Supporting Culture Through Internal Company Communication

Rachel Kleban, VP of People, OpenPhone

Communicating with the team can feel tricky for leaders. We often feel like we have to get the message right. We worry about the negative impact on the team and culture if we don’t. The words we use are important but internal company communication is so much more than the direct messaging. Leaders communicate all the time without even saying a word. We communicate through the culture we build, the decisions we make, and the structures we create. To talk more about the role of internal communication in creating culture, I spoke with Rachel Kleban, VP of People, OpenPhone. 

We talked about: 

• How communication can build a positive culture

• The role of authenticity in a leader’s communication style

• How implicit systems cause stress and confusion

• Why transparency is important, especially around compensation and performance

We met through the Troop HR community. So we don't know each other well, which is fantastic. I just discovered that you also worked for the Gap like I did. 

I worked for Gap for probably three years. I was a regional HR leader for the outlet division. 

I was an Assistant Manager at a GapKids store in San Francisco and then worked at a buying office for Banana Republic at the headquarters. I learned a lot about business working there. 

Yeah, there’s something about that culture, I don't know quite what it was, but when you’d ask people how long they’d been there they’d say, “Well the first time I was here 10 years and then I left and came.” Everyone had a boomerang story. I learned from the Gap, don’t burn bridges. If people want to go and they need to do something great, you are always here for them. I always encourage leaders to be open to a boomerang story. It's a great feeling to see somebody come back and say, okay, I went out and now I'm home. I think it's great for that employee and the employees around them. I love that the Gap created a culture where people felt free to go and free to come back. 

I love that because there’s this idea that when people depart it’s all negative. Sometimes it’s just time for someone to leave. The business is in a different place or they are or they want to try something new. Maybe they want to have kids or travel around the world. There are lots of reasons for departures. So I love that you talk about being open to boomerangs. 

When someone leaves for an amazing opportunity, I always try to say, “Look at what we did. We helped this person take the stepping stone they needed to get this job that was like a dream job.” Shifting your mindset around what it means when someone exits – there are a lot of different reasons and some are better than others – can be really powerful and even put yourself in a position where you're helping people work towards those goals in a deliberate way. I had a manager who asked me, “What do you want to do with your life?” I said, “I want to lead an HR department.” She goes, “You’re never going to do that here. It’s too big. How can I help you get there when the time is right? What’s your punch list of things that you need to do to be ready for that job?” That’s so meaningful so when I did leave, it was a celebration rather than a sense that I had crossed them. 

It reminds me of the idea that we treat our company like family. If we do that, there may be a feeling of disloyalty when we leave. We want to treat people with kindness and fairness but we’re not a family, we’re a business. 

Yeah. You can't leave your family, but you can absolutely leave a job and your job can absolutely leave you. You have to figure out what you’re trying to get at when you say we’re a family. Break that down. What are you trying to achieve? Family is very loaded. I think there are enough people who know that it's not the thing to say anymore, but it’s a hard habit to break. There’s value in the concept but that language doesn’t serve anyone. 

This leads to our topic about internal company communication as we need to think about our language and the way we talk to our team. But before we go there can you introduce yourself and give us a little bit of background? 

Absolutely. My name is Rachel Kleban. I live in San Francisco. I've got my little family here, my 

eight -year -old son and husband. Something very special about our little life is that we live in the Presidio, which is a national park inside San Francisco. It's a really special place because it's like we live in this little forest with access to all the jobs and restaurants San Francisco has to offer. But it’s this peaceful little enclave where my son can go outside and play on his own with our neighbors and feel safe. So that's a little bit about me.

I am currently the VP of people at OpenPhone. We're a voice-over IP communications platform for small businesses, mom-and-pop shops, startups, and companies that need to connect with their customers seamlessly. We're about 125 people, fully remote and distributed globally, though most of our employees are in the US and Canada.

Before OpenPhone I spent a couple of years in consulting helping early-stage companies put systems in place for really fair and equitable systems like so that the decisions they make about things like pay, performance, and promotion are grounded in clear criteria. 

