internal communications

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Clare Josa
I can't wait to share this interview with you with Janet Hitchen, who is a world leading internal communications consultant who's worked and advised leaders the likes of Apple and Nespresso. And in today's interview, what we're going to be covering is why starting with how is getting hybrid back to front? We're going to look at the energy with which we make decisions, whether it's control or fear or whether it's empowerment. We'll look at how to create a genuine level playing field, how to make sure everybody feels their voice has been heard, and how to communicate the decisions that we're making on hybrid working in ways that inspire people to thrive and feel like they belong rather than getting them searching the job hunting websites.

Clare Josa
So this is for you, whether you're an internal communications or whether you're leading or advising a team or manager on how to communicate hybrid working decisions and how to make those decisions in a way that put people first but without compromising on results. So over to Janet. I want to introduce Janet, I know some of you joining us today know Janet already, but Janet's career as an internal communications and culture consultant has seen her advising leaders from companies as diverse as Apple and Nespresso.

Clare Josa
And she's a trusted guide in creating the best in class communications strategy. She's known as a rebel woman and she asks the questions that create breakthroughs whilst getting everybody on board. And that's exactly what we're going to be talking to you about today. So hello and welcome, Janet.

Janet Hitchen
That's a lot to live up to is now.

Clare Josa
And I think we're going to do that and more today, what we want to start with today is looking really at the process of how do we create the hybrid environment? What is the culture that we need to create and how do we get people on board? And Janet, I want to start with a real bugbear of mine. I know that you've got some really great stuff to say is everybody with hybrids seems to be starting with how the mechanics, how many days a week, how far distance to the desks, what do we do about how to make this work?

Clare Josa
And starting with how is getting hybrid back to front. I'd love to hear your take on the question.

Janet Hitchen
We should be asking ourselves instead why everything starts with the why. Simon Sinek said it best and we seem to have forgotten that. And it's really, really interesting. This is a whole new challenge. Nobody's done it before. It's brand new. And yet everyone seems to have thrown out all of the best practice and jumped to the to the how, because that's the bit that they're all a little bit really concerned, worried and and anxious about.

Janet Hitchen
But actually, that's not the bit that the employee cares about. First and foremost, the employee cares about the why, I think, yeah, we can get to the how we can get to the how far is my desk away and do I have a one way system and all that sort of fun stuff. But we can also sorry. Somebody is just trying to tell me what's typical isn't it. Something starts and someone calls you. So I think it's why I think we need to get straight.

Janet Hitchen
And what we need to do is from an internal communication standpoint, go back to the basics, write the brief, understand the problem you're trying to solve and sit in that problem for a little bit. So understand this from the employee perspective. How are they feeling? And this is where I think we always talk in Intel comes about. No. Do you feel sometimes you talk about say we talk a lot about a line, but here I think the biggest thing is feel because we've all been through.

Janet Hitchen
A chaotic 18 months, we've been through a really crazy 18 months. And everybody's feeling different. Everybody has a different sense of where they're at. So I think unless we understand that feeling and we understand how that communication is going to affect us and affect the people that we're communicating to, we're doing our the employees a real disservice. And I think the other thing is employee insights. So that was part of that briefing process. You might think, oh, well, we don't have you know, we only have formal employee surveys.

Janet Hitchen
OK, fine. You've got an employee survey, but what informal information do you have? Have you been running town hall meetings? Where you have Q&A is every month. Every week. Have you got coffee chats with your CEO where people are asking specific questions? What questions are they asking? This is about temperature checking and understanding how people are feeling right now, because where they were at the employee survey that might be once a year is probably not where they are right now with the information that's happening.

Janet Hitchen
So I think it's making sure you have really good, solid insights. And if you don't have those insights, go find them. I don't think oh, well, we got how we got to get out that quickly. No, you don't. It's more important to get it right first time, because if you don't get it right, first time, you're going to spend a long time working your way back to then work your way back down the way to work in the right way.

