This blog is about the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
The profession
What is internal communication?
Today, Lisa Barone asked a very simple question: what is marketing? Inspired by her post, I thought we could try the same thing here by mirroring her approach to answer the question: what is internal communication?
Step 1: First, Lisa turned to Google. So off I went to search internal communication is. Here’s what I got:
- internal communication issues
- internal communication iso 9001
- internal communication iso
- internal communication israel
- internal communication is necessary
- internal communication is a type of communication
- internal communication is defined as
- internal communication is poor
- why internal communication is important
A little dark humour perhaps. The second is of a room full of people looking at a panel and a screen. It was called ‘Video conference’. And the third:
Poor stressed out guy on a phone entitled “Taking Notes’. Ouch! It was only at image 4 where people were apparetnly in conversation with each other. Though I have to say, there was a menacing quality …
I don’t know about you, but this exercise has left me even more perplexed and discouraged than Lisa in her search for “what is marketing?”
What is internal communication? After today’s exercise, I have no idea. Tomorrow, I may try this exercise on employee communication. As for today, I’m off to take a pain killer.
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Go for the gold!
Over the weekend we attended our first triathlon. Before you get too excited, Michael and I were just there to cheer Michael’s brother Stephen on. The top ranked competitors [including I'm proud to say - my brother-in-law] take it very seriously and are very good. They swam 1.5 km, rode 40 km and ran 10 km on a still, hot day [30C+ without humidex] when Michael and I could barely stand the heat as we stood in the full sun [no where to go] and rang cow bells to encourage Stephen as he flew by.
There was a moment when two competitors were running within inches [maybe millimeters] of each other, when the lead just lost “it”. It was obvious. His face changed, his stride changed, everything changed. Less than a second later he’d fallen lengths behind with only a few meters to go to the finish line. And it was at that moment that I started to think about what it really takes to bring home the gold. And to think about what we can learn from top ranked athletes and how they train.
The difference between being a good athlete and being a great one can be pretty small as anyone who’s watched the Olympics knows. These athletes don’t just know how to do their sport. They bring their body, mind and spirit to what they do in a very focused and intentional way.
Last week I asked what our organizations are doing to support employees doing their best. Today, I’m asking what we as employees and professionals are doing to be our best.
Are we clearly articulating what success looks like for ourselves in our work life? When do we want to realize that vision? Does that vision inspire us? If not we need to start over.
Are we clear about where we are in relationship to our inspirational end state? Do we know what key actions we need to take, and what skills and capacity we need to build to get there? Are we taking action every day to get there? Are we eating properly, exercising and getting enough rest to do what we want to do over time? Are we developing the mental skills to handle our current situation and get us to the next level? Are we mentally prepared? Have we made time to meditate and develop our focusing and visualization skills? Are we consolidating what we’re learning and adjusting our plans?
If we’re not as present in our work life as top performing athletes our chances of achieving the highest levels we aspire to are significantly less likely to happen. We can rely on chance, or go for the gold!
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Let there be light!
Over the past couple of years I’ve had this niggling feeling that just won’t go away. Communicators and human resource professionals are working in the dark. Demands are changing. Resources low. Pressure increasing. Time? Well there isn’t enough. Result, we’re running from one event, crisis, deliverable to the next. Not only are we not thinking beyond the next week, month, quarter, but we’re working in the dark.
This came home to me again in the past couple of days. Rachel Miller had tweeted a request for help for a masters student, Sonsoles Lumbreras. Sonsoles is doing research for a dissertation that will focus on the use of social media in the context of organizational change.
Given the topic and the cause, I offered to help. And, what an interesting project that turned into. Amazing to find in my very little sample [9 executive contacts, all at major international companies] that companies either don’t have a group level internal communications person or don’t have a social media strategy so don’t have anything to say or my contacts don’t know the Communications people… What? Don’t know the Communications people?
How can we help our organizations develop strong and sustainable relationships when institutionally we aren’t doing that ourselves? How can we understand, and I mean really understand, the impact of what we’re doing if we aren’t widely and deeply networked. We have to get out more my friends! It’s not an option.
By the way, Sonsoles wants to speak to people in international businesses with operations in the UK. If you’d like to help her e-mail is: sonlumbreras@yahoo.com.
