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integration with other functions, it doesn't matter if what you deliver is almost unreadable, uninteresting, and is superseded on the intranet homepage within a couple of hours.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?

PS.

I met the new CIO today. He's cool.

Does blogging work?

For ages there's been a bit of an effort to bring together all the communicators across the company. It hasn't worked very well. People have been focused on their own business units. They haven't seen the point in sharing information. Only the heads of comms or their next in command are usually involved. Being a global company means either a hugely expensive conference or a web meeting/teleconference.

Now we're moving towards becoming One Organisation it seems like a good time to try a blog as a means to bring communicators together. Of course it won't be easy. But it could be worth it. Now I'm told I have to define the exact strategic aims for the blog. No, I think someone may be missing the point somewhere....

Blogs vs. conventional communication

It's quite easy for your blog to cause trouble, and you may not even know it' happening.

Regional CIO blogged that he met the new Group CIO yesterday - and, he commented, many people in IT didn't even know we had a Group CIO. Is this a problem with the way we communicate appointments, he asked.

Group CIO's boss (v. senior director) gets to hear about this, assumes it's the fault of communications and asks communications director why we didn't publish the announcement.

Communications director immediately assumes her team has let her down and never published the announcement. (If that was the case it would be the first time in seven years that the team has let her down). She finds a different page published on a different date and assumes the deathless prose has been butchered. Accusations fly.

Reassurance. We did publish the announcement, the trouble is that not many people read it, and it was six weeks ago. Furthermore we have a comms plan for the group CIO starting with a profile on Monday.

Hmm. Strange absence of grovelling apology from the comms director.

Neither the blogger (Regional CIO), bloggee (Group CIO) or v. senior director know about any of this. Should we tell them? Don't know. Should they have communicated the appointment better themselves? Well, yes. Can a communications department cover up for managers failing to communicate to each other? Errr...

Emailing the CIO

Our new CIO responded to my request for help with blogging guidelines. It's great to have a perspective from elsewhere - he's been working in the States for years.

One of his points was that many of the most successful blogs are set up to meet a short-term need, perhaps over a few days or weeks. That's probably something which would only work in a corporate environment where people know about each other. No-one would know about an internet blog which came and went in a week.

The other point is that it has to be as quick to set up an internal blog as it is to create one on Blogger or Wordpress. That's not the case at the moment. Even duplicating an existing blog takes a couple of working days, which is very scary.

It was great to hear back from another blogger, director of customer experience in one of the UK divisions. He said he felt really concerned when he got my email that it meant the end of carefree blogging in the organisation... but in fact he felt my guidelines were good and really helpful. :-)

Now the hard bit will be to stop HR turning them into a set of rules and banning everyone from using Facebook.

Blogging guidelines

I've been asked to put together some blogging guidelines for my current client. It's quite a challenge. Writing them is like writing a good blog entry: succinct, readable, tell you something you didn't already know, link to more information. And you never know your audience.

The fist draft has gone to some of the company's existing internal bloggers for comment. They range from the group CIO (he joined last week) to a lady whose job is to post responses to blogs and messageboards to soothe aggravated customers. Plus my personal favourite blogger, the Europe CIO, and a number of other movers, shakers and mavericks. They are a really good collection of interesting people. I can't wait to see what response I get.

Loose collections of ice, dust, and small rocky particles

Last week I had an interview for a possible contract based in Rickmansworth, Herts. An IT consultancy wanted someone to do the communications for an IT change programme for a major retailer. I did fine on the phone interview, was in London the next day, so agreed to go out to Rickmansworth to meet the senior IT consultant. However, since the identity of the client was top secret, we had to meet in the Caffe Nero in the High Street.

On the way out of the Tube station I passed a large, brown building with a big illuminated sign on it. I arrived about 20 minutes early, spent 10 minutes seeing the sights of Rickmansworth (it takes that long), and repaired to the cafe, which was very draughty, noisy, and full of harassed mothers with young children. The interview was due to be at 5pm.

At 5.15 I phoned the consultant's mobile and left a message on his voicemail. At 5.25 he called me to say he was on his way. Just before 5.30 he arrived, apologised slightly, didn't offer me a coffee, and we went to the back of the cafe to chat. At 5.55 he abruptly said he didn't have anything else to ask me and the interview was over. In all this time he declined to say who the client was or tell me anything useful about them. Nor would he explain what was actually involved in the project or who the stakeholders were.

Strangely I didn't get the job. They said I didn't seem enthusiastic enough. I wonder why?

As a consultant, when you attend a job interview the quid pro quo is finding out quite a bit about the company you're seeing. You put in a fair bit of time on research and they tell you more at the interview. Even if you don't get the job you come away with extra knowledge which is always useful. None of that works if the client is, supposedly, secret.

In this case it seems likely that they had found a friend of a friend to do the job, forgot all about me, and made a token show at an interview. I haven't named the consultancy here, but I was not impressed and nor were my agency. I don't like being treated as insignificant or inept. No-one should be.

Camilla Herrmann - profile

Camilla is the director of Kalessin Consulting.

She is a communications professional with extensive experience in corporate and internal communications for blue-chip companies in the financial and hospitality sectors - and with a special focus on intranets as a communication tool. Her background is in newspaper and magazine journalism and contract magazine publishing.

Camilla is respected for capability in analysing and understanding communications needs, and in originating, planning and delivering successful solutions from print and intranet to face-to-face.

She is also passionate about effective, clear communications and good writing at every level of an organisation.