How can we support employees living with cancer?
By Sally Pritchett
CEO
One in two people will face a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. This means cancer is likely to impact us all at some point – whether we receive a diagnosis or know someone facing cancer.
In the UK alone, 890,000 working-age people are living with cancer, and around 700,000 are balancing work while caring for a loved one with the disease. However, half of those living with cancer are afraid to tell their employers and over a third feel isolated at work during their cancer journey.
At such a difficult time, people should feel supported by their employers and colleagues – not afraid to share their diagnosis and left feeling like they aren’t receiving the support and flexibility they need.
Joined by Lindsay Bridges, Global Head of HR at DHL Supply Chain and Anna Dunn, Associate at Working With Cancer, our CEO, Sally Pritchett, started an honest and insightful conversation about how we can better support employees living with cancer.
What common challenges do those living with cancer face in the workplace?
One of the biggest challenges around cancer is the misunderstanding it creates, both for the person facing it and their employer. Until someone experiences diagnosis and treatment, it’s hard to know what recovery will be like. Cancer recovery isn’t linear – everyone responds in their own way and with different emotions. Understanding this can help create a more supportive and empathetic environment for those going through diagnosis, treatment and recovery.
What can employers do to better support employees facing cancer?
Understand that everyone’s situation is different
Cancer recovery isn’t the same for everyone. People with similar diagnoses can still experience very different emotions, treatments and challenges. This makes having a standard ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy difficult.
While it’s important to have a workplace policy, employers should also guide colleagues on who they can talk to and what processes are in place, and provide flexibility to meet each individual’s needs. Offering a clear, open line of communication can help reduce stress and create a supportive environment during an already challenging time.
Give your managers clear guidance
Equip line managers with the tools and information they need to confidently support team members facing a cancer diagnosis. Clarify what support your company provides, let them know their role in supporting the employee (versus the responsibilities of HR) and provide helpful resources. This not only ensures employees receive the support they need, but also helps them feel less like a burden, knowing managers are prepared to offer the right support.
Consider creating a guide for managers or running training sessions to help line managers within your company feel more confident handling these sensitive situations.
Support employees with their return to work
After cancer treatment ends, many people face a new set of emotions – loss of identity, a lack of confidence and fear of recurrence. While they may want to return to normality, navigating these feelings can be tough, and added pressure from employers can make it harder. Compassion and open communication are key during the return-to-work period.
When discussing an employee’s return to work, it’s important to ask how they’re feeling and what feels right for them. Let them lead the conversation so they can be honest about what feels right for them. Just like treatment, the post-treatment phase is not the same for all. A phased return to work period of at least 12 weeks can help employees ease themselves back into work and rebuild their routine without feeling overworked or overwhelmed.
How can employees better support their colleagues who are facing cancer?
Give people control
When someone is facing cancer, they may feel a loss of control. Asking how they’d like to discuss their diagnosis and treatment – or if they want to talk about it at all – can help them regain some control by setting their own boundaries. It’s important to respect their wishes and follow their lead on how open they want to be.
This conversation should continue after treatment too, so you can continue supporting them in the right way for them. Asking simple questions like “How’s your health?” allows someone to choose how much they want to share and whether they want to discuss their cancer moving forward.
Treat your colleagues as you normally would
Cancer doesn’t define a person, and many may not want to be seen only through that lens. Treat your colleagues as you normally would, while being mindful of their needs and how they’ve said they’d like to talk about their cancer.
A quick call or message to check in can mean a lot, but remember – there’s more to their life than cancer. Keep conversations balanced, acknowledging their interests and experiences beyond their diagnosis, so they continue to feel recognised for who they are beyond their diagnosis.
Think about what you say
It’s normal to feel unsure about what to say to someone facing cancer. A simple acknowledgement, like ‘I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry,’ can be enough. Avoid making assumptions about their journey or suggesting treatments, as everyone’s experience is unique.
Let the language that they use guide you – some people may feel empowered by using language like ‘battling’ or ‘fighting’ cancer, while others might prefer to say they are ‘living with cancer’. Respect their chosen language and be sure to support them in a way that feels right for them.
Advice for colleagues and employers who want to better support those living with cancer
There are lots of amazing resources available to help you better support someone living and working with cancer. Charities like Macmillan offer online communities and advice specifically for those supporting a loved one, friend or colleague through their cancer journey. Organisations like Working With Cancer can help employers and employees, employers to manage cancer and work.
For employers, offering training about cancer recovery can help teams better understand what someone may be experiencing. This awareness helps them offer more compassionate and informed support, creating a more understanding, supportive and empathetic work environment for everyone involved.
If you want to make your workplace fairer, healthier and happier by better supporting your employees living with cancer, we can help. Get in touch to find out how we can help you educate your workforce and create a culture of care and support.
Tune in: Supporting employees living with cancer
How communication overload is slowing organisations down (and how to fix it)
By Sally Pritchett
CEO
As passionate communications experts we love communication….when it’s effective. The problem is too often we’re communicating too much and instead of helping it’s hindering.
We all know how it feels to be constantly swimming against the tide, trying to keep up with an ever-increasing avalanche of emails, notifications and messages, flicking between channels and getting distracted by notifications pinging on multiple devices around us. This constant influx of communication is forcing us to multitask, distracting our concentration, preventing us from getting into productive flow states, and preventing us from achieving important tasks.
Has hybrid working made this worse? Possibly. While very few people are missing the busy, noisy and distracting environments of the pre-pandemic open-plan office, today’s equivalent is perhaps the increased instant messaging platforms pinging away. Sure, we can turn off notifications, but it doesn’t stop our colleagues having questions.
On top of simply not harming productivity, this communications overload is also impacting mental wellbeing, stressing employees out when they feel they can’t keep up no matter how hard they try, and creating a sense of dread that they’re missing important messages and tasks that get buried in the noise.
As professional communicators driven by making a meaningful difference, we want to help the organisations around us. Here’s what we believe are the main culprits are along with our tips for reducing the communications overwhelm.
Too many channels
It’s great that technology blesses us with better channels all the time, but we must be careful to ensure that these new channels aren’t just adding to the noise. Part of the communications overwhelm is purely maintaining and checking so many difference channels.
Our tip: Be brave and don’t be afraid to close channels down.
From closing X and Facebook accounts to turning off internal channels like Yammer or WhatsApp. Question if another existing channel could serve the same purpose.
Poor use of channels
“Email as become a counter-productivity tool” Justin Rosentein, ex-Facebook and co-founder of Asana
If you’ve ever experienced a school parent WhatsApp group when a child loses its blazer, or have been part of a ‘Reply all’ email frenzy, you’ll appreciate how quickly poor communication can do its damage. Unfortunately, poor communications etiquette is common practice in organisations because it’s rare that anyone has been shown how to communicate better. Like leadership skills, there’s an assumption that subject matter experts automatically know how to communicate effectively.
Our tip: Provide effective communications guidance to employees
Help employees to choose the right channel, understand the anatomy of an effective piece of communication and how to use AI tools effectively.
Whilst email isn’t quite dead yet, it is time to reset the way we use it. Email should be limited to 1:2:1 conversation or used as an ‘inform’ broadcast channel only.
Too much collaboration
Yes, we did just say that. It’s obviously great to involve people, engaging stakeholders on the journey is critical to success, but that doesn’t mean cc’ing the whole company every time there’s an update or getting feedback at every stage.
Whether we blame modern matrix management, shifting leadership styles or anxiety over making decisions, there’s no doubt that organisational decision making is slowing down and getting more complex.
Our tip: Increase clarity where possible
Be clear on roles, responsibilities and RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). One of the most common reasons for looping in too many colleagues is not being sure who needs to know what, being clear on this can help reduce communications overwhelm.
