Why the C-suite rarely mention the C-word
CEOs ignore the common thread that now connects all their strategic goals
There’s one, important thing that most people get wrong about written communication. And that’s to dismiss the entire subject as a hygiene factor. Usually, it gets relegated to the list of things we should just ‘do’. If it goes wrong (for which read: if someone can’t spell, punctuate, or tell the difference between your and you’re), then fix it and move on. Nothing to see here.
Don’t get me wrong. Grammar is important, as are punctuation and spelling. Mistakes can lead to misunderstandings and undermine your credibility. But that’s where its contribution to good writing ends. It’s important only in the way that brushing your teeth is: neglect it and people will notice, but it’s hardly the key to success or the bedrock on which to build important relationships.
‘Most people’, in this case, includes the leaders of most organisations. That’s why you’ll rarely hear an executive talk about written communication. In their view, it’s a (very) low-level, tactical issue.
What they’re far more concerned with is getting results. Growth and performance are what get their attention, and rightly so. The challenges of the pandemic have put enough on their plates. So they figure they have much bigger issues to tackle than the lowly topic of writing skills.
But in ignoring this ‘hygiene factor’, they’re also ignoring the one thing that connects almost all the things that they do regard as a priority. And that means they pass up the chance to use a silver bullet that could address so many of their problems at once. I’ll explain why in a minute, but first, let’s look in more detail at what they are concerned about.
Pandemic impact
I hardly need to remind you that the Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on the way we work. But the stats really are pretty staggering. Just a couple of years ago, working remotely was a rarity. It was a perk that only a few managed to negotiate – and then often only after much haggling with their bosses to be allowed, say, to work from home on Fridays for some much-needed relief from a gruelling commute.
But now the tables have turned 180 degrees. A survey by Owl Labs reveals that fewer than four out of ten (39% per cent) of American employers now require their staff to be in the office full time. And it seems we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Seven out of ten employees (70 per cent) say they want a hybrid or remote working style after the pandemic is over.
Work from home: the number of job ads mentioning remote working has tripled
Employers have no choice but to respond. Research for the UK’s Office for National Statistics found the number of online jobs adverts that mention homeworking tripled last year compared with pre-pandemic figures. And this seismic shift in the way we work is reverberating throughout the workplace.
The latest CEO benchmarking report from Predictive Index, based on a survey of more than 2,000 company heads, found that the pandemic led more than two-thirds of companies to restructure teams. That means most staff are working with relatively new colleagues. Recruitment has been erratic (first because it was on hold, now because of a competitive labour market), so those staff are also having to do more with less.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the CEOs interviewed say their number one challenge is getting staff to work well together remotely. This is a triple whammy: they need to get more out of existing staff, who are also trying to cooperate in new team structures with new colleagues but without being physically present together. No wonder then that confidence in team cohesion has dropped by almost a third (compared with pre-pandemic figures).
The research also found that the closer an organisation is to being fully remote, the more likely it is to have team cohesion problems. CEOs of companies who have at least 90 per cent of their employees working remotely are significantly more likely to worry about their ability to produce high-quality ideas that advance the business’s goals. Those goals are often new: strategy development is the most common priority for the C-suite now, and 96 per cent say they’ve changed strategic direction as a result of Covid-19.
With all this change, it’s no surprise that fewer CEOs believe their employees understand the mission and strategy, with confidence dropping significantly in this area. To quote the study’s authors, ‘When making major decisions at lightning speed, it’s easy for middle managers to lose clarity, especially in a remote environment.’
The common thread
So what is it that connects team members to each other, in this brave new world where the kitchen or box room has become the office, customer care cubicle and meeting/board room (and even school classroom) combined? How do they get their instructions from managers? And what connects those managers to the senior leadership and, ultimately, the C-suite? When the CEO makes strategy decisions, what is it that connects that strategy to the tactics needed to achieve it, and those tactics to execution?
If you’re tempted to answer ‘video calls’, think again. Research by the US Bureau of Economic Research found that, while the pandemic has led us to taking part in more meetings (virtually) than we once did, those meetings are an average of 20 per cent shorter than they once were. As as result, we’re actually spending less time in meetings than before (even if it doesn’t feel like it).
But it also found that we’re now sending more email (up by 5 per cent), to more people (increased by 3 per cent). And we’re doing it for longer. (More than 8 per cent of emails are now sent after business hours.)
We’re also using instant messaging a lot more. Slack, the internal business chat app, became a Silicon Valley ‘unicorn’ (a company valued at more than $1 billion) within 12 months of launching in 2014, doubling its user base every year for the next four years. Last year, its revenue grew by 36 per cent, attracting 12 million users. Its quiet success hasn’t gone unnoticed by everyone. It became the darling of the tech industry soon after it launched. And the software giant Salesforce acquired the company for almost $28 billion last year. Slack began as an instant messaging platform and – despite the addition of voice and video call functions – it still is, predominantly.
Then there’s Microsoft Teams which, though we may hear most about it as a video platform these days, was always meant to be a direct competitor to Slack. (The two firms are locked in a bitter law suit under the EU’s antitrust laws at the time of writing, with Slack arguing that Microsoft should not be automatically bundling Teams with its Office 365 suite. Microsoft strongly refutes the claims.) When you launch Teams, the chat function is at the top of the menu, and more than half a million organisations use Teams as their default internal messaging app.
Instant messaging and email are, let us not forget, both examples of written communication. Mention writing to most people and they may think of essays or novels. But the truth is that writing is what most people reading this do all day. We compose an email (writing). We text our friends (writing). We post on social media (writing). We send our colleagues instant messages (writing). Live chat is now ubiquitous on company websites and the default way of contacting customer services for most.
That’s all on top of, of course, producing reports, proposals and company or team announcements (all writing). And when we’re not writing, there’s more than a fair chance that we’re reading what someone else has written.
If you’re looking at a screen and not on a Zoom call, then you’re probably communicating through the written word. Look at what occupies your time outside of meetings, and you’ll probably see that it’s reading and writing all the way.
It’s only logical, therefore, that when CEOs are struggling with team cohesion and strategy execution, improving the critical communication element that drives those activities is a way to win all round. It really is the rising tide that lifts all boats – or, as I said at the start of this article, the silver bullet. Just as long as you don’t limit that improvement to arguing about split infinitives and apostrophes.
Sources
Business and individual attitudes towards the future of homeworking, UK. Office for National Statistics.
Curry, D (2021). Microsoft Teams revenue and usage statistics. Business of Apps.
Curry, D (2021). Slack revenue and usage statistics. Business of Apps.
DeFilippis, E, et al (2020) Collaborating during Coronavirus: the impact of Covid-19 on the nature of work [PDF]. National Bureau of Economic Research, working paper.
Foo, YC (2021) EU questions Microsoft rivals over Teams integration in Office. Reuters
Predictive Index (2021) Annual CEO Benchmarking Report
Slack announces first quarter fiscal year 2022 results. Slack Technologies
State of Remote Work 2021. Owl Labs
Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash
Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash
