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.