Nikki Little of Franco, a Detroit-based PR agency, joins us to talk about the importance of internal communications during times of crisis or rapid change—in other words, times like these.

Join Franco’s 5-Day Challenge and learn how to navigate uncertainty with strategic communication that builds trust, engagement and resilience.

Nikki shares tactical insights on building a culture where listening is prioritized alongside speaking, ensuring that every employee feels heard and valued. She highlights the importance of two-way communication channels and building trust to foster a collaborative workplace.

By integrating communication strategies at all times and not just during crises, organizations can enhance their internal relationships and navigate challenging times more effectively.

Read the transcript and notes for this episode on our website.

Key Takeaways

• Internal communications are crucial for maintaining employee trust within any organization, especially during uncertain times.
• Regular communication helps avoid a sense of surprise during crises, ensuring all employees are aligned with the company's mission and vision.
• Building a culture of listening and creating two-way communication channels enhances organizational transparency and trust.
• Encouraging feedback, acknowledging it, and acting on it where possible instills trust and shows employees that their input is valued.
• In-house communicators and their agency counterparts must empower leadership to facilitate open communication and promote a consistent and transparent organizational culture.

About the Guest

Nikki Little is a co-owner/co-shareholder and the chief marketing officer at Franco. She supports the agency’s strategic vision and growth strategy with a specific focus on new business and marketing alignment. Nikki also serves in a strategic advisor role for several client programs and supports future and current talent development. Since 2012, Nikki has published The MichComms Report, a bi-weekly e-newsletter for Michigan communications professionals. She’s also an Impact100 Oakland County member.

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Credits

Copper State of Mind, hosted by Abbie Fink and Dr. Adrian McIntyre, is a project of HMA Public Relations, a full-service public relations and marketing communications firm in Phoenix.

The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like the PRGN Presents podcast, hosted by Abbie Fink, featuring conversations about PR, marketing, and communications with members of the Public Relations Global Network, "the world’s local public relations agency.”

One thing you can count on about human beings: we're always talking ... to ourselves about ourselves, to each other about the situation around us. We are natural communicators. It's what distinguishes our species.

And when times are great, we're talking about what's good. When times are hard, we struggle to find ways to articulate what we're dealing with, our opinions, our points of view. And for companies whose human resources, the people that make up your organization ... there are conversations happening all the time, internally and externally, that really matter, especially when things are uncertain. Abbie, what's on your mind?

Well, the communications that we do on a regular basis when we are advising our clients and we are talking to them about how they need to talk to their customers come so naturally to us in our business. It's where we focus a lot of our energy. It's certainly one of our areas of expertise.

And what I think gets lost in the shuffle is the impact of that communications on our internal audiences, or lack of communication on our internal audiences, meaning our employees and those important to our business.

And, you know, Adrian, you and I talked about this at the beginning of the year when we returned the podcast to our schedule was a about the world that we were living in and how important it was for me to be able to communicate to my team that I heard them, that I understood them, and that things might be challenging, but let's, you know, know that we honor and respect each other. And quite honestly, that was sort of where my ending was of my employee communications and which is not smart.

I should practice a little bit more about what I preach to my my clients.

So I was intrigued when about a week ago, I saw an email from one of my colleagues at our PRGN partner in Detroit, Franco, from Nikki Little, that said, let's figure out how to do some communications internally. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to click. It said challenge. I'm always up for a challenge.

So I clicked on it and started receiving these really powerful messages about the importance of communicating, especially in times of uncertainty and change. So I reached out to Nikki and said, come on on and chat with me a little bit about this. And she was gracious enough to make some room in her schedule to do that.

So what's on my mind today is really about the importance of how, when, and why we should be talking to our internal audiences, maybe even more so in times of uncertainty. So, Nikki, thank you for, first of all, for sparking the conversation via email and coming on to talk about it.

