The Crucial Role of 'Why' in Effective Workplace Communication

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In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, Nina Kontos shared innovative approaches to enhancing workplace communication and employee experience. As the Senior Director of Global Internal Communications, Employee Experience & Learning at Axonius, Nina draws from her diverse background to provide fresh perspectives on fostering an engaged, informed workforce.

Central to Nina's strategy is explaining the reasoning behind organizational changes to employees. As Nina explains, understanding the "why" makes employees feel valued and promotes inclusivity. By sharing the rationale behind decisions, companies transform HR from a top-down function into a collaborative process where individuals feel part of the journey.

Nina also discusses the importance of leveraging technology to personalize employee communications. Tools like Pyn (access for free) allow companies to customize messages at scale to make each employee feel recognized. This personal touch is crucial for creating a positive environment where people feel their contributions matter.

For modern leaders, Nina advises clearly articulating reasoning and treating employees with respect. By avoiding one-size-fits-all corporate memos and embracing straightforward explanations, leaders foster mutual understanding and an empowered workforce.

As Nina reflects, the future of workplace communication involves a shift away from broad decrees that alienate employees. Instead, it's about adopting diverse, engaging strategies that connect with individuals. This evolution enables the agility and inclusivity needed in today's rapidly changing business environment.

Nina provides a timely call to action for revolutionising how we communicate in the workplace. By embracing innovation that informs and engages, leaders can transform not just messages but culture and employee experience. For companies seeking to unlock their workforce's full potential, Nina's insights are essential listening.

Episode Highlights

• Understanding the three-legged stool approach: leadership, people practices, and communication

• The role of technology in enhancing personalised employee experiences

• Crafting human-centric communications: moving beyond formal corporate language

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Recommended Resources

• Follow Nina on LinkedIn

• Learn more about Axonius

A simple and free solution to the complex challenge of creating an exceptional employee experience.

Made for global and remote teams, Pyn helps you plan and schedule messages at key moments across the employee journey.

🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Nina 0:00

Communication in this sense isn't, hey, this thing is happening. And of communication. There are stories behind everything. There's a why behind everything. That's the part that I think sometimes gets missed with HR. It's sort of like, Hey, okay, so we're rolling out this new thing. This is the new thing. We assume you'll read the email and then we'll move on. That's not how things happen in a workplace right.

Chris Rainey 0:30

Nina, welcome to the show. How are you?

Nina 0:31

I am very well, it's nice to see you. Again.

Chris Rainey 0:34

Nice to see you. Before we jump into level a little bit more about you personally in your journey to where we are today because you have an unconventional route.

Nina 0:42

So personally, born and bred New Yorker, I'm a mom to an eight year old boy whom I adore. I am a wine enthusiast. I just got my level one. Oh, wow. You said certification.

Chris Rainey 0:57

awful awful. That was just an excuse to say you drink wine. I was I'd say my wife's gonna use that from now on. Whenever asked what? I'm actually going to be like, Oh, why? Why? Why do you choose? Yeah, that's a great way of saying I love I've had a good drink after work. But you actually got a you got notification. So okay, carry on. Sorry. That's actually

Nina 1:15

the science behind it. Let's see my professional journey. Kind of in a nutshell. I went to a liberal arts college, no one I knew was going into corporate work. I'm majored in sociology, which is essentially the study of how large groups of people behave, and ironically, has really been the space I've worked at. Yeah, knew in corporate America that you could actually really do sociology. And actually a friend from college said to me, you need to go into public relations, because you're really good with people. And I was like, great, what's public relations? I, I got, my first job was at a communications firm, I made my way into internal comms consulting, which to me was fascinating. I just right away, got really excited about well, all these people are in an organisation working towards a purpose, how do we communicate with them? What do we do to inspire them, and then understanding how important leadership is so I got to work with a whole bunch of clients early on in my career, and also an amazing mentor and team. I don't know if I'm one of the few people but my first work experience from a team mentorship teammate. perspective was phenomenal. Um, so it sort of set the standard high on for leadership and team dynamics for me, so that I ended up at Google and I actually went back into internal comms, I was there for almost nine years, I had several different roles started out on the business side, running exec comms for the Americas part of our business or worked with some phenomenal leaders helped to build up the exec comms team, I started to learn a lot about calm, then benefits and performance management. I also had the privilege of working within our learning and development department for a while working with our chief learning officer, before I were the chief people officer. And so that was great. And I actually realised, Wow, there's so much overlap between comms and HR. So your

Chris Rainey 3:20

role now is global in total communications and employee employee experience and learning senior director, right? I've never come across that role before. And that's one of the reasons why we're really excited to chat with you. And it makes so much sense now. Now, everyone understands the context of your background. But when people ask you, what do you do you how do you describe that event?

