Advanced Internal Comms

Over at CommsOffensive325, Mike Klein joins the debate started by Liam Fitzpatrick over on BlackBeltDojo about "Advanced Internal Comms" and whether there are any revolutions left to come in the field, or is it all about really implementing basics we already know about?

Mike poses the debate as one about concentrating on competency (the Liam suggestion) vs the prospect of "fundamentally reinventing" the field. Mike suggests that:

Liam’s view only really holds water if you accept a view that organisations are fundamentally hierarchical and that internal communication exists to support the smooth functioning of hierarchies. If you accept the notion that organisations are simultaneously hierarchical and networked in nature, then it is worth recognising that very little work has been done in developing an advanced approach to internal communication that harnesses and influences the social networks in and around organisations while supporting what necessary hierarchy is required to drive an organisation towards its strategic or commercial objectives.

While the Holy Grail still eludes us, the emergence of social network tools and social network thinking are likely to play a key role in propelling the Internal Communications profession as we continue on its quest. And with the challenges we are likely to face in the short term as the budget-cutters seek easy targets, I for one think this quest is well worth continuing.

I think I have some overlap with Mike's view but I'd like to take a moment to muse on the philosophical question of "fundamental reinvention."

In the comments on BBD, I mentioned that I felt Liam was having it both ways. I said this because depending on how you cut the definition it's easy to cast something as evolution or revolution.

For example, let's take small group (4 people or so) transport. Let's think of the bullock cart from the Indian village of my grandparents, the mail coach of the Napoleonic London to Portsmouth route, one of Daimler's earliest 4 wheel vehicles, the Honda on my drive and a concept car of tomorrow, environmentally friendly which uses technology to drive itself.

There are lots of axes upon which one can measure some kind of fundamental change, for society. The increase in speed makes a huge difference to what transport can do, we seem to go in a circle about the environment, from animal power to "clean hydrogen" or whatever. And the notion of a car that drives itself has something to it too.

But, from another point of view: 4 wheels, power plant, somewhere to sit, control interface... nothing has changed in 500 years at least...

[Another set of objects for consideration might be: portable gramaphone, boombox, walkman, ipod.]

And so to the debate on IC. I do think that there are large elements of current theory (and some elements of practice) that are not going to go away. There will still be a need for various existing forms of organisation communication. So, you can fast forward 30 years and I think Liam can easily expect to find people doing "the basics" and so it's easy to argue that "fundamental reinvention" just isn't happening.

 

Of course, I'm not sure that's the right way to look at it, particularly from the point of view of IC professionals, because I think there are changes on the horizon for the typical IC department in the next 30 years. Mark highlights how social media trends mesh with the notion of an organisation as a partly a network (rather than just a hierarchy) could radically change the kinds of communication needed in an organisation.

One analogy for this might be the change from "Managament Information Systems" (MIS) departments to "Information Technology" (IT) departments. In the 60s and 70s, companies had an MIS department, which served to use technology to gather information on those doing the work and present it to managers. In a modern organisation a group of similar people are still there, but their role is (to some degree) now to think much more about how information moves between those doing the work - IT. Of course that role is still evolving, but I think it has something to say about the coming change in Internal Comms, from a management focus to a whole organisation focus.

My own contribution for now would be to suggest that once you move into that "whole organisation focus" it becomes apparent that where "communication" currently stands as a proxy for moving around particular information sets, in the future that has to expand. IC will have to overlap more with IT and think more about all the different aspects of communication. But I'll say more about that another time.

 

Technorati Tags: business case,future of internal communications,internal communications,lateral communications,social networking,systems

Main Website Update

I've just put up a fairly large update of the main website:

http://www.enoptron.com

I've been doing a lot of networking lately and tried, in part to use it as a method of "real time market research." The changes to the website are largely a product of that. I've made an effort to explain what we do in a less jargon filled manner and to highlight what we can do for organisations of different sizes in more detail.

The new menu system is no prettier than the original one, but should make it easier to extend/maintain the website in the future.

Finally, I have to own up that the "Industry Focus" section remains "under construction" as it was in version one of the site. I hope to remedy this soon...

