This episode features an interview with Victoria Dew, CEO of Dewpoint Communications. Victoria is a leader of employee experience and future of work, with more than 15 years of global internal communications expertise. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Victoria to discuss how the pandemic affected DE&I, what we can learn from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and why to stop waiting for a seat at the table.
This episode features an interview with Victoria Dew, CEO of Dewpoint Communications. Victoria is a leader of employee experience and future of work, with more than 15 years of global internal communications expertise.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with Victoria to discuss how the pandemic affected DE&I, what we can learn from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and why to stop waiting for a seat at the table.
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“When we talk about what does the ideal employee experience look like, it's a way that accounts for all the factors that help a human being to thrive in the workplace. And we can think of some of those are feeling valued, feeling safe, feeling seen, respected. And having the opportunity to grow, having the opportunity to contribute, having belief, actually, in the purpose of what we're doing, in our leaders, in our organizations. [...] Communications can come and help us weave all of this together and connect the dots. Because connecting the dots is one of the things that communications professionals can and should be doing often better than other parts of the business. It's kind of one of our superpowers.” – Victoria Dew
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:41): Victoria’s background
*(06:19): Victoria’s role at Dewpoint Communications
*(07:35): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(08:16): The ideal employee experience according to Victoria
*(12:44): How Dewpoint Communications improves employee experience
*(14:49): Mistakes companies make that hurt the employee experience
*(22:04): Segment: Ripped From the Headlines
*(22:50): How DE&I has been impacted by remote work
*(35:57): Segment: Asking for a Friend
*(36:15): Challenges IC will face in the future
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Links:
Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn
Download Dewpoint Communications Insights Report (Maslow’s graphic on page 9)
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Victoria, how are you?
Victoria Dew: Great. So good to be with you.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I'm so glad to have you here.
Thanks for joining me today. I wanna first start off and understand more about your background. Walk us through your career journey and what got you into communications. I
Victoria Dew: have kind of an, like a little bit of a different background than well, many people, but certainly many communications professionals.
I know many communications folks come from either. They study coms at school or they come from journalism. I actually came from Hollywood. My first career was in film and television here in Los Angeles. And interestingly in theater before that, and interestingly, I think one of the things that's really relevant about that is that it was about learning structure, like story, structure, and storytelling, but specifically a lot of.
Development feature, film, script development, and writing, and, you know, producing scripts is about making sure that there's a really clear narrative arc through a story. And if you peel the layers back of like the story itself and the plot itself, which we might call in communications tactics, it's about a strategic infrastructure.
That creates an experience or creates a world for the audience. And if you think about it, that's very similar to what we are doing in communications, right? Especially when we get into space of employee experience at a certain point, given Hollywood is, you know, very Hollywood. I wanted to leave and long story short, my partner was a Lord of the rings person and he wanted to go back to New Zealand.
So we went to New Zealand and I was there for 11 or 12 years, and I didn't wanna be in entertainment. Um, even though I had kind of come from that world via movies. And so I started temping. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Cause I felt like I'd never had a real job. I never had a job. I couldn't wear flip flops too, you know?
And so I started temping and I ended up by the communications team and I was like, wait a second. This is a job. Because it was all the things they kind of knew. It was like writing and telling stories and a kind of producing aspect. But so what I did was I be, was able to really build a communications career there that became all the things I knew how to do, and then layering on so many skills and becoming increasingly more strategic and learning more and more about the business and had an opportunity there just by the nature of the work and of the market to work across industries, different sectors, and had a really wonderful.
Wonderful career there, both in internal communications and external, but really always had a passion for internal. And so then I moved back to this country in. 2015 and went and got a job in corporate America. And we can talk a little bit about how well that went or didn't go.
Amanda Berry: I'd love to, I'd honestly love to hear I'm sure a lot of our listeners could, could identify with that as well, but we, we can get into that.
Victoria Dew: When I came back to this country and I went and I got a job in corporate America, I had come because I'd come from a very different experience. Right? So in New Zealand, just the way that the culture is first great, people are hard to get. And there's a few reasons for that. One is Kiwis are very mobile.
They have a very. Transferable passport. So they're always moving overseas. So if you think about it, it's fairly small country and talent is very, you're not just competing against companies for great people. You're competing against currencies. So if the British pound gets strong, Kiwis go overseas, right?