But you know, this is such an interesting discussion about, you know, we know the importance of our employees. We recognize them as important stakeholders, but we sometimes don't arm them with information to be that for us.

And so just to kind of kick it off a little bit, you know, what was your impetus for sort of thinking about putting this email program together and really sharing some of your knowledge out there for others? But why it's become so important to remember our internal teams.

Well, first, thank you for having me on the podcast. I am excited to talk about this topic because it is something that is on the mind of all communicators right now, hopefully on all the communicators right now, of how do we not only communicate well with our internal teams, but then how are we advising clients on the importance of. Of internal communications?

Internal communications is important at all times, but I really fundamentally believe that it is so vitally important during times of change, which is what we're experiencing right now. We were talking before we started recording the podcast of that it doesn't matter what industry you're in, right?

Like, if you're paying attention to the news, you're aware there's tariffs going on right now, right?

That's impacting the automotive industry, that's impacting a lot of other industries, but there's also AI that's impacting every single industry and every single role in some way, shape or form. So it doesn't matter what role or industry you're in right now. I guarantee that every company, every person is. Is feeling that pinch of. There's.

There's some change going on right now, and it's bigger and it's broader in certain industries than in others. But again, I feel like, you know, couple years ago, five years ago now, we all went through this, this global pandemic, right?

And we all had to change how we're communicating, how we're doing things. Marketing plans got totally destroyed. Right now we're in another era of change, and.

And it looks different, but it's the same kind of fundamental principles of how do we prioritize communications and particularly with our internal teams during times of change. So we've been talking a lot about it, a lot as a leadership team at Franco.

Communicating with our team members is the most utmost, utmost important goal for us because they are our most important stakeholders. We don't do the work. The clients don't get the magic if we don't have a great team, right?

So if we are not communicating well with them, if we're not keeping them updated, Motivated, inspired and informed. They're not going to bring their best selves to the work that they do for our clients.

So we've always viewed our team members as our most important stakeholders.

So we've been thinking about how do we kind of through our work that we're doing with our clients, through some of our marketing initiatives that we're doing for the agency, how are we putting that concept out there and helping other companies understand this is very important. And here are some kind of tips, tools, resources that you can use if you believe in the fundamental importance of internal comms right now.

But maybe you're stuck and not quite sure the best way to do it.

Maybe you have leadership that aren't doing it in the right way, but you, as the comms leader, want to help guide them and shape them to be better communicators for the internal team. So that's kind of how it came about.

And how this also started is we are big firm believers of taking an owned piece of content and reworking that for different channels. Abbie, I know you're very familiar with the PESO model and Spin Sucks and that beautiful framework that Gini Dietrich created.

So we live and breathe by that with our clients. So we kind of practice what we preach with taking an owned piece of content, which was an article that I wrote for Forbes Communications Council. I contribute content there every quarter or so. And we said, okay, this is great, right? It has a lot in it. What can we do with this? How can we kind of chop it up and use it for other purposes?

So from there, that turned into this navigating uncertainty quiz and how prepared are you to communicate during change and navigate uncertainty? And then we said, well, why don't we take this and break it off a little bit more? And then that's where this five day communications challenge came in.

Great. And let's talk a little bit about the specific tips and tricks.

But one of the things that was interesting in what in your opening here that, that I struggle with, you know, as a small business owner and wanting to be transparent with my team and keeping them apprised of what's happening at a business level. Right. The conversations that are not about how are we servicing our clients. That is a very easy conversation to have.

It's the conversations around the financial impact of what's happening or the, you know, we wholeheartedly respect the different views that all of us bring to the table. What's the right place for those conversations to happen? Should they happen in the workplace?

Is it my place as an owner to encourage those kind of different dialogues or do I need to somehow guide them in a different direction that is maybe not appropriate to be talking about? Politics, religion, viewpoint on what's happening in the Middle East. Pick a topic. It's highly charged.

