Author: Penny

As the title of my blog suggests, I am a freelance PR working mainly in the public and voluntary sectors, on projects from small scale copywriting to big social marketing projects. In my time I've worked for government departments, the BBC and a range of other organisations of various stages of dysfunctionality. Now I'm trying to get to grips with the world of the micro-business and facing up to the recession with a fair bit of trepidation.

The language of customer services

 One way or another I’ve spent a lot of time with customer services departments recently.  Banks and internet providers and router-repair people and others.  It’s painfully obvious which companies have had the customer service police in and which ones still allow their staff to speak like human beings.  Inevitably the ones who talk to you in Human are much more approachable (even if no more able to resolve a problem)  than the ones sticking to a script that says they have to start every phrase with the words “Yes Ma’am”,  which just makes me feel that they’ve mistaken me for the late Queen Mother (TalkTalk, I’m looking at you)

The language gets even more baroque when they’re apologising for something – even for something that isn’t their fault.

I recently forgot to cancel an automatic renewal on some virus protection software.  Entirely my fault for being slow – and the company gave me plenty of warning that the payment would be taken.  When I finally woke up to the deadline and asked to cancel the renewal it was as though I’d caught them climbing out of a ground floor window with a bag marked swag:

Dear Penny , kindly accept my sincerest apology for the inconvenience this matter has caused you. Rest assured that this matter will be taken in consideration for the improvement of our process and policy…  Penny, we regret losing you as our valued customer… we’d like to let you know that the only reason why your subscription renewed automatically is because we wanted to make sure that your computer does not become unprotected even for a day … Thank you for giving us the opportunity to assist you … we look forward to being of further service to you in the future…”

and on and on.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate being treated politely by the companies I deal with. It’s just that either they’re taking the piss (not impossible, I’ve had jobs that made me hate the public too); or they’re completely unable to communicate like normal people and need to get a better script.  I can’t be the only person who reads stuff like that and is reminded of one of the great villains in English literature – probably not the effect they’re after.

“They taught us all a deal of umbleness—not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters!…‘Be umble, Uriah,’ says father to me, ‘and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,’ says father, ‘and you’ll do!’ And really it ain’t done bad!”

101 words of advice – resisting vanity projects

Countless wild-goose chases start with a CEO saying: “I’m not a comms expert, but I think we need a video (or a new microsite, or a leaflet, or an event).”  This translates as: “I’ve had an idea worth sharing with the world.  Make it so.”

Unless it is a good idea and you’re resisting out of pique because you didn’t think of it, refuse.  Firmly.

It won’t fit the strategy, will generate work, deplete your budget and be forgotten by everyone – including the CEO – within a week.  Tell them straight (maybe not the last bit).  You are the comms expert.  They should listen.

101 words of advice – what Star Wars teaches copywriters

Discussing the shortcomings of the Star Wars films over breakfast (we’re a cultured family) my husband claimed that Harrison Ford once waved his script at George Lucas snarling: “you know George, you can type this stuff, but you sure as hell can’t say it.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is as good a definition of bad writing as I’ve heard.  It’s stuff you can’t say when you read it out.  Dense and knotty, sprouting jargon in every dangling clause, bad writing defeats good actors and casual readers alike.

Write it.  Cut it.  Cut it again.  Read it aloud.  You’ll be amazed.

Coping when consultants come a-calling

Or:  I am a consultant.  You are meddling in my job.  He/she/they are  exploiting the boss’s gullibility…

Odd experience of being on both ends of the consultant/consultee equation recently, with unsettling results.

First the background.  I’m providing communications support for a big  change programme in a company which has brought in one of the big 4 consulting firms to deliver the technical stuff.  As part of their standard pack the firm offers support with comms, so I had a meeting the other day with a consultant who has theoretically been brought in to do  work I was brought in to deliver.

Starting the meeting with an open mind, I found my hackles rising when she started by telling me what a comms strategy is and how to plan one.  Every time she suggested things I’d already done my jaw clenched a little harder.  Eventually we agreed, amicably,  that  my specialism was comms – and I probably had ten years’ more experience in the field than she did; hers was programme planning – and dashboards bring me out in a rash,  so we’d split the job along those lines and get on with it.  Which we have, perfectly happily ever since.