Amanda Berry: Kiwis are
Victoria Dew: Kiwis are new Zealanders. Sorry.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, that's what I thought. No, I just wanna make sure
Victoria Dew: if the British pound. Strong new Zealanders go overseas and live and work there. And if the Australian dollar gets strong, they go and work there. So if you think about it, you're always having kind of brain drain and it's very much part of the culture to expect that people will leave and go overseas.
So great people are hard to get. Right. And so we know that and that. War for talent and what we've seen in this past, you know, great recession, et cetera, that has always been part of the culture there. The second thing that's interesting is that employment laws favor the employee. So you can't just fire someone on a Tuesday because you decide you don't like them anymore.
Right? It's very hard. You have to performance manage them out, which has, is some problems in terms of sort of passive aggressive behavior. But in general, you gotta love the ones you're with great people are hard to. and you gotta love the ones you're with, if you want them to be able to really drive your company and, and run your company for you.
So all that is by wave saying that the experience we create, the culture we create and the way we communicate and connect with our people is really important. And that is on some level, give or take well understood and embedded in the culture there. So I came back to this country and went and got a job in corporate America, where it was not at all the case.
And there was, I think, this like, idea that I was just gonna write some newsletters and maybe post some stuff on the, in. I hadn't done that in a long time, you know, and it was not at all the things that was interesting to me. I knew and know that. And as we've seen play out that the way we communicate with people, the experience we create, the way we bring employee experience to life is really important in how we run a business.
And so that's when I started my own firm.
Amanda Berry: Great. Well, tell us about what you do at Dewpoint
Communications.
Victoria Dew: So I like to say we live at the intersection of employee experience, internal communications and the future of work in that employee experience. The mesh, the world that we create for the people who work in our company is brought to life right in communications, is how we make it real for people, how we make it real in the hearts and minds of the people that we are counting on to run our company, employee experience is sometimes, and it's always a little murky about.
Sits, but very often it sits in HR and it can be a sort of, it can be, has to do with, you know, policies, programs, initiatives, cultural initiatives. But if you think about it, The way that we breathe life into that, the stories we tell, the way we connect the dots, the way we connect purpose and meaning for people, a lot of our job is communications.
Professionals is creating context. If you think about it. And so how we do that, and we know we've got a lot of different tools in our toolkit for how we can do that. That is how we. We kind of create, and we create the employee experience and through in communications that starts to create the future of work.
So that is the work that we do in our firm, working with all different companies, different sizes, stages industries, but what they all have in common is a very strong desire and commitment to create this experience where people can thrive and do their best work.
Amanda Berry: I'm
gonna move us into our next segment, getting tactical.
Producer: I'm
trying to figure out tactics and be perfectly honest. And I didn't have to worry about tactics too much. Here I am in charge and trying to say, why did you sleep through tactics tactics?
Amanda Berry: I wanna come back to something you said just a second ago, about the employee experience often sits with HR. I have a long experience in internal communications, and I feel like the past few years, I feel like that shift has been put on internal communication.
And I'm just wondering when you think about it, when you think about the employee experience, what I often think about is waiting for leaders to make decisions, to help improve, whether it be improve better technology, different benefits, but I'm wondering, what does the ideal employee experience look like to you?
Victoria Dew: We have a, a graphic that we use to explain this, and I I'll share it. We can share in the show notes, if you want. Basically we line Maslow's hierarchy of needs with Gallup's definitions of employee experience and galls arenas of employee experience. So if you think about it, hierarchy of needs, right?
Help keep me safe, helped me to belong, help me to do my job well, help me to connect with others, help me to contribute to the big picture. The aspects of employee experience are help me work safely. right. And that means physical and psychological safety help me to connect with my team, help me to underst have role clarity, understand what I'm meant to do, help me to grow and develop, which relates to the role of the manager and then help me to have overall wellbeing.
Right. And that's financial, physical, psychic wellbeing. So. When we talk about what does the ideal employee experience look like? It's a way that accounts for all the factors that help a human being to thrive in the workplace. And we can think of some of those are, you know, feeling valued, feeling safe, feeling seen, respected, right.
And having the opportunity to grow, having the opportunity to contribute, having belief, actually in the purpose of what we're doing. In our leaders, in our organizations, there's all these aspects. So when we create both the programs, policies, infrastructure, and much of that will sit with INR and ops and DEI and it communications can come and help us weave all of this together and connect the dots.
