In this episode, we dive into the world of internal communications with expert Jason Anthoine. Discover how to strengthen employee connections and foster a positive workplace culture. Jason shares his valuable insights on building strong relationships with employees and provides practical strategies for effective communication. Join Jason and Janine as they explore actionable approaches to enhancing employee engagement and satisfaction, helping you create a thriving company culture.

GUEST: Jason Anthoine | LinkedIn | Visit their Website: Jason Anthoine

HOST: Janine Hamner Holman | [email protected] | LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter | Subscribe to my Newsletter! | Book me to Speak!

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Reaching The Frontline: How To Connect With Your Employees With Jason Anthoine

Introduction To Jason Anthoine

Jason Anthoine has many years of experience. He is a leading change expert in internal communications and culture change. Inspired by his father’s dedication, Jason’s work is rooted in values like respect and teamwork. He has guided hundreds of companies, unleashing them to reimagine their approach to employee experience. His mission is to inform, involve, and inspire employees in the workplace to drive better results in the marketplace. For Jason, this isn’t a job. It’s a reflection of his core values instilled by his father’s example.

I’m a normal, regular guy. That makes me sound like I’m putting on airs or something.

No, you’re not putting on anything. I want to get to the question that I start with, but first, I want to ask you about your dad. Tell us more about your father and what his dedication was that inspired you on your journey.

I grew up in a small town in Middle Georgia called Fort Valley. Fort Valley is only known for two things. One, we grow all the peaches. It’s a county seat for Peach County.

Georgia is the Peach State. That’s quite a claim to fame.

The peach season in Georgia, at least for my relatives, will be over. They’ll be going on vacation and relaxing. We’re known for peaches. The other thing we’re known for is Blue Bird School Buses. If anybody rode a Blue Bird School Bus back and forth to school back in the day, those were made in Fort Valley.

My dad worked at that manufacturing site for many years as a frontline supervisor. He started when he was seventeen. He goes there after school. The president of the company said, “When you get here, you come to my office because you have to do your homework first before I let you go out there and work. He did that while I was in high school. He finally graduated by the skin of his teeth.

My mother was a secretary at the bank. They both grew up in Fort Valley. They would come home from work and talk about what happened, what was good, what was not good, people they liked, and people they didn’t like. We all do. I’m assuming kids when they’re little because my kid was like this. When he was little, he was still like this. He was not little anymore. They don’t care about it. They don’t want to hear about any of that stuff. They don’t care about any of that. That feels like 1,000 years away for me.

For some reason, it was interesting to me. I enjoyed hearing those stories and hearing about the work. A small town is what it was. We could go down and visit. It was no big deal to go and have him page. He would come up from the factory line and come out to the front. He could go to the bank and see my mom. I was fascinated by work and still am many years after college, and that was several more years on top of that when I was doing all that with my parents back home. It instilled in me that work matters. Most of us spend most of our time working. It ought to matter more. What can I do to help make that possible?

 

What is something that you have noticed either within your business or with your clients? What’s one thing that they have been failing to pay attention to? What’s the cost of that inattention? What’s the problem that inattention is causing?

Common Communication Failures In Organizations

For my clients, I’ll answer from that perspective first. My clients don’t pay attention. As a general rule, they don’t pay attention to the need for communication with their employees, and they don’t consider the best ways to do that. There are a lot of reasons it happened. None of them are on purpose, nefarious, or anything like that. People are busy. Work is busy and complicated.

People back then were like, “It’s difficult now.” We’re looking back then, and we’re like, “It was easy.” It’s difficult. It’s difficult all the time. The default is they’ll learn along the way. They’ll keep up as things happen. We, the company, the leaders, or whoever it might be, don’t have to make any extra effort to make sure all that’s happening, but we do as leaders.

I see that in my own business. We are in the communications business, but I have to spend a ton of time communicating with my own team about the work we’re doing, what’s happening with the client, different prospects we’re talking about, and processes and procedures to keep the place running like it’s supposed to run. All of that has to be deliberate and on purpose. If you wait for people to absorb it over time because they’re hanging around while stuff is going all around them, I don’t think that’s the best way to try to run a railroad personally.