Nina 3:38

The majority of my job is working hard to make X, Sony is a great place to work. I mean, that's a broad statement. But if you think about it, what really makes a great place to work or what makes a culture strong. And I always think about it, there's like a three legged stool that I like to talk about. So it's leadership, people, practices, and communication, where I plays across all three of those things. The reason I think of it that way is everything starts from the top right, if you need to have a CEO and an inexact leadership team or CEO at the least who really is principled, is clear what the company stands for aligns with the values, right? They're not just something on paper, they're actually something that that person and the team really, really feel and are intentional. And then how do you build your people practices and therefore experience around it? What do you prioritise are good people managers, really important to you is, you know, having a formal performance management process really important is having the best benefits important. Not every company can be the best in everything. So you have to choose, where are you going to go deep, and what's important, at least to start with, especially for a company of our size, right? We're sort of a mature startup, we're 600 people. We're still building thing, which is what makes it fun. And we're building and then we're saying something doesn't work and we move on. Like, that's the that's the piece of it. That for me is exciting right now. But so then you determine what are those things you go deep in, and then you communicate it, but it's not communication in this sense isn't, hey, this thing is happening. And division, right? There are stories behind everything. There's a why behind everything. That's the part that I think sometimes gets missed with HR. It's sort of like, Hey, okay, so we're rolling out this new thing, this is the new thing, we assume you'll read the email, and then we'll move on. That's not how things happen in a workplace. Right? So number one, people don't read their emails, or at least a lot of them are they get to them late. Number two, people always want to understand why. And if you tell them why you ended up, helping them understand the story and how you got to the decision versus them feeling like something is done to them. And I think that's the thing that's important to think about with HR, you make sure that every time you're designing or communicating something you think, why should people care? Why should employees care? What's in it for them? How do we help tell that story? It doesn't feel like HR is being done to you?

Chris Rainey 6:11

And that's, that's because of the way it's communicated? Right? Like it's everything to everyone, and then it becomes nothing. So everyone that it really makes sense that it I don't know if that makes sense, at all, because they can't see themselves, because you're just sending everyone his blanket message 2030 things going on, and it just means nothing to them, thinking about

Nina 6:30

how people consume information, right? That's also part of internal comms, you know, are you a Slack company? Are you a meeting company? Do you like to use video? Do you have all hands? I mean, it's all the different modalities. But I think the important thing is always starting with who's your audience? Why should they care? And what's in it for them? Yeah, so. And the y piece is really important when you're designing. So that's where the employee experience comes in, and why it's great that I also get to oversee experience, because I'm invited to the table when we're designing people practices. Usually, the question I asked first is, why are we doing why are we doing it? And then why are we doing it this way?

Chris Rainey 7:11

Could you walk us through an example of like, what does that look like, when you're designing it?

Nina 7:14

It's gonna sound like a mundane HR thing. But we're moving from a third party vendor for benefits. And we're moving benefits in house, right? Like, sounds super wonky, not important, kind of could be something that you're like, Why do I even need to know about this, but there were some real changes to how you interact with getting your health care and what platform you go to. And that's important, as they were sort of making the decision to make this change our head of comp, and Ben, who's an amazing partner to me was like, Okay, let's start talking about what this means for employees. Here's why we're doing it. Here's what the timeline is, I would ask questions like, why this vendor versus another? Why are we doing it now? Are there going to be any things that we're taking away? Are there going to be any things that we're giving to people that we can talk about, like this change is great, because we're giving XYZ? And we worked a lot on the change management and communications around this, and it went so smoothly, people got the information. There were minimal, quiet, I mean, sure, there were always questions. What we didn't do was say, Hey, this is happening, end of story. It was, here's what's happening. Here's why we're doing it. Here's when we're doing it, here's how it's gonna affect you. Here's what we need you to do. And we repeated that in multiple sort of channels. We made sure we had info sessions we made sure leaders were prepared for it. There's so much work that goes into it. And I always like to say, like, if nothing happens when you roll something out, right?

