A Musing on Improving Communication and the 'Communication Constitution' Method

Do you want to improve communication? 
Yes, good, now what do you mean by that?

Reviewing every letter, email and instant message you send out is a mammoth task and it is often shuffled away for a time 'when we're not as busy!' Well, at least this was my experience when I was working in law firms. Worse still when improving communication was consider an ad hoc task where odd paragraphs were added to existing letters in completely contrary style or using inconsistent terminology. 

If you agree that communication is something which is important to your organisation then you should consider investing time and effort to its improvement, and with anything worth investing time and effort, it must be done in a structured way, with clear goals and a path to achieve them goals.

First, you should identify the problem. This is probably easy enough, look at your communication. Look at your marketing communication and the communication you have with the customer through your business process. Is there an inconsistency? Put yourself in the place of your customer. If you read the press release and then received the communication would you think they came from the same business? Also look at what you promise the customer, do you promise a 'fast and reliable service', does your communication live up to that? 

The temptation is to start re-drafting your letters and emails, but we need to slow down and set up a process, otherwise, this problem is going to come back. You need to pull the root of the weed out, or the problem will only grow again and probably into a Triffid. I devised the following method when looking at my organisation's communication.

I prepared the following on a white board:

The purpose of the model was to establish the vision in the top left quarter, establish what we wanted to avoid in the top and bottom right quarters but preserve what we were doing well.

I did the exercise alone to start with and in the top left quarter wrote things like clear, correct, friendly. I repeated the exercise with some senior members of the operations team and they wanted quick to produce or automated. I repeated it again with customer services, people who were on the telephone to customers every day, and they wanted the communication to be frequent and informative. As you can see the perspectives of communication differ depending on a person's priorities and, as in most business initiatives, a collaborative effort is always more successful. 

From the four sections, we were able to create a benchmark by which all communication and future communication could be judged. We had created a 'Communication Constitution'.

The next stage, setting up a process. Assigning responsibility to people who will be able to come together when necessary to consider changes and regular reviews of the communication and start re-drafting. As with so many business activities, reviewing your communication isn't a one-off job but something which needs to be considered time and time again. As time passes the 'Communication Constitution' isn't used as a benchmark, but as a springboard for improvement. We can start to ask questions such as 'could we make this clearer?' or 'could we automate this communication?'

This method seems to work very well for 'standard' communication but there is always an occurrence which cannot be anticipated and you need your staff to be able to communicate without those helpful templates but still with the 'Communication Constitution' in mind. Engaging with staff is paramount, repeat the Constitution finding exercise with new recruits and in team meetings and check that they share the same values as the original constitution. Encourage self-assessment, getting them to look at their own communication against the constitution.

We focused on Customer communication, but the same exercise could (and should) be repeated for internal communication and communication with third parties.

Reviewing my organisation's communication has been a very enlightening experience, please feel free to try the 'Communication Constitution' method and let me know how you get on.