Why Audits Should Delight Communicators - with Lynn Zimmerman

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Daniel Nestle: Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. If we pull thematic thread that's running through the last decade or so of communications and maybe even of business in general, there's a strong argument to be made that we'd have a long, winding story of transformation on our hands. Business transformation, organizational transformation, digital transformation. The more we hear and use these words, the less impactful they should be. I mean, if we're in a constant state of transformation, then aren't we just working, living? It's like transformation is either the ether around us or the water in which we swim. Pick your metaphor.

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Daniel Nestle: But I think that since transformation hits us where we spend most of our time, which is at work, it's still fair to say that we have to grapple with it, accept it as the norm, maybe, but recognize that we need help getting through it. And as communicators, we have or should have a major role to play in guiding transformation at work. And the most critical audience, the ones who have, you know, have to actually do the work around transformation, are the ones we often overlook or mishandle. I'm talking about employees, of course. Not the first time on the show we've talked about employees as a public or employees as an important audience. But the central role they play during transformative times cannot be overlooked. Especially when change is accelerated by M and a restructuring and other paradigm shifting events, not to mention AI.

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Daniel Nestle: Good thing we have people like my guest today who have spent their careers helping companies and their employees deal with transformative change. An internal change communications pro with more than 25 years in the business, she's been involved in over 40 acquisitions, capital projects and enterprise level integrations. An award winning strategic communicator, an active member of the International association of Business Communicators and master of the communications audit, which we will get into. Please welcome to the show the CEO and chief strategist of Swing Communication, Lynn Zimmerman.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Well, thank you.

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Daniel Nestle: How you doing?

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Lynn Zimmerman: I'm excited to be here and chat about change, comms and communication audits.

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Daniel Nestle: Good thing because I set it up talking about change and transformation, so I hope we can talk about it. It's fascinating the more that I talk to people and dig into this whole idea of transformation, whether it be in comms or not. You know, it just dawned on me that this is something that we've been talking about forever, but it doesn't end. And maybe that's just the nature of transformation, but you'd think that since it doesn't end or since it's something that's with us, we probably, we should have gotten a few things right over time, you know, and I suppose we have.

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Daniel Nestle: But I wanted to ask you know, first of all, you know, first tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this, into the area of change and transformation, communications, and then maybe we can kind of dovetail that into what is the kind of condition of transformation and change that we see around us now. So I know it's a loaded lot of questions, a lot of room there to play. But let's hear a little about, a little bit about Lyn. How'd you get to where you're at?

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Lynn Zimmerman: Sure. So I have been in communications since the beginning of my career. And so, you know, started out in the agency. I did prior. It's going to tell you how old I am. But my client was a yellow pages company. And so it was toward the end of, you know, when yellow pages really were relevant in the world. And so it was a tough way to start out a public relations career trying to sell, you know, local media to the excitement of, you know, the new yellow pages dropping on doorsteps. And so, yeah, it was an interesting way to start out my career. And, you know, it was fun and it was a creative challenge because we did have to try to make the yellow pages seem interesting. And that's, it's not an easy thing.

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Lynn Zimmerman: But started out there and then, you know, moved over to the corporate world where I worked in community relations. I worked in and then eventually started shifting my career to internal comms and really found that was where my heart was. I love helping people understand what's happening, you know, and, you know, making high level corporate, you know, speak and, you know, all of the language that, you know, executives use and make it understandable to employees and help them relate to how they're. The work that they're doing for the company is helping the company succeed, you know, because a lot of times you don't. It's hard for them to make that connection. You know, people will say, well, I just, you know, enter information into spreadsheets. I don't understand how that's going to help us sell widgets.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And so that's one of the things I always try to keep in mind when I'm communicating. But so throughout my career, so I moved into several different internal comms roles, started moving around. I tell people I was moving south. I grew up in Iowa and I went to school in Kansas and then I got a job in Oklahoma. I was convinced I'd eventually end up in Mexico, but thankfully, kind of made a shift, was able to move to Colorado about, gosh, almost 20 years ago and have been there since. But in that time, moving through my internal comms roles, I got pulled into some projects with. And at the time, I hadn't heard the term before, but change managers, you know, and they needed help creating a communication plan for these changes that were going on.

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Lynn Zimmerman: The first change project, big change project that I was a part of, was an acquisition of a company that was a pretty major acquisition for us. And there were more than 70 IT projects that needed to be done. And so that I spent about two years traveling to different locations, working with different project managers and change managers and, you know, really working on communication plans around those changes. And so that's what. When I realized, oh, this is the work that I'm really supposed to be doing. And can I just.

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Daniel Nestle: Pause there for a second? Because I think here's an important point that the people outside of our comms bubble, and maybe even marketers to a degree, I think this, the whole idea of creating communications plans and communicating around these changes is lost. You know, you think that, okay, there's a, you know, there's a new IT rollout, right? What has to be announced, what kind of communications are necessary? Why does, you know, why did you have to do 70 different versions of a rollout plan? And, you know, the fact is, if you're in a company that has three people, it's not a problem. But if you're in an enterprise with different units and different people, any of these, it could be small or large changes to the way that they do work.

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Daniel Nestle: There has to be a unified message, and there has to be some way to kind of move them along through this change. And who's going to do that? The IT team if they don't want it to be done? Well, sure. Sorry, IT guys. I know, I know there's plenty of great IT communicators out there, but I think it's overlooked that the volume and sort of urgency around those projects. So the internal comms role or the person who's in charge of these kinds of communications tends to be sort of like, I don't know, under the radar or like, seen when they're needed. But it's. It's a mixed bag. I, I feel like these people, like, you need to be elevated A little bit more. Maybe I'm biased.