Janet Hitchen
So don't create more work for yourself. Do it right first time. And how do you find these employee insights? One second is almost just decided to come into the house. Interesting.

Clare Josa
While Janet is just having to deal with that, this builds a lot on the work that I do. So I work a lot with people on Imposter Syndrome. And it's the power of the word 'because'. When we can use the word 'because' when we're asking somebody to do something, it's much easier for them to feel like they've actually bought in. If we've got leaders saying we need you to come back into the office for this many days a week because it removes the fear, it gives people a reason.

Clare Josa
It helps them to feel like they in some way been involved, and it gives them that sense of connexion with the decision. One of the other things that I know that you've got some great views on, Janet, as said, so many of these decisions are being made from a place of control and fear. Maybe you could talk about that a bit.

Janet Hitchen
I think it's really interesting. We're doing a lot of reading and reading of articles, I'm not seeing other people posting on LinkedIn, so I'm seeing a lot of stuff, the same stuff that's getting churned. But I kind of go towards and yes, it's more American. But I think it's really interesting because I think it's still very relevant for for us here. And a lot of people work for American companies. So it's kind of, you know, it's important to get a full spectrum.

Janet Hitchen
And so I've been looking at things like The New Yorker and I've been looking at Inc and Wired and Fast Company. And actually even today I looked at something on the Atlantic. And I think what's really, really interesting is the word that is now starting to be used is gaslighting, which is really quite, quite a big word and not a word that we've heard before in a corporate or in a sort of a business environment. It's more the word that we've heard.

Janet Hitchen
You know, when your ex-boyfriend disappears or, you know, something something like that is more that kind of thing that we've heard. This is really interesting and it's about the use of language. And I think you and I were talking just before this, Clare, about how what's happening is people have been talking and using terms that sort of say, we know that you want to come back to the office. We know you've missed the office, do you?

Janet Hitchen
If you haven't done any of that employee inside work, if you haven't understood the why and then you're telling me how I feel. Yes, I do feel gaslighted. And that will get is that the right word? And that's not OK. That's only going to compound people's anxiety. That's going to compound people's the challenge that you have and make that even bigger. I think where are some of those pieces coming from? At the beginning of lockdown down one, I posted a piece about remote working because I've been remote working for ages a long, long time with remote teams internationally, having a team who was all around the world.

Janet Hitchen
So we went in one place at one time and it was really interesting because somebody sort of challenged me on it and said, but how do I know what they're doing? Like what? And it was a long time since I'd heard that kind of opinion expressed and I thought, OK, that's that's really interesting. All of is the work being achieved? Are you achieving your objectives as are things happening? Is your company making money? Yes. Right.

Janet Hitchen
Okay. Well, in that case, it's all good. Why do you need to sit over like an overlord? You know, this is no longer, you know, sort of a cotton factory or cotton mill in the 19th century. This is a little bit strange. And I think some of that is about fear. And there's a huge fear on, well, what does this mean? Does it mean I lose control? And I think there's a huge amount of work that can be done.

Janet Hitchen
And I think HRT is learning development teams could really, really support line managers here, particularly line managers who are getting who are going to have the brunt of this information, such as how to deal with to understand where what is that fear? What are you actually afraid of? Have those fears, are they justified and work through do that work, understand if those fears are justified? Because if you just have the I'm afraid, therefore we react, that's what we're going to do.

Janet Hitchen
That feels incredibly 19th century. If you understand that you're you have you're afraid of something. You're afraid that there's something that's going to happen because this is all new. This is all different. This is change in everyone collectively is going through it. Then actually, we need to do some work around where's that fire coming from? Is that fear founded? And how could you actually make that if it hasn't been working? Well, OK, fine. But if it has been working.

Janet Hitchen
What can actually moving to Hybrid working for you? Is there an opportunity? Do you have a lot of extroverted thinkers? Do you need those people to be working together and therefore they would benefit from coming together, but maybe once a month? Once a week? What and what does that actually look like? What is the work that you're trying to achieve and how do you get there? And then if you do that collaboratively, you have your why as to what it is that you're going to to achieve.

