CIOs and IT Communications Leaders on Communicating in a Crisis

What a month it’s been! Since countries around the world went on lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, job #1 for IT has been jumping into action, getting people connected, and building capacity. The digital transformation work IT organizations have been doing over the past few years has delivered in a big way as businesses have had to pivot to remote work while making sure day-to-day operations and customer engagements continue to run smoothly.
 
The slogan “digital first” was already gaining traction among forward-thinking companies, but this experience has proven that every company is going to need to adopt a digital first mantra going forward.
 
With the “firefighting” of the first few weeks behind us, CIOs and IT communications leaders are reflecting on where we are now, lessons learned, and what comes next. Moving out of a strictly reactive mode, they’re looking at how to capitalize on opportunities this new business environment offers, particularly as executives are now seeing more clearly than ever the value that IT brings to the business.
 
What follows are some of the themes shared by CIOs, senior IT leaders, and IT communications leaders in a recent virtual roundtable discussion about communicating in a crisis. For additional insights, download our report, IT Communications: 5 Lessons from an Essential CIO Partner.
 
Overall Messaging

• Clear, concise communication reinforcing the company’s priorities: health of employees and their families, maintaining seamless operations and commitment to customers, and ongoing strategic initiatives—in that order
• Consistent messages starting at the top, particularly when there is difficult news to communicate (e.g., layoffs, salary cuts): Explain the why, not just the what
• User tips and tricks on tools to keep remote workforce productive and collaborating
• Data utilization
• Essential to get the right information out at the right time, via the right channels

 
Leadership Communications

• Regular video messages and calls from the CEO
• Daily tips from CEO on how to interact/be productive from home
• Increased frequency of Q&A sessions with CIO
• Communicating in more personal ways and beyond just email
• Small group calls with senior leaders
• More unscripted, candid discussions and Q&As
• Realizing it’s OK for leaders to say, “I don’t know.” Sharing what they can, including when things aren’t clear or decisions haven’t been made.
• Overall, there’s been a humanization of leaders, which is creating a culture that puts people at ease

 
Digital Transformation

• New platforms to enable new ways of working and collaborating
• Reprioritizing in the context of COVID-19
• Continuing to collect user success stories
• Continuing digital product launches, without external marketing campaigns—important for employee morale as people feel a lot of pride in the accomplishment

 
Challenges

• Feels like we’re jumping from fire to fire
• Difficult to prioritize when the business environment keeps shifting
• IT has so much to communicate, from daily changes to digital transformation success stories
• So many groups need to get messages out on Sharepoint sites and other platforms that it’s hard to put the IT message forward in a way that isn’t “hogging the mic” but still gives visibility to important messages
• Communication challenge of making sure people are comfortable asking honest questions about tough issues in the absence of face-to-face time/in-person meetings
• Keeping creativity high, not just productivity: How do we use the tools to get the same level of creativity when people are working in distributed ways?
• So many tools! Can be confusion over what to use, when, and for what purpose
• Dealing with burnout: IT has been very busy. If anything, our workload has increased.
• Remembering to lift our heads and look beyond today

 
Lessons Learned

• Coordinate with other groups in advance about communication needs, and structure things in a way that IT tools and information get critical visibility.
• Incentivize people to use the communications channels.
• Could have been more forceful in pushing a remote culture so that we didn’t have to go through this exercise. Will be more focused on communicating the value of these digital initiatives in the future and pushing them forward.
• Scrub “back to normal” from our vocabulary. This is leapfrogging us into the next generation, which will be more virtual, tech savvy, and collaborative online. Need to start planning and instituting that right now.
• Trying different things to combat burnout/isolation, e.g., communications encouraging teams to play games, gather at the virtual water cooler, etc., and showing them how to use the tools to do that
• Hosting weekly virtual happy hour—have learned more about my team in the past 3 weeks than in the last 8 years!
• Rolled out a pulse survey on remote working, how people are feeling and doing. People’s biggest concerns are about their own and their family’s safety, but number two is how the company is doing and what else we can do to make things better for customers.

 
Silver Linings

• Organizations have become more productive working remotely than they were working in the office. The reason—they’ve been forced to use to the technology!
• There’s a new mindset at the top about the feasibility of work from home and the value of IT: This has been a big “aha” moment for executives to understand the why behind digital transformation efforts.
• It’s been a good opportunity to test out new systems. It pushed our projects to the forefront and forced leadership to partner with IT because we’re the holders of a lot of the information they need.
• Can take a lot of what we’re doing now and package that to not only show the business how IT is delivering value, but also show my team what creating value really means.
• The business is now more receptive to iterative approaches.
• Overall, strengthening relationships and being more flexible, not just with customers but with employees, too. Humanization of the experience and interactions.
• Probably won’t get as much pushback in the future when we have to do business continuity planning.

 
What’s Next?

• Leveraging all of the positives and not letting it go to waste!
• Taking advantage of the moment to implement things we’d already wanted to do. Example: Formed a Tech Council that’s looking at industry shifts and things we want to happen, and setting the stage for what the new reality is going to look like. Coming out in front of it and articulating where we want to go so we’re seen as a thought partner, not the fix-it team.
• Using the value we’ve provided to message IT in non-IT speak. Business partners don’t care about DevOps, virtualization, cloud migration, etc. They care about the benefit.

 
IT’s ability to step up has created huge brand equity for IT across the rest of the organization. One of the biggest values that’s come out of this crisis is how much organizations in general took IT for granted. Now they realize IT brings tangible value in terms of collaboration, productivity, and the interconnectedness of systems and data.

It’s up to IT to communicate that value in a way that speaks to the business while leading the transformation necessary to keep the organization future-focused and well-positioned for what’s to come.

Learn more about marketing a technology organization and communicating IT’s value.

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