Alyssa Zeff:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to Employee Buzz. I am Alyssa Zeff, your host. Some things about me you may not know. I love Star Wars, I went skydiving 20 years ago and absolutely loved it, and I am an escape room expert. I have never, not escaped from the 12 escape rooms that I've done. I am here with Darlene Hyde. Hey Darlene.

Darlene Hyde:
Hey. Why am I not surprised about that escape room thing?

Alyssa Zeff:
Yes, I'm a little competitive. Darlene is the Senior Project Director at Davis & Company. You may recall Darlene joined us on Season One of Employee Buzz, where she talked about leader communication. Darlene is also a fan of Star Wars. I wonder if that will come up again later? A fun fact that I just learned about Darlene recently is that she used to be an inline hockey coach. Very impressive, Darlene.

Darlene Hyde:
Men's league. I like to boss them around.

Alyssa Zeff:
Yes. Excellent. So today, we're going to talk about a whole new topic, communication to create learning. All right! Let's start by helping our listeners understand what that means. What is the connection between communication and learning?

Darlene Hyde:
Communicators, we're always talking about how to move employees from being aware of something to being engaged, right? Everything's about how do we engage employees? Awareness seems to be on the knowledge chart, kind of the low end of the spectrum. So if we think more about learning and how people learn, we stopped thinking about how do we engage them? How do we do that? But instead, we start to create experiences that facilitate how they learn, especially how adults learn. If we can think about creating learning experiences rather than engagement experiences, we can influence that movement from awareness to that engagement. Engagement is the result. Does that make sense?

Alyssa Zeff:
Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting, to you to build on what you're saying, in so many organizations, they hear learning and they're like, "Oh, that goes to our learning group or our training group." Right? And then it becomes, that sits over there. That's not something a communication person wears as part of their hat. What I think we're going to dive into today and what I like is that learning is needed no matter what you're communicating.

Darlene Hyde:
Correct. Learning requires layers of different types of communications. So you've got guided instruction, you've got self-guided practice, repetition, feedback. If you think about all the kinds of communication that we create, that's what we're doing. So when we get out of this mindset of communication is about sharing news and sharing information and thinking more about we're building knowledge and engagement, we're shifting into that learning discipline. And when you start looking at it that way, you can go back and look at decades of research from sociologists, from psychologists and behaviorists. And you can take a lesson from some of the things that they've done over the years.

Alyssa Zeff:
It's really interesting, and I think it starts with the idea of being objective based with your communication, knowing upfront, what are you trying to accomplish? And very rarely is that answer going to be, "Oh, just to get this thing in front of that person." “Just get something in front of my audience.” It's either that you want them to be more aware of something, which is some level of learning, or you want them to do something differently, change an attitude, change a behavior. In that case, you realize that just putting something in front of them, just pushing out information, really won't have the impact you're trying to go after.

Darlene Hyde:
That's right. And again, you're looking for how to get to that result, right? And to do that, you use these sorts of learning techniques that have been developed over the years.

Alyssa Zeff:
What are these techniques? What are some examples that move people, employees specifically, from awareness to engagement?

Darlene Hyde:
Well, there's three communication techniques that I can think of that we've employed plenty with our clients. And those three are the Bite, Snack, Meal approach. There's immersive storytelling. And then, of course there's this hands-on learning.

Alyssa Zeff:
All right. So let's dive into each one of these a little bit. Start with bite, snack, meal. Tell me a little bit about that.

Darlene Hyde:
So, based on the research that we've done with employees, and we've done a lot, we know that employees want tailored communication. People want to be able to customize their internet homepages so that they just see the feeds that they want. But we also know that internal communicators can't tailor every piece of communication to every employee. So the key with Bite, Snack, Meal is that it's like the illusion of customization, right? So if you want to serve up just a headline in a summary, that's a little bite. That gives you an idea of what that communication is going to be about. The snack might be a little bit more, maybe it's a short article. So the bite leads them to a short article that gives them a little more information. And then maybe that article leads them to a larger policy document. If you feel so inclined to read the full policy document, you can have at it. So that's the meal. So it's the illusion of customization where you take a little bit, just what you need today.

Alyssa Zeff:
Another great example and where I see Bite, Snack, Meal come to life a lot, and it also connects to learning because you're trying to get people to understand and change behavior, connects to benefits, right? And so there's so much involved in benefits and your full plan, the detailed plan, and it has everything, that's your meal. But nobody's really going to read that meal cover to cover. So the bite is when you send the postcard that says, "Hey, you have to take an action on this day." The snack is a little more detail about one component of the plan, right? Like, "Oh, here's a summary of what's new in our medical benefits this year." And like I said, the meal is the full plan. And it's such a great example because employees do need to know about this. They do need to learn what is available. But if you just send them the plan, there's no way they're ever going to read it from cover to cover. Or, are they ever going to understand it.

Darlene Hyde:
Right. And what's interesting is a lot of our HR clients, there's this thought that if they give them all the information, they have everything they need to make the decisions.

Alyssa Zeff:
Right.

Darlene Hyde:
And the truth is you're not helping anyone with that giant plan, because like you said, they're not going to be reading it from cover to cover. And then making the decisions, they're going to end up calling HR anyway, to help them make those decisions.

Alyssa Zeff:
Exactly.

Darlene Hyde:
So it behooves us to take these approaches that help the employee learn a little bit more what they need.