Poor personal leadership
When we think leadership, we often look to the top of the organisation, but everyone can take responsibility for stepping up personal leadership within their roles and this extends to being concise and considerate in their communications.
Our tip: Empower champions
We can’t all absorb every topic all the time, divvying up projects, workstreams or topic themes provides a great way to funnel communications through individuals so they can filter and share updates when appropriate, reducing the constant overload.
‘Always on’ communications
With hybrid working came many flexibility benefits including a blurring of the general 9-5.30 workday, the challenge this brought for many is a culture of ‘always on’ communication which has added to the feeling of overwhelm.
Our tip: Set the ground rules around the ‘right to switch off’
While for some the ability to work outside of the usual workday helps flex around care responsibilities or other responsibilities, it can add pressure to colleagues to feel always available. Be clear on expectations and the ‘right to switch off’ and increase awareness of ‘send later’ features.
As passionate communicators with experience in supporting large organisations with employee engagement, we’re keen to make sure communication helps drive innovation, builds relationships and enhances productivity. If you think over communications is slowing your organisations down and aren’t sure where to start book a call with us here.
30 practical strategies for creating effective and inclusive internal communications
By Sally Pritchett
CEO
In a noisy world filled with countless channels and constant ads, internal communication can feel overwhelming for many. Being an excellent, effective and inclusive internal communicator requires a lot of skill and expertise.
In this article, we’ll explore the key areas that make organisational communications more effective and inclusive.
5 strategies to reduce the volume of communication
There’s no doubt that in all organisations communication has become overwhelming and the larger the organisation the more overwhelming this can feel.
‘Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating’ Charlie Kaufman
While instant chat channels like Teams and Slack have helped speed up collaboration they’ve also added to the noise and duplication. Already struggling to keep up with the hundreds of daily emails, instant chat messages now mean we’re expecting employees to hold several conversations concurrently. And rather than speed up productivity this multi-tasking is slowing organisations down and impacting employee wellbeing as they fight to prioritise and keep on top of their workloads.
- Pledge to reduce duplication, making communication engaging and effective the first time prevents having to send it multiple times.
- Proactively segment audiences so you can personalise and increase relevancy.
- Increase self-serve information, letting audiences consume information when they’re ready.
- Give your channels a clear purpose, audience and content strategy so the right information is going through the right channels.
- Ditch the routine, if a newsletter is going out weekly because it always has and the deadline is driving the content, it’s time to ditch the deadline and publish on demand instead.
5 strategies to increase the clarity in your communication
There’s an irony to Blaise Pascal’s quote ‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter’ because, of course, we would have more time if we were consuming less communication. In organisational comms, one of the best things we can do is respect our workforce’s limited time.
- Work hard on your subject lines / headings, these are your headlines so think like a journalist.
- Use AI tools to keep your comms concise. AI can be great for getting started, but they can also be quite verbose. write prompts carefully and consider giving a challenging word count.
- Structure your comms thoughtfully: start by setting the topic, add depth in the middle, and end with a clear call to action.
- Reduce company jargon; it complicates communication, especially for newcomers or those in a hurry. Avoid acronyms when possible.
- Set word count limits. If you regularly publish newsletters or intranet articles, be clear on your limits and challenge yourself to stay within them.
5 strategies to increase accessibility in communications
The most creative communications in the world won’t be effective if they don’t enable people with different abilities to access them. All workforces will have employees with differences in visual, hearing, learning and cognitive processing as well as those with limited literacy proficiency.
In the UK, accessibility regulations have been in force for the public sector since 2018 ensuring comms tools like websites, mobile apps and intranets all follow accessibility guidelines. There are no regulations for organisational comms, but that doesn’t need to be a barrier for driving accessibility in your communications.
- Focus on readability, with the average reading age in the UK being 9 years old. Consider using tools like Hemmingway Editor to help simplify your communications.