 

Technorati Tags: enoptron,internal communications,international communications,lateral communications,update,website

The two worlds of business communication

A newsletter from Mindjet (who make the excellent MindManager mind map software) reminds me again of the two ways people tend to talk about "communication" in business and my own uncertainties about where they join up:

1) There are those known as "Internal Communication" professionals and they focus largely on what might be termed "community communications issues." This ranges from the hardnosed business case models around communicating "brand values" in the organisation to created "engagement" to potentially softer strategies around more journalistic exercises which create and reinforce a sense of community and well-being within the organisation.

I've spent a fair amount of time writing about these aspects recently.

2) The other people who tend to work with "communication" are IT consultants and Business Process Re-engineers, who (like the Mindjet people) largely talk about communication in terms of the needed exchange of information to make a business process happen. If you're designing a new widget, then there has to be an exchange of information regarding costs, design parameters, market needs, etc.

It is my feeling that these two worlds, which have largely been long separate are now starting to touch at the edges. Two major reasons why spring to mind right now:

a) The rise of the "knowledge worker." This deserves a post on it's own, but in short, industries are changing. Service industries are often all about manipulating information and even traditional manufacturing industries are finding that competitive advantage depends more and more on how they do things and the design of the things they make. As a result, the "knowledge" of various businesses now sits more than ever with the people. Where processes used to assume that people were interchangeable parts who existed to facilitate the process, we're gradually learning that in real "knowledge roles" the process isn't so easy to institutionalise. As such, the technological/process imperative is now more about enabling communication than specifying it.

This has parallels with:

b) The rise of social media. It is social media technologies, as much as anything that have produced an awareness in internal communications types (not to mention marketing departments too) that "message management" is a dying proposition. Where previously IC might have felt it was the medium of community information exchange in a company, it's clear now that people can talk to each other in myriad ways. Forward thinking IC professionals recognise this and seek to work with it, and thus they are also looking more at enabling communication than specifying it.

Where I think a crucial confluence exists is that the existence of communication technologies does not mean that necessary communications are taking place.

As such, in knowledge work, there is a need to bring the two perspectives together. From the BPR angle there is an expertise about incentives and formal rules for promoting specific information exchange and from the IC side there's a much greater understanding about the human issues around communication, which becomes ever more critical as the information we seek to communicate becomes more human (less numeric, less precise, less quantifiable) as the task involved becomes more abstract and more creative.

Add that together and that's some sense of my gut feeling of how the two worlds can help each other a little.

 

Technorati Tags: business processes,communication,information exchange,internal communications,knowledge economy,lateral communications

Cultural adaptation

Over at IABC Café, Julie Freeman remarks on the amazing adaptations that cartoon characters undergo to compete in new cultural markets.

Fictional characters are of course more pliable than corporate identities, but at the same time, companies like Disney and Marvel have a very strong sense of the core values of their characters. Those values cannot be thrown away for commercial convenience in a particular market because of the potential damage to the worldwide brand (e.g. Spiderman or Mickey Mouse.)

The lesson for those of us involved in "cultural translation"?

Look carefully at what the core message is, very often we cling to particular forms of expression or outward formulas too strongly. The behaviours and attitudes that the message create in the audience are more important (day to day) than creating a monolithic "image identity."

 

Technorati Tags: communication , cultural translation , internal communications , lateral communications

IABC "Speedexperiencing" Event - Tues 9th Oct

Just a few words about my first IABC event. Everyone was very friendly and the setup was interesting, with the opportunity to take part in three of five discussion groups.

I wanted to be in all five, but ended up choosing the group on engagement run by Kevin Keohane first. It was nice to meet someone in person that I've only had "blog contact" with in the past. He had some pointed questions to ask about the alignment of the "employee brand" with the aspirations of current and potential employees, but I won't attempt to reproduce his nifty diagram here. I felt this discussion was just getting going as the hooter went to move us on to the next one. I hope we at least laid some groundwork for the next group.

