Internal communications: what's in a name?

When I first started working in an internal communications department, back in the mid-1990s, the focus was clear. We had to produce publications for staff which would help them become better informed about the company. The general principle was that a better-informed employee is a better employee. The focus was very similar to that of journalism, which I had just come from: you made contacts in the organisation, using those contacts you unearthed news stories or features, and you published them in a place where staff could read them - initially, on paper, but later using more and more kinds of electronic media.

The most senior manager working in the same territory in the same (more-or-less) organisation, 15 years later, is now called Director of Employee Engagement. An engaged employee is said to be a better employee. Internal comms is just one of the tools used for engagement.

So, over the years, what were the steps which turned internal comms into employee engagement? And what have we lost en route? It feels like one of those word puzzles where you have to transform a word into its opposite, changing one letter at a time and making a valid word on each line:

Internal comms can fit in different parts of the organisation:

• Sometimes, it's part of HR, where the focus is on organisational design, repeatable processes and lots of measurement. 
• Sometimes it's part of marketing, where the focus is on running campaigns and (possibly) making things look pretty at the expense of functionality. 
• It may fit with brand, either within marketing or separately, where the focus is on creating an internal brand which employees can relate to. 
• Or it may even report directly to senior management, which has a big advantage in overcoming the all-time biggest problem for internal comms: getting the managers to believe that it matters.

In a large and disparate organisation, internal comms departments in different divisions or regions can (and have) done all of the above at once. It's not surprising that we sometimes get confused about what we're supposed to be doing.

There is an effect I noticed in Group Lotus many years ago: the more (and the more often) you change things at the top, the less effect it has at the bottom. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lotus was bought and sold like a rich man's toy with top management changing frequently. Every new whizz kid planned to change things, introduce new models, shake things up. But the bread and butter at Lotus was the engineering department, and the guys who worked there didn't care who owned the company: they were passionate about good engineering and that's what they tried to continue to do. Interestingly, they were engaged employees in some senses, but I think an employee engagement director would have had a hard time with them.

Similarly, the more an internal comms department is messed about, the more it depends on a few solid people, probably way down the food chain, who actually deliver stuff. They can write good English (or whatever is their own language), edit pictures, publish online, grapple with intransigent technology, moderate comments, get up at dawn to publish stock exchange announcements to employees, scan intranets to produce weekly highlights emails, and do it all to a tight schedule. These people, many of them women with children who work part-time, tend to be hugely unappreciated because they don't really align with any of the possible owning departments. But without them the campaigns can't be delivered, the pretty page banners are ignored or laughed at, no-one really understands the company's strategy and the internal brand is weakened.

Research shows that good writing and effective delivery are absolutely key, though. Just today I have read in Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox that grabbing your reader's attention in the first 10 seconds is vital, and you can only do this through clear communication of your value proposition. He's talking about external websites, but just the same thing applies internally. Elsewhere, also today, David Broome of VMA talks about the results of the recent survey on Professional Development in Internal Communication. Among the four key requirements for an internal communications professional, the survey highlights writing: "what should be a 'given' is often lacking – ensuring your ability to write well should be a key priority".

It's true that the end game of internal communications is, and always has been, employee engagement. Internal comms is just one means to get there, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have values of its own. Over the past few years I do think we have lost focus on the craft of communications. We've moved on from the days of just delivering a monthly newsletter, but those writing and delivery skills are just as crucial as ever.

SharePoint 2010 - the long view

For the past six months I've been involved in upgrading Aviva's large and very complex global intranet from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The expected go-live date is in quarter 2, so we have allowed plenty of time for planning.

It's been a steep learning curve for me, as for the first time I have been working pretty much in a pure IT role, leading what we called the Business Readiness workstream - ensuring that the business is ready for the new software, and also ready to make the most of the opportunities it offers.

SharePoint 2010 has somewhat better networking features than its predecessor. In 2007 you got a profile, and a My Site which could hold not only your personal and shared files, but also your blog. In 2010, as well as all this, you can post your status (just like on Facebook) and leave a message on someone else's Noteboard (just like the wall on Facebook). In the wider SharePoint implementation you can also tag pages and documents with anything you find useful, and sometimes you can give a star rating.

From a corporate point of view this is scary territory. What happens if I post something nasty on someone else's Noteboard? Supposing I tag a page with a Bad Word? Unfortunately for technical reasons you can't have a real-time filter for Bad Words (one exists, see www.sharepointfilter.com, but it doesn't work in a way which Microsoft approves of). So the only option is "Report and take down" - if someone reports offensive content it will be assessed by a central team and if necessary removed, although it won't disappear from any news feeds or email alerts which have already picked up the item.

Report and take down has a number of issues. It takes time and resource to deal with each report. Depending on where the content was posted, it will still be visible in news feeds, as above. And if someone tags pages with rude words in Lithuanian or Turkish, it's going to be hard to manage for a central team who only speak English.

The key question for a risk-averse organisation is who is responsible for the content. If an employee is so deeply offended that they sue their employer, does the company have liability because they provided the system in the first place? Is it different from offending a colleague via your internal blog, internal email or a public system like Twitter?

The alternative is to tell the workforce that they have responsibility for what they post, and get them to believe it matters. In the end that has to be the primary approach, whatever else happens.

Aviva is not alone in worrying about this and it will be interesting to see what happens as SharePoint 2010 is adopted more widely. In my view, whatever the risks of people abusing an internal system, it is better than having your employees use Facebook for corporate communications - which is already quite a widespread practice.