I have a passion for fostering an environment of clarity and transparency. That came out of my time at Airbnb. I joined when Airbnb had about 200 employees in the US and about 500 globally. Still the days of “You're gonna sleep where? I don't understand.” It was formative in terms of watching a company grow in scale. Our mission at Airbnb was to create a world where anyone could belong anywhere. So as a people team, we thought a lot about creating belonging internally and what it meant to build our systems and processes in a way that was inclusive. We did a lot of research about how to make our performance reviews more fair and equitable. We did a lot of research on what belonging means in the workplace. That set the stage for the rest of my career to date, which has been very much focused on this idea of creating systems where the outcome is clear, fair, and transparent decision-making.. Now it’s expanding and applying those principles to drive transparency in other parts of the business. For instance, how do we talk about what's going on in the business? How do leaders land messages that are honest and clear to their teams? 

I’m a former COO of a startup and I think about how to set expectations and build structure as the company grows to be more sustainable. 

Yeah. I think in a startup, there's sometimes an allergic reaction to structure and things like levels and hierarchy. 

It doesn't matter what size company you are, employees crave clarity about what am I supposed to do, what's expected of me, how am I doing? I did it at Airbnb at 2,000 and for clients at 9,000. It's such a mess to unravel all of the missed expectations along the way. You have to have these really difficult conversations. What if when you were 50 or 100 people, you said, “Here’s what we expect at each level of your career and we’re going to be clear about it. People appreciate it and you save yourself so much heartbreak later on when you do it early. 

Yeah, I worked with a company that had to re-level their folks and set expectations because they hadn’t done it before. In these situations, some folks have an effective demotion or even leave the org. You’re right about it being so many hard conversations. We can’t always get it right but trying to get ahead of it is so important. 

Yeah, absolutely. People crave clarity. Why not give it to them? It can be a little hard to have the conversation about their level but what happens after that is that you can give them clarity on what their job looks like. “This is what I expect of you. Here’s where you’re crushing and here’s where you need some help and I’m here to help you with that.” That’s a very different conversation than “great job” or “you’re fired.” It’s really focused. It’s transparent. It respects the employee in a really important way. We’re all humans and we all want that kind of clarity. We all want to be spoken like grownups – just tell me the truth, be transparent. 

Right. I see internal company communication in a broad way. It’s not just about the specific words that you say, you’re sending communication all the time in the way you pay your people, promote your people and all the decisions you make. You’re constantly transmitting a message. 

Absolutely. Everything.

Also, many startups say they don’t want much hierarchy but that also means there are a lot of implicit systems at work. Operating in conditions with implicit systems is much harder – it causes confusion, it’s overwhelming, and causes more anxiety than the explicit systems of a hierarchy. This is also a form of communication.

Yes. That's right. Comms is everything you do and everything you do is how you communicate, but that’s also your culture. I have this experience of internal comms being its own department. And to your point, we’ve got to think about this more broadly. It’s not just the words on paper. It’s about how we’re all representing ourselves to each other in this organization. 

I’d love to talk more about how you see internal company communication. 

When I joined OpenPhone, they had just recently done a very small survey, their first employee survey, and they didn't explicitly ask about this, but the feedback (from employees) was very much, we don’t really know what’s happening. 

First and foremost, internal comms is about how you communicate with the team about what's going on in the business to do their job but also feel empowered and part of something. How do you help connect their work to the mission of the company? How do you help them feel like an owner and an important part of this journey that you’re on together? 

Where we really started when we got that feedback was to say, how do we want to talk about our goals? How do we want to talk about the actions that we're taking and do it in a way that's both engaging and the right amount of information. Then there’s this idea of reputation is repetition. Say it once, say it again, add something to it, and come back to it. Use the same language again and again and build upon a narrative over time because A) people have so much information coming at them and it is very hard to take it all in. And B) communicating with your team is building trust. If I keep coming back to the same message and I'm reinforcing it, I'm saying, remember I said this? Let's come back to it. Here's what's new. Here's what's different. Here's what we learned. Then I'm building a reputation for being consistent, for being trustworthy, that I'm going to follow through, that if I set a goal, I'm going to stick to it. That builds a lot of trust in leadership and it builds a lot of trust in the times where things do change. (They think), Okay, there must have been a good reason for that change. We've all worked with leaders that are changing direction all the time… “no, no, this thing, no, this thing, no, this is the most important thing today, no, that's the most important thing today.” So, I’ve tried to help CEOs continue on a narrative that could build and grow rather than, “today I'm focused on this thing. Today I'm focused on this thing.” Bring it back. How does that relate to this core messaging? 