Janet Hitchen
And I think we're jumping to communicate some stuff too fast at the moment because we haven't sat in the problem long enough to actually understand what it is, what we're trying to do. Why is that? Why is that going on and how employees are going to feel at the end of it?

Clare Josa
And I think those are such important points, Janet. And I'm seeing so many organisations are starting with the decision of how many days a week, and they haven't necessarily thought through why they haven't really understood what is that going to do for our teams? And they're creating systems that will allow people to come in on random days, meaning that teams will never actually have a day together. And instead we could be looking at, well, what do we actually want to achieve while we want people to be able to have those watercooler moments?

Clare Josa
Great. What process do we want to put in place that facilitates that? How are we going to handle people having flexibility of choosing which days to come in and still make sure at least once a month there's a team day where people actually get to connect rather than just bringing their laptop in and doing the emails at work that they could have done from home?

Janet Hitchen
And I think the other thing as well is that we there are lots of companies who've been doing this for a while now.

Janet Hitchen
There are fully remote companies. A friend of mine works for a Start-Up that is fully remote. They I think they come in once a quarter, something like that. They used to they used to connect 14 days. And then and then everybody went back out remote KPMG. They're huge. They've been doing this for ages. Why is there no case study on what KPMG have been doing? Why are we not looking to them and saying, well, you guys have been making two days a week out of the they actually forced people out of the office.

Janet Hitchen
They do not come in two days a week. We don't want you here. And that was about real estate. And you know, how many bums on seats do you want at a certain time? They've got those teams have been making this work because, you know, when I last looked, KPMG were doing all right. So what are they doing? How have they managed it? What have their own managers got? What support they have? And I think where were those case studies where we can actually say so?

Janet Hitchen
People can't sort of think very simply that it's. Oh, well, that's a start up. We're not a start up. We're not like that where we're not, you know, 20 something and cool. That's got nothing to do with it. This is about the type of work that you do and understanding. Can that be done together or apart or hybrid or however. But I think that's that's been sort of really I've been really interested. There's been lots of jumping into a space.

Janet Hitchen
And I think you and I talking about this earlier today, sort of a this is brand new. Nobody's got the right answer yet. And there seems to be a land grab for what the right way to do this is. And we don't know that yet. And everybody seems to be a little bit nervous that there needs to be a right way and a wrong way. And actually, there's not there's lots of different ways and everyone's going to have a different way of being able to do this.

Janet Hitchen
This is an opportunity to rethink things that haven't been working. This is an opportunity to allow, you know, people who've been asking for flexible, working for huge amounts of time and have been told, no, we can't do that, to say, OK, well, we've made it work, we can do that. But I think the land grab for the narrative has got to stop.

Clare Josa
Absolutely right on that.

Clare Josa
And it's a great point. Come up in the comments and everybody who's with us live, do feel free to use the chat here.

Clare Josa
So I think the point about control and fair is so important. I believe some of it boils down to managerial skill set being based on physically ensuring the work is being done rather than adding value. Such a great point. And as you've just said, Janet, we've actually just done this for fifteen months. And yes, for some companies it hasn't worked, but for so many it has. And to suddenly tell staff that what they've moved heaven and earth to achieve over the last 15 months is somehow now invalid and they can't keep doing it, isn't going to work.

Clare Josa
And something I'd like to cover next is one of the things in life is our values. What's important to us tends to be quite that unless we go through a big life change like, say, becoming a parent or getting married or getting divorced, it can change your values. What's important to us as can going through a global pandemic and suddenly our entire sense of self and world turning upside down, what we've seen with so many people is suddenly they're realising, I don't want four hours a day on a train.

Clare Josa
I don't want two hours a day in a car. I want to be able to see my kids when they get home from school. I want us to be able to have a family dinner. I want to be able to go to the gym. And it's not five o'clock in the morning. People's values have changed and they're going to be voting with their feet to find organisations whose working patterns match with their values. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, Janet.