Chris Rainey 8:47

Yeah. Yes. I love that. It's such a good thing, because so many people panic, like, Oh, my God, what was no one's saying anything. And normally, it's a good sign. How did you map it, though? Like the points of when to do that, if that makes sense. So

Nina 8:58

I always start with, like, what is happening when, right? So we start with, okay, we're doing background data transfer on X day, that's not going to be visible to employees, okay, not something we need to communicate about. When does the new platform go live? And people actually need to select benefits, for example, okay, on X date, so then how do we back up and say, what do they need to know before versus dropping it on them that day? They need to do something, how do we prepare them for that, then how do we remind them what to do? And also, how do we say all of this in a way that doesn't sound like it's a computer manual?

Chris Rainey 9:32

I want to touch on that, by the way, because that was one of the main things in our last conversation that I really took away from it. You You said? Can you explain the way you explain a lot better to me

Nina 9:40

like anything you're putting on paper, you're advising people to write something that you would say out loud yourself to somebody else, you shouldn't sound like a computer, you should sound like a human. I think a lot of times even with email communications, people think you need to use certain language or make it sound really fancy or complicated. I always say if you're reading it out loud and you sound On silly reading it like you're like I would never use these words, then then those aren't the words you should be using. Like there's nothing that says you can't put on paper or say out loud the things that you would normally say in any other conversation, people start people can relate to it more, right. And again, it doesn't sound like something's being done to them by some entity, it just sounds like there's another person explaining something to you, like you

Chris Rainey 10:26

would do if your friend or family member or you know, or even, like you said, or when you're just having a day to day conversation, you wouldn't write, like, I always tried to tell him like, stop emailing. So formal, you wouldn't say that to me. So just email me. And also like, sometimes it's, I feel like companies, they've got this weird philosophy like that, the more information they add, the more value and I hate it. The

Nina 10:46

flip side to that, though, and I always say sometimes communications, they do need to be MIDI, but then every word needs to count. This has always attributed to the wrong person in history. So I won't even try. But there's a saying that I really love, which is, if I had more time, if I had a what was the saying, If I had more time, I would write the whole

Chris Rainey 11:06

idea and post it there.

Nina 11:10

Now, I also think it's so I also think there's an aspect of communications to employee experience that has to do with consistency, too. And by that, I mean, you should think about how you're showing up as a company, from the moment you reach out to a candidate all the way through when they exit, for example, if your all hands have like a certain cheeky tone to them, or you do use very human language, which of course we do at axonius, because, you know, I'm running all hands, but officers amazing, and our C is amazing at Target. At talking like humans, let's say you have that certain tone. But that doesn't show up, for example, in your onboarding, communications, like it's very rote, very routine, fill out this form by x date, otherwise, you will not get paid on your first paycheck. Right? Think about that sentence. That's all true. Imagine if it were delivered, hey, we know paperwork is kind of a pain. But we're just asking you to do this once so we can get you paid and up and running. Right? Yeah. Between those two sentences, right? And then if you carry that through the whole experience, people are like, Oh, wow, it's like I'm working at a place where with like other humans, with people talking to each other, well, surprise. The consistency aspect. And then there's also the like, if you if you tell them about it in a meaningful way, and when they need to know about it, then they'll get excited about it. Like, that's my my other pet peeve on like when we roll out when people rollout programmes, and they start a communication saying, we're excited to launch? And it's like, who cares? If you're excited? They've already

Chris Rainey 12:59

you've already lost people, because you said we

Nina 13:02

know, I'd like to know about what you're feeling? Tell me. What's in it for me.

Chris Rainey 13:07

You mentioned obviously, the journey. And we, you know, we hear so many conversations now around making sure we meet people at the moments that matter. So you mentioned for example, benefits, that's a huge one, you definitely want to know how to find when you need them, as well, right? So how do you meet, pay your employees at the moments that matter? And make sure that you're aware of those?

