The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or two — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

Which audience is most important for your business? Many say it’s clients or customers. But often the most overlooked and valuable audience is your employees.  Whether it’s communicating about the post-COVID return, your mission and values, or your new offerings, how you engage your employees is critical to your business success. This week on HearSay, Michael and Lee welcome Larry Moscow and Katie Cronen to talk about all of that and more, including why some words like “agile,” efficient,” “innovative” and “transformational” might not be effective and what language you should use instead.

Listen below or on your preferred streaming platform:

LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

maslansky + partners newsletter

EPISODE 8 TRANSCRIPT:

Katie Cronen:

If you look at some of the things that executives tend to champion and want to talk about, they can stray a little bit too much into things that sound like what you read on LinkedIn articles.

Michael Maslansky:
They said what? Welcome to Hearsay: a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we provide our take on the smartest, savviest and stupidest messages in the market today, and what you can learn from their experience. Our philosophy is: it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And that’s why we call this, “Hearsay.”

I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of the firm that invented language strategy and author of The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics.

Lee Carter:
And I’m Lee Carter, President Partner at Maslansky and Partners and author of a book called, Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter.  So today we’re going to talk about communication with your most important audience. No, it’s not your customers. It’s not your partners. It’s not your corporate overlord and it’s certainly not your investors. There’s one audience. I think that matters more than any other because without them, your business wouldn’t be possible. And that’s your employees.

Michael Maslansky:
That’s so right, Lee, and I think for all the effort that we spend talking about external comms, our customers, different ways that brands are reaching out through external communications, advertising, websites, social media, often the story about internal comms, about how important it is to effectively communicate with employees, gets lost in the shuffle.  And so, they are in many ways the backbone of the business. I think that there’s increasing emphasis on why and where we need to connect and engage with employees. But it certainly is how we build engagement, how we build loyalty, and often how we find our best advocates inside the organization.

Lee Carter:
Yeah. And I think it’s critical piece of our workforce, no matter what business you’re in. And I think this is something that we can all learn from and agree on. And I thinkalso when you start thinking about how 2021 is shaking out and even how 2020 did with the rise of social issues, with the rise of advocacy. I think how we’re engaging with our employees is more important than it ever has been. Just even getting through all the change that we’ve been through in the last year. I think it’s really important that we have a renewed focus on our employees. And I think there’s no one better to join us to talk about this than two of our colleagues. The first is Larry Moscow. We’ve been working together for a decade and a half, which is hard to believe. We actually started at Maslansky on the same day, even if he doesn’t remember. And Katie Cronen, a senior vice president who is a repeat guest and also has some great experience here too. So thank you both so much for joining us today. We’re looking forward to a great conversation.

Larry Moscow:
Thank you, Lee. Hopefully I can cover more of the smart and savvy, and less of the stupid.

Katie Cronen:
I’ll take the stupid.

(Laughter)

Lee Carter:

It seems to me as we’re having this part of the conversation that these pieces of advice are especially relevant I think to every employer as they’re contemplating how they’re bringing their employees back to offices or back to headquarters, or as they make decisions if they are going to go back to offices or headquarters. Because this is a challenge I think most companies are facing right now. How do you deal with the uncertainty of now?

Katie Cronen:
Yeah. This is a really thorny one so I’m very keen to see how this plays out across a lot of the different companies. But one of the things that I have been thinking about in terms of communicating a return to work is to what extent can we talk about the change, not as something that’s very revolutionary, but evolutionary? Are there ways that we can make this process feel like it’s about incremental things that we’re going to try in our day to day versus telling people we’re going to flip the script all over again? The other thing I think about is instead of just talking about a return to work, is there a way to make this all about… A lot of companies have actually had a bunch of wins over the past 12, 14, 15 months in terms of adapting to change and there are probably things that have worked really well for them. I would be talking about, how can we celebrate and retain the habits that we have gotten over time and just adapt them and expand them versus making it look like yet another whole-scale about-face.