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Lynn Zimmerman: No, I think you change communication. It's, it's a bit of a mystery to some people what that means. I actually did a LinkedIn post about two weeks ago where I was. The post was all about what change communication is. And I listed all of the things that we do as change communicators. And I actually had some change managers come in and argue that. I was describing the role of a change manager and somebody said, you should be a change manager. You need to go get your PROSCI certification and do that. And I said back to her, you're not working with the right people then. Because as communicators. And there is a difference between internal comms and change comms. But internal comms, because of the rate of change and because a lot of times in corporate change, the employees are the biggest stakeholder group.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Internal comms is kind of the natural place for people to go.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And we need to be more. I think the beauty of bringing an internal comms person into a change project is that we have an understanding of the entire organization. We know that, you know, HR is doing a big project rollout at the same time that this, you know, big IT project is happening. And so, you know, we're kind of that connector to the different groups. And we can take a higher level look at the organization and say, this is what we're doing. You know, we're doing this over here and then we've got this over here. And so we need to make sure that because there's stakeholder groups that overlap, we need to make sure that we're not overwhelming them with communication.

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Lynn Zimmerman: We also know, you know, we can tell people more about the organization because we know how the frontline workers like to receive information. We know how the finance group prefers, you know, to get a newsletter or, you know, we know more about the employees and the different stakeholder groups than most other people in, within the organization. And so we can add more context.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Outside of just the communication, you know, we're there to say, here's the strategies we need to use to communicate this change. But we also should be really saying, we know about these people, we know how they like to be communicated to. We know what's going to be received well, we know what kind of language we need to use and we know where there's going to be some resistance to certain things. And so communicator, the communicator should be a part of the core project team for a change. I will Die on that hill because.

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Daniel Nestle: Couldn't agree more.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Yeah, it's because we can ask, we'll ask questions. And a lot of times, you know, the rest of the project team is so ingrained in that project, they know everything about it. And as a communicator, we're still kind of on the outside. We're not an IT expert. I don't understand all of the technical things. And sometimes I'll ask a question that they just assumed, you know, that it was already handled. And my best example of that is I was in a project as an HR system that was being rolled out and we wanted to put posters up because this organization had frontline workers and they didn't have computers, they didn't have access to a computer. And so we needed to have them download this app on their phone. And we wanted to do a poster with QR code and then login information.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And I said, well, how are they going to log in? And the IT guy said, well, their email address, their corporate email address. And I said, so this person who doesn't have a computer and is an hourly part time worker has a corporate email address. And this was less than a month before went live with the new system. And so, you know, sometimes we just know what questions to ask to make sure that the change is going to be communicated well to the employee.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I've always said that one of our superpowers as communicators is that curiosity, the inquisitiveness and the kind of relentless interrogation that we bring to certain projects, hopefully in a good way, where we ask the questions that nobody thinks of or that other people think might be, oh, I don't want to ask a stupid question. We don't. Yeah, ideally we're not afraid of stupid questions because we know there's no such thing. But you know, we ask a lot of questions. And the idea, for example, of assuming that frontline factory line, you know, production line workers can be communicated to in the same way that the accounting team can, is, you know, flawed from the go. And they wouldn't think about that.

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Daniel Nestle: They're, you know, they're looking, the change management team or the consulting team that's come in, they're looking at the Gantt chart and saying that, you know, okay, here's the critical path for this particular implementation. The training modules go out this day. The, you know, the post survey happens this day. Make it work. And it's like, okay, how are you delivering the modules? How is this being, you know, how do we know, how do the workers know what the benefits are of doing this? That they need to spend time, their precious time understanding this? Or do they not, if they don't need to? That's another story, too. That's also part of the communications. So these kinds of questions are critically important.

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Daniel Nestle: And, you know, I, I've told this story before in some ways, but I've been involved in multiple change projects and I wasn't brought in because of any particular expertise or understanding of change communication. It was because I was the lead communicator for the organization and it was kind of assumed that I knew this stuff. And luckily I know a lot of it. But I'm not, you know, I'm not focused on exactly that. The kind of things that were trying to do or that were being, you know, implemented should have had dedicated support because they were, as I said in the, in the intro, they're like paradigm shifts for the organization. And, you know, spending a few hours here, a few hours there doesn't give it the kind of justice it needs.

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Daniel Nestle: And then you're talking about the kind of messaging that, you know, employees typically are not going to be happy to hear, you know, and then you have managers or leaders who are not familiar with what we do who say, I don't know, can you just spin this? You know, make it just kind of like spoonful of sugar, whatever it is, get that message down and it's like, I'm sorry, what year are we living in? We do not spin anymore listeners out there. I hope none of you do that. But yeah, your point about having that dedicated change communicator, and going back to what you said, a change communication is different than internal comms, although the internal comms team often handles it. What are those aspects of change communication that define it as its own discipline?

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Lynn Zimmerman: Well, I think the biggest thing when you look at internal comms, those are ongoing programs. As an internal communicator, you are focused on company culture, employee experience, and ongoing things like HR programs, you know, those nuts and bolts, you know, things that employees need to know about their benefits and things like that. A change, you know, has a start date and it has an end date. Ideally, you should never have an ongoing change because that would be horrible for employees to go through. But, you know, a change has a start, a middle and an end. And usually that involves, you know, the ramp up of the project. The middle is the change, and then the end is once it's back to, you know, business as usual. That's a.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Not the best term to use, but it is, you know, it's where the change has become standard for the new normal. The new normal, exactly. So you know that it is a different, it's kind of a mindset. Mindset shift for an internal comps person to look at something. As you know, this is, this has an end date and we've got to really focus on creating a pretty dramatic shift in how our employees work and think in order for this change to be successful. And it's not a natural shift for some internal communicators. You know, that's, it's not. I've worked with some clients who have said, I don't understand how you like change. You know, they like to know what's happening. They've got their plan and they're really good at it.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And that's why, you know, they brought me in because I can be that conduit between the internal comms team and then the change team and the usually, you know, especially in IT change, there's an implementation partner. And so it's, you know, I, my role often is to represent the client, the internal comms team, to make sure that, you know, I know what they're working on and so the change doesn't disrupt something that's important for the company from an internal comms standpoint. And then also, you know, helping the change team know, you know, these are the channels we have available to us and this is the appropriate use of those channels. And you know, and also coming up with the strategy, how do we communicate?

