Cutting Through the Noise: Strategies for Powerful Internal Communication – Sivadas Radhakrishna

Nena Dimovska: So welcome to another episode of the PeoplePulse podcast, where we delve deep into the difficulties of building a thriving workplace. Today, we’re exploring the vital connection between internal communication and employee experience, uncovering actionable insights from an industry expert. The following is a conversation with Sivadas Radhakrishna, Internal Communications and Employee Experience professional with over 12 years of experience in strategic people initiatives, marketing, and communications. He worked across industries as aviation, entertainment, sports, automobile, and academia. A voracious writer believer in sharing whatever he learns through his constant engagement with internal communications and employee experience community over LinkedIn, which recognized him as top voice in the internal communication space. Hi Sivadas. Thank you for being with us today and welcome to the podcast.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Hi. Hi, Nena. It’s a pleasure. How are you?

Nena Dimovska: Doing great. Thank you. I’m looking forward to discussing all these interesting topics with you today.

Nena Dimovska: Can we start by… can you share a specific example where you’ve quantified the impact of internal communication, translating it into tangible ROI for your company?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Actually it’s, it’s a good, it’s a great question, Nina, because I, I would love to share an example in this case. I would jog my memory back to even before I was in internal communication. So before I moved into internal communication, I come from a marketing and comms you know, background.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So, I’m someone who learned how marketing and communications, how internal communications can impact, like, you know, the customer experience bit of it. And that’s how I kind of transformed my journey from dealing with customers to dealing with employees to create happier customers. So your question actually takes me back to one of the examples that I, I kind of engaged in one of my initial parts of my career.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So at that point I was working with, with car dealership, kind of a, kind of a company, a pretty big one back in India. And they had a very specific challenge on the customer front and this kind of, you know, stitches how employees can impact the customer experience bit of it. So whenever we were delivering cars in that particular organization, we discovered that the parent company used to send a survey back to the employees where they could kind of mark…

Sivadas Radhakrishna: you know, they were extremely satisfied, they were completely satisfied or they were delighted with, with the experience with the dealership. And this response was directly tied to an incentive that used to come to the dealership. If, if the customers mark them delighted. It was very interesting. If you look at the human psychology, we always like to mark one down, you know, you would never mark delighted outright.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And we observed that customers would mark, let’s say, completely satisfied or extremely satisfied, whereas actually they were delighted. And the percentage of people who were marking delighted language somewhere, let’s say about 40, 45 percent of our customers. So there was a huge chunk of customers who were delighted, but just because of the psychological block were marking us, you know, one down and our, our sales executives were trying left, right and center to kind of push this graph up, but it was impossible.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So something that based on a collective discussion with our, with our sales executive, we came up with an idea where at the delivery bay, we created like two baskets. Okay, kind of created an engagement with the customers. So we name both baskets as delighted and extremely satisfied.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And above the delighted, we put a smiley with a very happy face. And in front of extremely satisfied, we put a smiley with a sad face. And through our internal comms to our sales executives, we told them to engage with customers on this bit. So whenever the customer was taking the delivery of the cars, they used to hand over a soft ball to the customer and ask them to hoop it into one of these baskets.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: If they were delighted into the delighted basket, if they were kind of extremely satisfied into this, into that basket, but with a sad smiley. We observed most of the customers started throwing the balls into, you know, delighted section. Now, what our sales executive did based on the comms that we, we kind of send out to all these guys is they created that mental model within the customers that if I’m delighted, I mark delighted and these converted the, the, the responses that the customers were giving to about 95, 96 percent of people started saying delighted after that.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So that was a huge you know, incentive that was coming into the dealership from this, this specific example. So, so, and this was one of my first interactions with this, how employees directly kind of, you know, impact customer experience. And from here, I started kind of, you know, transforming my journey into how to deal with employees to create more happier customers kind of a thing.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So this is something that I remembered with your question.

Nena Dimovska: That’s a very interesting example. And thank you for sharing. If I may add, you know, psychology definitely, I’d say influences how people react by, you know, just affecting their emotional state, biases, expectations. Right. And also, you know, how questions are framed.

Nena Dimovska: These factors like social pressure, mood, or cognitive biases can lead customers to, you know, rating their experiences more or less positively.

Nena Dimovska: So yeah, that’s, that’s a very, very interesting example. Now, can you perhaps guide us through a systematic process that utilized to construct a communication framework that authentically reflected your company’s culture?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Very, very interesting framing of question, I would say Nena. So so there are a lot of frameworks actually, and I would say frameworks are very subjective to use in case to case basis, you know, maybe one kind of framework may not work in a specific example, whereas something else will work. Quickly something that I can remember based on what you’re asking is and this is not something which I usually share, but, but it’s always there in the back of my mind, you know?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So have you heard about the, the communication framework by the great Greek thinker, Aristotle?

Nena Dimovska: Okay.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So, so, so it’s very simple, actually what, what Aristotle says is that in the, in the communication framework, he uses three parts. There is something called as ethos. Which is like the speaker’s you know, degree of credibility when, when the person is speaking. There’s something called as logos, which is the logic behind whatever, what you’re trying to speak.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And then there’s something called as pathos, which is the ability of the speaker to form an emotional bond with, with whom you are interacting. Now, a lot of frameworks you would see with, you know, boxes, which says, you know, you connect something to something and the, and then you can achieve X, Y, Z kind of a thing.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: But this framework actually, if you kind of zoom out and you look at. I’ll look at applying this framework across whatever you do. Take an example of a very big organization where, you know, you are from an internal comms department and let’s say you’re very famous within the, within the organization. Still, what’s the number of people that you would probably interact directly with. It would be probably 500, maybe 1000, if you’re like exceptional, but let’s take an example of an organization with 50000 employees, what do you do then?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Can you really go and interact with people? So when you are an internal comms department and you are sending out things, do you have that credibility among all the people, you know, who is reading this messages? Imagine someone who is sitting in, in a remote location in, in, let’s say Brazil, in Rio, somebody is in Auckland, somebody is in London, Singapore.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Are you really creating that connect? So what can we do here? You can create communication champions within, within those. those sections, you know, who kind of echo your thought. So you’re, you have the logic in the Aristotle’s principle. You have the logic, which is coming from the internal comms department, but the ethos and pathos part can be bridged by a champion within that specific department or region.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And an example that I can think of in this case is imagine somebody who is working in finance in the month of March. Okay.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: It’s a financial year end. People are crazy with, with numbers and you’re crunching numbers. You’re trying to match your, you know, PNLs and things like that.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And then you have somebody in internal comms who comes and says, celebrate Women’s Day or celebrate X, Y, Z. You know, there’s no, there’s no connection, but imagine somebody from the finance department itself is speaking to the people within finance department and, and echoing the message that internal comms is sending out.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Then you create that, that channel where, you know, you match the ethos and pathos part of it. And you kind of have the emotional bond and credibility to, to amplify your messages. And it’s something very simple that, that any organization can do. If you are a smaller organization, it’s easier when with one or two internal comms people.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: But the moment your organization becomes larger, it becomes very difficult to bridge those, those, you know, emotional bond and credibility factor for internal comms people. So this is one easy framework anybody can implement.

Nena Dimovska: True. I have to say, I love how you connect the, you know, how you incorporate the ethos and the pathos with champions inside the company. And I couldn’t agree more that champions add credibility. And, you know, just emotion to the entire communication framework that we use, you know, in boarding the company values and, you know,

Nena Dimovska: just inspiring each other with

Nena Dimovska: their passion. Great. That’s a wonderful example. And…

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Even the culture, even the culture part.

Nena Dimovska: Especially, especially the, the culture part.

Nena Dimovska: And it’s, something that’s easy to remember. And I think that it can resonate with with literally every culture.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Yeah.

Nena Dimovska: Can you share a scenario where some of the conventional best practices in internal communication fell short?

Nena Dimovska: So how did you pivot from a, you know, one size fits all approach to achieve success in this scenario?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: I think instead of giving an example here, what I would do is I would probably look at a more general scenario because I would try to associate this with things that happen with everyone. And I’m pretty sure I’ve experienced this in some parts throughout my journey through. But if you look at, let’s say, 80 to 90 percent of the internal comms community, what do they rely on today? You would have a digital platform like your traditional intranets or things like that, through which you would send messages.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: You would have probably emails again, it’s, it’s something that, that is extensively used. You have town halls, which they bring people together and you have, you know, interactions and stuff, and you have newsletters. I think if you look at this four channels, about 80 to 85 percent of internal comms population today would be using this for in some combination.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: But, but you look at what happens here, emails and traditional intranets. These are one way communication channels. Where you are sending things out, but there’s very limited capacity or capability to get feedback or, or for them to reply to you, the employees to reply to you. Okay. Town halls within smaller organization, it’s probably easier, but the moment you have, let’s say 500 employees, 1000 employees, it becomes very difficult to have this town halls in a way that matches everyone’s time slots.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: It’s even more, it’s even more logistical nightmare if you have you know, offices across different time zones to organize the town hall. Okay. And, and the third thing with newsletters every time you pick up a newsletter, it is more and more generic. Or, or it is, it is information that is probably which has happened and people are already aware of, you know.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So this is the traditional methods that we have been using. Now, how can we pivot from here to, you know, make it more engaging? Something that I’ve noticed is a lot of corporate, you know, social media networks, which, which are available, like, like something which are forums, which are blog based, which have social features in it. Which allows people to, you know, real time give comments, like things, you know, react to the messages, interact.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: To the messages that you’re putting out. This becomes a major factor. You can help, you know, improve your engagement there. Town halls going virtual. You don’t need to be physically present somewhere, but you can probably have it through your mobile phones or stuff like that. You can you can engage with them.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And for newsletters, I would say you know, shorten the newsletters and probably start sending them out department specific or, you know, role specific and things like that. And very quick, you don’t need big 20 page, you know, newsletters, one, two pages and probably weekly or monthly. Which is more interactive.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So, so I would say as a, as a community, we need to pivot to this kind of approaches where it’s, it’s not Sivadas alone or Nena alone, but as a community, there has to be this pivot, which has to happen within internal comms, where you need to start breaking down the information to smaller bite sized things, which people can easily consume.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And also we are dealing with a digital generation who, whose attention spans are very low. You can’t expect them to focus one hour in a town hall meeting and listen to everything that, you know, your CEO or your CHROs want to kind of, you know, send the message. It has to be more digestible. So I would say that’s the pivot which is expected within the industry.

Nena Dimovska: Yeah, very well put. I would say bygone is the time where, as you yourself said there’s this All Hands meeting where you have the CEO speaking for two hours and everybody listening carefully. So I think that it’s safe to say that we’ve entered the input experience revolution.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: True, true.

Nena Dimovska: And there’s so many changes happening all the time. You’ve briefly mentioned something that I would like us to discuss a bit more. Perhaps maybe you can give us some strategic initiative that from your experience has notably improved the employee experience in your company.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Like when you speak of employee experience, right? One of the major factor that everyone needs to remember and I, I kind of have this interactions with my fellow colleagues from other employee experience space and things like that. Something which is most important and, and the biggest factor that that employee experience generating employee experience within any organization is your direct manager.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And until and unless employee experience or internal comms professionals can get into that space to engage managers. You can’t really create, you know that, that employee experience impact that you want to bring in because your direct line manager has a huge impact on you. No matter how amazing your culture you want to project as, or things like that, if your direct manager is not engaged or is not engaging enough, the employee experience within that specific team is gone.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Now, something that I usually put forward at, and this is a side joke, I would say. I usually put forward that almost all organizations should make their employees read a book, which I really love a lot. I’m, I’m sure you have heard about this book—How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, you know.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: That’s an outstanding book and, and that brings me to the next topic, which is improving employee experience through appreciation. Okay. So one example that I can think of, yeah. One example that I can think of is in one of my previous organizations, which was to do more with, you know entertainment space.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Where you would have people coming in and you have kids who would come in for, you know playing and stuff like that. And you had this people who would come in for, you know, bowling space and things like that. You know, those kind of a setup. What was happening there is that you had a lot of ground employees who are engaging with customers daily, but there was a disconnect between these employees.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And the reason was everyone was feeling that they were doing great job, but for some reason, nobody was recognizing it. Or, or there was no appreciation according to their perception that appreciation component was very low. We did a very simple thing where we created a board which was like a shout out board for the employees.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And we purposely placed it in an area where our CEO used to visit regularly. You know, so, so we suddenly noticed that there was a competition to appreciate each other among the employees. Yeah, and, and it automatically improved you know, their employee satisfaction levels because now you were getting this dose of dopamine in terms of appreciation from your colleagues for every small thing that you were doing.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And you also had this in the back of the mind that CEO is reading these things when coming. And there was no monetary benefit or anything like that, but just this small thing where you have this appreciation, you know, given out to employees, you automatically improve their experience massively.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: This is a huge thing.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: It’s not my personal initiative or something, but something that I’ve seen, which works in the industry. Flexibility for employees is huge.

Nena Dimovska: Of course.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Organizations, I think, need to realize that employees have a life outside work. They have things to do. What happens if, if you have your kids who are falling sick in school, you know, you have to go and pick them out.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: If you are not an operational employee who is facing customers or who has, who is stuck in a production line, which would impact, you know, your production output units and stuff like that. If you’re not in those roles, there should be flexibility. You should be able to kind of. Get out for some time, go finish your work and come in.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And a lot of people are matured enough to fill in their time, which, which is lost in between or complete the task that they are supposed to do. Of course, there will be a small fraction of people who would probably take advantage of the system, but they would exist anyways. So can we come up with this kind of things?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And third, third part to improve employee experience massively. What I feel is financial wellness. Something which is very less focused by a lot of organizations, but if you can solve the financial problems of your employees, I think they will be highly engaged within an organization. So can you, can you develop programs to help people invest the money that they are making to create a more safe and secured future financially, you would automatically remove that worry from their head and they would be more engaged.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: I think these are some of the factors. There are a lot more, but I would just share this three at the moment.