We’ve evolved our survey since then to ask, “Do you understand how your work impacts the business? Do you understand what’s happening at OpenPhone? Do you have the information you need to do your job and the context you need to do your job?”

Those are great questions for employee surveys. It’s a good reminder that company communication is a two-way street. It’s not just the leaders communicating something out, it’s what are we getting back about what we’re saying? Is it landing?

Yeah, it's interesting because our CEO started a newsletter as one way to share more. We got feedback that they were too long so we shortened them a bit. Recently he said, “I’m going to stop doing it because only like 20 people read it.” I told him, “That means you need to keep doing it. You committed to doing it, you have to figure out how to make more people read it. This isn’t the moment to pull back, it’s the moment to lean in.” 

I know what it’s like as someone who’s rolled out like a million HR programs in my career to know what it feels like when no one is listening. “Didn’t you read my long comms?” Well no, you didn’t. It’s incumbent on us to figure out how to get attention. If you stop now that just shows, I guess we didn’t care to work for it you know? 

It is hard work and it’s wonderful that people get access to what the CEO is thinking. If I was still in a company I would love it if my CEO wrote a newsletter.

Yeah, it's great actually. The co-founders of Open Phone have built a really beautiful culture. The team really trusts the leadership and there are a lot of really great cultural elements. When I came I wanted to understand why that was so I could tell them to keep doing it. I was watching them interact with the team at the company offsite. The leaders felt like a part of the company, not separate from the company. They show up in a way that is so approachable. They don’t come off like they know more because they founded the company. They’re like, “You tell us, help us understand.” It’s a low ego, humility, all-in-it-together vibe they create that’s impactful in the culture. It comes through in the way they communicate in a nice way that just feels approachable. It’s kind of raw and not overly polished. 

I’ve worked with a client who brought in a communications leader. They started coaching the CEO who started getting more and more polished. Employees started going, “Hello. Where’s our CEO, the beloved CEO that we know? The one we feel this sense of kinship with? Suddenly there’s a distance. As time went on and the company had to make hard decisions, the impact on the trust employees felt was pronounced. 

That makes me think about executive presence which makes me just shudder. It feels so inauthentic.

That gets me to a big tangent about bias. What executive presence looks like and that we’re all molding it after this white male persona. 

Right. It’s very specific. There’s nothing wrong with that type, it's just not the only type. These stereotypes play into it for sure. It can make someone communicate differently because of an expectation of needing to project authority or a certain image that’s disconnected from who they are. 

Yeah, and that taps into the idea of authentic leadership. When you show up in a way that’s authentic, it hits differently. It’s really true as it relates to communication. When it happened at my client, employees were wondering what was going on. They had an opportunity to work with someone who was very authentic. When it changed, the impact of trust was immediate. He had gone to the other side, a corporate guy now. So when I think about our current founders I’m always encouraging them to be authentic. You have to think about what you’re going to say but speak from the heart and speak about what’s important and meaningful to employees. 

One of the things we’ve talked about before was the idea of “messaging.” I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

While I was working at Airbnb it got much bigger. We had a big internal comms team. I remember taking something I wanted to roll out to my internal comms partners and they’d work on messaging. In retrospect, I just think why weren’t we just straightforward? With messaging, it feels like we need to make people feel a certain way. As I’ve gone through these different experiences in my career I’ve come around to realize you can’t make people feel a certain way. But you can make them feel distrustful or suspicious.

So in all my communication at the beginning of every project, I do a couple of exercises to define what is the purpose of the project and what are the principles and the why from Simon Sinek’s Start with Why. I lead every communication with that. For example, we’re rolling out performance reviews. I always repeat our purpose: we want to be clear about what’s expected of you. I use the same slides over and over but there’s no messaging. This is what we’re trying to do. I’m telling you what to expect. You can feel however you want about that. That’s not my job. My job is to be as clear and direct as possible. So you understand what’s happening. It’s the same thing with the business. 

I think it’s fine to ask how you want people to feel but you don’t actually get to control that. You get to share what’s happening.

