Communicating Complex Ideas Clearly with Alison Ramsay

Tony Garner
This is a Viva PR podcast.

Alison Ramsay
I really get concerned when people say comms is dumbing it down because we’re not. Did I ever suspect in defence, you’d walk through a corridor and there’d be a slogan saying, show us your white bits. I think we’ve got to move as an industry to be more intelligence led. Put in the ingredients, employee experience, and that’s where you get the power.

Tony Garner
Welcome to PR in the Real World with me, Tony Garner. And my guest today is Alison Ramsay, who’s the corporate communications and Employee Experience director at awe. Alison’s had a fantastic career. She started out in the typing pool at BAE Systems before rising through the ranks to become the communications director. In this episode, we’re talking about all sorts of things, like why simplifying isn’t dumbing down. And we discuss how us as comms folk, need to treat employees like adults. And we also talk about how we need to get serious about data. Let’s get into it. So, Alison, thank you for. For coming to join us.

Alison Ramsay
Thank you.

Tony Garner
Obviously, I. I know you’re from. You work at BAE Systems and AWE more latterly, and, you know, bae, the Earth sector and awe, for me, anyway, they’re about as complex as it gets. Both kind of the technical knowledge that you need and then organisationally, the structures that brings with it loads of common challenges, I’m guessing, and one of them being that the ability to kind of take those complex worlds and explain them to different audiences. I mean, you might be talking to, like, high level regulators and government officials at one end and then shop floor engineers and another part of the spectrum. How do you kind of do all that and how do you kind of stay set in doing it?

Alison Ramsay
It’s hard. It is hard. One of the reflections I have, it’s not about dumbing it down. And I think I. I really get concerned when people say comms is dumbing it down. Yeah, because we’re not. We’re not. We try really hard to understand that complexity. But then think of the audience, because you need to understand what that audience needs and wants from that piece of communication. So it might be different for the regulator, it might be different for the person who works on the shop floor. Yeah, but it’s what they need and what they want from that piece of information. And I think sometimes, because I work with a lot of engineers and scientists and they’re the brightest brains in Britain who I work with, but it’s very personal to them when they’re explaining that complexity and they hold it dear.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
But our job is to work with them and try and get the essence of it based on what the audience needs. And I think that’s a big difference. I really think it’s a big difference.

Tony Garner
And I think there’s you. You often when we’ve worked together in the past and yeah, spoiler alert, Alice and I, we’ve, we’ve worked together for a while now. You’ve always valued a one pager and you know, Boiling things down into that essence. Is that an approach that’s worked for you or is that just a, a symptom of busy times and trying to kind of.

Alison Ramsay
No, I’m obsessed with a good narrative. I am absolutely obsessed. I want to have one page clarity.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
On what we are communicating. I think once you’ve landed on that narrative, you can then look at how you turn that narrative into something digestible, understandable, engaging, impactful for the various audiences. But you have to start off with a core. And I’ll be honest, you know, working with a new team, I’m constantly, well, what’s the narrative? What’s the narrative? And I think I, I think the fed up admit, to be honest, but it’s something that I hold dear to my heart. Because if you understand what you’re trying to get across.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Everything else can build from it. Everything.

Tony Garner
And over the years, some of the projects that you’ve thrown our way have been those examples of complex communication or bad EQ communication where people have just hidden behind a corporate veneer to send out a message without thinking that there’s a human at the other end. Can you talk about some of those that make your blood boil at times or you turn your hair not specifically because of the nature of your work.

Alison Ramsay
So when you’re talking about complexity, I think there’s technical complexity. And when you’re working with really great minds, they want to explain their technical solutions. Yeah, I think that is easier. I genuinely do you work with an SME.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And you work hard to explain an engine or a super computer. And I think that’s the easiest bit.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
The hardest bit is organisation complexity. And what I mean by that is working with the organisation to articulate something that might not have a clear answer or a answer that isn’t black and white. And I think that is the biggest challenges for corporate communications leaders today. It’s around that organisation complexity. And, and my big driver is we’re all humans.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
We all on this earth as human beings. And I think the Second part is we’re adults.

Tony Garner
Right.