Nena Dimovska: Very good example. And I honestly, I couldn’t agree more. You know as you said, recognition, financial wellness and flexibility, all. I would add here a fourth one, the talent density are all interconnected elements to contribute. Yeah. To a thriving workplace culture.

Nena Dimovska: You know, by implementing these, as you said, recognition programs and promoting financial wellness and flexibility companies and managers.

Nena Dimovska: Especially line managers have the power to create an environment that attracts top talent, that fosters engagement and, you know, ultimately increases this talent density leading to greater productivity and success for our companies. Now going back to the framework that, that we discussed would you say that there’s any way that companies can audit?

Nena Dimovska: Their existing into experience strategy, what they do and how can they identify the areas where they can improve?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Audit. You mean to say audit the employee experience framework as such?

Nena Dimovska: Yes, to, to let’s say more specifically check where they can improve, how they can, what are the areas where they can be better? Because as you yourself have said, employee experience is a very big space and there are many ways on how we can improve it. You know, you’ve mentioned the financial wellness, flexibility, these are different areas and especially large enterprises, they can be great in some areas, but performing not so good in others.

Nena Dimovska: So how can they easily identify these areas and improve there?

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So Nena, to answer this question, I think we need to kind of… come out from that and and let’s say look at it from outside perspective. Predominantly there are probably four things that impact employee experience across any organization. Okay. So the first thing are the EX drivers and this EX drivers can be like further split into: the cultural aspect, which we discussed previously, there is the environment like the office set up where you are sitting.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: If it’s office, if it’s remote, how you are kind of, you know, placed, this is, this is the second part. And the third is the tools that you are using. The tools that are provided to you, how, how you interact with things, you know, so this, these three things form the EX drivers. Then you have the employer branding part of it.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Okay. So the employer branding is the second point. In the employer branding you, how you, how you attract talent from outside and how you fulfill the promises that you have given through employee value proposition internally. This is point number two. Point number three is a design. How you, how you envision your future state.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: And how, where you’re currently, you should have a clear understanding of where you’re currently and where you want to go. And here you need to use things like functionality, empathy maps, and things like that within this factor. And the fourth is listening and feedback, how you collect, you know, continuously collect feedback and things.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: So if you look at this four aspects, they impact employee experience massively. So when you say audit, audit, you know, your employee experience framework, I would say we need to drill down into this four factors. And start looking at each of the elements. So, for example, cultural aspect. If you want to audit the employee experience overall, you need to look at how the cultural aspect is impacting.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: It’s one thing to say that you are transparent or you are, you know, you are an organization which promotes transparency. But is this transforming into actions? And if it is, what’s the frame? What’s the time frame that you want to achieve this? I want to make this organization a transparent organization, let’s say in five years time.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Implement plans, communicate this with the employees, and then you audit these factors. Are you hitting the milestones here? Because employee experience is not something in vacuum, right? There are multiple factors which are contributing to it. And to audit an employee experience as a whole, you need to start auditing each of these things.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: Same with tools. If you are saying you have cutting edge tools, ask employees, are they happy with those tools? Because probably you would have a generation which is working, which is not so tech savvy, but you have implemented a very forward looking technology within your organization. While you can claim that you are technologically forward, but your employee experience is not forward because your people are not really, you know, have that skill gap in terms of adopting that technology and vice versa.

Sivadas Radhakrishna: If you have, let’s say Gen Zs who are working within your organization and you are using clunky ERPs where you don’t even know where the click is and you need to kind of, you know, look into the screen to find those buttons. Then you have lost the plot. So I would say we start auditing at the elements which contribute to the employee experience and that’s where you can probably look at how you can frame these things.

Nena Dimovska: Yeah, very, very good points. So we have tools, the branding and the employee value proposition that we communicate to both our existing and new employees. We have the design and feedback, feedback, feedback.

Nena Dimovska: Timely, constructive, in a, in a proper manner.

Nena Dimovska: Couldn’t agree more. And I, I agree that there is this transformative potential of this, let’s say. If I can say digital employee experience across organizations. Well, thank you. Thank you, Sivadas for tuning into this enlightening discussion on internal communications and employee experience. We enjoyed having you as our guest. And remember the, the key to fostering a thriving workplace lies in strategic communication and relentless focus on enhancing the employee journey.

Nena Dimovska: Stay tuned for more valuable insights on our upcoming episodes. Thank you.