It strikes me that a lot of communication comes at the intersection of change. People need a minute to process change. You might want them to feel a certain way but they’re going to feel how they feel and some people take longer to process. You have to respect the change management process. You cannot message the feelings that come with it away.

Yeah, yeah. I have another little bug about messaging. I had a client who asked for help communicating and being transparent about compensation. I asked them to tell me about their compensation practices. They were like, “They’re a little loose.” I told them they needed to fix that before they could communicate transparently about your compensation practices. I had a boss who always asked, “Would you put it on a billboard?” What she was saying was, if the decision is sound and you’re confident and can stand behind it then communication and transparency comes. You’re just saying what’s happening. When you aren't confident in the decision or you're worried that people aren't going to think it's right or fair or good – that's when you start trying to message, to make up for the holes in the decision. 

So when people say, how do I communicate that? I start asking questions about the decision rather than the messaging. If you 100% believe in this, then you can proudly go out and say it real straightforwardly and people will understand it and at least understand why.

It’s a great point. Are we making the right decision or are we trying to paper over something in our communication? I want to talk more about transparency in communication. I’m curious how you see that.

I think particularly as it relates to decisions about people – pay decisions, performance reviews, promotion decisions, even things like, why'd that person get that assignment or project and I didn't – that people should understand why those decisions were made. Those are the most personal decisions. Sure, there are the business decisions and there are the organizational decisions. For me, I care most about why am I paid the way that I am? Why was I rated the way that I am? We need systems that can clearly articulate how those decisions are made. It's the same answer. 

Transparency is a byproduct of a sound decision-making system. I had a really funny experience. I was at a conference for our HRIS. I wanted to be able to show people their comp ratio and their pay band in the tool. I asked if this was possible and the rep asked, “Why would you want to do that? What if somebody’s paid below the band? They would find out.” I was like, “Well, no one’s paid below the band so its not a problem.” Our system is sound, so we can communicate transparently. 

My question is why is somebody paid way below the band?

Exactly. When we put bands in place, there were people below the band and we brought them up to the minimum because why would we wait? It’s so much about building the right system. Our performance review system is really focused on our career framework, our leveling framework. So when somebody says, well, why am I meeting this expectation or not meeting this expectation? We say, well, let's go back and look at the expectation, and here's what that means for you. Here are the examples to say you do or don't meet that expectation. And these are the expectations we have for everybody. So it's fair and consistent. I want managers and leaders to have confidence in the decisions that are made. I want us to be transparent, and have a page in our Notion that outlines every decision that we make about comp. How do we calculate bands? How wide are our bands? What is the comp ratio? We aren’t going to tell you someone else’s salary but anything that relates to you, you should understand. It’s because we put a system in place that doesn’t have any discretion and doesn’t have decisions we can’t explain. 

Be convicted and confident in your decisions. Know why and how you're making these decisions and taking these actions. Be straightforward. Talk to employees like the qualified and smart individuals that they are. It pays huge dividends in trust. When your team trusts you, life is so much easier.

One of the things we talked about was talking to employees as if they were owners. What are your thoughts on that? What’s important about that?

Yeah. We put candidates through the paces to get these jobs. We say they meet a certain bar of intelligence, skill and motivation and the ability to get the job done. Then we trust them with that work. And we say, we trust you to take this piece of our business and own it and drive it and make decisions about it and, you know, talk to our customers or talk to our prospects.

But then we don't trust them with the information about how our business is doing and what decisions we're making. To me, that just doesn't track. What are we afraid of?  I think ultimately what leaders get afraid of is what we talked about before is the emotional reaction. What if they don't like it? What if they're gonna leave? There's a lot of fear that happens in this context. So if we can harken back and say, well, we trusted them enough to bring them on, pay them a salary, and trust them with our work, what else could we trust them with? And to your point about two-way conversation, what ideas might they have? How do we create more opportunities for them to tell us what we don't know about our business because they're doing it every day? So that's what I mean by treating them like owners.

I love that. Is there something about internal communication that we haven't covered yet?

Be convicted and confident in your decisions. Know why and how you're making these decisions and taking these actions. Be straightforward. Talk to employees like the qualified and smart individuals that they are. It pays huge dividends in trust. When your team trusts you, life is so much easier.

You can read more conversations from the leader series here.