Larry Moscow:
Katie, I think that that’s right on, but I would also add that while much of this is evolutionary, I think some of it is going to be revolutionary as well. A few financial service companies, some in particular that we’ve worked with either currently or in the past. MetLife and Prudential, for example, do an awful lot of work trying to study and survey employee trends. And one of the things that very recently come out is that of the employers who’ve changed working arrangements, 90% say they expect return to pre-pandemic working arrangements. Yet 42% of employees say if their current company does not continue to offer remote working options, they’re going to look for another job. That’s a significant disconnect and a significant challenge and potentially a revolutionary way, although it’s not as revolutionary as it may seem because we’re now used to it, but a revolutionary way of running an office.

Michael Maslansky:
So I think one of the things that’s really interesting about that is that I suspect that if you go back to those executives and you had a conversation with them about what they mean by going back, they probably don’t mean going back exactly the way it was. They’ve modified their thinking, but when they talk about it, they may not recognize it. So we recognized early on in the pandemic that even this term return to work is like you’re telling me to return to work. I’ve been working my ass off for the last 14 months in front of a computer screen and now it’s return to work? It’s just not true, right? But it’s a language issue. It’s not return to work, it’s maybe returning to the office. It may be something else. So there, I think, are a lot of opportunities for miscommunication because people aren’t focused on the specificity of their language.  And they’re going to be a lot of ways to talk about what it means to come back to the office and what a hybrid approach looks like that can easily be misinterpreted. We know that everything vague is going to be interpreted negatively, right? So if you give your employees the opportunity to think about the downsides of something, to think that you’re taking control away from them instead of kind of giving them a certain amount of control and agency in how this process works, they’re going to interpret it negatively. If we use the wrong words, then we can be creating problems that we don’t need to create and could avoid if we’re just more careful about how we articulate our message.

Lee Carter:
In talking about words, one of the words to me and all of this, we talk a lot about whether it’s a return to work or return to the office. I actually think that one of the challenges with the words is return because that implies we’re going backwards and I don’t know that everybody wants to go backwards. We might want to keep some of what we had and we want to get back to that culture, we might want to get back to some of those things that we had before, but I think we want to move forward. We’ve talked about this as a great accelerator. Obviously it’s changed so many different things, but this is almost about what is the next chapter of work going to look like? What is the next chapter in our company going to be looking like and how do we bring people along for the ride? Because I find return to be a negative kind of word going backwards. I’m not sure that’s what I want.

Larry Moscow:
Yeah. And I think it does create a new lexicon for how employers are talking to their employees rather and what they’re talking about. Words like safety, protection, flexibility, self-care, well-being, those are things that are now top of mind for employees, and employers have to recognize that and not only enact policies that speak to that, but use the actual language and words that connect them to those actions.

Michael Maslansky:
Yeah. And I think that this is a really important area to dig into. And we’ve been working with a number of clients in different situations on this around how to get that tone and how to get that language right. In the old days, so to speak, it was enough to talk about what. What it is was the new policy, what did you expect of employees? And today we need to focus on why. When it comes to the future of work for a given organization, the question is, why are you working that way? If you’re bringing people back to the office, is there a good reason why? Do you think that there are particular benefits to bringing people back to the office that you can articulate? If you work in a creative organization and you say, “Look, we think that there are huge creative benefits or huge benefits to creativity by being in the room together.” That’s a compelling reason to come back together. If you think that your organization benefits from kind of an apprenticeship model, where you need to be able to look over somebody’s shoulder in order to learn and see how they do, that’s a great reason to say we want people back in the office because we think that that will be lost. And so the kind of why it makes sense to be in the office, when it makes sense to be in the office, I think, becomes really important. There’s another area that I know a lot of companies are concerned about, and that is the, okay, so let’s say people don’t want to come back to the office and leadership wants them to come back to the office, there are many different ways of framing the response to that. There is one way to say, we have a policy, we expect everybody to come back to the office, period, right? Wouldn’t be unfair. This is the way we work. This is what we think is best. This is the organization that we want for the future, come back to the office. Larry, as you said, many people may choose to leave, but the flip side of it is to say, look, that we have a clear set of needs for the organization, of expectations of employees. We’re going to map those out in really clear terms and we’re going to give people the opportunity to meet those expectations from wherever they want. And if they can do it from home, great. If we can accommodate that and they’re happier and they can do what is needed for the role, great. If they can’t, then we’ll figure that out along the way, but we’re not going to be prescriptive about this, about where you work. We’re going to be prescriptive about what the role entails in order for us to be successful as a business.