- Format your text based on its intended use. As most content is consumed digitally, consider how it will be viewed and adjust accordingly. For example, if it’s likely to be read on a desktop screen, use a landscape layout instead of portrait..
- Ensure compatibility with screen readers, this means formatting your documents with consideration.
- Check your colour contrasts as employees with colour blindness may struggle with certain colours or contrasts.
- Get your typography right because font choices and sizes are crucial for making communications effective and accessible.
For a deeper read on accessible comms check out our recent blog or watch our webinar.
5 strategies to use imagery inclusively
The human brain typically processes images significantly faster than written text, making imagery a potential fast track to creating effective communication – when used correctly. Often, however, imagery is also used to break up text, fit existing templates or to make communication ‘look better’. This is where the challenge comes, forcing audiences to process images that add nothing to the overall purpose of the communication.
- Make sure images add to the content, try to avoid bland library shots that add no value.
- Try to avoid overly surreal images unless this is part of your brand identity.
- Authentic representation is vital. If you’re using library images, try adding prompts like ‘diverse’ or specific attributes to result in a wider selection.
- Aim for a balanced representation of people over time to avoid bias towards certain parts of your workforce or reinforcing stereotypes.
- Consider using animation or illustration to provide more options if authentic or appropriate photography isn’t available.
5 strategies to making your communications more audience centric
While it may seem obvious, it’s easy to focus on your own priorities and accidentally overlook how your audience will perceive your communications.
- Consider different job roles and aim to make communications resonate with the frontline. Before sending or approving, put yourself in your audience’s shoes to make improvements.
- Workplaces are diverse with cultural nuances, avoid idioms or complex expressions that could hinder inclusion.
- There are up to five generations in the workforce for the first time, stop and think how communications could be perceived by different ages of your workforce.
- Using audience insights is critical for your messaging to resonate. If the organisation is struggling due to challenging times, staff shortages, or seasonal peaks, ignoring this in your communications can alienate your audience. Instead, acknowledge the organisation’s current situation and ensure your communications are appropriately positioned.
- Stay attuned to how your audience responds, including their preferred channels, formats, and language, to maintain effective communication.
Tiny wording tweaks like replacing ‘lunch breaks’ with ‘rest breaks’ can make more difference than you think if your front line includes out of hours or night shift workers.
For a deeper exploration on embracing multi-generational workforces, check out our webinar.
5 strategies for building trust in your communications
Effective communication is not about saying what you want to say correctly but enabling it to be heard correctly. To inspire action from your audiences, trust and believability play a huge part.
‘The idea is to write so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart’ Maya Angelou
- Consistency is key to building trust. Whether guiding the workforce through a complex transformation or engaging them in a new strategy, keep a consistent dialogue on rationale and goals.
- Tone of voice should be authentic, open, honest and human to be believable.
- Avoid vague phrases, if there’s important information, share the facts openly.
- Don’t ignore difficult topics: if there’s a question on the workforce’s mind, address it directly. Avoiding it won’t make it go away; it just reduces trust.
- Provide feedback loops and create psychologically safe opportunities for audiences to share concerns, questions, or feedback.
Top tip: To ensure you comms are human, read them out loud, if you sound like a robot you probably need to create a warmer, more conversational tone.’
How would your audiences answer?
Employees go through a mental checklist when receiving communications. Their response – whether, how quickly, and how they engage – depends on how they answer these questions:
- Is this aimed at me?
- Is this relevant to me?
- Do I trust this?
- How do I feel about who this is from?
- Do I care about this enough to prioritise it?
- Do I understand what this is about, or does it require me to stop and think?
- Is it clear what action is expected of me?
- Is there a clear deadline for responding or actioning?
Bringing the value of creativity
As passionate communicators with experience in supporting large organizations and hard-to-reach frontline audiences, we use creativity to simplify messaging, bring stories to life, and inspire action.
Want to find out more? Book a call with us here.