Positive Comms +Plus for Week of 27 April 2020

Image of fallen trees and forest at Raven's Rock State Park, NC, USA

Interesting or inspiring articles (perhaps a bit of both)… We hope this post stirs your thinking about corporate communication, employee engagement and leadership focused on purpose and values.

Change Management

We’ve been thinking about changing culture — more specifically individual behaviours — within large organizations a lot lately. Countering the “forgetting curve” may be one concept to consider, as “the downward slope of the forgetting curve can be softened by repeating the learned information at particular intervals.” This point reinforces the idea that employee communication must be phased in over time and be a continuous process.

You Probably Won’t Remember This, But the Forgetting Curve Theory Explains Why Learning is Hard via QZ.com

Communication

Now, more than any other time in recent memory, many of us are being asked to answer questions we may not have an answer for. Here’s a great article on how to give a “helpful and honest” response during these most trying times. Be well!

How to Answer an Unanswerable Question via HBR.org

Communication

How would you handle communication for a cyber security incident, particularly a data breach? Do you have a plan in place to respond? This article gives a good outline of things to consider. We’re not sure we agree with communicating just “once or twice during an incident” because that should be dictated by the circumstances of the situation, but otherwise the advice is good.

4 Tips for Communicating Through a Data Breach via IABC.com

Leadership

Rita Men, Ph.D., APR, has done a review of a number of academic and professional studies that cover leadership communication. She highlights in her article the recurring themes for effective leadership communication during a crisis. BTW, showing empathy is the most recurring theme. This is a worthwhile read.

Wartime Leadership Communication: How Should CEOs Communicate During the COVID-19 Pandemic? via InstituteforPR.org

Thank you to our fellow communication professionals for sharing some of these articles. We were curious about how we were spending our time in April years back and came across this picture in our archives of Raven’s Rock State Park in North Carolina, USA, taken in 2014.

K. Barker

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