Larry Moscow:
I think that’s a very enlightened approach. If in fact, most employers are willing to take that flexible, enlightened approach that you did, then I think that that’s going to go a long way towards meeting the current employee mindset. Just a little anecdote. I have a daughter who’s a recent college graduate who’s now been in the workforce during a pandemic longer than she’s been in the workforce non-pandemic. And she said to me recently, she works in New York and she’s been going to work every other week for the last couple of months, going to the office every other week. She’s been working every day. But she said to me, “Why would any employer ever expect us to come back into the office again five days a week? That’s so inefficient. That’s so ridiculous. Why would I waste so much time commuting? Why would I waste so much energy and effort and money? That just seems so old fashioned to me.” So again, that’s a sample size of one, but I do think there is an emerging employee mindset that speaks to that flexibility that you offered, Michael, and that’s fine when there is that sort of ability to customize a working environment that works for you, but employers who aren’t willing to or able to make that shift, I think they’re going to be in for a rude awakening.

Katie Cronen:
Well, and I think in the back of a lot of employees’ minds, if, for instance, they’re working as professionals, and they didn’t experience any layoffs, or if their company didn’t go bust, then the argument that we need to all be together all the time is totally bust in their eyes. It’s totally busted. Because I-

Michael Maslansky:
But you’ll get in the office at 9:00 AM tomorrow, right, just to be clear?

Katie Cronen:
Yep. Mm-hmm (affirmative). And by office, you mean

Lee Carter:

My living room.

Katie Cronen:

I was like, “My laptop on my bed.” Yeah, no, but I think people will interpret any argument that is, we are an in-person culture, we have to go back to five days a week. That reek of disingenuousness to a lot of audiences, because you could say, “Well, we did just fine last year. Maybe it wasn’t ideal. But that argument doesn’t hold any water because, because we didn’t actually collapse. We proved that we can do it.”

Lee Carter:
Now, I think that this is an important conversation, because there are companies who believe that they have to go back. You see it, a lot of financial institutions are having this conversation, that their goal is to get back to five days a week, the way it was, and their business will not operate otherwise.  And there’s other companies that were saying, “We can be flexible, but we’re going to need employees to all be together at certain times.” So how, as an employer communicating to employees, do you communicate the necessity, get their buy-in and understand that they’re still being heard, that there’s a reason for this? Because sometimes the answer is just going to have to be to the employees, “No, you can’t have it all. We can’t run our business with all of you all over the country every day. We ultimately do need to have something different.” So how do you do that?

Katie Cronen:
Sometimes I think about the language of try and see or experimentation. So you could say, “I think that we have seen the benefits when we are all together and here’s an example or two, but I also see the benefits of when we’ve been able to work flexibly and how we’ve been able to make it work.” But what I see for our company is the value of in-person work. And what we’re recommending is that we try this new approach. We see how it works. We see where the pain points are. And we don’t expect that this is a one and done final policy change, but rather a new era of adapting and being reactive to what we learn.

Michael Maslansky:
I think increasingly, what we’re seeing is that employee communications is change communications. Change is happening so frequently and dramatically inside organizations that seemingly every time companies open their mouths, they’re trying to drive their organization in either faster and in a certain direction, in a new direction, trying to change behaviors, trying to get them to think differently about things. And so as we think about what’s critical to change communications, change management communications, what are some of the examples that we’ve seen and recommendations that you would have for companies who are constantly communicating change to their employees?