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Lynn Zimmerman: You know, taking lessons I've learned from the internal comms team, you know, this is what this group of employee likes. This is what they need, you know, and so it's a partnership.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And it's hard for internal comms folks to make the time to be a part of a change, especially a large change, you know, if you're doing a workday implementation that gets really busy toward the last, you know, as you're getting close to go live. It's, it's communications has a big role in getting the organization ready to go live. And then following the go live, you have the, you know, follow up and you've got all the questions to answer and the things that, you know, break and aren't working correctly, you need to. There's a pretty big communications effort with that as well.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, handling the change. Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Once it's done and the day job doesn't go away for the internal communicators. So you Know, they still have to do that day to day stuff that is really important for the organization as well.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And you know, I've witnessed it from both sides and certainly internally as you know, leading a comms team and being in the comms teams and being in marketing teams. And you're right, it gets messed up. It's like it is. People get diverted or distracted and you end up cutting certain activities because. Well, no, we need to focus on Project X or whatever we're calling it. And sorry, I can't tell you about what Project X is but you know, because of that we're not going to be able town hall this week, whatever the case may be. And you know, that certainly does have an effect on not only morale but also, you know, resource availability and you know, the effectiveness of your overall internal comms program or employee communications or employee engagement program, whatever you choose to call it.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, something earlier as well as you said, you know, and thank you for kind of setting that almost boundary between what changecoms is and what the, you know, how it differs from what the internal comms team might be doing. This point about dealing with the change managers and kind of like being seen as, okay, you're over your skis, you know, this is, you're doing the change manager job. I, you know, look, I'd argue that, yeah, I mean sometimes change manager job is a communications job, but to a point. And I mean I was speaking with a couple of very senior comms entrepreneurs slash consultants recently who are putting together a, you know, an internal communications change communications solution.

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Daniel Nestle: And one things that jumped out at me was, wait a second, it sounds like you're positioning yourself as the change managers and I'm not objecting to that. I'm saying that's an objection you're going to have to face. So how do you deal with that? Like how do you getting to that point, you know, where the racy chart of what's happening with an org. Organizational change or an implementation, whatever the, or an M and a, you know, the change managers versus the change communicator. What, what's the line? What are the differences and where do you land?

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Lynn Zimmerman: Well, I think there needs to be a lot more education on the difference between what a change manager does and a change communicator does. I see so many job descriptions that are looking for, you know, the director of change management and change communication and I don't know who's applying for those roles because I would not want that. I feel like there is a Very distinct line between change managers and change communicators. Because even though there's a lot of overlap, you know, the overlap in doing the stakeholder analysis, you know, that should be something that the change manager and the change communicator should be working together on. Because, because it's important for both of them to know what that stakeholder analysis looks like. But, but, you know, change manager, they're doing. I, I think the misperception is that change management is communication.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: The reality is communication is a part of change management. Change management encompasses so much more. There's, you know, the training is involved in change management, you know, kind of managing stakeholder expectations, you know, the project sponsor. It's, it is having that total view of what is happening for that change communicators. Yes, we need that total view, but we're more focused on the stakeholder piece. How are we going to let stakeholders know what is happening? How are we going to get them to accept this change? And, you know, what are the methods we're going to use to get them there?

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Lynn Zimmerman: And we, you know, and so I think as change communicators, one, we need to educate people about it, and two, we need to set boundaries and say that is not, you know, if somebody came to me and asked me to put together a training program, I would say that's not my, my area of expertise. Yeah, you need to hire, you know, somebody who has done trainings before and who understands it. You know, I could probably put something together, you know, but that's not using my skills in the best way.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, it's more like, okay, you put the training together and I'll, and I will reach out to the teams that need to take the training and tell them why it's the greatest thing since sliced bread and what they need to do and how it's going to improve their life and, or that's. That sounds a little like spin, doesn't it? It's more like, you know, talking about it, like just basically it's communicated to the people.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Yeah, we will communicate. We will tell people why it's important for them to take the training and we will tell them what the benefits to them, because that's a big part about change. And I think this is something that people get wrong, is that when you're talking to a stakeholder, they need to know what, why they need to change. They don't care about how it's going to benefit the company. They don't care about any of that because they're being asked to do something differently. And for a lot of people, change is very uncomfortable. They like doing the same thing. They, they've got it down, they know how to do it. And so, you know, as a communicator, we need to be able to say this is going to benefit you and it's going to make your job better.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And it's, and sometimes, and it may not even better, it may just be how you, this is why it's important for you to make this change. And you know, it's not always, they're not always going to celebrate that, but we need them to say at least I understand why I need to make this change.

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Daniel Nestle: And you know, delivering. When change is bad news for certain individuals, as often happens in an acquisition or in an, in a merger or just a straight up reorg, where oftentimes reorg itself just means bad news to a lot of folks. It's so like we get a lot of pressure as communicators to really transmit the CEO's vision and the leadership team's careful stewarding of the employees and the brand and so on, when in actuality people are just like, do I still have a job? You know, and what do we do about that and how do we move people through this period of anxiety? The change managers are not going to look at that. The communicators will look at that. It's really interesting because, you know, to me the change managers are, you know, far more, you know, far more project.

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Daniel Nestle: They should be more project managers. But they also have to be, they have to understand where partnership and where yielding certain, I think, you know, where absorbing certain parts of knowledge are critically important. Where it's important to listen to and take into account what the comms team is seeing, what the marketing team, what the sales people are saying, you know, they, that all has to be valuable input for the change manager. So it sounds almost like that the change communicator is ideally reporting into the change manager or dotted lining or.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Something is that the projects that I felt were the most successful and I was able to bring the most to the project is when I was a member of the core team, the core change team and the change manager or the, sometimes there's a separate project manager, you know, so, but I am invited to all of the meetings. I know exactly what's happening. It's never a, you know, oh, somebody's, gonna, you know, cascade down information to Me, I'm there, I'm in the room where it happens to, you know, quote a great Hamilton line. But, you know, it is, it's important for us to hear, be here, everything that is being said. Even if they're talking about technical stuff, there's still things that we can contribute.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: By being involved in those meetings and.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, and by being an advisor as well. You know, I am curious if over the course of the 20 something years that you've been doing this work, if you've seen an evolution in some ways and you know, are the change managers or the sponsors or the people, you know, you're. I don't want you to say anything bad about any clients, of course, but are any of the kind of teams you've been working with, like, are they gradually understanding or. Or do you think they finally grasp the idea of the employees as a key stakeholder audience, but not a monolith? A, and I guess depends on the size of the company, but also B, that it has to. Or that successful projects at least, and successful change requires their participation, not just their acquiescence is, you know, how.