Alison Ramsay
And I just. I remember trade union leader saying to me a few years ago, you know, Alison, when we’re at home, we pay our own mortgages, we sort our own bills out, we bring up children, but when we walk through the gates, you expect us to remove our brains and you tell us what to do.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And like, we’re adults and I think we shy away sometimes around having those adult conversations where we haven’t got the. It is really complex. It is really complex and we haven’t got all the answers. But having that conversation adult to adult, I. I think it’s absolutely fine.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
It doesn’t need to be tied up in a bow. Corporate comms is not responsible for communicating everything to everyone. Right.

Tony Garner
Or hidden behind. Or hidden behind acronyms and.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah. Or being too scared to have the conversation.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
You know, I’m super proud of the Draw the Line campaign that we worked on together. This was around stamping out poor behaviours in the workplace. And were bold and brave in that. You know, did I ever suspect, in defence, you’d walk through a corridor and there’d be a slogan saying, show us your white bits. Yeah, that. That was one of those stop and think moments for us as an organisation. So treat them like adults, because that is the sort of bad behaviour that adults say every day. Put it right in the face.

Tony Garner
Yeah, yeah. And it’s the kind of language that they actually use as opposed to, you know, corporate b. Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah.

Tony Garner
And I guess there’s a. There’s the other line that you can go too far. And it was before the red light came on. I was recalling a time where I upset a lot of engineers by describing one of the. The processes that they’d taken years to develop and install is like baking a cake. And they were fuming quite rightly, but I guess there’s that potential for over simplification and there is.

Alison Ramsay
But again, it’s about your audience. If the audience for that piece of communication was the general public or the wider organisation who doesn’t have a knowledge of engineering and science. You know, we’ve got finance people, we’ve got HR people. Not everybody lives in that world. So it depends what you’re trying to achieve.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
If you’re talking to a group of engineers and scientists, I wouldn’t advise that you describe it as baking a cake, given that they’ve all got qualifications up the yin yang and you’re saying it’s like baking a cake.

Tony Garner
Yeah, fair point. I think. I mean, I mean, the other complexity in those organisations is what you said you’re dealing with, you know, groups of many thousands strong, but very disparate, often in disparate locations physically, but also a vast range of job skills and talents across a range. And that must be a hard work to kind of like map out how you’re going to kind of.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah, it is really hard work. And I think as an industry, I’m not sure we’ve cracked it yet. I genuinely haven’t. I think we’ve got to move as an industry to be more intelligence led, really. Using data. Really using data and understanding it. We’ve all been doing employee surveys for years, but I think it’s more than that because you’ve got to start connecting the data points. So what data points as HR got, what data points has comms got and what’s it telling us about what we need to communicate about when and how? I, I think it’s just my personal view. I think as an industry, corporate comms has to get better with data. I, I fundamentally believe that one of.

Tony Garner
The things that you kind of pioneered looking internally was looking at Personas and not just treating work groups as, all right, that’s the shop floor lads and girls, that’s the office typing pool, you know, so we’ll select them like that, but a much kind of wider look at people. Was that, was that part of your thinking that we’re getting, we’re not getting this right?

Alison Ramsay
Do you know the best thing I ever did? People who I work with in corporate comms describe it as my sabbatical.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
But I left comms for about eight years. I moved into hr, I moved into project management and change management and I left corporate comms for eight years. And I can truly say it was the best thing I ever did. Because when you’re in corporate comms, sometimes it’s around quantity.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Quantity of communications. And when I went to work in the business, I’m like, what on earth is all this stuff that they’re bombarding me with? What do you want me to do with it? How? What do you want me to think? What do you want me to feel? What do you want me to do? And when you come out of the bubble of corporate comms and go and sit in the business and realise, oh, people aren’t on the Internet eight hours a day looking at my beautiful content. Yeah, they’re not, they’re doing real life jobs. Yeah, they’re working really hard. And don’t get me wrong, there are people who are on it all day, but there are people who just have a snapshot every now and again. And I don’t think as corporate comms, we think through the individuals.

Alison Ramsay
So Personas for me are really important. But I worry sometimes we bucket people in roles. So this is how we communicate to an engineer. Yeah, this is how we communicate to a HR person, actually. Every HR person is different. Yeah, every engineer is different, you know.

Tony Garner
Yeah. I mean, well, there is a real danger, isn’t there? Real danger of creating a communications function in our own likeness. And, you know. Oh, well, I love podcasts. So let’s, you know, podcast is a.

Alison Ramsay
Great solution for everybody who works in corporate comms. When I left, I’ll be honest, I didn’t look at the Internet for about three months. And I’m just being brutally honest. The value I got was when I got a briefing off my leader.

