Learning from our past

“Will the [internal communication] function be needed?  No, and that’s a good thing. In fact, that should be our professional aim – to restore our organisations’ ability to communicate to the point where our services are no longer required.”

So said Adam Hibbert in a comment on my last post.

I love this aspiration [although I’m not sure about "restoring"].  And, I know it’s shared by many of you who are following the discussion on CommScrum where our frustration concerning the function is often the basis for “the scrum” and on Kevin Keohane’s  blog – “Death to internal marketing” – where the blog’s name speaks for itself.

I think we all agree that – good, bad or indifferent – employee communications have and do happen with or without a function called internal communications.   So, when did the function come into being?  Why? And what was work life like before and after?

We actually don’t need to go back very far to find a time when the function didn’t exist.

According to my resident economic historian, Michael, since the multi-divisional corporation was only invented in the U.S.A sometime in “the 1920s” when it was first introduced by Alfred Sloan at General Motors (“Sloan’s Revolution”), the employee communication function, as a function, couldn’t have existed before that.

A quick look at Sloan’s book “My years with General Motors” and the organization charts that are produced there show something very interesting.  The beginnings of a human resources function are there as early at 1921.  At that time, General Motors had a position called General Advisor Staff.  This position reported to the VP in charge of operations and was responsible for 15 functions wide ranging functions from the cafeteria to real estate.  One of these which was called Organization – Line and Staff and another called Personnel Services [Welfare, medical and San. Serv.].  The beginnings of Human Resources are there.  But nothing that suggests a specific employee communications function.

By 1963 the biggest corporation in the world still did not have a Public Relations function.  The closest thing to that seems to be advertising and market research function that reported to the VP Sales and Service.  Oh those Mad Men!  That’s the biggest company in the world.  That’s  1963!

By that time the Personnel and Labour Relations function with its own VP.   And, there are three places within this function that start to look like employee communications.  The first two are the General Motors Suggestion Program and Employee Research functions [both reporting to Personnel Relations] and the second is the Appeal Hearings and Arbitration [reporting to labour Relations].  Perhaps even more interesting from a communication point of view is that they all are potentially about listening.  They certainly don’t sound like mass communications.

To understand our present and prepare for our future I think we need to understand our past.  This brief look into the past has made me more curious.

• When did organizations decide they needed to influence employees with more than hours and wages?  Was it when employees began to unionize and take action against their employers?
• What motivated the creation of an internal communications function?
• When did the first internal communication function show up on an organization chart?
• What impact did internal communications have?  Did the work of the first  internal communications functions improve the workplace or not?
• When did internal communications become a professional communications function rather than a Human Resources specialty?  Or did it?
• When we expect the function to be a humanizing force in our institutions are we asking it to do something it was never designed to do?

If you know the answer to any of these questions, I’d love to hear from you?

Is it time to scrap the current structure and start from nothing? I know where you and Kevin stand Adam.  Anybody else?

For more you might want to check out:

Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Company, 2003, pp. 104-109

Alfred Sloan, My Years at General Motors, 1964

Alexander R. Heron, “Sharing information with employees” , 1942 is considered the first book on employee communications

Tags: Communications, Employee communication, Michael Hinton, The profession, Work