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Daniel Nestle: How are you seeing that evolve through your many projects?

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Lynn Zimmerman: So I think that people, you know, companies now know change and managing change well is important.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: I think there's still a challenge in making that investment in having the right people involved in the change. And you know, like I said that director of Change management and Communication, it's like they're trying to combine roles more than they should. And hopefully with education that will not happen as much, but it is a spot that people are like, oh, we can just make it. You know, they're change management and internal comms director, they're trying to do that. But I think the recognition that change is important is a big step. And so it's evolving. I worked on a project and this was this corporate acquisition, the first time I was involved in change. And I was working with these project managers who weren't familiar. You know, this was a new process.

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Lynn Zimmerman: This, in this company that I was working for is a Fortune 5 company. And so were enormous and we had a lot of processes and things that were doing, but we didn't. The change management office was new and. And so were creating. We were kind of, you know, building the plane as were flying it, creating this process for change communication. And so I would call up, you know, there were 70 different project managers that I was dealing with and I would call them up and say, hey, we need to create a communication plan for your project. And I said, I would, I need two hours of your time. And they're busy. And so, you know, that's a pretty big ask. And they'd always say, I'll give you an hour. And I'm like, okay, fine, we'll do it.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And then we would come in with our process that we had created. And it was. So we had this thing perfected. We'd come in, you know, what's your objectives? Let's do the stakeholder analysis. And that was where the magic happened. When we pulled out the. The big whiteboards and were documenting all of these different stakeholders and were digging in, you know, is this group small enough? You know, do we need to break them out? And we would ask them. I always, I talk about, we want to do your current state. And so, you know, what are the characteristics of each stakeholder group? And then what are the desired behaviors? How do we want them to act? And so we'd get into those conversations, and almost all of them were like, I've got another hour for you.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Because the conversation was so good and they learned so much about from the questions that I'd ask them that made them think about things that they hadn't thought about before. And so, you know, that was when I realized the power of the process that I use and how people respond to it. It's just, you know, it's getting into the room and, you know, this is 20 years ago. So now it's easier because people are more familiar with change, communication. They know how important it is, but it's still a challenge to get the time that you need. But when you come in as a communicator and you have a process and you can prove very quickly that this is going to be a valuable use of their time, they will give it to you, and then they're going to expect that moving forward.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Because once I did one meeting and, you know, then the project manager would come to me and say, we need to do a comms plan.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. And it's. It's also what a communicator needs to do, which is to speak to your audience in the manner in which they. They prefer to be spoken to. And if you're speaking their language from the get go, you will absolutely have much more success with your message. So when you speak to project managers, you have to understand the language of project management. You have to understand, you know, if not all the terminology, you have to at least understand, you know, frameworks, method, you know, methodologies things that make sense, metaphors. You can use the kind of process and, and behaviors that you need to exhibit in order to, and I'm not saying that you have to be a chameleon and change the way that you are, the way that you act. It's really digging into your toolkit and understanding your audience. Right.

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Daniel Nestle: And if you kind of can nail that down, whether you're internal comms or change comms or external, that it's a core skill that we all have to have. What I wanted to ask you and because, you know, because this now reminds me what we talked about in the intro earlier, is this the idea of going in with a process and a methodology that's been very successful for you, that it starts with this as is situation. What is the current state getting there? You know, you've spoke to me in the past about the communications audit, and I kind of want to know more about that because we always talk about that. We always talk about, okay, let's audit the communications.

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Daniel Nestle: Let's audit what we've got when we're talking about, especially in a, you know, in a comm strategy situation where, you know, you need to rethink the strategy. Okay, let's see what we've got first and then to let you decide what content you need to make. And, and it seems almost you know, almost like in pursuit of a very specific objective, which is really to understand where the holes in our game are or, you know, hey, we're saving, for example, we're saving money and we need to, you know, we need to put out X amount of content. And all right, I see that we have 47 legacy pieces already here. So that means that we only need to do seven this year. You know, something like that.

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Daniel Nestle: But what you're talking about with the comms audit, I believe is a little bit more extensive and certainly, you know, more valuable to these, to larger organizations especially. So walk us through this, like, what is the comms audit? You know, and where do you implement it? What is it? And what. What are the prime steps? And, and, you know, educate us.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Sure, yeah. This is one of my favorite things to talk about because they're so fun as a consultant who gets to go in and do a deep dive into, you know, communication practices of an organization and finding out what, you know, what people expect. And so communication overall and the type that I do is a very extensive look at an organization and how they communicate and how their stakeholders want to receive information and so, you know, we start out by talking to the client about what are they expecting to hear in this communication audit. And so there can, they could come to us for different reasons.

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Lynn Zimmerman: I've had clients come to us as, you know, they're just a growing company and they're recognizing that the way the company has been organized in the past and how they've communicated in the past is just not working anymore because, you know, they were organized by region. And so they're, you know, each region was getting different information or hearing the information in different ways. And so they realized they need to centralize how they communicate. And so, you know, went in with that perspective and the questions we asked were, we're looking at that.

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Lynn Zimmerman: I've had other companies come to me and they were going through a merger and so they were trying to identify, you know, what are the best channels that they should keep, you know, what are the practices that each of the companies that were merging, what they did and what was the most successful way to communicate. And so, you know, we always go in with kind of an idea of what we're trying to hear, but then it turns into something more than that because, you know, we're the ways we get information and do the research is we do one one conversations with leaders and other key people in the organization.

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Lynn Zimmerman: We do focus groups with, you know, different groups of employees to hear about what, how they like to receive information and what they think is important and you know, how they feel, you know, do they feel left out of some communications or do they feel like they're getting too much information or not enough of certain topics. And we do surveys again, asking people to tell us what's important to them, what type of information is important to them and you know, how they like to receive it. And we take all of that and then we also review, you know, communication. So we'll take a look at, you know, things that have been sent out over the last year.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And most of the audits that I've done have focused on internal practices, but we, I also have done social media and external and so talk to reporters and talk to customers and things like that. So again, what, knowing what the client or, you know, what you're trying to get out of an audit is a very big first step in deciding what you're going to look at. Because you could look this, you could go on for years doing all sorts of research and normally, you know, you want to get the results in a few months. So having a distinct Perspective of what you're looking at is an important thing. But you know, through these audits you also start to hear about culture issues.