What’s the problem? I get that we’re busy, and we forget, we don’t want to take time out, or we don’t see the importance of it necessarily filling our people in and bringing them in on what’s going on. In my experience, the problem that causes is that everybody isn’t rowing in the same direction. You’re trying to implement a change initiative, and people have different ideas about what it is that you’re supposed to be doing.

Some people are excited about the change because that’s how they’re wired. Most people are not because that’s how most people are wired. Most of us hate change. I can see that those would be some of the problems with forgetting to bring your people in on what’s going on. Focusing on internal communication is your purview and what you are an expert in. What are the other problems that I’m not yet coming up with?

People don’t see the need, which is related to what you said. They’re like, “We’re going to get out here on the field and play this game, but I’m not going to tell anybody what the plays and rules are. We’re not going to have a scoreboard.” That’s not a game. That’s practice. Those two things are different.

There’s no clear point in this game. What’s fun about playing something? If you don’t know what the rules are, you don’t know what you’re trying to do.

That’s some of it. Some of it is like, “We did communicate about that. I said what I thought needed to be said. Isn’t that good enough?” No.

I told them what we were doing. They’re not getting on board. What’s missing there in that sentence?

There are two things. One is frequency, and two, is it from the employee’s perspective? On frequency, think about it. If we’re leaders of an organization, we’ve been talking about this change effort, whatever it might be, for months, maybe most of the year, before it’s finally time to say, “We’re going to talk to everybody. We’re going to enact this.” We’ve been living with that thing for months. We forget that these people are hearing about it.

We’ve heard it several thousand times during that time. They’ve only heard it this one time. It’s like with advertising. You see these ads on television. There are billboards and social media stuff that back it up because you need to see something 9, 10, 11, 12 times before it sinks in. That’s to decide whether you’re going to get a Big Mac or not. Change, in my experience, is more complicated than most Big Macs. That means you have to spend a whole lot of time communicating over again. That’s the first part. The second part is relevant to the employees themselves. We had a town hall where we talked about this, but we ran out of time for questions. That was what we did.

Why isn’t that enough?

From the leader’s perspective, you’re doing that, but you have to think about the employee’s perspective, which is, “I’m sitting here for an hour. They’re using big words and talking about big things. I don’t even understand. Even if I had a question, they wouldn’t let me ask it. I don’t know who to go to afterward.” We’re not thinking about the employees and how they’re receiving that information and the types of additional things that they are going to need beyond what you think they are.

Don’t just communicate. Engage. The biggest communication failures come from ignoring the employee's perspective. Share on X

I want to break this down. The first part is that, as leaders in an organization, we’ve been thinking about, talking through, and being involved in this change for maybe a few years. When we get ready to roll it out, we forget that not everybody else has been involved in thinking about this. Often, we forget to bring them in on the steps. We’re done thinking about it. We’ve been thinking about it for however long it has been. We’ve been thinking about it for a damn long time.

It means we don’t even remember the first meeting we got to when that process started when we didn’t know anything. They started telling us that stuff. We can’t even remember that far back.

I’m an organizational leader. I’m working on rolling out a new initiative. I am excited about it. I’m also done with talking about it because we’ve been hammering it through, doing SWOT analysis, and looking at all the different possibilities. I’m finished. How do I, as a leader, figure out? I can’t even remember the first meeting when we didn’t know what we didn’t know. I know a lot more than I knew then. How do we effectively go back and connect the dots for our employees so that they can get excited about it in the same way that I’m excited about it?

That’s a great question because we all face it. It doesn’t matter what size of the organization, what changes, and how long you’ve been dealing with it. When it’s time for the rubber to hit the road, there are great ways to think about how to do that. We’ve been there. We’ve been working on this stuff for a while. It’s time to start rolling it out. Everybody is ready to go. Nobody wants to slow down and be deliberate.