New site for Kalessin

I got an email from Google inviting me to use Google Apps. I was interested in using it for some voluntary work I'm involved in so finally got around to taking a look yesterday.

I'm not really sure if we need corporate email or collaborative capabilities inside Kalessin Consulting. But it really is fantastic to explore and understand the options. In less than 24 hours I have bought a domain name and set up a website for the company. OK, it takes a bit of fiddling about, and knowledge of SharePoint, Blogger and other publishing tools comes in handy. And I still haven't worked out how to change the heading styles.

Take a look: www.kalessinconsulting.com

I can build an external website and a collaborative intranet for no more than the annual cost of the domain name ($10) and my time. That's vastly cheaper than paying Microsoft to host SharePoint for you. I believe the security is not quite at the same level, but if it saves me a few million dollars a year it's probably not a problem....

I'm really looking forward to developing all of this further, the next time I have a spare day :-)

I'm still not sure if it's the right tool for a volunteer group, but it really is brilliant for a small company.

The future of internal communications

I was talking last week to a friend and former colleague working in one of our key UK divisions. She spends probably no more than 5% of her time writing content and the rest of the time devising processes and getting sign-off.

Increasingly internal comms does not seem to be about creating content which will interest people or that they will enjoy reading. It's not even about creating a structured approach to comms as a key part of every project or programme of change. Nor is it about delivering material which will help people do their jobs. It's as if the structure has become more important than the material itself. Provided you have a plan, a flow chart, 10 sign-offs, and full integration with other functions, it doesn't matter if what you deliver is almost unreadable, uninteresting, and is superseded on the intranet homepage within a couple of hours.

Surely, this is madness. People are turning to blogs and discussion groups to find out what is really going on and to wikis to share information about working. I don't think it's true that classic corporate comms is dead yet, nor is it even dying - there'll always be a need for some comms which represents the official position of the company - but I think it is quite sick.

Reptilian brain

On Friday I went to the engagement part of my cousin Mark and got chatting to a chap called Francis, who is a second cousin of my aunt (I think). He's involved in marketing and is doing some work on how we make choices using the reptilian brain, or brainstem.

Wikipedia helpfully says that the reptilian complex "... is responsible for rage^[1], xenophobia^[1], and basic survival fight-or-flight responses^[1]. Often, the R-Complex can override the more rational function of the brain and result in unpredictable, primitive behavior in even the most sentient of creatures, humans included."

Francis thinks that this explains a lot about why men like fast red cars with big bonnets. But how much does it influence people's response to internal communications? Do we judge everything in a rational way or is some of it instinctual?

One of our senior HR directors used the phrase "create an emotional burning platform" in a recent news item to launch a series of summit conferences for senior managers. This has raised an internal debate about use of jargon. Clearly a lot of people read this sentence and are immediately turned off. The HR director contends that we won't learn new phrases unless we encounter them. It's a bit like Beatrix Potter's soporific lettuces.

Several questions arise:

• In good communications, should we explain every phrase which might be unfamiliar to the audience? (I would argue yes, but you have to know your audience to avoid being patronising).
• When is it permissible to use jargon? (only if you know you have a specialist audience - which was not the case).
  
• What percentage of users will actually go away and look up the phrase or ask others what it means? (A few).
  
• What percentage of readers will use their reptilian brains to decide this phrase must come from an alien culture, triggering a xenophobic reaction? (A lot).

Changingminds.org says: "The term 'burning platform' is now used to describe a situation where people are forced to act by dint of the alternative being somewhat worse. The crisis may already exist and just needs to be highlighted."

I wonder if the blogosphere is actually quite small?

My current client has around 60,000 employees, half in the UK. But on the active blogs there are probably only 20 or 30 commentors, and many of them post to all the blogs and join the discussion groups too.

Perhaps it's like a pyramid selling thing....after a while you just run out of possible audience and it becomes incestuous.

Reminds me of my favourite corporate statistic: If an organisation has more than 400 people they can spend all their time interacting with each other and never get any actual work done. Wait. I'll just go and see if I can verify that...

Rowing in the same direction

I had a longer session with Toby, the new group CIO, on Friday for an interview we're publishing on the intranet. What a breath of fresh air! He reminds me a lot of Steve Boden, who was my boss several years ago - masses of enthusiasm, really positive, very bright, and with clear ideas of what is the right thing to do. Sadly, Steve was never given the power to achieve what he wanted and eventually had to take early retirement. It's not surprising that the division we worked for no longer exists.

Toby's view is that IT has to operate as a team – in a vertically structured organisation it acts as a kind of horizontal glue. He said if we’re all on a boat (this is a man who likes analogies) then we need to decide where to row. And if everyone is rowing north-west and he finds a couple of people at the back who are rowing south-east, he will have a very serious conversation with them. If they persist he will put them into a penalty box (all the best rowing boats have penalty boxes don’t they?). And if they really don’t want to go the same way as the rest of the team he will help them to find a new team outside the company.

I said that one of the company's problems is that we have a very consensual culture, so if people can’t agree, then no progress is made. He said in that case someone, ie him, has to make decisions. He said if it’s a committee which has authority, “we have to drop a ton of bricks on that”. Steering groups are OK in the right places but sometimes they aren’t, and a single decision-maker is better. And he doesn’t much believe in setting guidelines either.

When I was working for Steve we spent two years, literally, trying to get the two key UK divisions to agree on anything at all - IT or otherwise. It's rumoured that a crucial employee letter was delayed for six months because one division wanted it to start "Dear Miss Jones" and the other one wanted it to say "Dear Samantha"... How can any organisation be so dysfunctional?