Scoot on a couple of days.  I am also providing comms planning support for another client who wants to re-focus the work being done in the department she’s just been brought in to lead.  We had a team meeting last week.  Knowing that I can be  – ahem – forceful when I’ve got the bit between my teeth, I really tried to stress how much I understood their problems and recognised the great work they were doing against the odds before getting into the  “what might we need to do to improve matters?” stuff.  Heard yesterday from my client that they just felt undermined by the criticism they felt I doled out.

Now, I feel genuinely bad about that – even though I know the team isn’t firing on all cylinders, and so do they – so something has to change.  It’s never nice to feel that you’ve made someone’s working day worse.  But it’s a good reminder of a lesson I’ve been learning since the beginning of my career – it never does to take things personally.   

The consultant talking to me should have started by asking where we were on the job before she leapt in with the assumption that nothing was happening – but she wasn’t criticising me personally, she just didn’t know what I’d done.  It was pointless getting cross about it.  The team I met last week evidently didn’t hear any of the good stuff about themselves, they just took away a sense that it’s not good enough.  There’s a lesson there for me about framing what I’m saying, but equally it’s worth remembering that however hard you try, some people will only hear criticism, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Five business terms to ban in 2012

Loved this Freelance Switch post on Words which should be banned in 2012.  Pedants click on the link and agree – but not before you’ve added to my own top 5 candidates of business terms which should be retired this year:

  • Robust meaning ‘effective’ or ‘thorough’ – as in “we need to design a robust process for dealing with this issue”.  Oddly it’s a public service favourite which doesn’t yet seem to have made the leap to the private sector, where they seem more concerned with…
  • Granular/ granularity  meaning ‘specific’ or  ‘detailed’- as in: “we need to get to a really granular level of detail on this”.
  • Thought leadership – unacceptable in any circumstances, ever.
  • Engage with meaning ‘speak to’
  • Stakeholder – incredibly ugly and much over-used.  Irritatingly it’s also incredibly useful.  Work to do to come up with a better alternative.

Passionate and Solution have been dealt with elsewhere on this blog, as has Mumpreneur, but sadly all three persist like Japanese knotweed.  It’s almost as if no-one pays any attention to what I say…

2011: 5 lessons from a hard year in business

It’s hardly the Office of National Statistics’ survey of the national accounts, but I’ve been spending the last semi-working day of the year looking at some figures for my business which showed:

1.  I’ve worked more days – at a slightly lower day rate – for more clients this year than last.  Which surprises me.  If you’d asked  before I looked at the numbers, I’d have said this year was the worst ever.  In fact, with a full quarter still to come, I can see I’ll end the year  up in both days billed and income generated. Possibly it has just felt harder, coming after the long slog of 2010/11, which left reserves of both cash and bulldog spirit at an all-time low.

2.  But, I’ve got an awful long way to go before I return to the glory days of  my personal annus mirabilis – 2008/09 – when the global economy tanked but mine soared.

3. My business suffered from being too closely entangled with the public sector.  I was cushioned through ’08/’09 by a government commited to  spending to ward off a slump (thanks Gordon).  Things slowed down immediately after the general election.  It’s been a high price to pay for not taking my own good advice to spread the work around (though in fairness I saw the crash coming, I just wasn’t able to avoid it).  It takes a while to change direction – even for a tiny business like mine – it’s not just a matter of developing new contacts, it’s also a question of changing people’s perceptions of what you can do.  No wonder there’s been  a boom in advice for ex-public sector bods trying to join the private sector.

4. The good news, though is that in the world of micro-businesses the difference between a good year and a terrible one can be just one contract.  This year has been improved by two new clients offering several months’-worth of work each.  The thing to cling to during the troughs in business is that one phone call can turn things round.

5.  I’m not the only one to have found trading tough.  Some clients I got lots of work from in the early days have disappeared completely.  Only one client I worked for last year has used me in the last 9 months, all the other business has come from new leads.  If nothing else this highlights the importance of marketing your business and expanding your network of contacts.