Nick Grant asked us "Can internal and external communication ever be aligned?" Again, time caught up with us, but (being the IABC) there was of course some consensus that they two perspectives have to be aligned overall, otherwise the mixed messages can cause serious problems.

Alas, I cannot recall the name of the final discussion leader, but the topic of "Can change be managed?" and the notion that it rather had to be "led," than "managed" made me think today once again about our approach to internal communications.

In particular, one idea in the "change leadership" discussion was that most people are most likely to change for a direct manager who they know and trust. It's largely only someone who they work with regularly, who understands their working life who has the credibility/trust to ask someone to undertake radical working change.

For me, there was a strong parallel with how internal communications "should" work. Statements from the top, or even just far flung regions of the company are unlikely to have as much credibility or trust as those from direct supervisors and colleagues. We instinctively know this, I think, but often give up on it because it's very hard to make practical use of. Rather, many people view "middle management" as the "big sponge" that soaks up all the information, but never passes it along.

As a result, we've invested in circumventing the traditional channels of communication. That has some exciting possibilities, especially in connection with new "social media," but at the same time (hobby horse alert!) I feel it has pushed "internal communications" into a "mass communications" or "marketing/advertising" mould, where the purpose and expertise of internal communicators is to create communications strategies and implement them.

What I see is that there is an important role for "internal communications" in helping people communicate, helping "the sponge" of middle management actually pass more information along. In effect, doing less communication and spending more time on helping people communicate, both by innovating technology/processes and the hard work of teaching people extra skills. Why? Because in the end, they will tend to have credibility that a distant communicator will struggle to have. Social media allows a narrowing of that kind of distance, but even there I think that "social business communication" is going to need a lot of experience and even training to get the best out of it and existing trust relationships will continue to dominate.

 

Technorati Tags: change management , IABC , internal communications , lateral communications , marketing the strategy , top down , training , trust

Internal Communications: The Big Ideas

 

2007 seems to be a year when people are asking questions about the direction of internal communications. My take on things first developed during 2005 in an MBA Marketing Communications class discussion of "current trends in corporate communications."

In the time it's taken me to get around to actually writing about it, a lot of other people have independently produced similar ideas, either directly about internal communications (e.g. Kevin Keohane) or more abstractly about organisation (e.g. James Surowiecki - Wisdom of Crowds) and marketing (e.g. Mark Earls - Herd.) At the same time, I've already linked recently to people like Sue Dewhurst at Black Belt Dojo and Ron Shewchuk who are posting interesting tidbits in this area on a regular basis.

Given that there are similar ideas around, it would be silly not to talk about them. To that end I'm going to quote quite a bit from  Kevin Keohane's blog postings not because he's the only one posting, but because he's condensed his thoughts into three convenient posts...

 

In "Internal Marketing is..." Kevin starts by saying:

"The concept of internal marketing is based on a false premise that one can treat employees like external customers.

“Internal marketing” is back as an employee communication approach. The concept is simple: use basic marketing approaches to communicate to employees in the same way that these methods can raise awareness, interest, intent and action with consumers."

To me, however, "internal marketing" isn't "back" it never really went away. There are pockets of good practice and experimentation where different approaches have been adopted, but my experience in contact with a range of typical organisations of various sizes is that "internal marketing" logic remained the dominant mode of action, even as IC professionals like Kevin moved on to new and better approaches with those clients who had the required imagination.

Kevin continues:

"The explanation for the revival of internal marketing is also simple. Marketing Directors are increasingly delivering a range of internal communication tasks. The logic is that if an organisation is trying to deliver a differentiating customer experience, then who better to get employees lined up than the people responsible for defining the customer experience? The fact that the Marketing function often has greater influence than does Internal Communications adds weight to the idea. With the importance and power of brand rising rapidly on the corporate agenda, the case is compelling on its face."

I would add that there is an underlying structural issue that has kept "marketing techniques" in pole position in a lot of IC departments. The discipline of marketing was founded (if you'll forgive the stereotype) around the needs of the Marketing Department at a company like Proctor and Gamble. You have 50 to 100 people who need to explain the value of a new product to millions of current and potential customers. It's a process of very few to very many communication, or in shorthand a "one to many" process. Likewise, in many IC departments, you have a very small staff, expected to produce results that affect a very much larger number of employees in the rest of the organisation. It's a very natural step to look to the techniques of "mass communication" from the marketing discipline to make that happen.