Cuz connecting the dots is one of the things that communications professionals can and should be doing often better than other parts of the business. It's kind of one of our superpower.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I love that. That multidimensional view of it. You talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs the, how that relates to employees.
I've never really thought about that way. I'd love to take a diagram of that, not the Maslow, but the points you just said, and to take it to leaders and say, what are we doing in each of these to actually improve the experience? I think sometimes people think I get every other Friday off. That's what they've done.
And that really doesn't. Scratch
Victoria Dew: that itch. It's kind of the fun part. And I'll share this diagram cuz we use a lot and actually people tell us they print it out and came in on their desks. Yeah. Which is nice. I think it's that thing of what I like about it is it breaks it down. It's these very like simple components that everyone can understand.
And I think kind of the cool part is the experience is what we, and this is gonna be unique to every organization. How we take all those pieces, the creative pieces, you know, if we go back to scripts in some. This pyramid, this diagram is the structure, the infrastructure. Of what employee experience is now, how we layer story, plot programs, policies, you know, events, how we layer all that together is the kind of magical creative part to a very clear strategic framework.
And I think that's where we get excited. I always slightly bristle when people talk about storytelling, because even though I'm, I mean, I'm passionate about it. I think it's really important. I get nervous. That people will stop there and just think that it's telling a story and not understand all that's underneath the surface of that iceberg, that there's so much strategy that goes into how you do that.
Amanda Berry: What would you say? Some of
the under the iceberg stuff that people
need to be mindful of?
Victoria Dew: What goes back to that pyramid, it's understanding what are the core drivers, you know, talk can talk about coming return to the office and how do we create part of office is office sort of a metaphor, isn't it, it's a physical place that we've identified, but where people can come and have an experience, you know, I like to think of the office, like a touchstone, right?
How can we have an experience that inspires us energizes? Helps us to collaborate, innovate, do our jobs better connect with others, feel all of those things in that pyramid. So we can talk about storytelling and how you do that. But storytelling is also sort of like a metaphor for how we just create these worlds that are very real for people.
You know, we hear about the metaphors as this idea of creating something, a culture or whatever, but it's really a tool. That will bring some of these ways that people want and need to feel at work to life so that they can do better. And our businesses can do better.
Amanda Berry: I
feel like to hearing you say that the return to office is a metaphor.
It just really sort of exploded in my brain, trying to unpack this whole push to return to office and why that's important for businesses and leaders. It's almost like return back to your normal life, because this has been a rough two years and the big front part of that is returning to work. So I, I just have never thought about it that way.
So what do you do at, at Dewpoint Communications that help businesses improve their employee experience?
Victoria Dew: Few different things. We work with businesses, you know, obviously we do implementation execution, project management, some staff augmentation, but more and more honestly, what people come to us for is helping first cross functional teams to be more strategic in the way they think about the big picture.
You know, one of the things we hear a lot and this sort of surprises me or sometimes is people come to us and they say help us to lift our gaze, widen our aperture and think bigger. Help us to get our people out of this day to day. And we all know what this feels like, right? We've got our little heads down and we've got all our tactics and we're doing all our things and we, and we lose sight of the big picture and we forget how to connect the dots.
We forget how to work cross functionally, because it takes a lot of time and energy. Right. But help us to get out of the weeds a little bit, to have time to thinking time to do this. Sometimes they talk about us as being professional for Sears. And I tell leaders that we work with and like, Your business will see all the trees.
Don't worry. No one's gonna lose sight of the trees. One of the best ways that you can support the business is by staying focused on the forest because it's hard. It's actually the hard thing to watch the forest and connect the dots between like see those trees over there. They're part of this forest and this works over here.
So ways that we do that, honestly, sometimes it's just training. Workshops ongoing programs that help teams take them through a, a curriculum or developing a strategy. Very often we do help teams develop strategies and we do it alongside them. And we just walk them through, we've got a process and a framework, but they do it themselves.
So it's cool because it has, you know, everything that they create. It's not some consultant going off and doing something and bringing it back for a report or something that goes in a drawer. They're, they've got their fingerprints all over it. It looks, feels like them, but they've got us alongside them to help them see the.
And to kind of bring that depth and breadth of expertise there and especially global our team's global. So that's very helpful for companies that are in north America and trying to figure out how to account for other markets. Um, so that's one of the biggest things we, we do.
Amanda Berry: When I think about employee experience, a lot of companies are focused on it right now.
