Teaching the tone
Your company has developed a great tone of voice (TOV) 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.
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 TOV 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 TOV 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
Here at Levelup, we realise that training programme needs 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 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, the training programme we create is developed ad-hoc, based on the very specific characteristics of the TOV guidelines, the team, the audience and the brand itself.
We know we have fulfilled our role when not only have the core communicators learnt to implement the TOV independently but are also able to teach their skills to each incoming team member and thus keep the brand’s communication coherent amid staff turnover. Successful implementation allows the TOV guide to serve as a source of inspiration for employees who previously struggled to get their texts right, by providing them with a firm ground to stand on and create.