Katie Cronen:
I think it’s really important to spend the time defining what are the values and then the behaviors that you want to promote. And the best companies not only define them particularly well, but they bake them into things like performance reviews, feedback. It becomes way more than just a poster on a wall, virtual or otherwise, or physical. And a couple of things have stood out to me even as you go about articulating the kinds of behaviors you want to inspire in your employees. One of them is, if you look at some of the things that executives tend to champion and want to talk about, they can stray a little bit too much into things that sound like what you read on LinkedIn articles. They’ll say, “We need to be obsessed with the customer,” because they want to inspire more insight-based decisions. And what happens is you say, “We’re going to be customer obsessed,” employees say, “Okay, so you don’t want me to have a personal life. You want me to eat, sleep and breathe the customer. And that doesn’t really sound like a place that I want to work.” Similarly, they’ll talk about things that are revolutionary to the business. We’re going to revolutionize the way we innovate. And employees don’t tend to hear that particularly well in the way it’s intended. They tend to hear, “So you’re telling me that all of my experience up until this point is useless and I’m going to have to learn a whole new job and start all over again.” So finding the right way to those goals, those behaviors, those values, in a way that is going to be compelling and inspiring and also credible, is really important.

Larry Moscow:
Yeah. And I think companies, CEOs, tend to over promise or be a bit too aspirational in the language that they use. Katie, you talked about revolutionary. Innovation is another thing. Every CEO wants to be viewed as running an innovative company. And I think sometimes that really does ring hollow to employees. If you’re calling an action revolutionary and yet the employees, and in particular frontline employees, so we’ve been talking a lot about white collar employees, but think about the frontline employees, the people who come into your home to set up a service, for example, and the CEOs out there talking about how revolutionary it is. And the employee is thinking, “Wait a minute, I don’t have the right tools. I don’t have the right equipment. I don’t have the right processes. I don’t even have the right training to deliver on the promises that this company is making.”  And so what you have essentially done by over promising and being too aspirational in your values is you have turned what could be one of your most effective brand ambassadors into a critic of your company. And this is a person who is dealing directly with your clients and customers. It’s a real danger point that a lot of employers and a lot of CEOs seem to miss.

Katie Cronen:
I saw that disconnect. Still today, but a few years ago, the word that that seemed to be driving a lot of it was “efficiency.” Senior leadership was talking about how we’re going to be all about efficiency and becoming more efficient. And the number of employees who heard, “That means layoffs,” was astounding. And I think if you fast forward to today, I’m seeing a different trend, but it actually has evolved to the word “agile.” We need to be more agile in our work. And there are a lot of employees out there who are nauseated by that term. Because to them, now it all only means I need to jam even more into my day with even less at my disposal. And that’s not to say that that’s a bad value, but I think that there are other ways of articulating it. And usually, it can be as simple as being a little bit more explanatory about the kinds of things that you want to celebrate and the kinds of things you want to do less of.

Lee Carter:
So what would you say instead of agile, Katie?

Katie Cronen:
I would say, Hey, I think we can all recognize that there are probably parts of our day or parts of projects that feel either a little redundant or not the best use of our time and so what I want to do is I want us to focus for the next couple of months on identifying where those pain points are and at least asking the question, Hey, do we really need this meeting? Is this step really giving us that much extra in this process? And in some cases we’ll say, yes, there are good reasons for it. And in other cases, we may find we should try doing without it and seeing how it goes.

Lee Carter:
The other things I think we often do, is we talk about what we want instead of the benefit of it. So if you’re talking about, you want people to be agile, what we’re trying to do is, in some ways, we want people to find better ways of working. We want people to find relief. So if you’re going to say a part of agility is about, we want to be able to move fast, we want to be able to do things, but we also want to be able to do so in a way that that works for everybody. So if there’s a better way of doing things, then we should be doing it. And so maybe that the benefit should be leading the conversation, that this is about finding really for employees who are burnt out after more than a year of working this way. And then you can start getting into a conversation where people feel engaged in it.

