How Smart Brevity helped Cox Communications boost its staff's understanding of business goals

The broadband company saw a 17 percentage-point jump in how well staff said they understand their goals.

In his words...

I'm Mallard Holliday. I am the Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for Cox Communications. 

The challenge: Our employees did not understand our goals, and we knew that from surveys that we had taken of the employee base. And once we knew we had a problem, we thought, "Oh, well, we'll just tell them about it more often. We'll put it on posters. We will send our executives off to our markets to meet with employees. We'll do screensavers on our laptops that have the goals. We'll increase the volume."

• And all that did was increase understanding only just a few points.

The solution: I introduced Smart Brevity to the organization by going to the top. I convinced the president of our company to read the book, and he was immediately wanting all of us to adapt the Smart Brevity principles, and things that we already had in flight that we were ready to produce — we had to call a time out on everything because corporate communications wanted to be the example.

• We immediately saw the workforce after they had been exposed to corporate communications writing in this format, whenever they would see something that didn't fit that format, they complained.
• We converted everything. 

The results: We went from less than 70% of our workforce understanding our goals all the way to 87% of them saying they do. A huge jump. And the only thing we did different was use the Smart Brevity principles. 

How they sustained that success: A game changer for us was using the software. Axios HQ gave everybody the ability to have a platform that they could simply write in, have it analyze what they had written, and then follow all the tips and tricks from the books and the concept and convert it very quickly to something they could use.

• As more people use the platform, more people got comfortable with talking and writing in Smart Brevity. But it really had to start with the book and getting the buy-in and seeing the excitement of the organization — and then followed by the Axios HQ software that helped make it even easier for people.

Now, I would say, we are a faster organization. People communicate faster and more people understand what we're saying and what's important.