You have to stop that to pull in a handful of employees or small of a focus group. We’re letting you all in these five, whoever you are, and we’ve picked you so that we can tell you here’s what we are about to announce. Before we do, we want you to tell us if this is the right way. Are we saying the right things? What questions would you have? Do that first and get a baseline. We said we’re going to do these ten things to communicate. Seven of them confuse these folks, and the other three aren’t quite deep enough because they don’t answer their questions. That’s a good way to test that before you go wide with everybody. You’ve got the whole organization confused instead of a handful of folks.

The other thing is that humans are humans, and leaders are leaders. It’s all about we have to get to the next step and execute. That’s great. When you think about what execution is, it’s the what, the when, the how, the where, and the who without much thought to the why. The why has already been decided. We have to go and do all this stuff right now.

When rolling out change, remember: It’s not just about the 'what' and 'how'—it’s about the 'why' and making sure everyone understands it. Share on X

Connecting Employees To The “Why”

What’s lacking in the initial part of the communications around a change initiative is the why. What is happening in the marketplace? Why do we have to think this way and change things? What are our competitors doing? What are our customers saying to us? What input have we gotten from our employees, if any, along the way? What is the why behind this?

If you start there and get people on board to understand the need for change, you can get to the details on how you’re going to do that. You have to set it up for why it’s needed in the first place. It’s based on what you said earlier. A lot of people love change. Most people do not. If you don’t spend any time trying to understand it, why should I do something differently? I’m not in favor of it because I don’t understand.

I want to tease out one thing that you said. When you were talking about the why, you said one of the things that you want to fill people in on is what input you got from employees, if any. I am from a school that believes in taking on a major initiative. If it’s going to involve five people, it’d be great to involve those five people, but if it’s going to involve a lot of humans, you want to engage your employees in the process. That’s going to help with the buy-in, the understanding, getting the why, and their intrinsic motivation. I’m curious. Do you see that as well in your experience in helping organizations communicate?

I see it when people do it well, and I see it when people don’t do it at all. What happens is that when you don’t get that input, people don’t feel like they’re part of the process and have a chance to get bought in along the way. For employees, what that feels like is change is happening to them versus buy through and for them.

 

We’re still going to get the change, but we’re going to have a better change experience the more we bring our employees along with us, ideally at the beginning. They can give us their perspective on how any of this is going to land out there and the processes, procedures, workflows, and everything else that they’re responsible for that leaders higher up in the organization don’t know. They’re not supposed to know. They have to ask the people who do.

I am reading a book called Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges. One of the things that I am enjoying about this book, which was recommended to me by a friend and future guest, is that one of the things that it talks about is that we have this idea that change is a moment in time. We used to do that, and now, we’re doing this. There has been a change, which is true.

What that doesn’t pay attention to is the transition from what we used to do to what we’re going to be doing in the future. It’s that pause between what was and what is yet fully to be. It occurs to me that both involving people in the design of the change and recognizing that whether you love or hate change, there’s going to be a transition that we all get to go through. Finding ways to honor that and help people through that transition can also be an important part of the communication process.

It’s in that book you mentioned, but there’s a ton of theory and research out there that anybody can look up around the change curve and what that looks like. Normally, it’s starting on the bottom left. It’s towards the bottom. There’s some change coming. That’s exciting. It’s starting to happen. I don’t like this. It starts to dip back down. People end up lower than they were before the change started. Things happen, and people say, “I’ll give it a shot.” Some people are like, “I’m never going to give it a shot.”

It starts going back up. The change itself starts to set in. Ideally, it would look like a slowly curving, tight U where it’s not a big deep V, which would be the left-hand arm of a V. That’s like a rollercoaster. That’s shocking. Ideally, it’s a nice little curved, lazy U. What happens normally is that as soon as it starts curving down, leaders tend to react by saying, “They don’t get it. That’s their fault.” Instead of saying, “They don’t get it. That’s our fault.”

If it’s their fault, it ends up being a long, flat, projected bottom part of that U that looks more like a trench until something shocks the system. Normally, it’s the leaders saying, “I know you guys hate this, but let’s focus on trying to start going upwards again.” You want it to look like a lazy curved U, not a big long trough, and not like a V, because that’s shocking. That bottom part is when people are deciding whether I’m on board or I’m not on board. Most people will be on board. In other organizations, most people won’t be on board. Who do you have to get on board to drag the people who aren’t? Is it possible that nobody will ever be on board, and you miscalculated things?