Nina 13:30

So I mean, I think you have to know your audience, right. And it's different also, by function, like engineers are going to access information and have different times in their day versus versus salespeople. I mean, right now, we're small. So we have, you know, sort of succinct suite of benefits. But you know, we've gone deep in certain, like, certain areas that I think are important that we've we've communicate a lot about, like parental leave, we think that's important for people to have time off. And so we communicate broadly about it. You know, we make sure our, for example, our family ERG is really well versed in it and we bring them along with making sure they understand what we offer. And we periodically remind people about it too, right? We just we weave it in. And I'd say we stay close to the teams. So we're constantly trying to figure out what's going on in the business. What do they need? Oh, wait, we have this solution already. Let's make sure we deliver it where we need to create a solution. Like I said, we're in major build mode right now. So we're finding sort of challenges and then figuring out how to address them. But I also think that technology helps, right, so our friends pin have come up with this really cool way to kind of to automate Where are people in their journey? How can we remind them about things in that moment? And so we leverage different technologies like that to help us out so we can scale to or, you know, even things like anniversary at a company, sometimes maybe your manager will remember not remember. But chances are, they'll remember if you nudge them. And then if you send a note on behalf of the company that actually sounds again, like a person's doing it. So we use pin for stuff like that. And I'm always interested in exploring new technologies that help make it more efficient and easier and still human to get across to people.

Chris Rainey 15:24

It's tough for managers, right? Like now more than ever, I think it's really tough, especially when you're remote, right? Because it you have hybrid teams as well. Because if I see Ivan in the office, I'm probably more likely to remember if it's his birthday, or its anniversary, or have a have a one to one or all of those things, right, that are easier to do. When you see people then you make it remote, and you're trying to remember and everyone's ESeries, and all of those moments that matter that we're talking about. That's where I think technology gets exciting. And one of the things that I know that you and your team have taken forever is that you also give them templates. Could you explain a bit more about that.

Nina 16:03

But one of the things we invested in this year is to really create templates and clear onboarding materials for managers, right, especially for new managers who are hiring someone. And you know, they don't know that actually sending them a note to their personal email the day before they start to say that we're excited to see you tomorrow is important. And then on day one, they should get some face to face time with them, whether virtually, or in person, which is a little bit more rare. But it's again, it's like it's like, what are the things you would do if you were making a new friend, you'd want to meet them for coffee, get to know them more? Like it's a little, it's the same with someone on your team. It's just the conversations are more around, here's the opportunity we have, we're so glad you're on here's the impact that you know, we want to make your expectations. But it's like those little things. So we came up with here's what to do day one, day two, week one, week three, week four, and we built off of best practice templates. But you'd be surprised how much people appreciate just guidance in that area. I think everyone's really well intentioned, they just sometimes don't know where to start so nice.

Chris Rainey 17:08

Like when just having something down. Like, here's five questions you can ask, during your one to one like

Speaker 2 17:17

to be able to do that. Here's a guide about how to have a conversation around well being, right, because people are so afraid of saying the wrong things and what language what language can I can can and cannot say. So you could say the same thing around Ei, right conversation wants terrified of saying the wrong things as well. So just giving our managers those resources when they need them, even when they probably don't know they need them. Not. Here you go, Oh, yeah, I really couldn't use that right now. The

Nina 17:45

other important overlay to that is understanding individual preferences of your employees. So for example, some folks might not like to be celebrated on their birthday, because birthdays might be a sad day for them for whatever reason, or they just don't like birthdays. You also need to know your team's Yeah. So to leverage those things, but really understanding into individual preferences is important to

Chris Rainey 18:09

kind of highlight from our conversation for me is I realised that through personalization, you reduce the amount of communication. And I thought that was really interesting. We're sending so much because it isn't personalised and the moment we can personalise using technology, etc, is less communication but more meaningful.

Nina 18:28

Look, it's always got to be balanced with sort of mass community, of course, yeah, of course, there is the balance, but even when you're doing mass communication, it should feel personal, right? So like, for example, it should feel personal and the why should also be in there. We're just wrapping up our feedback and impact cycle addicts. stoniest. Get feedback, we talked about impact, you know, we needed to nudge managers to make sure they submitted their reflections on time. So we could kind of do a loose alignment, otherwise known as calibration, but we're sort of loosely doing alignment right now. Yep. So formal calibration. So it's like, okay, you could write a communication or a slack. That's like, don't forget to do by the deadline, right? Okay. I know what the deadline is, versus, here's why we have this deadline. Because if you don't submit it, then we can't do alignment. And alignment is part of running a fair process. And we know that you are invested in we know a fair process is important to you as people managers, right, because your teams are important. Make sure to get in on time. If you can talk to your people partner, like let us know what the issue is. That's a very different message. Right? That maybe some people will still ignore, but at least they're like, Oh, actually, I know why there's a deadline. Yo, I get it. I don't want my team member to miss out.