However, comparing “now” with “then”  already feels like an academic exercise. As an SME-owning friend said at the weekend:  the world has  changed.  There’s no point worrying that you no longer know you’re going to be booked out for the next six months.  It’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future, and we’ve just got to make the best of it.  The trick, for freelancers like me at least, is to diversify – to develop new skills and ever-wider networks, to get better at seeing where new opportunities are coming from and to be flexible enough to grab them.  I can see some light at the end of the tunnel – do these points ring true for anyone else?

Workplace bullying … make the bully pay

As well as lightly grilling Piers Morgan yesterday, the Leveson Inquiry heard  evidence about newspaper culture from Steve Turner, an NUJ rep on Fleet Street with some depressing things to say.

10.49am: Turner says management back bullies up.

It’s almost distressing to see members expect to get justice through this process – and it never happens… one level of management backs up the next…

Bullying is still going on in newspapers, says Turner.

In one company fairly recently, one of our members went to management to complain of bullying and they said to him immediately ‘you’d better leave’… the bully is still there, nothing’s been done about it.

Looking back, I realise I’ve worked for some corking bullies in my time though, being young and inexperienced,  I just assumed that this was how people behaved in the world of work. 

Dodging the flowerpots…

The first,  the flowerpot-throwing, spittle-flecked yeller at the theatre where I started out, was excused his tantrums on account of his genius. He believed that we  backstage toilers should be grateful to be flayed daily in the service of Art.  I  learnt a lot from him about taking my job seriously.  On the other hand he did leave me with mental scars which can make the interview question “tell us about a handling a difficult situation at work” liable to bring on a dose of post-traumatic twitching.

… and the bollocking chair

I arrived at the BBC at the tail end of the old-school management era.  The guys I worked for had come up through the ranks and been bullied themselves.  Now they had the chance, they were happy to pass it on.   Grown men would fight to avoid the “bollocking chair” in the morning meeting – the one  which put you in the Controller’s eye line when he looked up from the papers and needed  to vent some wrath. 

Then, eventually, to Whitehall, where things were quieter, though the sense of having stumbled into a world where everyone else knew the rules but didn’t care to explain them, often felt worse than simply being yelled at during assembly.

Again,  I arrived at the  end of the period where staff joined young and toiled up through the ranks, learning  how to be “one of us” along the way.  The worst bullying I saw  happened to  a colleague who eventually took early retirement, blaming  stress-related health problems, with compensation – and a confidentiality agreement – negotiated by her union.

In all these cases the victims moved on and the bullies stayed put or were moved sideways to relieve senior management of the task of doing anything about them.  I doubt they changed their ways

A business’s culture starts at the top.

These are not healthy ways to work.  They do not deliver organisational excellence.  They leave people anxious and unhappy.  I met a friend for coffee the other day and we swapped war stories about places we have worked.  Coincidentally we’ve both done time at Channel 4, the BBC and government, and agreed that C4 was best.   When we were there, there were at least two senior women in the management team who supported junior members of staff up the career ladder rather than keeping them in their place. Bullying would just not have been tolerated.  And quite right too.  The scars last a long time, and no-one is helped by the belief that it’s too hard to do anything about it. Which seems to have been the approach in Fleet Street for years –

The reporter concerned had been bullied over a long period of time and was ringing Turner twice a week to get advice.

Because I have seen so many of these things end in tears and possible job loss, [Turner’s ] approach was to counsel the reporter through the difficult time in the hope that the executive would move on to someone else.

101 words of advice: how to handle debt

From  recent personal experience – as the disgruntled supplier – I suggest:

If they owe you

  • Be reasonable.  Times are tough, people generally do the decent thing.  Anyway hitting hurricane force immediately leaves nowhere to go.
  • Be persistent.
  • Know your rights.

If you owe them:

  • Don’t hide.  Ignoring email, phone messages or carrier pigeons sent to chase the debt won’t work.  Like Arnie, they’ll be back.  Keeping people in the dark  infuriates them.  There’s good advice here.
  • Be honest, explain, offer to pay a bit at a time to show good will.
  • Get  help.
  • Remember, no-one believes “the cheque’s in the post”.

 

What recruitment consultants don’t tell you about job hunting

Can recruitment consultants help?

I mix freelance projects with longer interim posts so I’m a bit of a recruitment consultant connoisseur.  There are lots who specialise in placing interim managers .  Some are brilliant – finding out my strengths and skills, asking where I want to work and what’s important to me, keeping in touch.  The best one I’ve come across is happy to share my details with partner agencies if she feels they might have clients who can use me, knowing  they will reciprocate.

