Mind How You Talk About Your Own People

A housing association posted recently about the work it had done for tenants during the heatwave, and the work itself was genuinely good. They carried out wellbeing visits to 240 sheltered housing tenants identified as among their most vulnerable. They made 140 courtesy phone calls to people with recorded vulnerabilities to check they were safe and supported. They texted all tenants with advice on staying hydrated, keeping cool, checking on neighbours and seeking help if they needed it.

Then, in the same list, came this: they reminded contractors to follow health and safety guidance while working in extreme temperatures. And finally, they shared wellbeing reminders with staff.

Read that list quickly and it looks like an organisation doing the right thing in a difficult week, which it was. But everyone I know in comms hit the contractors line and felt their eyebrow go up. It took a second to work out why, so let me explain it, because the lesson is bigger than one post. Look at the verbs.

Tenants were visited, called, cared for. Staff were supported with reminders. Contractors were reminded to follow guidance. The tenants and staff are people the organisation is looking after. The contractors, in that one sentence, become people the organisation is managing without a great deal of care or thought.

Out in extreme heat, on the same sites, doing physical work, and the framing is not "we made sure the people working in this dangerous heat were safe," it is "we reminded them of the rules."

One is care. The other is a caveat. Here is the part that fascinates me. If a journalist had written that exact list, or if a tenant had posted it, it would have read as praise from start to finish. The same facts, the same contractors line, no eyebrow. The problem only appears because the organisation is talking about its own people.

When you are the author, every sentence is a small statement about how you see the people in your world, and the reader feels that whether they could name it or not. This happens far more often than anyone intends. A council thanks its hard-working staff in one paragraph and refers to managing performance in the next.

A charity celebrates the people it helps, then describes its volunteers as a valuable resource, as if they were a supply rather than a crowd of humans giving up their Saturdays. Nobody means anything by it. The tell is always the same, though. There is a warmth in how we describe the people we are proud of, and a flatness, a slight distance, in how we describe the people we are handling. And the gap between the two shows.

The reason this sits under internal communications, as well as social media, is that your own people read this content too. It informs your culture. The contractors saw that post. The staff saw it. So did those who work alongside the organisation. They notice instantly which group got the care and which got the reminder, because it confirms or contradicts how they are treated the rest of the year.

You can spend a fortune on external reputation and undo a slice of it with one sentence that tells your own people exactly where they sit in the pecking order. The fix costs nothing but a minute of attention.

Before you publish anything that celebrates your own good work, read it back as if you were each person mentioned in it.

Would the contractor feel thanked, or warned? Would the cleaner feel seen, or counted? Would the volunteer feel valued, or inventoried? Then mend the verbs. The contractors were not there to be reminded of guidance. They were out in genuinely dangerous heat keeping the place running, and they deserved to be in the care part of the story, not the compliance part.

"We made sure everyone working on our sites in the heat was looked after, including our contractors" is the same fact, the same length, and it makes you look like an employer worth working for rather than one keeping its distance.

Good work deserves to be told well, and this organisation had real good work to tell. The story was true, and it was kind to the people it set out to help. It is just that one line let the self-regard show, and turned a group of people working in the heat into a box to be ticked.

So tell your good stories, you have earned them. Just mind how you talk about your own people while you do. The audience is always listening for it, and so are the people in the story.

*Martin Buhagiar is co-founder and CEO of JAM Group Media.*