I think this is important, because while Kevin goes on to identify that:

"... there’s a basic problem with the whole idea. The nature of the employment relationship is essentially different from a consumer relationship."

and

"Most marketing practice is based on crafting a message, packaging it and delivering it to an audience — and then gauging what happens and modifying the next round of activity accordingly. Internal communication, at its best, goes beyond so-called “two-way” communication models, and creates an ongoing dialogue that both reflects and shapes the place where this conversation occurs.

there's a basic pressure (as in every part of life) to do more with less. And less staff and less resources pushes you back towards "one to many" communication, which in my opinion always tends to look more like "two-way communication" than genuine dialogue.

Perhaps most importantly, if I was to identify one reason why so many organisations still indulge in "internal marketing" it would be that most people involved in "internal communications" have a background in Marketing or PR. We need to consider carefully the skills we prioritise in IC if we want the field to progress.

Having said this, it's important to remember that it's not all a bad thing. Sue Dewhurst corrected me on this in reply to one of my earlier posts and Kevin puts it well:

This is not to say that some of the methods, practices and tools that prove valuable in marketing don’t have an important place in an effective internal communication effort. In fact, internal communication people can learn a lot from marketing approaches such as developing “the big idea,” defining the essence of a brand or value proposition, identifying, prioritising and segmenting stakeholders, and being more creative and inspirational in their overall approach.

 

Finally, Kevin says that:

While internal marketing may well be based on a false premise, the emerging truth is that no organisational silo – marketing, human resources, internal communications or IT — owns the whole solution. Best practice engagement is about making sure that these disciplines work together in a complementary manner to deliver the right result for the organisation.

For me, of course, this is where things get really interesting. If there is going to be more to IC than "internal marketing" then maybe we need to think carefully what "internal communications" can do for an organisation. Is it all about creating a dialogue between the top of a company and the rest? Or is there more?

My answer is that there is more. If you're going to talk about "internal communications" then you should be involved in every aspect of people communicating with each other. That means not only dialogue between "leaders and followers" but also between "followers" and not just discussions around values and community, but also the kind of communications people need to get things done, day to day.

 

So, onto Kevin's post "The end of internal communications."

This is getting long, so I'm going to "quote and paste" less of Kevin's work. Go and read it (or re-read it, if that's the case) as it's really worthwhile.

First, he sets the scene:

"There have been the rumblings of a seismic shift in the employee engagement and internal communications arena for several years now. Digital technologies are expanding our opportunities, consumer power and influence grows apace, and traditional organisational structures and hierarchies creak under the strain of 21st century business velocities. The contract among employers, employees, investors, stakeholders and customers is being re-written."

He moves on to point out that whilst in the past "internal communications" has bounced around the corporation, sometimes being sited as part of HR, sometimes part of "corporate communications," sometimes an adjunct to PR and marketing, it has been managing relatively well understood and stable needs and relationships. However, with the "seismic shifts" from changes in technology and society, this is no longer the case.

He goes on to list all the people involved in different aspects of the "customer experience" and note that everyone is responsible and if you don't get organised, your competitors will.

I'll let Kevin's words make the key point:

"What does all this have to do with internal communications? And why is it “dead”?

Many functional internal communication leaders today have come from a publishing, journalism, or PR background (and increasingly from Marketing disciplines). And in general, internal communication functions have been managed – and often managed very effectively – as information and knowledge publishers. Of course, most internal communication operations are very good at managing “two way communication,” ensuring that employee surveys track how things are going and what drives the right results to the bottom line; supporting senior leaders and line managers in their communication roles; providing opportunities for the employee to be heard. “Best Practice” is well and truly bedded in, and blogs, wikis, and ‘MySpace for the corporation’ are all adding new approaches to the mix.

