Written by Anna Zaslavska, copywriter at Writitude
Your company has developed a great tone of voice guide.
It may be coherent and detailed and really captures the spirit of your brand, but the problem is — without implementation, it will rest in peace forever.
In this publication we will talk about:
- Why the resistance to changes in communication may occur
- Ways to mitigate it while developing a style guide
- Training and workshops as part of the change management
Previously we discussed why guidelines for the verbal communication of a brand need to be as detailed and specific as visual brand books.
Yet even the most well-defined TOVs face a challenge that visual guidebooks don’t — verbal language is simply a more abstract matter.
There’s a crucial difference between applying a colour scheme defined by a brand book and producing original written content based on TOV guidelines.
A writer doesn’t have a colour-picker tool to verify if the wording they are using corresponds to that specified in the TOV.
This means that even the most detailed descriptions of the desired style and tone of communication will always leave some room for interpretation and imagination.
And that, in fact, is good news because you certainly don’t want your ToV to be a creativity killer!
So how does a company facilitate creativity while also ensuring compliance?
The answer lies in implementation and, more specifically — in training the employees who perform the communication.
Change to manage
Since a judgement of what is and isn’t compliant with a defined brand voice cannot be mechanical, a copywriter (by which, in this case, we mean every person who writes something on behalf of the company) and any managers who approve the texts have to literally train their ear to detect false notes.
So what an effective training program needs to achieve is not only how to memorise the rules but also how to apply them creatively within each new context.
Another objective of employee training is to overcome the fear of change (or rather, of underperforming under new conditions) or any resistance the communicators might have.
It needs to tackle their insecurity in the face of change in an emphatic manner.
Enforcement strategies that impose the guidance from above prove to be ineffective.
After all, a tone of voice guide is just a document — it needs active collaboration from actual communicators to work.
That is why a training programme needs to be part of a broader change management plan.
We shall overcome
(and we talk from our experience)
The training programmes need to be both practical and creative because this is the nature of text production itself.
Sometimes teaching involves a lot of joint effort and teamwork. Sometimes we go for individual coaching sessions.
At other times, we combine both.
Sometimes one session is enough, while often there is a need for one or two follow-up sessions.
We have also applied psychotherapy-inspired methods with great success when there is insecurity, resistance and inertia to overcome.
Every time, a training programme should be based on the very specific characteristics of the ToV guidelines, the team, the audience and the brand itself.
You will know you fulfilled your role when not only do the employees and the core communicators have learnt to implement the tone of voice guidelines independently but they are also able to teach their skills to each incoming team member and thus keep the brand’s communication coherent amid staff turnover.
The successful implementation allows a brand tone of voice guide to serve as a source of inspiration for employees who previously struggled to get their texts right, by providing them with the firm ground to stand on and create.