Janet Hitchen
There's really interesting, I read this as I say, I've been doing a lot of reading and I read an article the other day that said actually within the pandemic, lots of people have been finding new jobs, but a lot of people haven't been moving job because I thought, oh, security, I've got to got my thing. If they're not kicking me out and I'm not I've not been made redundant, then let's just stay still for a bit. So actually, for quite a large number of people, there's a lot of pent up.

Janet Hitchen
This was I wanted to move. I couldn't move. Now was the time to move. I've noticed an internal communications. There was a huge number of job opportunities at the moment taking mid level. I think there's a huge, huge number of companies that are sort of realise, oh, we do need internal communications. This really will help us. Whether they actually understand how that communicate internal communications is going to work is a different matter, because it seems to be they seem to be all over sort of a little bit all over the place with sort of the the jobs that are being offered.

Janet Hitchen
But I do think if you've got that pent up group who wanted to leave anyway and suddenly they hit a pandemic, the brakes have been put on. That's not good. Then you've got the people who, as you say, will suddenly be told. Right. Well, you need to come back in. I have some friends who have been told you need to now come back to the office and they had to move country. And they are no longer in the country of their of their office, and when they've sort of said, look what we've been doing this job for 50 months, we've been doing great.

Janet Hitchen
We're having, you know, we've delivered we're doing everything that you want us to and more they've been told yet doesn't matter. You need to physically be in this location. And I hear things like, well, it's tax law or tax law needs to catch up. Don't just cite tax law. If that person has been doing a really great job and those two particular people have left, have left their company not because they wanted to, but because they had to.

Janet Hitchen
So I think there's suddenly going to be this workforce that becomes incredibly... Instead of sort of sitting and we're standing still, we're not staying put, we're going to find a lot of people moving about and moving. Previously, we've known people move for managers. That's still going to happen because it might be my manager suddenly said I need to be in five days a week. And I think that's a crock. Or we might think actually they don't want me in at all.

Janet Hitchen
And actually, I really need to be with people. So I need to find somewhere that does that. I think there's going to be a huge amount of movement. I really, really do. I think it's going to be really interesting to observe, do I have any of the answers? No, but I think it's important to look, to observe, to listen and to to analyse why are people doing what they're doing, why the movements being made and where are people migrating to?

Janet Hitchen
I think it's I don't think there's going to be one or the other. I think it's going to be really interesting to observe at least over the next 18 months at least.

Clare Josa
Absolutely. I think there's going to be an awful lot - for leaders who are watching this, either with us live or on the replay - there's going to be a lot of us needing to watch out, because we're going to suddenly find that some of our key players are just going to leave and we'll be confused as to why. And there's a strong chance that whatever the decisions we've made on Hybrid working will influenced that. And as you said, Janet, it's not just people saying, well, hey, actually I want to work from home four days a week because this is now important to me.

Clare Josa
There will be the people saying, no, I want to be in every day and I want to have the right to do that because I hate having to sit on my bed and have my dressing gown in the background on live streams with clients. And one of the things that's really important, I know you and I have talked in the past on it, is that Leaders' Super Powers is going to they're going to need to include understanding that there are so many diverse opinions on this that is no right or wrong.

Clare Josa
There's no way to please everybody. But we need to try and find flexibility within ourselves and our organisations to allow everybody to now have the working experience that meets their needs and values. What are your thoughts on that one?

Janet Hitchen
I think it's huge. I think it's listening is an underrated skill. And I think in the beginning there's going to need to be a lot of listening that happens. And what I can see happening is certain line managers who in that fear are jumping to the I have to have the answer to the most valuable thing that you can do right now is listen and understand what what is your team make up? What what is the work that actually happens in your team?

Janet Hitchen
And this is about how does that work take place? What is the thinking work? What is the creative work? What are the innovative work? But also what's the executional stuff? How many meetings do you need? Have you had more meetings or fewer meetings? What does that actually look like? And actually take this as an opportunity to do a full reset? I think there's a huge opportunity to do that. But I'm really I'm worried about lone managers.