Tony Garner
No, it’s interesting. Is it that perspective? So have you been able to kind of take that perspective with you, even though you’ve kind of had come thrust back in your lap in your current role?

Alison Ramsay
I hate describing it as this, but it’s a journey. I think it’s a real shift for the corporate comms industry to really think about what do we want people or our audiences to do with the information that we are providing them. And one of the challenges we’ve got is corporations like communicating about process, you know, performance management. Fill in this form, hold an objective setting, discussion, put it in the system. How do you turn that on its head? Because actually what it’s about is being really clear with employees about what the expectation is and allowing them to showcase how brilliant they’re doing against those expectations and also where they need some help. That is very different than fill in this box.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Pass this process step. We’ve got to think differently.

Tony Garner
And that must frustrate you when you see that.

Alison Ramsay
It really annoys me.

Tony Garner
Yeah. But it’s been built up over. Over years because that was viewed good practice. Yeah. And. And I guess as well, going back to that reflection on. On how we all kind of receive and take information and take it in for some people that’s needed and necessary and that fragmentation is something that we’ve seen across our respective careers. That there isn’t always the right one channel. There’s a mix of what you need.

Alison Ramsay
Absolutely.

Tony Garner
So that’s the corporate comms world put to bed, I think. I mean, it’s fascinating though, because I think what it. What you’re saying is that we all need to Take a long, hard look at, you know, some of the tactical solutions and some of the tones that we use and some of the things that are tried and tested are that just, you know, we get out of our toolbox all the time because we always do it aren’t necessarily landing with the people that we are supposed to be communicating with.

Alison Ramsay
No. And that I come back to. That’s why you need data.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
You know, did my old comms team know that Alison, who was leading a team of 50 or so people, had never looked at the Internet for three months and therefore key communications hadn’t been shared look equally. Equally as a manager in the business, I was at fault. Yeah, I was at fault. So that comes back to how are we educating leaders about their role as communicators? So that’s a different angle completely on it. That I was being very selfish, not making best use of that comms to engage with my team.

Tony Garner
And there’s a real push as well to be. And we’re going to move on to this. To be a solid voice in the room at direct level, to be giving sage advice to leaders. And at the same time, we all kind of suffer with that. Everyone’s a comms expert experience. And if we aren’t strong enough in our convictions and understanding of our space, then I guess that they’ve got every right to chip in with her. To Penny as well.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah, we need, we need a voice at the table.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Because I think good organisations recognise the value that corporate comms brings to the table.

Tony Garner
Yeah. We were talking beforehand about you as an individual and your particular journey. I think it’s probably worth sharing with viewers and listeners how you started your career at BAE and then went on to become director of communications. It was quite inspiring. But also there must have been moments where you were going, what am I doing here?

Alison Ramsay
Gosh, you’re making me feel really old. So I’m one of five, the youngest of five children, and college and university was not part of the path that went on. Really clear, get to work, get a wage and pay your board. Not in a negative way. It was just that way back then.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Most of my family worked at BAE. So where do you apply? BAE? So I joined there three weeks after I finished school and I was there 34 years. Wow, that’s a long time. I’ll get on to why I left. So I joined at 16. I joined in the typing pool. And I have to say I’m one of the fastest typers in town. I am I am a super typer to this day and I’m still a wizard shorthand. Very proud of that fact. But actually I think that gave me a really good grounding on what it feels like to be. I can say it now because there’s no typing pills the bottom of the rung and how people treated you and it just wasn’t pleasant sometimes. I love the job, by the way,.

Tony Garner
But just explain to people because you’ve told me in the past that the geographical location of the typing pool.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah. It was a very male dominated world back then in 1989 and there was a shop floor and the typing pool was sat in the middle of the shop floor and were all females in the typing pool. I’d say the eldest was only about 35, 40 and we had a supervisor who was fabulous but she made us all very clear. You could, you came in with a face full of makeup, you had to wear a skirt, you had to wear heels. And I just remember tottering down the shop floor and I know they’re really different times, but God, we enjoyed those days because you were just a bunch of girls in the middle of a male dominated. And we just had fun. We just had fun. And then I progressed to being a page again.