And I think that's one of the challenges that I face on a regular basis is wanting to be as transparent as possible, wanting to keep the conversations going, but also recognizing that do I need to burden my team with things that aren't going to. Well, my view may not make them better at what they're doing.

And does it give them undue an unnecessary uncertainty if I bring them into too much of the day to day impacts that's happening in the business? I don't have an answer for it. So it's, you know, it's a challenge, I think.

Yeah. And that's gonna vary depending on each company, right. Like a small to mid-sized business. So our team, we're about 30ish team members communicating with our team and the level of information and transparency that we can share is different than a company that has tens of thousands of people. Right.

So that kind of process of sharing information, that level of information that can be shared first with employees before it is shared with boards or stakeholders or investors, like that's different. So I'm not even going to touch the big conglomerates of the world. I'll focus more on the small to midsize businesses.

But I think it's really the way you figure that out is knowing your team and knowing the types of things, like anticipating the questions that they're going to have depending on whatever challenge it is that you're facing, whatever the uncertainty is. But you have to know your teams well to be able to anticipate those challenges or to anticipate those questions.

Because then again, to your point, if you don't, then you're sitting there going, well, I don't know how much information I should share, right? Like maybe I'm sharing too much, maybe I'm sharing too little. With us, we always take the approach of let's share a little bit more.

And that way we are, you know, at least being open and transparent and not leaving people with more questions after we communicate something or after we share a piece of information. But there's also that line where we're like, well we, we know we can't share everything, right?

Like we can't share every little decision, we can't share every kind of scenario that we looked at. And, and I think that kind of goes to, to Trust with your team. If you've built trust, and this is important to do before you're in an uncertain time.

Right. Ideally, if you're in a challenging time or an uncertain situation, you already have trust with your team.

So even though they may not have an every single detail about how you came to a decision, if you share enough information with them, if you're honest, if you're transparent, then if that trust is already established, they don't have to have every single piece of details they know. I'm getting the information that is most important for me to have. I feel prepared, I feel, I feel good. I know what I need to know. But I trust that my leaders are making the right decision.

And I think the hierarchy there in terms of how it's communicated and by whom is also important as well, right? I mean, if you are an organization that has a management team and then that team has, you know, direct reports, it's the discussions that take place amongst the leadership.

Yes.

And then empowering them to have those conversations into the team. And then, you know, we're a small team, we're five, so they there, they all have access to each other.

We're not, we don't have a huge, you know, differential, but in some larger, larger than us, organizations certainly do.

But I think the, the part there on that trust factor, and we've talked a lot about that on this podcast, is that that is the number one, to me, important part of this because regardless of what you're going to be sharing, good news, challenging news, even if it's, "I don't know yet, this is what we're looking at."

Yes.

That fact that you have the trust and that they trust you to be open and honest and that you will share with them at such point that it's appropriate to do so.

Correct.

And giving your management team, those that are going to be helping you to deploy that information, you know, empower them to know they can do it.

Yes.

And are speaking on your behalf, but with the full support of ownership to do it.

Absolutely. And that's the exact way that we approach things at Franco too. And I, I would hope and I advocate for other small to midsize businesses that kind of have that, that layer of, you know, top management, leadership team, maybe middle management and then more of kind of your junior entry level team members who are working their way up to some sort of management role. But before we roll anything out communications wide to our agency, we talk to our leadership team first because they have great feedback.

There are things that they bring to us that we might not have thought of, or we suggest positioning something in a certain way and they're like, hey, you know what? We should think about this. And we're like, great, that's awesome.

So while there always have to be the decision makers at the top of the company that really, it's on, it's on them to make sure that they're running the business, they're making the right decisions.

If you have a team of leaders who you are empowering to kind of help you carry the mission, vision, communications forward with other team members, you. They have to have buy in. Right. They have to fundamentally believe in going back to that word trust. They have to trust in that direction.