Janet Hitchen
I'll be really honest. I'm I my heart goes out to them. I think they've got a really tough job because yet you can't please all of the people all of the time. And I think it's about figuring out what is the right thing to do all day is somebody who sort of says, I don't want to work in the way that you've all collaboratively decided. Can you look at ways to redeploy that person within your organisation? Are there better suited roles for that person now?

Janet Hitchen
I think there's a lot there's a huge opportunity here, but it's it's massive. It's absolutely massive. I can understand why teams are sort of kind of going, OK, let's have a collective sort of inhale and let's have a moment, because this is going this this is going to be huge. I think one point as well that is really interesting is how you're communicating this and how you're asking your line managers to communicate this. People will also start to leave companies based on how your culture has been affected by these changes.

Janet Hitchen
And have you got a culture that has that says one thing, but actually because of what's happening right now, because it's a because it's new, because it's different, instead of being the culture that you aspire to be, you've become a culture that you actually are. And that's not what people have joined. They've joined the aspirational version, but not the actual version of what you are. And does that mean that people are feeling? Less certain about where they want to be, less positive about the fact that they want to stay.

Janet Hitchen
I think this is really interesting, particularly this communication piece at the moment, how the knock on effect that is going to have culturally on my managers, on the whole organisation, I it's really, really fascinating at the moment.

Clare Josa
Absolutely. And building on what you said about the most important thing a manager can do right now is really listening, with that communication we need to be finding ways to make it really clear to people that it's OK to speak up. You know, the example you just gave of everybody in a team has collaboratively decided this is how the team is going to work. It takes an enormous amount of courage for that one person saying, "actually, this doesn't work for me," to speak up, rather than either resent it or vote with their feet.

Clare Josa
So I think some of that communication is going to need to be about: we are also here to listen. It doesn't mean we can pander to every need - that's going to be hard - but we're here to listen. And that builds to a question that we've got from the audience here on the live round of the session is how does the sense of fairness play out in a hybrid environment? It's difficult to balance out flexible working for knowledge workers with front line operational workers who don't have that flexibility option.

Clare Josa
I'm not expecting you to have the magic wand for this, Janet, but from a communications point of view and a cultural point of view, what could organisations be doing or asking themselves on that?

Janet Hitchen
I think it's about clarity and it's a great question. I think it's about being clear about what you are going to do, because if you are a front line operational worker with no flexibility option. That should be clear from the start, so let's take an example of a retail employee. If you're working as a retail employee, you know that you can't do that job from anywhere other than that space. You have a choice to do that job or to choose to do another job.

Janet Hitchen
And so it's very clear, and I think it becomes very clear within within the job role and the type of role where what the options are, there are some which are very, very obvious, like a retail employee. If you work at Janet Lewis, you have to be at Janet Lewis. If you are in a store staff member, if you are in Janet Lewis, but you are behind the scenes and you work in I.T., then you might not need to be.

Janet Hitchen
And I think that's then about we start to to review roles based on what is the flexible option. And some people have been doing that for years. I know that there are certain websites that you pre pandemic that would be where you would go. I want to work flexibly. I know that I have these out outside of work obligations. Therefore, I will go. I use this website because this is where all the jobs that offer the options that I want and need for my life, that's where they all are.

Janet Hitchen
I can go and find that this just means that that is now across. It just becomes bigger. And I think it's really interesting to see people advertising roles at the moment. I see some roles that are advertised and they say, yeah, remote, remote is absolutely fine. Others are very clear. No, you need to be in the office and you need to be in that specific geographic location. I think that sort of we've all talked about this before.

Janet Hitchen
It opens up well, if if I could work for a company in the US. OK, well, it just means that my time zones are different. So I'm OK as long as I'm okay with doing that. So I think it's the fairness is about being clear about what that role is, where that role is, what the opportunities are, and it's about clarity. And then it's and then it's the individual's choice. If you if you make it the individual's choice, if you impose it on the individual and the individual.