It's become the big topic. What are some big mistakes you've seen companies make?
Victoria Dew: We did a, a big piece of research recently looking at, um, published an insights report called the new rules of employee experience and in communications. So we talked to leaders like in a range of industry sectors, different sizes, different stages, different geographies, and all in all it touched.
Um, the leaders we spoke with touched the lives about half a million. Us workers and nearly a million around the world. So we got a lot of, had an opportunity to really see both what companies are doing, right? What are some of the emerging best practices, innovative approaches, and also where there's some opportunities.
Right? And we talked about like, what keeps people up at night? One of the things that's obviously bandwidth is a problem. And this thinking space to connect the dots, people haven't asked me, they say, who does this really well employee experience? Who's got this figured out and I hate telling them this.
I'm like, everyone's got some part of. Figured out, no one that I've seen has all figured out which to both be sort of reassuring to people and, you know, somewhat concerning that it, but it speaks to the fact that this is very hard. So to answer the question, the biggest mistake is not taking a holistic view.
Not taking a systems thinking approach system thinking is hard, right? Connecting the dots between different parts of the business, different ways of working different styles and seeing how all of them fit together. Systems thinking is something more and more that internal communications has got to get better at.
We've got to be the ones to do that. We've got to be the ones to hold the complexity for the rest of the business. One of my favorite futurists, Bob Johansen talks about it is liquid structure. And that in a world that is con increasingly complex, ambiguous, volatile, uncertain that VUCA world, that we have to be the ones who can live in that fluid.
And that means understanding how all these pieces fit together, holding in our kind of consciousness, how all the pieces of that pyramid, the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the arenas of employee experience, how they all fit together and then being able to break them back apart for different parts of the business and pick up different tools and apply them in service of this.
If you think about that, that takes a very, very different kind of thinking and a different kind of brain that's not common. And hasn't traditionally been require. Of us. So if you think back to my experience, I shared where someone wanted me to do a newsletter and post things on the internet. And that you can imagine.
Now, if you see my brain, when my brain works, how like very unclear I was on what the purpose of that was, but we can see those, that those tactics are very important, but only if someone is holding the whole picture and is, can be the nexus that connects all these functions. I talk about we, the people, people, so all the people in an organization that have responsibility for creating employee experience.
So it's just not just calms, although we can always be the trafficker or the person in the middle who can keep everyone together, but it's HR, it's it looking for? Digital workplace it's change because. There's no end of change or transformation. It's DEI, it's operations, it's property and real estate, everyone that has a stake, you know, in making employee experience real.
So we've got to be the one suffering, all of that together.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. I mean, being an internal comes, I know. And just hearing you say that, you know, you were asked to do an intranet post and newsletter sometimes that's what internal coms that all they're kind of allowed to do, and they aren't brought into the table to hold that fluid structure, I guess.
What, what advice would you give to people who are experiencing that level of difference? Like, well, I'm not brought into T meetings or I don't have that information. I'm just asked to build the newsletter based on what, what my boss gives me. .
Victoria Dew: Yeah, it's, it's great. And it's a great question. And it's complex, and I will say one of the ways that we see teams do best is when they have a really strong leader.
And honestly, it's usually that leader that brings us, you know, in, and this is something I hear, they say our teams keeps waiting for permission. To do things and they don't have that. And I keep wanting them to kind of think outside the box and think differently. And they don't. I think we all have empathy for that because we know that in some sense, it's sort of been beaten out of people.
Right. Also don't forget it got harder during COVID because just the nature of not having the ability to have spontaneous creative collision has sort of shifted the way people think and work a little bit differently. So we were all sort of a little bit in our own. Silos and vacuums of course, but would say is like there, people keep waiting for permission to do things.
And I want them not to. There's a few things there. First you need a good leader who will run interference for you so that while a team, and we do some of this work with, with teams who are partly building, I don't say confidence, but parting the building those muscles to connect the dots, to think more strategically, to connect across teams, their own internal.
And create a cohort where they understand how they can build social capital in the business, how they can build influence. Part of that is right. We make our stakeholders look good. well, we own the channels. So we had storytelling. So in terms of how we build social capital, one of the things is giving the people in our businesses, visibility and profile, which helps to increase our value, someone externally coming into the business.
