Clearer written communication
Felicity at Fonterra (GM of Standards, Frameworks, Deployment and Culture) came to us with a unique challenge that her team of talented and technically minded staff were facing; crafting written communication that sent a clear message and connected with staff across the globe.
The solution?
We tailored a written communication solutions session for the team at Fonterra, covering the ‘5 Steps to Effective Communication’. Here’s Felicity’s take on how it went.
The problem
As a company with a huge global reach, we’re constantly writing emails, sending documents and communicating with written language across countries and timezones, both internally and externally.
We know our people are busy and their inbox is full of information - my team needed to make sure our messages were getting through to people.
The approach
Initially, some of our team members were a little apprehensive about how the knowledge taught in the sessions would translate in the reality of their day-to-day jobs - we’ve all been on courses before where you pick up a few interesting points on the day, but nothing that really sticks.
Eithne came to us with a well structured solution, but one that was simple enough to integrate into our everyday. Our first session served as a really good introduction and an opportunity to talk us through the main principles of written communication and get our heads around the concepts. But the second, face-to-face session was where we got the most value, as we were able to jump right into Fonterra specific examples with Eithne.
At the time, we had just moved out of COVID-19 lockdown which had put our written communication methods to the test, and proved a great topical example for us to use in our Wires Uncrossed session. With Eithne’s guidance, we worked through communication examples from our own executive teams, created our own comms based on the structure Eithne taught us around specific problems we were solving and had some very useful discussions on how to get our messaging across in an impactful way with a sense of urgency and action.
The outcome
For me, one of the key things is that Eithne is really practical in her approach. Everything she taught us was implementable, and she was excellent at giving context around the ‘why’ of what we were trying to achieve. As the team is from a technical background, they were really interested in understanding the behavioural science behind the methodology to even further underpin the value and provide a strong foundation behind the concepts we learnt. We will definitely continue to use the framework moving forward.
Does this ring a bell for your business?
Get in touch to talk about how Wires Uncrossed can help your technical experts with effective communication.