And the way you do that is involving them along, along the way. So it's. Instead of the. This is what we're saying, this is how we're doing it. We need you all to be on board. We need you to communicate things this exact way.

Instead of pushing messaging at them that they may have some questions about or they may not fully believe in, we're involving them in the conversation. And you know, again, at the end of the day, there might be something that they don't really like. Right.

But it's a decision that the leaders at the top kind of have to make because they have the best interest of the business in mind. Which again, kind of goes in having the employees best interest in mind too. Right. It goes hand in hand.

But I think what you said about kind of having the leadership team on board is so fundamentally important when you're communicating anything.

Because if they're not bought into it, if they're not trusting what you're saying, how are you supposed to expect them to then go out and kind of funnel that same message to other team members?

This reminds me when I was in high school and college and I worked for, in retail and we always had, you know, the, the customer suggestion box, you know, and people would put. And we had one for the employees and one for customers.

And you know, once a month someone would take those things out of the box and they would never be looked at again. We all thought we were contributing and we had some great ideas.

And it was probably, you know, things like we need to have, you know, Fridays off and a pool party on Saturday. But it was our suggestions and we wanted management to know none of those ever got looked at or taken advantage of. And it, and it.

I wasn't smart enough at that point to say, oh, and it eroded my trust in management.

Right. But it did!

To some extent, it probably did. And I think the value in having this strategy in place and certainly where we are right now in this lot of unknowns and a lot of changing dialogues and things that are happening to us that requires us to react is raising this conversation front and center. But the truth is this type of conversation, internal communications is important at any point in your business strategy.

Absolutely.

That the time to start openly communicating is not when you're in the midst of a crisis or something. Correct. Because at that point you're building, you're starting from scratch.

And so a lot of this, you know, to me the recommendations and such are really about at any point in a business where and when do you bring in your team?

How do you communicate the types of things that are, you know, critical for them to understand so that they get the mission and the vision of your organization? They, to me, they know their role in helping you impact and move that forward.

Right.

That it is, if we're doing it right, a team effort in that no matter where you are in the organizational structure, your commitment to and understanding of what we're trying to do as leaders, as owners and managers is equally as important. We can't do our vision and mission if we don't have the buy in from our team members.

And we get that, I believe, by looping them in at what point makes the most sense. But not just when we're talking about uncertainty or challenging times, but it's all the time.

Yes, absolutely. Because like you said, if company leadership only take the approach of prioritizing internal communications, when something's wrong or there's a challenge, then I don't think that is the best way to build trust among your teams. Right. Because then it's like, okay, here we go. They're only talking to us now because this problem is going on or we're having this issue. Right.

But if you're, if you're constantly prioritizing communication with your teams and you've built that culture of trust and, and kind of care and empathy and vulnerability and transparency. That's the norm, right? They're used to it.

So then when you are communicating maybe at a different level or with a different tone or urgency, if there is change, then it's not abnormal from, for the team to hear from leaders to have be, to be receiving information. It's, it's just part of the culture. Right.

So, and I think the, again, like you said, the, the buy in and the understanding of like, okay, I know my role that I play in this because I'm used to getting transparent communication from my leadership that goes so much further than someone who's like, well, I haven't heard from our CEO or president in six months since the last town hall and now I'm hearing for them. But how am I supposed to trust that what this person is saying or what they're asking me to do is really in my best interest?

Nikki, one of the things that I'm fond of pointing out when I lead communication workshops or work with leaders on their executive communications is that listening is the primary skill, the foundational skill in communication. You know, it was one of the Stoics who said "we have two ears and one mouth and we should use them in that proportion."

Right.

And I'm curious about the other side of this because it's so easy to make internal comms be about what we're going to say, right? When, and how, and how will we frame what we say.

Yes.

But the other side of it is really interesting. And I'm reminded, there's a quote which is misattributed to George Bernard Shaw, but it's really important. It comes from an article that was published in the 50s called "Is Anybody Listening?" The quote is:

"The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough, but we have not listened. And by not listening, we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society."