Sometimes I think that it's one of the ways we are the biggest ally for internal coms teams is, you know, when someone in the coms team pushes back. There's risk there, but they pay us to come in and ask those same questions. So I wish it was different, but sometimes it's, that is one of the ways that we can be most helpful is just asking the questions that are hard to ask internally.
And I think part of it is looking for what will look like help in the business. Where can we showcase? Where can we build small pockets of influence? And then. How do we create more? And then how do we, we grow those, nurture those. So that there's an aspect of Somo that other parts of the business see what's happening.
And it starts to, you know, we get that kind of rising boat. There's a few ways that change significant change happens in business. One there's mandate from the top leadership says this has to be different. Two. There's an event that happens. I mean, something, something that rocks everyone's world that just disrupts the way we work and that creates this burning platform.
We don't really wanna have to wait for that. Do we? And then three is we start grassroots team by team cohort by cohort, pocket, by pocket, starting to cultivate our gardens and create systemic change in that way. So I think part of it is understanding if you have a manager or a leader that's just like telling you to keep the trains running on.
And you wanna work in a different way. There's some decisions to make about how can you help work with that manager? How can you help them see the value in it? It may just not be the right fit for you. I found certainly in the organization I was in that, that just was never actually gonna work for me.
And. I wasn't until I got out and learned and started working other ways that I was like, oh geez, Louis. I was, that was never gonna, I was never gonna be able to thrive there. So I think it is, it's starting to look at what are the small levers that you have and how can you start to do that? If you commit to staying where you are and driving change from within being really smart and strategic about how you do that.
And just building that like slowly, slowly, right? How do you eat the elephant one bite at a.
Amanda Berry: I love that metaphor onto the next segment. Rip from the headlines, you hear the news xray, xray, read
all about it. Our stories rip from the headlines, rip from the headlines, from the
headline. We're sitting here talking about employee experience.
I love you again, reference Maslow hierarchy of needs. You're talking about people feeling respected at work, feeling safe at work psychologically and physically just all of those components, you know, have opportunity to grow. One thing my brain keeps pointing back to is DE&I initiatives at a company.
I think that's just so important. And I wonder if companies are Aret invested, as they say they are, they say they're invested, but they're not acting in a way. So I wanna, I wanna talk about the DE&I efforts of companies with, especially with people working hybrid and remote, right. That's completely changed the, the game and the way people interact with their jobs, their managers.
So let's start there. How has DE&I been impacted due this hybrid work? Remote work environment?
Victoria Dew: Gosh, there's so many aspects of it. Aren't there, right? There's so many different facets. So one thing I would say is, you know, there's some research future forum did and future forums, I think tank kind of founded by slack and they did some really interesting research about the experience of remote work for black knowledge workers in the us, their complete experience improved during the pandemic and being remote because of, for a number of reasons.
But one of the things I thought was very interesting. Decreased microaggressions. And decrease need to code switch. And for me as a white woman, right? That is like, that's not something that I'm super familiar with. Some of our employees going to the, the physical workplace are experiencing unconscious bias or different behaviors that diminish their employee experience.
If you think about it, it really speaks to some of the nuances and the complexity of DEI. If you think about what's at the heart of DEI, it is. Piece of the Maslow hierarchy of MES, which is help keep me physically and psychologically safe and help me to feel like I belong and that in all those pieces fit together, because they're how we are able to thrive and do our best work.
And we know the research about how diversity improves business outcomes. So. I think there's another piece too, about how DEI fits into a broader ESG or CSR perspective and how all of the pieces fit together about how we create sustainable companies, where people can thrive. There's another really interesting piece of research.
I think it was in the Harvard business review or salon management review about. This, they call the double whammy effect of women in hybrid work, which is that women were already some sense disadvantaged or had had more of an uphill battle in terms of gaining visibility, being promoted, growing their careers at work, and then are also statistically more likely to opt for flexible work.
And that, that further in a hybrid environment sets them back in terms of visibility. Profile access to senior leadership, access to opportunities. And so how again do we account for all of this? Again, we talk about return to the office or the office as a metaphor. How do we create employee experience where people can come to this place and thrive no matter what that means for them.
Amanda Berry: I wanna just focus a little bit more on that DE&I stuff. What is a good DE&I program to help combat some of this return to work stuff? What does that look
Victoria Dew: like? I think it's tied very closely to employee journey and employee journey mapping. So I think it is really breaking down all the things that we do innately in internal communications, breaking down audience segments, understanding drivers, understanding people's journey, journey, design, thinking around empathy for who are these audiences and what affects them, what impacts them and how can we create both policies and programs and initiatives to help create that employee experience?