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Lynn Zimmerman: You hear about, you know, things that frustrate employees that aren't necessarily communication, but it's important for the leaders to know and, you know, for people to understand. And so the reports become this, you know, almost a bible of, you know, I, I know I have one client that we did an audit a couple years ago and she still carries around the report in her work bag because it has so much information that helps her think about how to better communicate with her employees. And so, and you know, we try the biggest thing that when you're doing an audit like this, getting buy in from leaders is so important because if the leadership isn't on board, you're not going to have access to the people you need to talk to.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And so when we have done audits with companies, it's, you know, we always make sure there's an executive sponsor, somebody who can pull the strings and make sure that the leadership supports it. And because, you know, getting access to pull frontline workers off of the line for an hour to do a focus group, massive. That is a hard sell. Yeah, yeah. And so things like that. And, and then once you start having conversations with the leaders, because again, we're trying to talk to leaders as well, they're much more open and you know, they understand what we're trying to accomplish and so they want to help because they know it's going to help them do better.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And you know, say the report itself, in this final report, once you pull together all of the information, it's, it's kind of fun to see the leaders go, oh, we knew this. We, you know, we recognize this was a problem, but now you've put it in writing and so we have to fix it now.

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Daniel Nestle: It exists. You've written it down.

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Lynn Zimmerman: It's like somebody from the outside has seen this.

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Daniel Nestle: It's, it's like, you know, I've seen a lot of pitches and a lot of projects start with, okay, we're going to start with an audit. We're going to do an audit. And you know, as you were talking, I was thinking, no, actually what they're saying is inventory, we're going to do an inventory, which is a lot different. You're talking about discovery more.

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Lynn Zimmerman: It's research.

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Daniel Nestle: Research.

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Lynn Zimmerman: It is a research project and it's extensive, you know, and you can do audits. I, you know, I talk to my clients about like doing little pulse audits, you know, taking a look at, you know, having regular check ins with an executive doing, you know, mini focus groups or listening sessions so you can hear things. But you know, if you really want to get a 360 degree view of your organization and your communication practices and it's going to help identify what's working, what's not. You know, you may be spending, you know, 40 staff hours a week on a company newsletter and then you hear in a survey or in a focus group that nobody reads it past, you know, the first article because they, it's too long, they don't and the information isn't all that important to them.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And so, you know, it's, it is an investment to do a full communication audit. It's, it's not. And it's not an inexpensive thing to do and it's not, it takes time to do it and it's hard to do internally. I always have people ask me, can we do it in house? Yes, you can. But the benefit, and this is not a sales pitch, this is just holistically, it takes time. And so being able to do 20 executive interviews and to do, you know, 30 focus groups again while trying to do your day job is a hard thing to do. And you're, it's going to take you so much more time to do it. Plus people are more willing to open up to an outside person. You know, I have no bias. I'm, I'm just somebody who's there to listen and ask questions.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And, and so.

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Daniel Nestle: Or they're scared.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Well, yeah. And you know, it is, it's weird when you have, you know, if you're a manager of internal comms and you're talking to the CEO of the company, are you going to be comfortable asking them, you know, what's something that you've done that you wish you had done differently? You know.

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Daniel Nestle: Right.

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Lynn Zimmerman: That's a tough question to ask.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, you need, you almost have to think of it as, you know, look, auditors have, get a bad rap in many, like in many areas, especially when they're accounting related, sometimes deservedly so because it's very painful to go through those kinds of like accounting related audits, financial audits. People get defensive. You know, there's, you can't remember what you did, what this receipt was for six years ago. Oh, I meant to fill out the form, you know, whatever it is. And you always think that every step is going to get you in trouble. But I imagine that framing the Comms audit in the way that you do it. You know, the outcomes are expected to be quite different than that. You know, it's. It's.

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Daniel Nestle: It's an improvement process or an enhancement or, you know, what are the general kind of rationale for that you've actually completed the audits for, you know, and whether it's. Whether it's to just get an accurate picture of what's happening or is it for cutting purposes or for enhancement purposes or.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Or.

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Daniel Nestle: I don't mean to lead the witness. What. What is it?

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Lynn Zimmerman: Yeah, no, I think it's. It's all of those things, and it's. It's, you know, if you're a new communications leader who just took over this role, you know, sometimes you come into something and you're like, whoa, I. I don't. I can see there's a problem, but I can't quite figure out what's happening. You know, maybe you have a part of the organization where you're losing team members. You know, that your turnover rate is much higher, and there's. There may be some sort of communication issue or if you're, you know, if you've had a lot of change. So if you've had, you know, three CEOs in the last five years, it's good to ask people what. What's important to you to know, because there's so much uncertainty and instability in that organization. It may be that you're trying to justify a new headcount by.

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Lynn Zimmerman: By saying, you know, we just can't do all of these things that the organization needs because we're understaffed. And so, you know, there's. There's a lot of different reasons why you might want to do one.

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Daniel Nestle: Do you ever come to loggerheads or. And have any issues with, like, with HR or with some of the other teams that you know, that an audit might conceivably encroach on there.

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Lynn Zimmerman: You know, I. I say there's a lot of things you can expect to hear from an audit. And, you know, there's. You're gonna find out what's working, what's not. You're gonna find out what people like to hear, what they want to hear, but you're also going to get some unexpected things, and you're going to hear some things that you probably don't want to hear, but you need to hear. And so, yeah, the. You know, my experience is that when employees are given the opportunity to share their opinions and talk about things that are important to them, they're going to take it. And so, you know, not. It's not just going to be about communication. It's going to be about other things, you know, and so we may hear some things about different departments.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And, you know, I'm going to share that because if I hear. Even though it's not within our scope, I think it's important, you know, it's. It's part of the overall employee experience, is part of the culture. And so, you know, so, yeah, we let them know. You're going to hear some things that are hard. I had to tell one client that people hated the Internet that she had spent two years building.