Alison Ramsay
That gives you a really good insight about leaders and management and what they need to be able to inspire and communicate with their teams.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And then my then manager encouraged me to apply for a job in comms and I applied. And over the following years, do you know what, I just worked hard. I worked hard, I spent, I was seconded to other sites. I worked across most parts of BAE systems at that time. Yeah. So, so that’s my journey. And then I turned 50, had a bit of a midlife crisis, decided I didn’t want to start and finish my career at BAE and I resigned and I’ve now ended up in another company in the defence industry. And it’s been a challenge after working somewhere for 34 years. But my God, I, I’m having fun here as well.

Tony Garner
Yeah, the rise through the ranks. What was that like? That, that change and how did that change you? And you know, I’ve always known you as quite a bold, instinctive person. You know that you pick your battles but you weren’t frightened of, you know, calling people out if you thought, you know, they were wrong in any way.

Alison Ramsay
So you, I think you just said that I was quite bold and spontaneous. Yeah, I think you use those words. Do you know what I had a coach a few years ago and I made a comment to her, I operate based on gut.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
A little bit like you described me. And she said, I think she really challenged me and said, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
You’re not doing it on your go, you’re doing it on 30 years experience.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And that for me was one of those light bulb moments. The, the 30 years I had in comms are. I put posters up. I, I did everything. I literally did everything from event management to external pr. I did it all. So actually, I do think you get to a point in your career, like, no, I know what I’m talking about. And then you’re more confident.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
But it took me a long time to get to that point. I looked after one of the sectors and I remember being in my first meeting and my then MD took me to one side after the meeting and said, you were really quiet in that meeting, Alison. You didn’t contribute in the way that I thought you would. And I said, I’m just a bit intimidated, to be honest. I was the only female in the room. And they were all engineers, they were all scientists, they were all really clever. They all went to university. And his counsel to me was, in three to six months time, you’ll realise that they are as insecure as you. And actually your voice counts. And that was really sound advice that he gave me and I draw back on that a lot.

Alison Ramsay
He was a really inspirational leader to me and gave me the confidence that my voice is worth listening to.

Tony Garner
Yeah. I think one of the things that you’ve always been able to do is question and put clearly that if you don’t get something, you don’t get it. And not as a criticism, but like explain it to me or you’re not. It’s not landing. But to do it in those circles and to say I don’t get it must. The first time you do it must be. Didn’t.

Alison Ramsay
It is. And it’s still hard now. And I was talking to one of my team only a couple of days ago. I was getting really frustrated because he was trying to articulate the narrative and it just didn’t make sense to me. It just, I. I don’t know if I was a storyteller in a previous life, but if I don’t understand it, I don’t feel I can give the organisation justice.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
To explain it properly and just an aside story, and this is quite a long time ago, but I Remember, there was a drive to cut down on the number of near misses at work.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And there’ve been a couple of incidents where women had fallen over or females have fallen over because they had heels on. So the automatic response was, let’s ban heels. I’m sat in this meeting. I was getting more and more annoyed. And I know this is on video so you can see me, but I’m actually five foot. And at that point, I was a little bit into power dressing and I certainly needed my heels. I was absolutely livid because they weren’t treating me as an adult.

Tony Garner
Right.

Alison Ramsay
To make a decision on what shoes I wear. So based on that, I, I voiced that I was uncomfortable and I said, let me go away and think of a different way of having this conversation.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And one simple thing that we did, I put a blog out and I put a blog out saying how angry I was that the company was thinking of banning heels.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
I’m an adult. I choose how to be safe. And it went viral.

Tony Garner
Broke the Internet in it.

Alison Ramsay
Oh, my. Oh, my God. I was. I was inundated with messages. I couldn’t walk across site where everybody was, like, pointing out my shoes. But. What. And I know it’s a really simple campaign, but it created a conversation. And then evidence. The data showed us that near misses were going down. And it’s because we forced a conversation. But then we took it one bit further. I rang Timson’s up and said, can you do me a deal if you. It. Can you. And it was before all these benefit packages. Packages. So I rang Timson’s and said, do you want to come part of this campaign? Can you offer all our employees a discount to get the high heels fixed?

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And it just rolled and it became viral. I hate to think after 34 years of leaving BAE that I’m just known as the heels lady. But I love the. Those campaigns that just make people stop and think.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
I, It. I know when I’ve done. Or we’ve done a good job as a team, when people like, yeah, what’s this about? Let’s have a conversation about it.

Tony Garner
Yeah. Yeah. And it, it gives people the tools to do that.

