Think MACRO

According to Towers Watson, a staggering 17 hours a week is wasted in a business of just 100 employees due to poor internal communication.

Staggering yes, surprising? Not really when you think about it. Unwieldy comms banged out, emailed out and left hanging unread in in-boxes. Cascades that start off in the right direction and get stuck midpoint through the organisation or get lost in a translation of Chinese whispers. Meetings about meetings about meetings about meetings.

A client recently did a room 101 of poor internal communication frustrations. Such was the volume they needed to fill rooms 102 and 103 on top.

We’ve got a great comms hack to try and keep anyone writing internal comms on track and the comms out of room 101.

A super simple, super handy acronym to get your people thinking about the what, the how and the who before they put fingers to keyboard. Just five things to think about for five minutes.

We call it Think big picture. Think MACRO ©

Message – What are the key message or messages? Ideally no more than three. Three is the magic number in comms. Try not to put every thought and idea down. Less is always more.
Audience – Who is your audience and what do you know about them?
Channel – What’s the channel or media? Email, poster, letter, intranet, tweet, DM, phone call, PPT presentation and so on
Response – What do you want people to THINK (the rational response), FEEL (the emotional response) and DO (the action) as result of reading your comms?
Objective – What do you want to achieve with your comms?

Once you’ve written it read it aloud, read it to a colleague. Put it down and come back to it an hour later and give it a good old edit. Then say it, send it, present it.

Simples.

Feel free to share this amongst your colleagues. Let us know how you get on.

(If you’ve found this useful you might want to know this forms part of an interactive talk about what internal communications can learn from advertising. It’s made a massive difference to the way people think about internal comms. Do drop me a line cdahl@woodreed.com for more info.)

© Woodreed Creative Consultancy Ltd

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