We. And what are some of the things that are the roadblocks that are getting in our way? You know, I don't have all the answers for DEI, but this is a place where we can have sleep, work, cross functionally, to support all of our partners and to ask some of these questions about exactly the question you asked, which is what does a really good DEI program for us look like, right?
Who are our audiences? Who are our people? What do we want them to, you know, know, feel do what do we want this experience to be like? And what do they need? in order to thrive here,
Amanda Berry: who should own the DE&I efforts in a company I've worked at companies where there's like a separate group of, of people like three or four people who bring in guest speakers and, and, you know, maybe sit on different councils.
I've worked organizations where there isn't that, but there's, you know, HR sort of owns it and they help try to set policies. Who do you really think owns that effort?
Victoria Dew: Oh, I think it it's a little bit like the question of where does internal communications sit, right? Again, it diff it's different for different organizations.
It sits where it can have the most strategic value to the business. For a long time. We've talked about having a seat at the table. And sometimes I think, especially for communications, it's just like be the table. Like you be the table. and then you have people come to your table, stop waiting to get a seat at other people's table.
You form the strategic imperative. Right. And have people come work. In that way with you. So, I mean, where does DEI sit? I think often it can sit in HR and can sit in ops. I think it can, it reports to the CEO, but what you mentioned about people have campaigns or that it's very tactical, that is the risk.
And I think that's what you highlighted, which is that people pay lip service to it. Mm-hmm , but somehow it's not embedded as a business imperative. I think this is where we're in a really strong position because companies that understand. This is much bigger, right? This is about how we run our business.
This is core to what we stand for, what we believe in and how we act activate and empower our people. And DEI is so is just so broad, right? And I never wanna diminish some of where it has been and where our focus has been in the last, especially in the last few years about dismantling systemic racism.
But over time, we'll have an opportunity to realize that. There are parts of it for everyone, right? Everyone needs inclusion. Everyone needs to feel belonging. That is how we thrive. So I think it's exciting cause we get increasingly sophisticated. So I'm very positive about it. I think we're just in a process we're in a continuum and we're learning, you know, one of the things I think should also be reassuring people is.
everyone's building the plane while they fly it. No one has us all figured out, but it's the fun part in why these conversations are fun is it's how we learn is, you know, from what other people are doing, we think, oh, actually we could try that. Yeah, that would be cool. This could work for us.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I love what you said about, don't wait for a seat at the table, be the table, be the table.
I even ask questions on this, this podcast. How does I see it in stay the table? I think that's such a great, different way of thinking about it kind of just blows up waiting for a seat at the table and just being the table. Yeah, I think that that's a great metaphor. What does that look like? If someone's sitting out there and saying like, how do I be the table and what does that look like for you?
Victoria Dew: I think one is, if you think about it, we own a lot of the infrastructure for the table. We own the. So as part of his, we only, we understand audience, we understand audience segmentation, we understand empathy. We understand actually, there's a really great quote. I feel like I talk about it a lot. Recently, Satya Nadella asked, he was asked what's the biggest source of innovation.
And he said, empathy and empathy is the thing that is most innate to all of us. And it is where of the source of, of innovation comes from, is being able to put ourselves in other people's shoes. Okay. So it's free, you know, Everyone can do it is our most inability. And yet, in fact, we often don't do it, but internal communications, we have the ability to actually harness some of that part of how we do it is we understand what other people's drivers are.
We understand what motivates them, what they need, what they're looking for, what success looks like. We can be that systems thinker, we can connect the dots. We can look for how to build social capital and influence how to weave things together. How to tell a story right now. You know, you reduce all it, it sounds like spin.
And it puts us back on that old kind of spin piece, but we can create a strategic really structured world that gets results. We know it gets results, but it means we've gotta work smarter and we've gotta bring other people into the fold. And that means like when we have this table, it's like, instead of waiting to be invited to someone else's dinner party, we're like, Hey, actually, we're doing this cool thing over here.
Do you wanna be part of. Actually it's doing some really cool stuff. We're getting really good results. And this actually, you see this part of the business they're doing really well. We've been working a lot with them and look at like, look at their numbers. Right. So I think it is, it's certainly like all carrot, no stick.