Alyssa Zeff:
Let's talk about immersive storytelling. That was your second concept. Tell us about that.

Darlene Hyde:
Well, storytelling has been buzzword, right? It's been for the past, I don't know how many years, 10 years or so, it's all about storytelling. But it, in fact, is the oldest form of communication. You look back at cave drawings from early man, and communication and storytelling have gone hand in hand for centuries. Hula is this form of storytelling, believe it or not. But the thing about storytelling is it takes these abstract concepts and brings them to life. If you want to talk about a strategy, tell a story about a team who's living the strategy. That's the best way to sort of give people an example, a live example of what that strategy means. It can often connect with employees emotionally. You can use characters, real or made up. And if you're building a story and one of the better, the classic story has this character development, conflict and resolution. So it connects with people. It'll bring you back to having a story read to you as a kid. So in learning, storytelling essentially falls under the social research called observational learning. And this is, especially when a leader, let's say a leader tells a story. If you connect with that leader, or you have some kind of reverence for that leader, you may then imitate that leader or follow their lead. So that's all that leading by example, kind of. So that's another way that storytelling comes to life.

Alyssa Zeff:
So a great example of this, I think, is business strategy. We consult our clients a lot because a business strategy is very abstract. It's not very human. It doesn't feel easy to connect to. But what we've helped so many clients do is take this and really humanize it, and tell the stories of how the strategy is coming to life or the impact that the strategy is having on your end-users, in health care, very often, that's a patient and stuff like that. And that really helps people feel connected to the strategy, which helps them want to understand it, learn it and know how to contribute to it.

Darlene Hyde:
Right.

Alyssa Zeff:
So our last technique that you mentioned is hands-on learning. Tell me more about that.

Darlene Hyde:
Well, hands-on learning, it's just what it sounds like, it's learning by doing, by participating. But how do you learn how to drive? Right? I've got a kid who's learning how to drive and it's very hands-on. And when you're in high school, right, you take government classes, you participate in mock governments to learn how government works. So this is how we think about how our kids learn. Why not take those same sort of principles to help employees learn, right? Again, it taps into those experiential emotions, the senses that you have when you're participating and those things help promote retention. And then it also, participation is another great thing that you get from hands-on learning, is this feeling of buy-in and agreement. When you're trying to hash out a problem, and you bring people together and everybody is trying to solve the problem, that participation kind of helps everybody. You don't have to go to this next layer of now everyone has to approve it. Everyone participated in it, so chances are having it approved have just gone up exponentially.

Alyssa Zeff:
What's an example of hands-on learning in an organization?

Darlene Hyde:
An obvious example is when you have a new process, let's say, or a new system that you need to learn. You can't just send people an email or a message and expect them to miraculously understand it, and then know what to do. Often, training falls under that, right? You give people the opportunity to try things out, ask questions, get their questions answered in a live hands-on setting. So that's kind of an obvious example.

Alyssa Zeff:
I think what's interesting about this one is that it doesn't have to be, come up with new channels and new ways to do it. You can build hands-on learning into existing channels and existing meetings. So it's about creating dialogue, it's about rehearsing and practicing and trying things and break-out sessions and also helping managers, empowering managers to do this. So it doesn't have to feel like it's additive like, "Oh God, now I have to help people learn too." No, it's about taking what you're already doing and making it work a little harder.

Darlene Hyde:
Yeah, exactly. Well said.

Alyssa Zeff:
So, last question, before we get to the fun part. If a communication professional says, "All right, I buy into this. I understand what you're saying. I want to do this. Where should I start?” How does someone get started on infusing learning into their communication?

Darlene Hyde:
Well, I think you start with that mindset shift, right? You reposition your thinking. So it's not about what you need to communicate. We can't think about creating communication to teach. It's about creating experiences that enable the learning process. It sounds like I'm saying the same thing, but I've thought about this a lot. When you focus on the experience, not on creating the communication, then you're going to, by just nature of that task, think about how is the person I'm communicating to, or the audience I'm communicating to, going to receive what I'm providing.

Darlene Hyde:
And so by that mindset shift, that's the big first step. Then we go back to something that you had said earlier, Alyssa, about identifying objectives, right? So that's when we're talking about experiences. What is that end state? What is it that you're trying to achieve for that employee? We call that the Know, Believe and Do. What do you want the employee to know, believe or do differently as a result of your communication? So once you position your objectives, not about what you're trying to do, but the end result and what you're trying to achieve, that's the next thing. And then you go about creating experiences or a combination of experiences. So you can use the Bite, Snack, Meal approach. You can try some hands-on learning. You can do some storytelling. Whatever that is, you create this combination of experiences that help you meet your objectives.

Alyssa Zeff:
And help you drive learning.

Darlene Hyde:
Yes, exactly. This is going to breakthrough.

Alyssa Zeff:
It is. Well, Darlene, thank you so much for being here again on Employee Buzz. This was really interesting, and I think really valuable and a shift that we're going to hopefully see a lot of in internal communication.

Darlene Hyde:
Hope so.

Alyssa Zeff:
Thank you again, Darlene, for being here. I hope you had a great time.

Darlene Hyde:
It was fun, thanks.

Alyssa Zeff:
Thanks for joining us on Employee Buzz, where we laugh and learn. If you like what you're hearing, go to your podcast platform, iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher, or Google Play to rate and review.