The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - To Push or Pull Communications? | FF33

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

When considering our communications strategies we should think about what we want to push to people, what we want to set up as a pull of information that people can go to and look at how we are interacting with folks virtually and in person.

Welcome to Foundations Friday, episode 33, to push or pull communication. This is a question that's related to People Process Progress episode 85, effective communication, which is foundation five of those foundational five things that I truly believe and have learned bits and pieces of over the years on getting leaders intent, number one,

establishing those, creating those smart objectives, number two, creating an effective organizational structure, requesting and coordinating resources, number four, and then number five, effective communications. All of those are their own episodes over the past month and a half or so. But for this Foundations Friday, what I want to consider to build off

the communicate, understand, decide, communicate principle I talked about in 85, some of those active listening steps that we talked about from verywellmind.com, and then some of those critical areas of communication, which is really everywhere, is should we push communication out or should we pull or depend on folks to go somewhere? And really, I think the bottom line is it depends on what you're doing. And this is something that just this week for me at work, you know, had a mess of, of communicating a change and, um, you know, something that, that needs to be top of mind more, right. And can happen when you have a lot of moving parts, but

so the push of communication is I'm going to send an email, we're going to send a newsletter. Um, we're going to, we're going to send targeted communications to groups of people or the mass mails. Right. And of course there's different returns on investment on what you get for those, the percentage of people that read them, when you push things out. And when you pull or you provide a pull of communication, like a website or a place people can go to get information, self-help kind of thing, and systems, it's a different factor. And I think the bottom line is you have to find the balance. You have to know when to push. Say you have a big system change or say it's a warning for like tornadoes. I know in Southwest Virginia,

we had some bad weather. You know, that's push communication to let people know ahead of time or just in time, this is going to happen. Take these actions or be aware of this change or make preparations, et cetera, because you want them to know. Of course, as you all know, with email, it's up to the people whether they read it or not. So there's a style in writing the subject line, right, that's catchy, that's not the same thing mass mailed every time, which isn't a big return on investment for how many people read it. And then the pull, you know, are you updating what you have on your internal website, your external website, you know, for like the people process progress.com website, you know, it's a pool of communication. When I do the write ups for the

episodes, and it's kind of a push when I put episodes like this out, right? So are you refreshing that? Are you updating, you know, with new posts, those kind of things, new interactive, or diagrams or summaries or something like that? But I think you all get it. But that's something to consider as you think about how you're going to craft your messages that are going to help communicate the other principles or the content of those. Let people know what the plan is, what the schedules are, when things are going to happen, when they're not going to happen. So just think about when do we push these messages? What are we going to set up

as a pool of communication? And then another thing that I saw on a few different websites that I looked at, and I'll post those when I post the write up for the show, is the interactive communication, right? And that's the face to face, which we have less and less of today are mask to mask face, more zooms, and calls like that, right, are interactive. We are having a conversation. We are in real time doing that or chat or text, right? That's interactive. But the ultimate is face to face, right? That's the ultimate way to talk to somebody, to work through issues, to be in the same room. And I'm hoping that one day soon, you know, when the practicality of knowing, to me, my two cents, you know, we can't be 100 percent safe from every virus.

Sure, we're taking precautions and, you know, get vaccinated if you choose to wear masks where you have to or whatever choice you make. But that face to face communication is critical. It's critical for our kids in school. So hopefully, you know, whatever the balance that we find, you know, soon, but at least we have technology so we can see each other on zoom calls, teams calls, whatever other product, right. I'm not, you know, endorsed or anything by either product. That's just, you know, the ones that I use mostly. So consider whether you're going to push a message, how you're going to set up your pool, and then you're in our activity. And hopefully, in addition to getting back to some normalcy with interacting with people, we can interact a little better, right? I was listening to Andy Stump's Cleared Hot

podcast here a little bit ago. He does a full auto Friday. And he had a great point. Just folks, you know, Joe Rogan got COVID, took some medicines, felt better. There you go. He just shared it, right? But he had to cancel shows. So he posted that. And someone had written Andy Stumpf about it. And just the comments on Joe Rogan's, I guess, posts, people just saying the worst things to him because he got sick or made this choice or that choice.

And I think we've lost, and Andy's a good litmus test like he does, is, you know, would you say that to a person's face verse behind your keyboard, right from far away or text from your phone. And I think we have gotten so disconnected over the past year and a half that we've forgotten what it's like to be in people's space and respect each other. That's America to me. And this is this is truly what I think the ability for people to say things and think what they can is what makes America great. But we as humans should be a lot better towards each other. Right. And I hope that as we in the near future, come out of the cloud of COVID or get back to some normal tempo in life, that we also get back to understanding that people are going to have different religious beliefs, political beliefs, beliefs on medicine, science, different educations, whatever. That's the makeup of America, right? That's just who we are.

And I think we're in a pretty crap time for how we do or don't communicate with each other. So my hope is that we get better at that. I will strive to continue to get better with this podcast. I thank you all so much for listening. If you're still listening to this episode this far in, please stay safe out there, wash those hands, and Godspeed.