And we bring people in slowly by building influence. across the business.
Amanda Berry: I love that. I, I hope that that's helpful to our listeners too. That's such a good carrot to take out of this conversation. There's a bunch, don't get me wrong. I've loved our entire conversation, but that's such a, such a great one.
Thank you for sharing
Victoria Dew: that. And maybe it's I think, you know, the entrepreneurial side of me, right? It's like, you can't wait for PE. You don't wait for things to happen. You could figure. Here's a problem. What do I wanna do? And you've gotta figure out how to go and solve it. I think people, especially internal communications professionals are hunger.
Like they're hungry to do that. They wanna do more. They feel stifled and are in that stage where they're waiting for permission. And I think, you know, I don't know if you've looked outside, but the world's like, who else? A little bit on fire, right? I just think the time when we can play it safe and be good little, you know, calms people and behave ourselves.
I just think that time is gone. There's a lot of problems that need solving and I think we're the ones to do it. And I think we just need to figure out like how to grab the bull by the horns and then bring other people with us. And
Amanda Berry: I, I think that's just such an important topic or idea to put in minds because, you know, in my past experiences, you know, in these internal comms roles, you're working with the CEO, you're working with the CIO, you're working with the CTO, all that C-suite level.
And so it can be intimidating. And you don't wanna take that step of building your own table but because there's a lot of trust usually built between IC and those roles. I think it's worth a shot. I think people out there, hopefully they take your advice and,
Victoria Dew: and give that a shot. I'll say something else to, you know, I talk to a lot of leaders, right.
And of course there's leaders and managers who don't know what to do with this. Don't, aren't interested in this and want you to do what you're told. Of course they're there. We know them. We've all worked for them, but I do hear a lot of leaders who come to me and they ask me who I know. Cuz they want people that will think outside the box.
They want bigger strategic thinkers. They're frustrated by not being able to find people who can think and work in this way, who don't have the confidence. Right. Who don't know how to like do these things. And they are looking for those people to help them. Change, you know, to change and transform their organizations.
So I think it's looking for those pockets, you know, when you're looking for a new role and of course we always see on LinkedIn every single day, that little cherry falling on mm-hmm, , there's a bunch of, 'em like really vetting that manager, that leader, like, are we gonna be a team? Are you gonna help me?
Like, I wanna do this stuff like that. I'm up to some big stuff. Are you gonna have my back? And are we gonna be able to get things done? Are we gonna build this function so that we can really do this? When I first came back and I went and I got this job in corporate America, they said, we want you to come and help us build a world class communications function.
And I thought, great. I wanna do that too. In fact, they didn't want to, they did what I call they want to want. Like, do you want to, or do you want to want to right. Do this idea? It would be cool, but you don't really have the will to. you think it would be a good idea, but you don't actually aren't really gonna do it or are you really like ready to do this?
Those are the places you wanna work. That's where you're gonna do the best work of your career.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. And that that's when you said ask those questions in job interviews. That was the first thing that came to mind with. I feel like there's always people who say that's what they want to do, but do they really want to do that?
And it's hard to weed those out. Do you have any questions you would ask just for our listeners if they're interviewing for jobs to help weed those folks out, or is this a matter of just. Ask the questions. See what they say.
Victoria Dew: It's different for everyone, but I see one is trust your instinct and don't let the fear of not getting the job stop you because have you ever not gotten a job that you later wished you had.
I've never not been hired for something. And like years later been like, oh, if only right, I've always never gotten jobs. And later have looked like, geez, I dodged a bullet there. Like that was horrible. So I think one thing is trust your instincts and don't let be afraid. I'll tell you, we can talk about with great resignation.
I was over, but I'm not worried about that because what I know is great, people are always gonna be in. The better we are, the more and more in demand we will be. So I don't really worry too much about that in the long term. And there's fewer and fewer humans we're at sort of peak use. Like there's actually fewer humans participating in the workforce.
So long term, the kind of numbers are in our favor. So not being afraid, asking good questions, not being afraid when you don't get the job, because that's the wrong place for you. And I'd also say activate your networks. I mean, I think one of the most, I. Things I've ever done is just build really good networks of people and have conversations.
And if you see someone that you know on LinkedIn is ask questions about the organization and about the manager and get intelligence through your network. Sometimes I think I get very nervous when I looked at people on LinkedIn and they have like 280 connections because like, who are you gonna ask without that kind.
