from a former colleague. About the time when they realised that products were being coated incorrectly into the AP system. Maybe the system told them they'd bought 500 balloons, when in fact they had bought 500 safety helmets, whatever told the right way with something unexpected. Those can be really funny stories. If you listen to my interview last week with Soundari she talked about how a company apparently had a bunch of astronauts working for them. Well, they didn't. In fact, this company had nothing to do with space exploration. It's just that astronaut was the first job title that came up in a dropdown menu and people couldn't be bothered scrolling any further. It's a great story about why we need to make systems work for the people that use them. So challenge team leaders to think back on any funny experiences they might have that could relate to the topic they'd need to communicate about and share them. I promise you. They will be much more likely to be remembered for the right reasons. Now, I've got one bonus tip for you. Remember, the Skills framework Skills stands for Subject, Knowledge, Ideas, Language, Less and Skimmable. This is a framework from my new book. So subject means who you're talking to, so making it personal, making it relevant knowledge is well, what context do they already have? What knowledge do they already have or don't have that you need to fill in the gaps? Ideas is how you structure the communication to make it. Easy to follow. Language is about keeping it simple. We've talked about that a lot less is keep it short. We've also talked about that and skimmable, because we know people don't actually read word for word, which is where some of these more interactive types of comms can actually be really useful because they're skimmable. Each one of these elements is backed by behavioural science and is gonna help you cut through the noise, even with the boring stuff. So subject knowledge, ideas, language, less, and skimmable. Okay, it is time for your episode recap and today I shared five tips on how you can make boring but important messages. Cut through the noise and be remembered. Tip one, boil it down to three things. We can only cope with a few new pieces of information at any one time, which means we need to get the to the crux of the message really quickly. Importantly though, though, make sure those three things are relevant to an audience segment. And like I said, you can even use those three things to p people's curiosity and get them to read more. Tip number two, make it visual. Our brains are wired to take in visual information and process it super quickly, and also making it visual means we make it shorter a lot of the time and get to the point more quickly. Tip number three, use a story. Our brains are also wired for stories and they're much more interesting than dot points. Stories can also help to put the information into context for people and help them see why it's important. Tip number four, make it interactive. Use clickable objects or games or quizzes to help grab and keep attention. And tip five, use humor appropriately. It can be a great circuit breaker and really makes messages so much more memorable. All right, team. That's it for today. Thank you so much for joining into another episode of Less Chatter More Matter. If you enjoyed today's episode or any other episode, please rate and leave a review and maybe even pass it on to somebody you think could benefit from the show as well. And as always, if you've got ideas for topics you'd like me to cover, whether it's myself or with a guest, please write in, send me a message. I'm happy to receive any and all feedback and any and all ideas. This is the People show. For now, keep doing amazing things and I'll see you next time.