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The challenge – Change the profession!
We’ve heard it all before. The traditional approach to corporate communications – tightly “scripted messages delivered by the chief executive, first to investors, then to other opinion-formers, and only later to the mass audiences of employees and consumers“ has got to go.
And it needs to be replaced by vibrant “peer-to-peer and horizontal discussion across stakeholders. [Where] the employee is the new credible source for information about a company, giving insight from the front lines. [And], the consumer has become a co-creator, demanding transparency on decisions from sourcing to new-product positioning.” [Ref for these quotes]
And yet, even as Web and Intranet 2.0 are about to become 3.0 we’re still working through 1.0 [ok maybe 1.5]. And if you have any doubt, just pop into CommScrum to check out the animated discussion going on there over what and how our main professional association IABC is or isn’t serving the needs of our profession in this new world.
As early as 2007, Arthur W Pages’ publication, the Authentic Enterprise in 2007, presented recommendations for transforming “our profession, open[ing] up new and meaningful kinds of responsibility and learning, and creat[ing] exciting new career paths for communications professionals. If you haven’t read it, it’s a great starting point for thinking about the revolution of our profession.
And, in June, after months of online consultation, The Stockholm Accords were published. Their aim “… is to articulate and establish the role of public relations in the “communicative organization” within a fast-evolving digital and value-network society.” [I think the authors would do well to refer back to the Authentic Enterprise].
We know what we need to do, so what’s stopping us?
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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
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“Resistance is futile”
At first glance social media is pretty alien. It’s another technology getting in the way of face to face relationships. And, as communicators we know in our hearts this is not a good thing.
And yet this is the irony of social media. This technology that on the surface seems to dehumanize in the end enables us to accomplish one of the most human of all needs – to connect with each other.
In the past week or so I’ve been reading about how GM management believe that giving employees access to social media “humanizes” the company with their clients and potential clients. But, I’m afraid this misses the real power of social media: The power to “humanize” institutions internally.
The organizations that embrace social media on the inside are enabling their employees to connect with each other across:
- time,
- geography,
- function, and
- level.
They’re helping employees access the information and expertise they need, when and how they need it to do their work. They’re energizing not just the formal organizational networks, but the informal as well.
Today the number of organizations who are giving employees full access to social media inside and out are few. Tomorrow they will be many. “Resistance is futile.”
What will this change mean for the Corporate Communications or Internal Communications functions? Not only what we do, but how we do it. I’d love to hear what you think.
By the way, as predicted by my social media mentors – Michelle Sullivan, Julien Smith, and Mitch Joel - I’ve learned that social media doesn’t get in the way of face to face relationships. In fact, quite the opposite. And, that’s a very good thing. Thanks you guys.
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Lessons from the newsroom
The need for news is and always has been a fundamental human need. What we get and how we get it certainly has changed fundamentally thanks in part to Web 2.0 and social media. And, it’s changing the newsroom forever. If it hasn’t already, it will change our Corporate Communications function and our profession forever too.
So, my interest peaked when I heard Tom Rosenstiel, Director Pew Research Centres Project for Excellence in Journalism, interviewed the other day on CBCs The Current. Here’s the change he described:
| From | To |
| Journalists and their editors decided what was important for us to know and when [basically from 6am to 10 pm] | We decide what we want to read, listen to and watch and when [any time] |
| Editors decide what’s of interest to us based on instinct [surveys are expensive] | We can find out what’s of interest to our ‘readers’ immediately |
| Traditional media are trusted | Traditional media are distrusted and they are most distrusted by those of us who are the biggest consumers of news |
| Large news rooms and good budgets with the ability to follow many stories | Shrinking news rooms and limited budgets means following only a few stories |
| Social consensus – we all knew basically the same things at the same time | No social consensus – we may or may not know the same things at the same time. We may be more informed [ie: go deeper on a story] or completely uninformed [doesn’t interest us so we go elsewhere] |
| Story telling was everything | Story telling is only part of the story. News media need to provide:
|
| Product | Service |
What do you think? Are there lessons here for us:
- As professional communicators?
- In terms of our function? What we do? How we do it? When we do it? What skills and experience we need and how we’ll get them?
- In terms of our professional associations?
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