Chris Rainey 19:52

You've used loads of different technology stacks over the years, I'm sure different systems. Yeah, what do you do now? You got pin, you've got email, and you've got what do you have? Just do to send? Okay, so how's that work? What was that look like we use

Nina 20:07

pin for more sort of personalised onboarding, milestone communication. So that's great. And that's up and running. We use email and slack. And my philosophy is some people are slack people, some people are email people, some people are both people. So if there is anything that we feel is really important, we email it out to the whole company. And then we post it on Slack. And we say, also emailed for visibility. So that if people see it in one place, and then they see pop up, and another, they know it's the same thing, but we're hitting them, wherever they are, when it's something that we really need to make sure people understand. Then we'll set up a live session, whether it's like a 30 minute, we want to walk walk you through this senior leaders, or 45 minute, hey, people, managers, we want to talk you through how to give meaningful feedback. So we decide based on the content based on the audience, but we do try to make sure we're meeting meeting everybody where they're at. I love all of the technology platforms, but I think people use them as the same platforms, but they're intended for different uses. And so some of those lines blur sometimes and it makes it a little bit harder for internal comms professional.

Chris Rainey 21:23

That's why I asked you this exact question. Because like, I had a moment someone was sent me a message on my team. And they're like, I'm like, Okay, is it in WhatsApp? Is it in Slack? Is it in an email you sent me? Sometimes it's a LinkedIn message alone, like I was. And not to confuse everyone, by the way, pin is integrated into those systems. So it will send a notification nudge into Slack, is that right? as well. So it's not a separate email, or emails, there's not a separate place. The whole idea is the headache. The headache for HR and comms leaders for years is how do we integrate all of those into one thing to push those notifications when they when it needed? What's another example of a pin that you use? We

Nina 22:03

do onboarding, we do anniversaries, anniversaries, we're going to start using it for our feedback process. And so next year, as we're building out the manager curriculum, I'd like to use it for like strategic nudges. Oh,

Chris Rainey 22:24

that's nice along their journey as a leader, like as a manager, I'm like most of us when we became managers, you just left Good luck. Along the way, here's your training you one day, half day, half day.

Nina 22:40

You know how to be a manager by Yeah. I mean, we started out talking about that. Right? We're you said at the beginning, people managers really, really tough. Yeah, it is. And it's an ongoing learning journey.

Chris Rainey 22:52

Yeah. Before I let you go, you I loved I loved the fact that you come with this background and experience and bringing that into the HR leadership learning space. Honestly, it's an area where a big frustration for many leaders, many CHR OHS and leaders that I speak to are so frustrated by that about how do they make all of these tools and systems they together, communicate. And it's always been tough. We've been dealing with our customers for for the longest time, right? Creating that custom learning, the customer customer experience for them. And finally, we're doing it for our employees. But it's also one thing that you wanted HR leaders to take away from this conversation. What advice would you give them? Always

Nina 23:34

explain the why? Why are we doing it? And why should you care?

Chris Rainey 23:38

Do you remember the Simon Sinek TED Talk? Start with Why? Yeah, same thing that really stuck with me.

Nina 23:44

Why always explain why you people like they're smart. Yeah, give them the background, give them the rationale. They might not always agree with what you're doing. But if they understand why you're doing and then decisions that went into it, it makes it easier to process and understand

Chris Rainey 24:03

where can we reach you from when people reach out? Say hi to you? Where's the best place to find you? And then we'll say Oh, reach out on LinkedIn.

Nina 24:09

Yeah, yeah, I stay I stay. I try to respond to everything on LinkedIn because I appreciate when people make the effort to reach out

Chris Rainey 24:16

so why am I not surprised from someone communication?

Walk the Talk or walk the walk. Yeah. Well, it's I appreciate you come on the show. And I wish we would definitely do. We definitely do part two. We're doing part two for the change. Yeah, I love it. I love it. I wish all the best to win next week. Thanks so much. All right. Thanks so much. Take care

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