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Daniel Nestle: Oh, gosh.

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Lynn Zimmerman: You know, and so it's hard. It's very hard to hear.

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Daniel Nestle: Nobody likes the negative. What do you call it? The, the. The black hat, the. The naysayer, the person who's the cynic all the time, you know, you, the complainer. And by. It's almost like you're. You're outsourcing it to a singular audit. So, like, look, don't shoot the messenger. These are all the things we found and, you know, the positives and the not so positives as well. And more organizations should actually do that. Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And we try to frame it as, you know, here's what you can do. It's not like I'm just going to come in and say, your Internet sucks. Yeah. We are going to go in and we're going to say, here's something. Here are the things that people found challenging about your Internet because we know, and we all know that you can't change things overnight, you know, and we try to say, here are some quick wins for you so that you can, you know, the leadership team that approved the additional budget and, you know, they're wanting to hear the results. It's like, well, here's a few things that you can tell them.

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Lynn Zimmerman: You know, we're doing this right away because my, all of my clients are like, we go into meetings with executives and we're like, you know, based on the results from the communication audit, we have decided we're going to do this and this. And they use it, and they continue to use it, you know, for a long time after is complete to say, this is why we're doing these things. And it gives them so much more ability to get things approved because they can say, well, we have this research. It shows us that we need to do these things.

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Daniel Nestle: We're defensible and valid. And, you know, it's one thing a lot of comms People do struggle with because, you know, they'll come up with ideas. And by they, I mean me. I mean, it's happened before, but, you know, you come up with ideas and you bring it to the leadership team and it gets into, you know, well, you know, deprioritize that we're not doing that this year, or, you know, we gotta not, you know, but you. And you know that's the right thing to do. However, you don't have the body of knowledge upon which to base your, you know, your suggestion or your recommendation. And then you run into things like, look, we've done various surveys internally. It's, you know, where it's not packaged as part of an entire, like, cohesive audit per se, but you do. You do a survey. You.

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Daniel Nestle: You pull information from the employee satisfaction survey, you run these different things and you have this data that says, look, listen, everybody hates workplace. They hate it. Nobody likes it. It's too noisy. It's this and that. Of course, you don't. You don't want to list it like a litany of. Of of grievances. You know, it's not Festivus. Every time you walk into the, into the leadership meetings, it's. But you do want to kind of point out that there is a source of satis. Of dissatisfaction with the employee experience every day. And, you know, it should be remedied. But then, you know, if you didn't talk to the folks who were responsible for purchasing and. And contracting workplace, you know, then you run into potentially those folks getting a little bit upset with you, to say the least. You know, just like, wait a second.

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Daniel Nestle: Wait, wait, wait. Who's. Where's this coming from? Why is this happening? We all agreed to this and that it's this big of an investment. They're just using it wrong, you know, which is usually end up where it ends up going. Oh, they're just using it wrong, or we need to do more education about how to use it properly or something like this and doubling down and tripling down. All of which. Some of which are good. Are good results, though.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Yeah, yeah. And. And sometimes that is, you know, you. You hear something negative and, you know, then you take it to the. The owner of, you know, whatever the negative thing was. And you know, it's not necessarily. We have to just delete it. You know, it is. It could be. We need to do better, more training on this. You know, we. During COVID we had to launch this really fast and just people kind of learned on the Fly. And now they're realizing that they don't know how exactly, you know, it' kind of learned on their own. And so they didn't have they don't have the best practices of things that they can do. And so, you know, sometimes there is an easy solution or a non, you know, blow it all up and start over again type solution.

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Lynn Zimmerman: But it is the point of, at least from my perspective, the report on the audit results should really have, you know, it's got the reality, but it also has here's what it could be. And so, you know, taking that, here's what we heard, here are themes, here are the findings. But there are solutions to all of these things. Some of them are long term, you know, you can't fix an intranet tomorrow. But it's like, let's start looking at ways we can make it easier for employees to use. And then, you know, long term, we might think about a new solution. But, you know, it's like, what are the small steps that we can take that of things that we've learned from this audit and how can we make some progress right away?

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Lynn Zimmerman: And I think one of the things that I love to do with the audit results is take actual quotes from what I hear. So I record and this is getting to your, you know, the AI part of the conversation.

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Daniel Nestle: Oh, I was going to get there, but thank you for taking us there because we're, it's required.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Yes, I was prepared, but we, I record all of the conversations. I use Otter AI and the tools that it has, the AI tools that it has. I can go in and, you know, I was in the conversation, so I have a pretty good idea what the key themes were. But I can ask it, you know, what are themes you heard from all of these conversations and have it, you know, pull those out. And then once I've figured out what themes are that we're going to report back, then I can say, okay, I want quotes from employees in this group. And so I can, you know, in the frontline employees, I want quotes about theme A. Can you pull 10 of them for me?

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Lynn Zimmerman: And so then it tells me and I go back and I confirm, you know, I make sure that it's telling me what the person actually said. But I can then put in the report an actual quote from an employee. And we don't identify the employees, but we say, you know, this is a frontline employee in the northeast region. And so the people reading the report can see where our recommendation is coming from and you know, have an actual person within their organization who said it. And it makes the report really strong and, you know, it helps tell the story of why we're trying to do, to make these changes and why we're trying to do what we're doing.

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Daniel Nestle: It's interesting talking about AI as it pertains to the work that you do and how things are changing. Just transformation, change, transformation, change. It's like AI itself is a massive transformation or kind of enabling a big transformation that we don't even know where it's going to go. And the audit, the act of discovery, the discovery process, understanding the AS is kind of where we are and what it means. A lot of that has to be human intel, right? It just has to be person to person discussions, et cetera. But the AI part of this, I think, as you've just mentioned, is enhancement. It's the ability to take all of that information and process it in ways that the single human or even the team of humans who are combing through data might miss. Right. Or it can speed up the process a little bit.