But internal communication people need to stop thinking about ourselves as internal communicators. Because we’re simply not anymore. And we shouldn’t be. Internal communicators should see themselves as business people with a specific communication, involvement and engagement business process focus."

Kevin carries on with more detail and following his natural style ends up with what sounds like a call for Internal Communications to be at the center of everything:

"But if we are truly to thrive and face the challenges of 2007 and beyond, as internal communicators, we need to become part management consultant, part HR professional, part IT consultant, part brand manager, part organisational psychologist, part executive coach, part media relations expert … and part accountant.

We need to get outside our box, without apology, and stick our noses into other peoples’ business. Because everybody in the organisation, and many of our stakeholders who aren’t necessarily on our distribution lists, helps us deliver our customer experience and our “brand” — which is, after all, our reputation."

Finally, in his third post on this topic Kevin assesses what this drive to be at the centre of everything in the organisation means for the average IC professional. It's not a completely optimistic picture, but it reinforces the notion that it has to be more than just the traditional skillset.

So what does all this mean to me?

First, I see that if Internal Communications is going to develop in this way, it needs to change a lot. The skillset has to broaden and critically, the focus has to broaden, from being "publishers of information" to "facilitators of dialogue." In time, this really means that IC professionals shouldn't really be writing so much at all.

What then should they be doing?

1) To pursue Kevin's grand vision, IC has to work it's way into the very fabric of corporate management. If you don't have contact with and credibility with all the people who contribute to the "customer experience" you're in trouble. And since every act, be it the institution of a new bonus system, or new rules for cost control in production is an act of communication (which often speak louder than all the traditional forums and dialogues) communicators need to be at least involved in the discussions before these decisions are made.

(N.B. I still see a role for a split between "internal" (workers, partners) and "external" (customers, regulators, media) specialisms, however.)

I think this is a long term project and I'm unsure how to put it into action at this stage. Thus for now, I'm concentrating on the second part of the equation.

2) It's time for IC to start taking on a real process focus. In particular, it needs to develop skills in process, rather than content, as I mention above.

The way I've chosen for my consultancy is to focus on lateral communications.

In my opinion, a key issue is to improve the quality of communication between various groups within the organisation. If we take the notions of the "Wisdom of Crowds" to heart, then enabling the "crowd" to solve problems themselves, without unduly putting a burden on the rest of the organisation has to be a good way to improve the quality of action.

As such, my aim is to offer problem solving in urgent cases and diagnosis and assessment to avoid problems for organisations under less stress. My expertise is all about getting different cultures to talk to each other, so I'm focusing on international situations and national ones that involve distinctive groups (e.g. engineering, production and marketing.)

One of my challenges is to prove that this specialisation is worth investing in, alongside more generic exercises in improving the quality of dialogue and information flow in the organisation.

The other is to develop more services in that more generic area.

And that will be some of the topics for future posts.

 

Technorati Tags: big ideas , business case , internal communications , lateral communications , systems

Why just repeating the strategy doesn't work...

Sue Dewhurst posting over at Black Belt Dojo has a pithy summary of some of the problems in internal communications today:

Then I asked people to imagine the sales assistant had joined in to persuade them to hand over the credit card. Here's what the sales assistant says: "We're operating in a very competitive environment right now and our revenues are under pressure, so we really need you to buy the jacket to help us increase sales." Not convinced yet? How about "We need to improve our cashflow, and we have to show quarter on quarter improvements to the markets. If you buy this jacket, you'll really help us improve our profits."

Ever heard a sales assistant try and persuade you to buy that way? Me neither. They go for the things they know you'll care about. But quite often inside organisations, we try to persuade people to buy in by talking about what's in it for the company - not what's in it for them. It's easy to throw together key messages. But if you really think about the people you're trying to connect with and try and look for an angle they'll actually care about, it gets a lot more tricky.

I agree with what Sue says, as far as it goes, but predictably I don't think it goes far enough. After all, she's really saying that internal communicators need to think more like marketers. There is the corporate strategy, but you need to sell it to the employees, you have to wow them a little, make a personal connection, show the link with their lives and aspirations.