That's SO relevant to what you're talking about right now! How do you create a culture of listening in an organization, such that not only is leadership being heard, but the employees are being heard as well?

Yeah. So we talk about this a little bit in one of the emails in the Challenge, but it's creating the two-way channels, not just broadcasting information, but establishing mechanisms or processes for employees to ask questions and provide feedback. That's super critical, especially during change, when things are a little unstable, right? Or things might be moving quickly.

So it's important that there aren't just those opportunities where again, a leader is speaking at that they are, you know, sharing what they need to share, but then opening that up for that two way conversation. So the next step of that is you can listen, right? But what's the follow up after that?

Actions speak just as loud as words. And I think that's another critical component of internal communications and those of us who are charged with it is that we have to counsel and advise our leaders on. If you're getting feedback, you might not be able to make every change. Right.

You know, Abbie, you gave the example of the suggestion box and okay, yeah, so you know, we can't do everything. But if you are saying we are creating a culture of not only listening but taking feedback and then acting on the things that we can act on, if you're not doing that second part, then that trust is eroded because then people are saying, well, why am I spending my time providing feedback and giving suggestions for improvement if nothing's done about it? So again, it's not a leader's job to be able to do everything that everybody is asking for. That doesn't always make sense. You still have to keep the most important priorities for the business and kind of the vision, the mission, the long term goals in mind.

But if there are really good suggestions and there are things that you can do to solve some challenges or solve some problems by listening and then acting, then that's definitely part of the role. And I think a challenge too is some internal comms leaders might say, "it doesn't matter what I say. Like, I'll provide the counsel, but my leaders are, they're not going to listen. Or they'll say they're going to listen, but they're not going to act on it."

Well, then I would say you shouldn't be at that company. And I know it's easier said than done to be like, leave a job and go find something else, right? But you're wasting your time. Because the whole goal is to be working with leaders who care about what their teams are saying, care about making changes that are for the better of the team, that will ultimately help everybody keep rowing in the same direction.

Well, and that full circle transparency, right, that I am going to, as the leader share with you important information about our organization, good, bad or otherwise, on a regular cadence. You know that there's an opportunity for these dialogues to happen. You will hear from your managers as they carry through some of the things that we've been discussing.

You have the opportunity to share feedback with your managers or with whatever the funnel is that will make it up to top level to be evaluated, reminding them that not every suggestion is doable, but every suggestion is important and we want to hear them. And then it's really then sort of demonstrating that culturally throughout the organization so that you live by those words.

As you said, actions speak louder than words so that we, we show that we've taken advantage. And I think to some extent where an idea is being implemented that came from your team, it's acknowledging that we're doing this because we heard from so many of you and this is important.

Yes.

And the impact that that's going to have. And if the bottom line in all of this is establishing and maintaining that trust, that give and take is so important. And that's any relationship, right? That's friendship, that's spouse, you know, significant others. It's not just the workplace.

Right.

But if I listen to you, you listen to me, together we come up with a solution. We're in a much better place to be able to handle any sort of uncertainty that might present itself.

Yes. Trust is the foundation of every relationship, whether it's personal, whether it's professional, whether it's blended. If that trust is not there, no amount of communicating is going to go anywhere.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Copper State of Mind. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with a colleague who might also find this podcast valuable. It's easy to do, just click the "Share" button in the app you're listening to now to pass it along. You can also follow Copper State of Mind in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast app. We publish new episodes every other Friday.

Copper State of Mind is brought to you by HMA Public Relations, the oldest continuously operating PR firm in Arizona. The show is recorded and produced by the team at Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm in Phoenix, and distributed by PHX.fm, the leading independent B2B podcast network in Arizona. For all of us here at Speed of story and PHX.fm I'm Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening and for sharing the show with others if you choose to do so. We hope you'll join us again for another episode of Copper State of Mind.