Leveraging Early Adopters In Change

As we’re talking about this, one of the things that I find taking hold in my brain is the idea that I’ve spent a lot of time working with small to midsize organizations and, sometimes, working with large enterprise-size organizations. It occurs to me that there are some things about this that are easier in a smaller organization. It’s easier to get people’s input and figure out who are going to be the early adopters and who never change, and I’m not down with this program. It’s figuring out how we leverage the early adopters. How do we find out if they never change folks are never? If you’re never going to do it, your option is to leave. There is no option that’s called stay here and subvert the change. That’s not how we’re doing this.

That happens way more often than you think. You want that level of turnover, especially for those people.

I’ve been working with an organization that has some toxic people in it. When the conversation turns out, it is time for those people to leave. They’re not getting on board with the new plan. They’ve had lots of opportunities. Instead, they are actively organizing against the new plan. There is still resistance to letting those people go. I find it mystifying. This wasn’t where the question was going originally. I’ll come back to where the question was going to go. I’m curious. Sally needs to transition and do something different. The time for Jorge in this role has now come and gone. It’s dealing with leaders who are resistant to that change.

It’s troublesome when it is the leaders because most organizations go into any change or day-to-day operations thinking, “All the leaders are on our side. They agree with everything we’re doing all the time.” Nothing could be further from the truth. You have to win their hearts and minds. The way I like to think about it is, for whatever the change might be, if you look at a scale of 1 to 5, the ones are people who are for it. The five are people who are against it. The 2s, 3s, and 4s are, for some reason, in the middle. The four are more against it.

Don’t spend any time on the 1s and 5s. They’re already passionately committed to whatever their opinion is. You’re not going to convince them either way. Don’t waste any of your time. Your biggest opportunity is moving the 3s to 2s by using the 2s and trying to move the 4s to 3s so that you can at least neutralize them. The fives don’t convince the fours. Start grabbing some of the threes. Spend most of your time moving 3s to 2s and dragging 4s to 3s. That’s during the process.

After “the change” is being implemented and things have settled down a little bit, there’s still going to be the fives who are like, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened.” In those situations, you have to either help them up or help them out. Whether they are up or out is up to them. If they’re not going to change, they’re welcome to not change somewhere else. If they are going to change, let’s figure out how we can help them. Maybe they do have some serious reservations for a lot of good reasons. Let’s understand what those are. If we can never get them on board, we have to get them off board.

I want to go back to where I was going at the beginning of that question about the difference in agility between smaller organizations and larger enterprise organizations. What are the things that larger organizations can learn from smaller organizations to help them in employee engagement and change engagement?

The number one thing that small to even some medium-sized organizations have that is the best luxury you can have is because of their size. They have the ability to do more in-person and face-to-face communications than large organizations do. Let’s pretend you run a dry cleaner. You got five people there. You don’t need an internet for five. You’re working around them all day. What a beautiful situation that is. Real-time feedback and guidance. You can do all that there in person.

Small organizations have a unique advantage—real-time, face-to-face communication. Let's leverage that to build stronger teams. Share on X

Nobody is working from home. Dry cleaning happens in that building. Let’s say you’re a medium-sized organization. You have 500 employees. They’re distributed over maybe three locations. That’s also conducive to face communication. You’ve got 50,000 employees globally. You could reach 50,000 people as you funneled through all the way down from senior executives down to the front line. By the time you do that, it’d be too late to change. The whole world would’ve changed.

Small, including some medium-sized, have a distinct advantage over the larger ones. The best way to communicate with anybody is face-to-face. They have that as an advantage. The reason these big companies have internet, apps, teams, and all these other things is a substitute for that. We can’t reach everybody in person. We have to reach everybody the best way we can, which is fine, but it doesn’t work as well as we do face-to-face. It never will.