The problem is, the audience is changing. Every new generation of workers has been bombarded with marketing from an ever earlier age. It's still possible to wow them on occasion and make things personal for them, especially in person, but in "mass communications" (which remain the staple of internal communications in many organisations) it's working less and less well.

Now Sue is on record with progressive views about employee involvement in strategy formulation and that's an important part of the story. It's a lot easier to talk to and inform someone if they have had a stake in creating what you are talking about. That's definitely progress.

However, in a lot of organisations, especially larger ones, this kind involvement remains limited. One answer is for internal communicators to campaign more aggressively for greater involvement for everyone in the co-creation of strategy.

There are organisations, unfortunately, where that just isn't going to happen soon and I think in those places in particular, internal communicators need to look long and hard at the business case they promote for themselves. I think the traditional approach of "we'll deliver employee engagement with your strategy" is a very dangerous way to sell the business case for internal communications, because it promises more than the tools can deliver.

Instead, I believe internal communicators need to look again at their role in communication, particularly communication from the bottom of the organisation to the top, and from side to side (lateral communication.) This is an approach that requires a greater engagement with the actual processes of the business. It's less about exercising individual creative communication on a daily basis and more about enabling others to communicate.

And now I'm largely caught up with my RSS feed of internal communicators, I hope to move from laying out the case for moving to a different approach to talking more about that approach itself in future posts.


Technorati Tags: internal communications, business case, marketing the strategy, lateral communications

Powered by ScribeFire.

Making internal communications relevant...

Ron Shewchuk points us to an article by Barry Nelson on "The case for "workplace journalism."

It's a well argued piece that I'd recommend you all read. The critical point is that if all your output (and I would argue, communications channels too) are focused on content that directly addresses the usual business case for internal communications, you are not likely to get many eyeballs:

The result, though, is that employees looking at their internal media see a monotonous parade of stories with the same underlying message: what it takes to make the company a financial winner.

Nelson makes the case for restoring a traditional balance:

What’s the lesson?

For communicators, it ought to be to keep helpful information on these issues flowing, as a lubricant, to help our more strategic messages get through. It should be to balance our coverage with empathetic workplace journalism – dialing down, just a little, the volume of our call to battle stations, and giving at least some prominence to our employees’ human concerns (e.g., how and why to get along with the boss, make friends on the job, cope with stress, live the brand, be a good teammate, and other aspects of a satisfactory work life).

I'm in complete agreement that if you want people to engage with your internal publication you have to provide a balance of content. If none of it is relevant to their daily lives, they are unlikely to make time for it. Also, there is an engagement question at work:

An excellent review of decades of studies on this point appeared in the August, 2002, issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Its conclusion: Employees tend to see their organizations in human terms, so they interpret evidence of more-than-minimal support for their well-being as a sign that the organization cares. And they respond in kind.

Employers they perceive as strongly caring earn strong commitment, including support for company success, and a desire to stay, even when the money looks better elsewhere. By contrast, companies that seem obsessed with their own financial security mostly inspire workers to be likewise, about theirs. Loyalty fragments, and trust is lost.

To bring things back to my hobby horse, I would draw attention to the newer media. A paper newsletter does rather push you towards "workplace journalism" if you seek an antidote to being "Pravda of the Executive Board." As the company invests in newer forms of communication, a number of avenues open up for employees to talk amongst themselves. A critical element in gaining credibility for the "internal communications department" is facilitating that peer-to-peer talk, rather than trying to lock things down and keep people "on message."

Likewise, a communications channel or technology is most valuable to people when it helps them in their daily lives and that means it helps them communicate with the people in the organisation that they need to, to get their job done. Generic tips on common problems are nice, but a channel is most useful when it connects people to the help and support they need as individual employees. Then people will use it every day and just maybe read some of the other stuff there, now and then.

The critical question from a lateral communications angle is: how much of the internal communications business case should be about "selling strategy in the first place?" It's a necessary top-down function, but we ignore the role of lateral communication in successfully implementing strategy at our peril.


Technorati Tags: internal communications, relevance, lateral communications

Powered by ScribeFire.