Inside: Hybrid Office Comms, Leaked Internal Memos, and Lego London

Insider Comms for internal comms

Have you (virtually) hugged your HR counterpart today? They need it.

🔑 Insider Comms: scroll down to the key emoji to access:

• IBM's memo to employees on mandating vaccines for office staff

• Microsoft’s email welcoming a high-profile new hire to run Teams, Skype, and GroupMe

• Fox News’s memo requiring employees to register their vaccine status in Workday

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1. 5 Ways to Bridge the Communications Gap in a Hybrid Office

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One of the biggest challenges in a hybrid work environment is this: “By virtue of being in person, the office people will have a much richer exposure to people’s behaviors at work than the remote people. They will have a shared reality—and a shared language—that simply isn’t available to people outside the office.”

To correct for these potentially career crippling discrepancies, Teresa West, a professor of psychology at NYU, suggests five potential solutions:

1. User fewer screens

2. Create turn-taking rules

3. Kill the chat box

4. Give priority to in-person time for newcomers and independent workers

5. When people come to work, give priority to social networking over “getting down to business.”

Read about her proposals in depth (WSJ).

2. Don’t Forget the Middle

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Reading Superconsumers recently I came across a passage that reminded me about the importance of communicating with middle managers to really effect change and support business outcomes:

As leaders it is always easy for us to lean toward the stars in an organization. We can count on them. They are usually more highly motivated and need less direction so we gravitate toward them and choose to spend our time with them. However, it’s the middle of the organization that needs our time. They will benefit the most from being mentored. They need to feel valuable and that they are being developed. When this middle feels valued, then they stay engaged.”

— Michelle Stacy, former president of Keurig

If you need ideas on how to engage the middle, connect with Andrea Greenhous. She has lots of great research and best practices in this area.

• Tell her I said hi! 👋

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3. Industry News

HRD

• How iconic fast food brand Jollibee kept staff happy and hopeful during the pandemic (Human Resources Director)

• Why and How to Treat Employees Like Customers Using Omnichannel Communications by Tim Vaughan, head of content for Poppulo (Forbes)

• Translink, Northern Ireland’s main public transport provider, launched its new employee communication “Spirit” app (which uses Thrive) (Global Railway Review)

• Corporate podcast platform FieldCast announced a partnership with Blue Microphones to offer professional, studio-quality audio (Yahoo! Finance)

• IT Issues Take at Least 3 Hours to Resolve for Half of U.S. Workers: Survey (HR Dive)

• Communication Experts Reveal Tips For Navigating Sensitive Topics In The New Workplace (Forbes)

• Are Workplace Diversity Programs Doing More Harm Than Good? (NYT)

4. 🔑 Insider Comms

• IBM’s memo to employees on the company’s mandate that in-office staff be vaccinated

• Microsoft’s email welcoming a high-profile employee to run Teams, Skype, and GroupMe

• Fox News is mandating that all employees register their vaccine status in Workday

Source

5. Get Your Brick (Back) On

Spotted on LinkedIn

Lego London welcomes back in-office staff.

Have a safe day! 😷

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Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter | Mister Editorial archive | editorshaun@gmail.com

Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I work in employee comms at Splunk. The views in this newsletter are my own.