Access to the conversations. It's very hard to get this right. And to be able to have different inputs and to be able to think and innovate and create new ideas and collaborate. We have a huge opportunity here with this, you know, internet and different conversations to, to really learn from each other.
And I think it's so important. Yeah. And
Amanda Berry: there's a lot of different even groups on LinkedIn. You can join. I know I'm in like six internal communications and employee experience one. So those are great resources too. I see people use those all the time for questions. And does anyone have a template for this or does know anything about this company?
I see that coming up quite a bit. Good advice. Let's move into our last segment, asking for a friend. Who's
Producer: asking for a friend.
Hey, asking for a friend, asking for a friend for friend you're
Amanda Berry: out there working with all different companies you mentioned globally. What is one challenge that you foresee that is coming up in the future?
That we're gonna have to deal with an internal
Victoria Dew: coms. This is something again that came up again in our research, I call it gravity. Like I, I keep looking for like a way to describe this. Isn't like ripping off wicked, but I think so much of our work is defined gravity. Right? We have tunnel vision we're in the day to day, we're trying to get things done.
The pace of change is just like unending and is accelerating. So one thing I'll say is if you're waiting for things to slow down, or go back to normal. You should stop waiting for that because the pace of change is only gonna continue to acceler. So our job is to ourselves and also to help others to be able to manage right this rapidly accelerating change, and the context are gonna be changing again and again and again.
And that's why, I mean, we have to be able to hold this complexity. So I think the. That muscle of holding the complexity, thriving, which is a strange word in the space of like chaos and change this vocal world volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and that we will always be toggling between getting the stuff on our to-do list done and holding the big picture.
Right. Seeing that forest. Honestly, it's partly why I have a job because part of what we do is we help people see the forest and stay in the. And it's like, we don't just do it once. It's like, you have to do it all the time. It's like brushing your teeth because the gravity's always gonna pull you back to that to-do list.
But really if we stay in the weeds all the time and the business will always drag you down rabbit holes, but we can't really serve them. If we go down that rabbit hole with them and stay down there, we can go down, but we gotta come back up. So I think that's the challenge is understanding how to lift our gaze, widen our aperture, think bigger and support the.
In the rabbit holes, getting things done, but that muscle of toggling and of going up and down, that's how we'll move the needle in the business. That's how we'll demonstrate our strategic value. That's how we be the table.
Amanda Berry: And I love that. They brought it back to that. I cannot tell you how much I love this current time of internal communications.
We have such an opportunity to really just turn everything on its head. You know, you'd mentioned job where you're just posting internet and newsletters. This is such time to, to try so many new and innovative things and bring out new ideas to the industry. Cuz everyone, as you mentioned earlier, nobody has everything figured out.
We're just trying to put together pieces and see. Sticks. So I, I, I love that and bringing it back to the table, taking those pieces and building that table.
Victoria Dew: This is such a huge opportunity for us, as you say. And I just really wanna encourage people not to miss it, not to let this moment go by when we can actually build the plane, like build the table, as you say, but don't let, like don't miss this time, this opportunity to really do some of the best work of our careers.
Amanda Berry: Absolutely. Victoria, this has been a lot of fun before I let you go. Will you let our listeners know where they can
Victoria Dew: find. LinkedIn is my platform of choice. I love connecting with people. I love, as I've said, having these conversations. So people should feel very free to reach out to me on LinkedIn and just say like, I heard you on the podcast and wanted to connect, and that's always really fun for me too.
We have this insights report that we publish the new rules of employee experience and communication. Feel free to download it. And if it's a, a helpful resource that pyramid, I talked about, that's in the, uh, report as well. Or if you want just reach out to me on LinkedIn and, um, I'm happy to share it. And if people have like questions, then we're always happy to be a resource or sounding board for people.
And, you know, it's how we learn literacy us all the time. Like, what are you hearing out there? Part of how we're hearing things is could people come to us and say, Hey, , you know, what about. So always happy to, to be a resource or sounding board for folks in the communications community and for other people, people.
Amanda Berry: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Victoria. This has been great.
Victoria Dew: Ah, thank you so much, Amanda. I've loved our conversation. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the cohesion podcast brought to you by Simpplr the modern internet software that simplifies the employee experience.
Learn more about how Simpplr can help you build a future of your employee experience. At Simpplr.com. That's S I M P P L R.com
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