The bad ones are woeful.  “Never mind the quality, feel the width” they  cry, as they pitch CVs by the bucket-full at clients, in the hope that somewhere in the human mix is a round-ish peg for the round hole they’re trying to fill.  They’re generally easy to spot – they don’t return calls, give no feedback on  applications, suggest you exaggerate the rates you charged in a previous role so that “you’ll be taken more seriously” and NEVER counsel you that, on reflection, the role they’re filling doesn’t meet your needs (or that you don’t fit the client’s).  It’s disappointing to come across one of them, it shouldn’t be surprising.  Recruitment consultancies work for the companies that hire them, not the candidates they place.  We’re the raw materials.

Working your personal network

There’s loads of advice online for getting the best out of a  recruitment consultant and it’s worth working at – I say again, many of them are excellent and great sources of support and advice.  The web also bristles with job-hunting guides.  I liked the self-explanatory 49 Best Ways To Get A Job in Today’s Horrible Economy. But I’ve had more leads on actual, chargeable work through personal networking and recommendations from previous clients than  any consultancy. This makes LinkedIn and other social networks the most valuable job-hunting tools you can wield these days.  This classic advice still holds good, even though 2009 sounds as distant as the Middle Ages in communications now.

The finest democracy money can buy: in defence of lobbyists.

Everyone knows who  lobbyists are.  They’re the mouthpieces of shadowy, wealthy businessmen prepared to pay for access to Ministers so that they can influence defence contracts, divert spending on major infrastructure projects, and make junk food an acceptable part of health policy.  They’re Nick Naylor in Thank You For Smoking,  described (not entirely un-admiringly) as : pimp, profiteer … yuppie Mephistopheles.

Of course the  email campaigners and dogged defenders of the NHS, 38 Degrees, are also lobbyists.  So are the policy directors of the NSPCC, the National Trust and  the Child Poverty Action Group.  So’s Jamie Oliver.  Anyone who works to influence government policy is a lobbyist, even if that’s not what’s written on their business card.

I’d far rather policy was made in open debate with business, the voluntary sector, interested experts and concerned members of the public than not.  Access to Ministers is not, of itself, a bad thing – though it’s interesting that no-one seems to expect Ministers to be able to resist the lure of the lobbyists’ lolly while they’re making up their minds up.

While I completely agree that the people with the deepest pockets shouldn’t be able to buy a say in policy-making, I think it’s naive to assume that the current solution – a register of lobbyists  – would improve the situation.  Who’s to be listed? By whom? How’s the register to be kept? Updated? Administered? What would constitute an abuse of the system?  What sanctions will there be against abuse?  How will they be enforced? By whom?  Despite promising to be the most transparent government ever, the current administration seems to have difficulty reporting on the meetings it’s having now, I somehow don’t see a new register of meetings with lobby groups getting us very far.  I also don’t see how a curb on lobbying could have prevented the Fox/Werritty saga which seems to me to be more about an extraordinary sense of personal entitlement,  hubris and complete disdain for a devalued civil service.

During the recent party conference season, a great deal was made of how expensive it is to attend conference these days – more than £700 to mix with the Tories in Manchester, apparently.  Ordinary members are frozen out and the only delegates are professional lobbyists of one sort or another.  Michael Crick did much eye-rolling on Channel 4 news at the discovery that some lobbyists were actually paying  £800 to attend policy sessions with the party hierarchy.  His (presumably synthetic) astonishment was dismissed by the redoubtable Olly Grender who pointed out that political parties have few other means of funding their activities and that conference is generally a commercial opportunity for them.  If we’re serious about reducing the influence of murky money in the political process, it might be an idea to start looking seriously at the issue of party funding, as she suggested.  Much harder than just listing lobbyists, of course.  And suggesting that more cash should be diverted towards MPs at a time when funds are being withdrawn from social services would be electorally suicidal.  But it might help avoid headlines like this:  Andrew Lansley bankrolled by private healthcare provider – originally written when the Tories were still in opposition, but which re-emerged on Twitter yesterday as part of the campaign against his NHS reforms.