Michael Maslansky:
I just just had a conversation with a client who said exactly what you said, Katie, that agile has become a bad word. And not only that, but that they weren’t defining it the right way, that they thought agile meant, “Let’s wait until an issue comes up and then let’s be heroes and save the day.” Because we could move so fast to jump and solve a problem instead of thinking about better ways of working so that we avoid the problem to begin with and that we make our lives better. And, and Lee, I’m going to throw it back to you because you talk a lot about the WIIFM. And we have one client in particular. So talk a little bit about that, about making sure that it connects to what’s in it for them.
Lee Carter:
So we have a client who often says her favorite radio station is WIIFM, what’s in it for me? And it’s something that actually, in the beginning when she said it, I laughed. And then I thought, “Oh my gosh, it’s so smart because it’s memorable.” But that’s really, the task of every communication really needs to be squarely in that, what is in it for them? And when you’re talking about employee experience in particular, the what’s in it for them in a time of change, in a time of burnout is particularly important. Because otherwise, they just hear, “Here’s another thing that you’re asking of me. Here’s another thing you’re asking of me. Here’s another…” And it’s really exhausting for them.

Larry Moscow:
It’s almost as if the lexicon that many corporate leaders had drilled into them at business school, things like efficiency, things like agility, is just steering them right into the iceberg. I would add globalism, certainly, I think, fits into that category as well. And I think we should try to get into it as a new project, a new client, get into the business schools, help them create a new corporate lexicon, because I think a lot of the older one is doing more harm than good, especially when it comes to employee relations.

Michael Maslansky:
Yeah, I’ll throw another one out there, transformation. So we know that people don’t like change in general. And then companies have these internal transformation initiatives, which basically says, “Whatever you are today is terrible. We’re going to completely transform it into something else.” And what employees tend to hear is, “I’m bad. I’m doing it wrong, or what I’m good at is no longer valued. And so this is going to be really uncomfortable, unpleasant, probably unfavorable to me as an employee, and yay.”

Lee Carter:
Every client out there, every business out there could create a list of baggage words, words that carry a tremendous amount of baggage. We call them baggage alerts. And we’ve had clients who take around notebooks when they hear from employees that there’s a word that triggers them, or they hear that there’s something that’s triggering. And I think it’s really important that people who are commuting with employees take note of these words, because you want to eliminate from the lexicon and take that lesson. And how do you change the language so that it’s really perceived as a benefit, not something with a lot of baggage?

Michael Maslansky:
Yeah. And I know there’s one other area that when it comes to change management, that that we’ve seen a lot, and that is kind of where and how you engage with different types of employees. That not everybody sits in front of a desk all day long.

Larry Moscow:
How you communicate with employees sometimes, forgetting the what, which is what we primarily been talking about, but just the how, and we’ve learned this, by the way, with people’s ability to get a vaccine appointment. If you happen to sit in front of a computer all day, you’re much more likely to be able to score one of the, and it’s changing now, but early on to score one of the much-needed appointments for a vaccine because you’re at a computer all day. And I think for companies with frontline employees who are on a factory floor, or in a truck driving from home to home to service whatever, how you actually communicate your messages is of paramount importance because emails often will fall short. There are too many of them. They’re not always prioritized.  And I think, generally speaking, most companies don’t do a very good job of one-to-one or even one-to-group, live, in-person communications because it’s just too difficult. You’ve got too many employees and too many different places. So I think that employers have to really think long and hard about what is the most meaningful channel that I can use to connect with my employees, and how do I make sure that they can separate the signal from noise? How do we make sure that the really important initiatives, the really important messages, are the ones that they’re focused on and the ones that they’re going to hear as opposed to the plethora of other communications that we often send out to employees?

Katie Cronen:
And I think-

Larry Moscow:
And I don’t know that there’s an easy answer to that.

Katie Cronen:
Yeah and I don’t have one. I was just going to add that in addition to how we communicate with employees, I also think for your biggest initiatives or the big messages that you really want to drive home, often there’s a big initial push, but that drumbeat of reinforcement tends to fall off. And I always think about you can have the big town hall, and maybe it’s a big success and you even get a lot of heads nodding along, but then it’s over and done. And so what are the nudges I’m going to get over the next couple of weeks, the next couple of months, that remind me of those values that you were announcing, or that initiative that you were trying to make top of mind?

Lee Carter:
So this is one of my favorite parts of the podcast where we ask our guests this question about what your favorite or least favorite words are. So Larry, I’d love to start with you. Can you tell me a little bit about your favorite word?

Larry Moscow:
It’s pretty simple. The phrase “well done” is something we all crave in life at home and in the workplace. And I don’t think companies, I know that companies do not do a good enough job of letting their employees know, “We appreciate you. Thank you for your hard work.” So just that little phrase “well done”, and its cousin “thank you” covers up an awful lot of sins and probably does more than any other thing that an employer can do or say to acknowledge how much they appreciate the work that our employees are doing.

Katie Cronen:
Aww, as somebody who’s received those notes from Larry, I totally agree. It just changes your whole day.

Lee Carter:
I’ve got to say, we did a project recently it was called Project Gratitude. And we worked with a company who had spent the last year trying to thank their frontline employees for all that they had done to keep the business going through the pandemic. And they wanted to know how they did and they wanted to know if there were more ways that they could express gratitude. And I thought it was one of the coolest projects that ever came in the door to think that they spent that much of an investment, that they had a whole campaign, how to think their employees, but wanted to know how they were doing. And so, one of the things that we discovered in that is the employees. Do you want to hear thank you and they do want to hear well done and they don’t hear it enough, but they also want to hear specifics. “Thank you for XYZ. Well done when you did this. It really meant a lot.” And so, I love those words and I love the idea of expressing gratitude, and I love how important it is to be specific so that everyone feels valued and rewarded.

Lee Carter:
So Katie, you’ve been here before. Do you have any new words?

Katie Cronen:
Lately, I’ve been liking Felicity. I don’t get to use it in my work enough, but I just think it sounds melodic. It’s a good word.

Lee Carter:
Have you used it recently or just thought about using it?

Katie Cronen:
I was actually thinking about the old American Girl dolls and how the red-haired one was named Felicity. And I was like, oh yeah, that’s also a nice word.

Lee Carter:
Katie, what is one thing that you hope people take away from this conversation?

Katie Cronen:
I think that internal communications and employee communications is certainly not just a job for people in HR. It’s really about the language of you as a leader.

Lee Carter:
Larry, what about you?

Larry Moscow:
Well, I totally agree with what Katie says. I always totally agree with what Katie says.

Lee Carter:
So boring.

Larry Moscow:
Yeah. I think the takeaway, and it’s going to sound like I’m shilling for our own company, but this idea of it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear could not be more truthful and more apt when it comes to employee communications because I think that the people who essentially can and should be the brand ambassadors for you are the ones that need to both better understand what the company’s trying to do and be aligned and in sync with what it is that the company is trying to do.

Michael Maslansky:
I think it’s such a good point in employee communications, where I think it’s often not the strategies that get companies in trouble. It’s the fact that their employees don’t understand them the way that they’re intended or the, the leadership doesn’t have the credibility that they think that they have. And so, we say if your language doesn’t resonate, if your message doesn’t get through, then you’re going to fail, and it often happens. And with that, I’m going to say I’m extremely grateful to have you as my colleagues to come to work with every day, even if it’s virtual.

Lee Carter:
I’m breaking out in hives.

Michael Maslansky:
And I think you did a great job bringing to light some of the perspectives on employee communication. So thank you, Katie Cronen and Larry Moscow, for joining us and to my colleague and partner, Lee Carter, for co-hosting with me. For more language insight, and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, follow us on LinkedIn at Maslansky-Partners, and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. If you’ve got questions, feedback, criticisms, or ideas, please reach out to us at [email protected]. That is all for now. Join us next time on HearSay, because it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.