COVID Is a Crisis that Needs Your Heart
We’re all feeling the fraying of communication nerves these days. Even me, and I’m in the business of communications. Many of us wake up in the morning not sure what to say. If you feel this way too, you’re not alone.
If I’ve learned anything these last few decades of financial communications, uncertainty goes hand in glove with communications during times of crisis. It’s how you constructively overcome the feeling of insecurity that matters.
Even kids, who are known to speak their minds when adults hold their tongues, are finding it tricky in this trying new world. My eight-year-old son has expressed anxiety about his Google Classroom meet-ups. “Daddy,” he says, “I’m worried I’ll say the wrong thing to my friends and make them more worried.”
Meanwhile my 13-year-old son tells me he’s only available between 10-12 and 4-5 for Zoom calls with his friends. It’s not that he’s busy. “Dad,” he says, “I think that’s when I’ll have the most to offer them.”
And my favorite communicators’ dilemma comes from my five-year-old daughter, who wasn’t sure how to join the drive-by Happy Birthday salute to her classmate: “Daddy, do I still sing Happy Birthday from the window?”
Communications when logic fails
While it's easy to only see their apprehensions, I encourage us to instead focus on my kids' respective desires to "be in touch" with their friends. As their physical connections are severed, they are learning to embrace the figurative meaning of the same phrase. Kids, as kids do, have lent us an essential insight for communications during COVID-19: "Be in touch" can also equal empathize.
Designing communications with empathy is especially relevant for COVID, a crisis unlike any other. There’s no blueprint here such as for a lawsuit, product defect or CEO scandal, where there’s a relatively clear, if not desirable, process. Trials end. The product comes off the shelves. The boss gets shown the door. Business goes on.
Where in other crises we are admonished to think before we speak in order to "manage the message," COVID defies this logic. With COVID, we absolutely need to feel before we think, let alone before we speak. Where you don't have the answers, my advice is to bring your heart. Let empathy, not cold reason—is my timing right? Is my message 100%?—lead your communications.
10 message waves for COVID
Business communications, when filtered through empathy, can be quite powerful. We did this exercise at Archie over the last few weeks. We asked clients how and what they were feeling. They then asked the same of their employees, customers, partners, investors, and other stakeholders. We quickly identified 10 message waves to embrace:
Employee: message for personal safety and security
Leadership: message for who is in charge, present and accountable
Finance: message for biz continuity, sustainability, cash flow
Risk: message for impact on demand gen, tolerance for net-new customers
Customer: message for care, relief, support, togetherness
Community: message for individual impact and "live where you work"
CSR / Citizenship: message for collective impact and working with others in shared interest
Regulatory / Govt.: message for treble leadership (private, public and social sector)
Product: message for your actions to encourage positive change in attitudes and behaviors
Innovation: message for what else your tech, IP and service can do
We’ve helped our clients order these waves into communications sprints to run over the next two or three quarters. We discovered the most important lesson of all: Heartfelt, “be in touch” communications always trumps the “analysis paralysis” of what to say.
In these coming months we'll all have to confront the discomforts of communication. But if you bring empathy, then I assure you your good words will flow.
Don’t hesitate to DM or email me during this challenging time. While I may not have all the answers, unlike my teenage son my Zoom line is always open.
Be well,
Gregory