Janet Hitchen
But I've been doing my job really brilliantly and now you're imposing something on me that I don't want that's different. If somebody says I can actually make a choice and I choose to do that or I choose to leave. But that's OK. As a choice, exactly, and as you said earlier, Janet, it's also about us having the flexibility inside ourselves to potentially ask to be redeployed if we feel it's not fair and it's something that is important to us, that value has come to the fore, then we need to make that choice.

Janet Hitchen
OK, I don't want to be there at the front line anymore. I want to be doing it differently. And one of the things that's heartened me is looking at traditional industries where there are people who've had to be in the office, in the knowledge workers, as described in the question, where it's been the assumption that they couldn't do it from home. Like, for example, in banks, people who are working on the trading floor, traditionally they've had to be in and they've been in throughout the pandemic.

Janet Hitchen
There are now international banks that have discovered we can actually pay for licences for them to have exactly the same software at home. That means they can do it there, they can do it securely, and it's having no negative impact whatsoever on the results that we're getting. So sometimes as an industry, we need to get away from that homogenised group-think into looking at, well, OK, if this is really important to this group of people, this segment of our teams, what could we do to meet that need that doesn't negatively impact the organisation?

Janet Hitchen
How could we be more flexible instead of just doing that stress based computers as an idea? Is it a wrap up today, Janet? Well, I'd like to talk about is bringing Cognitive diversity into the committees and the teams that are making these decisions. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And if anybody's got any final questions for Janet, please let me know by the chat and I'll bring them in at the end.

Janet Hitchen
I think it's absolutely essential, isn't it? I mean, it's if you have a group of people who are all the same. And by that I mean diverse as a diversity, they all look the same. But cognitively, they are all the same because they all have the same challenges, issues, etc. then you're not going to get anybody who will raise their hand and say, well, have you thought about what it's like for a working mother if there were no working mothers on the committee?

Janet Hitchen
And we've we've seen this previously. We've seen this throughout the pandemic where things have happened and then suddenly someone is going, what did you think about this group of people? And think, oh, no, we didn't think about a group of people. We didn't ask them because we didn't have anybody on the committee who was he was thinking about that group of people and that group of people turns out to be women and just, you know, fifty one percent of the population.

Janet Hitchen
It's absolutely vital. And I think it's really interesting. I think with something that we can learn from Germany, in Germany, they have workers, councils, and a lot of people kind of go to workers councils. Really, it's really complicated. You know, it stops everything. It makes everything go much more slowly. But actually, in previous lives, what we saw was when you work together with that workers council, workers council represents all different types of of employee and everybody votes on who those employees are that will then support them.

Janet Hitchen
So it's up to everybody to decide how they get that their cognitive diversity within that group. That group then is Torg. It's the employee voice in the room. And I think having the employee voice in the room is vital and it means that you don't get that group think that, you know, lots of either leaders who maybe all look and have similar outcomes, similar sort of family set up or similar sort of, you know, all of a similar age, or you don't have an H.R. team who are all who will sort of look similar.

Janet Hitchen
You end up with a diverse group who think in diverse ways and who are thinking about this. And if you don't have that cognitive diversity, then you need to have some sort of question list to figure out. Are you thinking about all the different types of people in your organisation and all the decisions that you're making, or are you asking the right questions before we even get to the decisions? Are you actually asking all of the right questions? Because if you just make decisions and you completely forget working mothers.

Janet Hitchen
What percentage of your population have you just completely discounted? And coming back to the communication piece when you communicate to them, well, you don't have their insight, you've not considered how they feel. So it's it's not going to land well and they are probably going to end up feeling desolate. So you are going to go into that sort of negative cycle. So having the maximum amount of Cognitive diversity, having the maximum amount of diversity. And making sure that all different types of your audience are, you know, you get input from and you're not going to be able to please all of them, but it's about considering it.