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Daniel Nestle: But I wouldn't remove the humans from that at all. It's just an additional point, an additional great data point.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Enhancement is the best word for that because it does. I usually work with a team when I do these audits because it is a lot of information to collect in a short period of time usually. And you know, we have conversations about, here's what we're hearing, you know, so we're keeping a running list as we go along and we're kind of formulating our themes and you know, all throughout. But the addition of AI to the process has made it better because it pulls out some things that we might have heard. But because there was something else that was a little bit bigger, we may have overlooked that. And then, you know, AI will say, well, I heard this. And we'll go back and look through the transcripts and review it and decide whether or not it is an important part to recognize.

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Lynn Zimmerman: But it does help us, you know, it's kind of a second brain. It helps us see things that we may have overlooked in the initial process. It also helps, you know, from a change perspective. If I'm doing a change program, I'll often go in and, you know, as I'm starting to put together my list of stakeholders, I'll ask it, here's the stakeholders that I'm thinking, am I missing anybody? Because, you know, in a generic sort of way. But it'll sometimes say here's another group that you should be thinking about who might be affected by this.

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Daniel Nestle: At the very least, it's a second brain. You know, when I think about everything that you're dealing with an audit, I mean certainly with an audit, I mean with a large organization especially, you know, it sounds like the process that you've kind of put together is very well suited for like medium to large organizations especially. Right. And organizations with a longer history of communications. Although I will ask you or about how small organizations can take advantage of this as well in a moment. But that's a tremendous body of information that you have to gather. And I've been really bullish on things like Notebook LM recently, you know, and when this airs, it's probably going to be, you know, sometime in March or April, but I, you know, of 2025.

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Daniel Nestle: But I, I think that it's only going to get more I think relevant to our work. The things that you can do with, you know, creating your own instances of, you know, what's, I guess what's called a, a retrieval augmented generation rag instance of AI where you build your own little database and that's what you get the answers from in a safe and secure environment. And adding all of your research from a particular audit into a notebook, for example, gives you new ways to plumb the data and new ways to explore or to validate your thinking or come up with other examples. I mean, this is just one thing that can make the value offering even greater. Right. And it's useless without the people to pilot it. Right. You absolutely have to have the insights experience to do it.

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Daniel Nestle: Now with that, I mean, it's clear that, you know, at least certainly on the show we always talk about the future and how things are changing and what the effect of AI is going to be on this, on your particular work. And you're, you know, we're already talking about that a little bit with respect to, you know, change management and audits. I mean, how do you see that kind of evolving now with, in addition to what we already mentioned, this kind of enhancement part, you know, and it doesn't have to be just AI. Like how do you see this whole thing changing as AI and other technologies force change upon our profession?

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Lynn Zimmerman: Well, you know, one of the things, one of my favorite questions to ask AI is what am I not asking you? And gives me a list of things that I should be asking about whatever we're talking about. And so from a change perspective, it's, you know, what are the pitfalls that I'm missing? What are the. Who, you know, who might be able to derail this change? Because, you know, what groups should I be looking out for? And it's mainly in a general sense, but it's, you know, it does help kind of get the wheels turning on. Who else do I need to be thinking about or what else should we be doing to, you know, create the momentum to move the change forward as opposed to, you know, stopping us in our tracks, for sure. And so, you know, there's.

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Lynn Zimmerman: There's so much opportunity to use AI in change and help make change more successful. I think, you know, from a future standpoint, I think change needs to change.

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Daniel Nestle: We're doubling down on the transformation's not going away ever.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And because change is not going away, and I don't really like the whole change is constant, you know, that's. That's not how change works. Change needs to have a start, middle and end, or else you're just creating chaos within your organization and uncertainty. And people are not going to feel comfortable. They're. They're going to be, you know, very negative toward anything you ask them to do. And so we need to remember that. But I do think there is, and I think about it a lot, and I don't have a solution yet. So if anybody has ideas, I'd love to have a conversation about it. But, you know, how do we create. How did the internal communication team create a state where people are more prepared for change? And so it is. We're not starting from the beginning every single time.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And so I feel like there is an opportunity for internal comms teams to have, you know, more discussion around stakeholders, around the characteristics of their stakeholders and desired behaviors, you know, in a general sense. So that when you come to a change, you know, and maybe it's just the characteristics, you know, we know this group is going to be resistant to anything we throw at them or. And we know this other group is going to be really helpful with change because they're ready to, you know, tackle a new project at any time. And so I feel like the internal communicators can kind of facilitate that. It's also them really pushing leadership to talk about their vision and the mission and the values of the company and really live those and show that they're real.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Because if you, if that's an everyday occurrence, if you see the leaders, you know, if your value is teamwork and you see the Leaders actually modeling that behavior, then you know, that's a natural thing, you know, companies know that's what we should expect from our leaders and that's how we should act as employees. Because if you only pull your values out when you're going through a major change, then it's going to confuse people. Or if you throw away your values when you announce a major change, they're going to see that as well and they're not going to believe you. So, you know, that's where I see internal comms has a really big role in change, is making sure that those company values are lived and that they're understood and that people know the vision of the company, what we're trying to accomplish.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And so when a change is announced, then they say, oh well, this is helping us meet our vision because it's going to give us a technology that makes this one part of our job easier to do.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, it's one of those things where we have to take the learnings of the knowledge that we've accrued to this point and double down on it a little bit more moving forward. If change is going to happen more often, then it's more important, not less, for the leaders to be human. It's more important, not less for the leaders to live, to walk the walk and to be whatever their corporate values are, whatever their values are, have to be aligned with their company's values. Those gaps are only going to be exposed faster and faster as we move forward into this kind of ever changing future or world that we're as we continue with this ever changing world. And I agree with you on this whole. Change is the only constant.