Alison Ramsay
But that goes. Sorry, that goes back to organisation complexity.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
That’s not a technical. That’s not technical complexity. That’s human complexity.

Tony Garner
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, it’s difficult to kind of. I don’t know, it’s difficult to kind of manage, isn’t it? Sometimes there’s no.

Alison Ramsay
Right. Wrong answer. Because we’re all human beings and we all think differently and want different things. Some people might. Wanted the ban on the heels.

Tony Garner
When did trust in your own judgment, you know, that advice that you. You’d been given. When did. When did you feel. Start feeling confident and what. What changed in you? Do you think?

Alison Ramsay
Do you know what. What I think helped me is moving around. And I know it was only in one organisation, but when you move around, you can sort of rebrand yourself.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
If you’re stuck in one job for years and years, you’ve got a certain brand. And I knew early on because lots of people knew me from my secretary days or my typing pill days. Yeah.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
I knew early on I’d probably have to leave from the site I was operating in because I’d never be recognised as a comms leader. I’d always be.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
The girl who did well out of the typing bill.

Tony Garner
Yeah. Yeah. My wife talks about, you’ve got to change the story about yourself, you know, then in. So if you. If you’re the person who loves cakes or, you know that reputation, people will bring you a cake all the time and you will. You’ve got to check, you know, if you want to stop that from happening, you’ve got to change the story about yourself.

Alison Ramsay
And what was really empowering and. Sorry, I’m sounding a massive advocate for coaching at the moment, but. But when I decided to leave my last company, my coach really helped me with my narrative, my personal narrative and my personal brand. So when I went in for interviews, I was really clear what I wanted my narrative to be.

Tony Garner
Okay. So can we. Can you understand a little bit about that process even, and how you know, what did you think about your personal brand before and how did it change?

Alison Ramsay
I don’t think it’s changed that much, but the way you articulate it is different. So even today I’ve talked a lot about what we’ve done. And actually, as part of my narrative, the value that I bring is I can make the complex understandable.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
I can make connections from shop floor to boardroom. I can inspire change. And that’s different than I did a Draw the Line campaign I did. And so actually I go back to my belief in a narrative.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Because. Because you behave differently when you’ve got that narrative.

Tony Garner
Yeah. And I think you were probably one of the first people who showed me the Silence and video a dozen years ago that went viral. That why we do stuff is so important. Speaking truth to power is a valuable asset and a great attribute to have. But obviously it’s double edged as well. It must have come out at a cost sometimes.

Alison Ramsay
Yes. Yeah. There’s been moments where I’ll be on the people. People have challenged me. You know, who do you think you are? You’re not, you’re not an engineer, you’re not a scientist. And it hurts. You know, I have had sleepless nights when I’m like, oh God, I shouldn’t have challenged. I should have done that differently.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
But I’ve got a job to do and I’ve got an important job to do.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And therefore it’s ultimately, it’s the organisation’s decision if they carry on with something that I fundamentally disagree on.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And there has been, I’d say only a number of things in my whole career where I have. All right, I fundamentally disagree with this but I will toe the party line. But I’ve been really clear that I am doing it in. I am toeing the party line. But I fundamentally as an individual don’t agree with what we’re doing. And that really sits uncomfortable because I’ve got a big value of fairness. It drives me. We’ve got to be fair. So I genuinely, I think it’s less than a handful of occasions where I feel I’ve copped out.

Tony Garner
Right.

Alison Ramsay
Even that terminology. Copped out. You can feel how.

Tony Garner
Yeah, yeah. Had tow the party line.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah.

Tony Garner
Despite your better.

Alison Ramsay
Yes.

Tony Garner
Judgment. Let’s, let’s move on. Your current role at AWE puts employee right alongside corporate communications. And it’s the kind of really meaningful like evolution from internal comms which was always seen as kind of like the baby sister of external comms. And you know, you put great store in certainly these large organisations that you’ve been involved in employee experience. And part of that is the communication of stuff. Where does that come from do you think? And explain the role for us.

Alison Ramsay
So I am super passionate about employee experience. It’s the corporate comms excites me. Absolutely. Putting the ingredients, employee experience. And that’s where you get the power.

Tony Garner
Right.

Alison Ramsay
And I truly believe that and I think it’s something that we all need to consider. So when I came out of corporate for my sabbatical, one of the things I did was create a employee experience team. And this is about really understanding what is the experience for an employee.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
So again I’ll use the example of performance management.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
So the experience sometimes, not always. And organisations are improving. But the experience of performance management is usually twice a year you’re dragged into A room.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Sometimes you get feedback from your manager that is a total shock to you because you think you’ve been doing well.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And that is the experience. If you know that experience, your comms will be different.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
The way you communicate that performance management time is here. Again, you will communicate that really different. And actually you might not do it twice a year.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
You’re doing it frequently. And that for me is where the power of employee experience with corporate comms and HR all come together. I see it as a Venn diagram with experience in the middle.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And corporate comms overlapping and HR overlapping. Employee experience is the power.

Tony Garner
We’ve talked in the past about how employee experience and drilling into it, you know, and learning from employees about their experience can be a driver for business growth and business success.

Alison Ramsay
Absolutely. If you listen, and I mean listen intently.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
It will inform your communication strategy.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
You know, if employees are saying they don’t understand the direction of the company. Okay. What are we going to do about it?

Tony Garner
Yeah. Rather than just bro. Be in broadcast mode.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah.

Tony Garner
Just, just that listening mode. But I guess you have to embed that listening function within the organisation somehow to be effective.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah. And within my current organisation, listening sits within employee experience.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
But it doesn’t mean to say they’re the only ones who are listening.

Tony Garner
Right.

Alison Ramsay
And, and I think I’ll go back to my point before. How is corporate comms, employee experience, hr helping managers understand their responsibilities of engaging with their teams? Corporate comms is not responsible for communicating everything to everyone.

Tony Garner
No.

Alison Ramsay
Line managers play a massive role in this. And what are we doing to help them?

Tony Garner
We had somebody on from BAE Systems probably about a year ago and they were saying that’s, you know, the essence of their job is helping the line manager.

Alison Ramsay
And you just think what that line manager has to cope with every day.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
So they’re getting issues coming from bottom up. They’re getting issues coming from peers and they’re getting issues coming top down.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
They are getting it from everywhere. And then we say, oh, can you get your team together and talk about, well being for a week?

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah. Think about their experience. They’re getting it from every single direction. So us just communicating more at them to communicate, just think what it means for them on a day to day basis. That must be really hard.

Tony Garner
So I mean, you know, in your role you must have, you know, various functions coming along. We need this campaign, Alison. We need this, we need a poster on this.

Alison Ramsay
We need all day, every day.

Tony Garner
So how do you, how do you triage that and clearly ignore what the business needs to communicate from a strategy point of view and how that fits in. But then, you know, how do you take the functional experience and then the employee experience and meld it, you know, do triage and get an effective communications plan together?

Alison Ramsay
It’s hard.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And I come back to. Organisations usually have a strategy and a business plan.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
It’s a bit of a blunt instrument, but how is this piece of communication helping the business achieve the business plan and strategy? And it’s as simple as that. And if we can’t, if we haven’t got the narrative about why it’s helping the business, we shouldn’t be communicating it.

Tony Garner
So that’s a test. You hold any kind of like piece of communique, it’s got to fit into. There’s got to be quite some kind of strategic alignment. It might be five pillars or seven pillars, whatever, but it gets crossed off the list. If it’s, if it’s just. It doesn’t fit into that kind of strategic alignment piece, I, I think it.

Alison Ramsay
Should be crossed off the list.

Tony Garner
Right.

Alison Ramsay
I. The other thing, and I’m talking personally here and other corporate comms leads may not struggle with this, but I’m sure they do is people wanting air time and deciding what gets air time and what doesn’t. And you know, I watch in all like there’s lots of going things going on at the moment, but I do watch in all actually how government comes. Grids topics.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
I haven’t achieved it yet, but it is around what gets air time and when. Yeah, we’re getting there. But, but that does go back to the confidence thing. You have to have confidence to say, I know it’s really important to you, I know this project is really important to you, but this is more important for the organisation at the moment. And we’ll come to you, but it might be in a few months time because this has got to be the priority for the organisation at the moment.

Tony Garner
Yeah. And we can’t bamboozle people with 100 different messages.

Alison Ramsay
Exactly. And overwhelmed them.

Tony Garner
Yeah. When actually they’re here to do it, whatever it is they’re here to do. I, I guess the other thing that you’ve got to be in your bonnet when were talking before was around the value and it goes back, I guess back to the data as well. And that, you know, is it value for money, that tactical output that. And how do you measure that and you bring in that kind of rigor to, to people’s thinking.

