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.