If you are part of an organization, that is, that larger organization, or you’re an entirely virtual organization, which more is happening these days, in your experience, what are the best ways when we can’t get everybody together in person or several different locations? What are the best ways to communicate, which I imagine can get tricky? You and I are towards the older generations of people in the workforce.

People can’t see us. They don’t know that.

In my intro, I was talking about several years. Nobody is getting several years of experience and still being 30. The younger generations are the digital natives. I was doing a project for a nonprofit in which I was involved in a high school lunchroom. I was startled by the silence. When I went to high school, the lunchroom was the noisiest place on campus ever. Here, everybody is on their phone. They might be talking “on their phone” to the people who are at their table, but they’re doing it with their heads down through the mechanism of their phones.

They’re doing a video call with somebody who’s two tables over.

In this day and age, when we have folks who are connected to their phones and hear something like meeting with people face to face is the best way to communicate. They think, “I hate meeting with people face to face. They’re not used to it. They’re not good at eye contact. When somebody else is making eye contact with them, they get squirrely. When we have all these different generations and experience in the workforce, as an internal communications expert, what is your opinion about the best way to reach people effectively?

Big C Vs. Little C Communications

You started this out by saying that qualifying were these bigger companies that had a harder time reaching their folks simply because of their size. All these other flavors you’ve thrown in there, demographics and some work from home. A lot of stuff is virtual. The way I like to talk about it with clients, particularly in larger organizations, is that you have two kinds of communication.

Big C communications come from “corporate” at the top. You have little C communications, which is all the other communications that are going on in the organization. In most companies, big C should be no more than 10%, and little C should be at least 90%. For the big C stuff, you want to be able to communicate with your employees and meet them where they are already.

For older folks, it’s email and sometimes the internet. For younger folks, it’s video, apps, and Slack teams. Those aren’t hard and fast rules. The point is that however it is, they decide they want to be communicated with whatever channel that is. Use that channel instead of trying to get everybody to come to your channel. You go where they already are. That way, you don’t have to try and win them over for some reason. Meeting those employees where they’re at is the best way when you’re thinking about the difference between big C and little C communications.

 

On the little C side, the advantage is that no matter how large the organization is, there is some management and leadership hierarchy within it. When there’s some big C thing that’s going on, it is up to the leaders and the managers to use their little C powers to translate and interpret what they said up there at corporate and what that means to me, all the way down to the, the person on the front frontline who never hears the big C stuff.

How can we get leaders, managers, and frontline supervisors responsible for helping to interpret and translate those things all the way down in the organization so that when they hear the big C stuff, they can turn around and say, “Here’s what’s going on? Sometimes, you get this stuff. Sometimes, you don’t. Let’s talk about it and figure out which way to go.”

If you’ve got all your leaders, managers, and frontline supervisors doing that little C stuff after the big C thing happens, it’s much more effective. You start to get to that feeling like a small to medium-sized company, where most of that is face-to-face or small groups on digital platforms like Zoom or Teams. You want that to feel as hyperlocal and hyper-personal as possible the further down you get in that organization.

There are ways to deal with all those things in a large organization. If you think about it as big C versus little C and meeting your employees where they are already on the channels they prefer, you’re going to have a much more likely scenario for success instead of fighting people at the outset. You’re supposed to read your email. All my emails go into the delete box. I don’t look at any of it. What do you look at? I look at Slack. I’m going to send it to you on Slack. Know that and move on.

The other thing that occurs to me is working with your local managers, local team directors, or whoever it is that is going to be your messenger and helping to train them. How do you deliver that message? How do you ask open-ended questions? People can talk about what they think about it or what process it out loud. That takes some skill and development.

The other piece of this is, as we all know, most managers got into managing people because they were good at a role. They were told, “You manage those people who were doing that same thing.” We never trained them in how to do that. This is one of those times when investment in training is going to make an enormous amount of financial sense for the organization because it’s going to mean the success or the failure of the initiative that you’re working on.