Janet Hitchen
And a lot of times it's about perception. And as part of the communication, what you can do is you can talk about that process. If you've got a wonderful process where the employee voice has been in the room and you as an employee feel represented and feel like you've been hurt, you're OK. They did. They were talking to somebody. That was that was my sort of circumstances. So perception is you then being heard. So you are less likely to feel desolate.

Janet Hitchen
You can include that as part of your communication plan. We spoke to X number of employees. We spoke to a cross-section who were who covered this. You can give that information. And people feel colleagues and employees feel confident that they have been represented as decisions are made. And it's about, yes, you want them to feel right, but you also want the perception of what is being done to feel right, because it might be that you made all the right decisions and you did all the right things and you got all the right people in the room.

Janet Hitchen
And Cognitive diversity was amazing. But if you don't communicate that well, perception might be that you didn't talk to me. You didn't bother with me. You didn't listen to me. I still feel desolate and I no longer belong in this organisation.

Janet Hitchen
Exactly. So you've got to do both. There's got to be what you do and then how you communicate that to make sure that the perception of what has been done is actually what has been done and what.

Clare Josa
Absolutely. That's brilliant, Janet. And everybody, I've got one last thing I'm going to say with say to Janet and ask her about that. While I'm doing that, I'd love to hear from those of you here with us live. By the way, what is your big light bulb from today? What is the one thing that you're taking away from what Janet has shared so far? So one of the things that's really important to people is feeling inspired right now because people are on their knees.

Clare Josa
We've got sessions in the conference on how to prevent burnout because people are exhausted if somebody is a manager rather than an internal communications expert on it and they've got to communicate a policy to their team. What would be the one piece of advice you'd like to wrap up with today to give that manager on how to communicate decisions or options in a way that inspires rather than scares people?

Janet Hitchen
Put yourself in their shoes. OK, be the employee and. From an end, it's all about it's about empathy, if you go in and you're nervous and you just fire something out there and then you leave. How would you feel if your manager had done that to you? So I think a lot of it is about putting yourself in the employee shoes. You should know if it's your manager. Hopefully, you know your team. You know them really well.

Janet Hitchen
You've been really close to them. So you know how they're feeling at the moment. And that means that you can, with the standard communication that you pack that you may get. You can then dial certain things up and down depending on how your team will take it. But put yourself in their shoes. How are they going to be feeling? And then in that first instance, listen and don't feel that you need to have the answers. And if you even if you don't want to answer at all, just take take say, you know what?

Janet Hitchen
I'm going to write down all of your questions and make sure that you are actively listening. Take those questions away and then come back what you do, something that kind of goes because you've got everybody in the room who you are, what's going to happen. And it's very emotional. You need to take the emotion out. Listen, allow people. And is there a survey where they could fill it in if they don't want to say something out loud, allow people to be lots of different ways to be able to express what they're feeling and then reconvene to be able to respond.

Janet Hitchen
And I would do it and I would do it like that and always, always put yourself in the shoes of the people who you are communicating to.

Clare Josa
That's brilliant, Janet. And I particularly love your advice about it. If not for the line manager to have every answer, it's OK for them to say, I'll take away your questions and find that answer, because often the answers that are given in the heat of that moment will then be the wrong choice, the wrong decision. That's absolutely gold dust. Fantastic. So we've got lots of great food for thought, listening, consulting and empathy. Fantastic advice.

Clare Josa
Thank you for an excellent session. Allowing Anonymous is a great idea. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Janet, and everybody who's joined us live. I hope that's inspired you today. And I'd love to hear from you as we wrap up your one thing. You're going to do what you want, action you're going to take as a result of the session. And Janet, if people want to connect with you, is it all right if we send them over to find you on LinkedIn or do you have a way?

Janet Hitchen
Let's do LinkedIn. It's nice and easy.

Clare Josa
Read it. I'll make sure that your LinkedIn link is below the reply on this. Thank you, everybody, today. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your wisdom and your inspiration. And I can't wait to hear what people are going to go and do this stuff. Bless you and thank you so much for being part of this. Thank you, everybody who has joined us live today. And we hope to see you again very soon.