Alison Ramsay
Now I’m not there yet. Not. Not there yet. I think few. Well, I’m sure that there’s some organisations that are absolutely whiz but you know, where I’ve worked have been traditional manufacturing organisations. So it is slightly different. It’s asking the budget questions. It really is about asking the budget questions. It’s around. Okay, we’re doing a all employee event. How much is that per head?

Tony Garner
Yeah. Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
What. What will be different when we’ve done the all employee event?

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
How do we know its value for money? You know?

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Do you know how much this function costs the company per month?

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
Do you think they’ll say that they’re getting value for money from us? It’s those. And I think it’s. I probably go back to my upbringing. You made your money work for you and that I think corporate. I go back to being a business leader. You’ve got to care about the commercials.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
You’ve got to care that you are adding value, not doing stuff.

Tony Garner
We’re very big on measurement here. We work with Steph Bridgeman, who’s been a guest on this podcast a couple of times now to really drill into that. And you mentioned that what do we want people to think, what we want people to see, what we want people to do. That kind of like thinking and how you measure those is really important.

Alison Ramsay
I have a really good team with really good intent. Everything. I think there’s a piece on how do corporate communications educate leaders about what our role is.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
So. So it’s a partnership rather than a transactional service. And that is something that I grapple with. Yeah, yeah. Yes. We are a service, but it should be in partnership were an enabler.

Tony Garner
Yeah. Yeah. And done right.

Alison Ramsay
Yeah.

Tony Garner
You really do enable. I guess as we come to the end and you know, we could chat for hours but I know you’re incredibly busy so I won’t keep you too long. But if you reflect on like the past 25 years plus working in this world, what do you wish you’d known 25 years ago that you could tell yourself now?

Alison Ramsay
What would I have told my 21 year old self who just started in comms? Spend more time understanding how the business works and ticks.

Tony Garner
Right.

Alison Ramsay
Because comms can be seen as a bolt on and I’d have spent more time. So how does that manufacturing process work? What does it mean? How do we make our money yeah. And that’s what I mean about being commercially savvy.

Tony Garner
Yeah. Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
So I’ve done that idol, believed in myself a little bit more.

Tony Garner
Right.

Alison Ramsay
You know, I know everybody thinks I’m really confident, I’m bold, I’m brave, but when you sat behind that closed door and you’re thinking about, how do I get, how do I challenge in the right way so people see the good intent and I don’t get it right now. I, I genuinely don’t always get it right now. I try really hard at it, but I, I, I know sometimes I, I, I think I’ve got a brand of being quite blunt and it’s something I work really hard at, but also I’m just like, get on with it.

Tony Garner
Yeah. It’s a, a passion to cut through things. I, I guess we’ve done that. Looking back, let’s look to the future. What do you see the shape of that in house employee experience or the comms leader in these complex organisations looking like in the next 10 years or what are the big challenges do you foresee?

Alison Ramsay
I’d like us to be recognised as a trusted advisor and I’d love us to be seen as the custodian of reputation and narrative. Coming back to my narrative, that’s what I’d like us to be seen. You know, I love it when a senior exec rings me up and like, we’re thinking of this, that’s where we need to be.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
I do think AI is going to change the world of corporate comms. I genuinely do. And I know we’ll fight it. I know.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And it’ll never give us everything that we need, but, my God, it’s going to transform the way of work. It really is. You know, little things I, I fed in my company narrative.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And then I’ll put a story into AI and say, out of a score of 1 to 10, how well is that bringing that narrative alive?

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
You know, that’s powerful stuff.

Tony Garner
Yeah, absolutely. Exciting or frightening?

Alison Ramsay
Oh, no, exciting. Always. Always. I’m a run to person rather than a run from. And that again, going back to communications. We’ve got to understand human beings. There are people who will prefer to run away from something, I. E. That’s broken.

Tony Garner
Yeah.

Alison Ramsay
And then there are people who like to run to something which I am, give me excitement, I’ll run towards it.

Tony Garner
I look forward to hearing the adventures from that journey. Thank you. Alison Ramsay, thank you so much for your time today and look forward to speaking to you soon on many more of these adventures.

Alison Ramsay
Thank you. Thanks for your time.

Tony Garner
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