I see many organizations, small, medium, and large, rely on supervisors, managers, and leaders as they should. The mistake they typically make, whether they’re big, medium, or small, is that they spend a whole lot of time writing talking points, handing out PowerPoints, and giving them all the content. That’s not what the problem is. The problem is that those leaders, managers, and frontline supervisors need confidence. We can give them the content. That’s not the problem. The problem is the confidence.

They’re like, “I’ve never had a meeting like this. I’ve never had manager training, much less how to communicate as a manager.” They’re nervous. The only frame of reference they have is TV, sports, or movies. They think, “Everybody has to be a rock star.” No, you don’t. Their biggest fear is that they’re going to share something, and somebody is going to ask a question they don’t know the answer to.

We have to help them feel comfortable saying, “That’s an excellent question. I don’t see any of that here, but I don’t know who to go and ask. I’ll circle back with you with the answer.” Employees are fine with that. You don’t have to know everything. There’s no way to know everything. You need to know who does and ask them.

We get hung up on the idea that if somebody asks me a question, I need to know the answer. As you said, there is no human on the planet who knows the answer to all the questions. I used to have a Post-it on my computer monitor that said, “The smartest people ask for help.” I was stuck in that domain of, “I got it. I can do it. Some things I got, but lots of other things I don’t have.” I learned how to be good at asking for help, but that is a developed skill.

Unless we’re helping our people develop their skills, especially in this domain, in rolling out something that could be critical for the future of an organization when we’re not empowering our employees to do it well, which means not having the things to say, but how to say them, the nuances, understanding of the why and the confidence in it and themselves. When they get asked a question, which invariably will happen, somebody will come up with a question to which they do not know the answer. They know who to come to.

The Role Of AI In Communication

Think about artificial intelligence. Everybody was like, “The robots are coming.” That’s not how artificial intelligence works for the most part. Yes, in some instances, but the way folks like us use it, people think, “It knows everything. All I have to do is ask it.” All you’re doing is asking it. It goes and finds all the information that’s ever existed in the history of humanity, brings it all back, and parses it out. It’s like, “This is what I think you asked. Here’s what I believe the answer is based on everything else that I went and got.”

That’s the same process that you described. I could be a leader or supervisor. If somebody asks me a question, I’m going to go find the answer, and I’m now AI. I’ll go out there and find out all this other stuff. I come back and say, “Is this what you asked? This is the answer I came up with.” It’s the same thing. AI is not any smarter than a human. It’s faster. Don’t be intimidated by it because it’s not doing anything other than what you ought to be doing, which is taking in input, going to find some sources, and coming back and saying, “Here are the answers.”

Sometimes, the stuff it comes back with is not correct. It has mistakes, or it can’t find the right nuance. I have asked AI questions. It says, “I don’t have the ability to answer that question.” People ask me questions all the time. Sometimes, I don’t have the ability to answer that question.

We can learn a thing or two from this new AI stuff, but as helpful of a tool as that is now and is certainly going to be going forward. There is no substitute for actual intelligence from humans. That’s how it is.

Closing Remarks And Final Thoughts

Jason, this has been a delight. Thank you so much for all of the wisdom that you have shared with us and your thoughts about internal communication and organizational culture change, everything from your wonderful story about your father and your mother to your fantastic sense of humor. I have enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you for having me on. This has been fun. I appreciate it.

Remember, great leaders make great teams. Until next time.

 

Important Links

• Jason Anthoine
• Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes
• https://RidinShotgunWithJasonAnthoine.com
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JasonAnthoine

 

About Jason Anthoine

Jason Anthoine is a globally recognized leader in internal communications, employee experience and culture change. With over 35 years of experience, he understands how to reach employees where they already are by communicating with them the way they want. His passion for reaching hard-working, blue collar employees was inspired by his father, who worked as an assembly line foreman in a school bus factory and embodied the values Jason teaches today.

Jason has worked with hundreds of companies with hundreds of thousands of employees, guiding them to reimagine their internal communications strategies to shape and shine their workplace cultures. By listening to and acting on the voice of employees, Jason’s work improves both workplace culture and marketplace results. Your employees’ work life is his life’s work. And he isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty to see it done right.