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Daniel Nestle: I've said it many times, I think, probably because it's a thing to say, but now that you kind of mentioned it in a certain way, I'm thinking if change is a constant, that's just chaos. And that's the definition of chaos, isn't it? Where you don't know what's going to happen next. We need to veer away from that. And a good kind of grounded internal comms function is one way to do that into the future. I don't think that's going to change much. I did want to ask you know, before we kind of wind down here about the, you know, the what communicators and, or people who run smaller companies need to be doing or how they can really pay attention to the value of an audit and you know, how they can even conduct some of it themselves.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, on a more regular basis. And if you think this is a softball handoff for you to talk about your toolkit, it is. So you've come up with a great toolkit, and I want everybody to hear about it, and I will put it in the show notes, but please, thank you.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Yeah. So I think, you know, when I talk to startup founders and small business owners, I talk to them about their. Their core values. I think that is the most important part of a company is saying, this is who we are, and this is how these are the things that lead us as a company and then to actually, you know, model those values. And so, you know, from. And then start thinking about communication before you're too big. You know, because it's so easy when you're a small company or a startup, you have five, 10 employees. You know, I can just walk out of my office and talk to employees or get on a zoom call, you know, with the whole company, and we can communicate in that way.

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Lynn Zimmerman: But once you start getting a larger number of employees, it's like you need to have a way to communicate with those folks and help them understand what the company is trying to accomplish. And so, you know, I think again, start. Start thinking about it before you're too big. And if you're already too big, now's the time to start thinking about it for sure. It's never too late. And really, yeah, it's like, it doesn't mean you can't have a communication program, but it's time to get one in place so that, you know, employees are informed and that they're all working toward the same goals as the company. And so, you know, looking at, from an audit perspective, maybe you don't bring in a consultant, you don't bring in a team of people, but you can go in, you can talk to employees.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And that's this toolkit that I've put together. You know, I've given some ideas for kind of Pulse Audit ideas. So talking to leaders and having a set, you know, when I do an audit, I always have a script. And so every leader I talk to, we ask them the same questions. And so for this Pulse audit, you know, have a list of questions that you're always asking leaders. You know, what is an example of a communication that they thought didn't go as well? What is an example of a communication that they think went really well? And it could be, you know, you could be asking them about, you know, this doesn't have to be within our company. You know, have you seen another communication that you think was very well executed.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And so, you know, asking them the same questions over and over again over time you're going to see trends. And so doing that quarterly, you know, every six months, whatever, but having a cadence that you're using to talk with them. You can also do listening sessions with employees. Again, have a script and again, you know, create a dashboard. Create something that you can follow the trends, but ask employees, you know, how, what information is important to them, how do they like to receive that information? Again, do you feel like you're getting enough information about the bonus program or you know, so ask. But having again, a specific set of questions that you're asking also, you know, taking a, a look at everything that you're doing. So you know, make a. I love, I love sticky notes. I am a sticky note person.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And so, you know, put every channel on a sticky note. And then, you know, have map it out, you know, say this communication, it goes to all of these employees, you know, but then you might say, oh, but our frontline workers aren't getting this. And you know, you can, if you map it out, you know, make a visual representation of your communication channels and the things that you're producing, you're going to start to see we've got a big gap here.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And you know, and taking a look at what kind of information is being sent out through those different channels. And so there are things that you can do that aren't, you know, very big time consuming. Things that you can do quickly to kind of get a better idea of how your communications are working and what you need to start doing in order to fill those gaps.

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Daniel Nestle: It's all about, it's all about calm self awareness in a lot of ways. Right. Like how.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Yes.

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Daniel Nestle: Do you know what your team's doing right and wrong. And like anybody really should kind of try to get a grasp of that I would say if they want to succeed in the future.

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Lynn Zimmerman: It's, you know, in the defense of internal, calm comms folks, it's, they're busy. These people are way too busy. And you know, it's a absolutely. Traditionally underfunded, we're understaffed. And so even adding some of those things are hard. But if you can make the time to do those things, it will help you create a stronger case for doing something new.

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Daniel Nestle: It's a good case for partnership across the organization as well. Like, you know, research companies do omnibus surveys all the time. You know, what about latching onto an HR survey or latching onto you know, a poll that it is putting out or something like this. You know, there's no reason why things have to be so siloed all the time. You know, people can think in multiple ways at once.

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Lynn Zimmerman: And we have so many tools available to us now. You know, most companies have an Internet of some sort, and most of those Internet tools have a way to pull, you know, you can just do a simple pulse survey. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of different ways to get information, and we probably almost have too much data now. Well, yeah, for sure, in some ways.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, that's where AI can come in and help you parse it. But we'll talk about that another time. So, so look, I will link to the toolkit in the show notes for this episode. Otherwise. Lynn, is there anything else that we didn't cover that you just like anything that you want to mention to our listeners here before we say farewell?

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Lynn Zimmerman: I think we have covered a lot of information and, you know, I, I love talking about this stuff. So like I said before, you know, if anybody has thoughts on the change of change, I love those conversations. And, you know, what can we do as professional communicators to, you know, it's all about the employees and all about the stakeholders who are going through those things. And so we need to really keep those people in mind as we're evolving and changing in our companies.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, well, look, you heard it here, folks. Change of change, that is, I think that's a watchword for us moving forward as a profession. Instead of saying change is constant, blah, blah. I think it's about just recognizing that we have to cope with change and get ahead of it and understand that, you know, every change is a fixed change followed by another change. It's not constant in the sense that we're in the middle of a big change and it's never going to end. But you can expect more changes on the horizon. And I hope that the trending communicator can certainly help us all understand what those changes are. But today, I really love this, getting into this whole idea of a kind of slightly different way to look at employee communications and treating the employees as a very key stakeholder group.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, there are some wonderful people who've been on the show and will be on the show talking about employees as a public and employees as a core constituency. But the role that we all play and that they play in change is absolutely worth digging further into. And if you want to dig further into it, please do look up Lynn Zimmerman. Her name will be spelled properly in the episode title, but it's spelled like it Sounds and on LinkedIn. And check out her website. It is Swing strategic communication. So it's swingstrategic. Com c o m.com and you'll find out more about Lynn there.

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Daniel Nestle: Certainly her LinkedIn is very active and please do reach out to her, connect with her and again check out the toolkit which will be in the show notes and I'm sure Lynn will post it to her LinkedIn at some point or you know, share it with you if you ask. So yeah, Lynn, thanks so much. This has been fantastic. I really appreciate you being here.

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Lynn Zimmerman: Thank you for having me. It's been fun.

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Daniel Nestle: Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's Conversation Station. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator.