Internal communications - it's not rocket science

Neat things I wish I'd thought of....

I suspect everyone has done it from time to time - heard something witty late at night on an obscure radio station and used it a couple of days later and neglected to mention that it wasn't original.

There's even a TV presenter who has been tweeting other people's gags...

But today at lunch Rachel Allen said of a conversation with a colleague "I told him that while 'communications' might be in my job title I was damn sure it was in his job description..."

How I wish I could claim that one...

Liam

I finally got the website up

Thanks to Laura and Bob...here it is.

Liam

Do IC conferences have to be a rip off?

I have just seen emails from two good friends bemoaning the quality of a conference that they had attended very recently.  They had both paid nearly £2,000 to spend two days listening to a mixed group of speakers and they felt that the value was pretty limited.

One of them was doubly shocked to discover that some of the speakers had paid to speak – so delegates were being charged to get someone’s sales pitch.  Great work if you can get it.

Which is a shame as conferences don’t have to be bad.  

I’ve heard some great reports about a recent event organised by the UK CIPR – just a day, a reasonable fee that didn’t rip anyone off and an interesting set of speakers who all had something stimulating to say.  I’m upset that I missed it.

However, at the risk of sounding old, it’s not as bad as it used to be.

OK, charging speakers and not telling delegates is a new one on me.  But a few years ago conferences were pretty well the only way people in internal communications had of finding out about best practice.  If your training budget has been blown on listening to a bunch of snake oil salesmen pass off their personal prejudices as insight it’s a bit of a shame.

(Cue sound of glasshouse being smashed).

About six years ago a friend and I saw a gap in the market and came up with the idea of a training programme which we launched.  It was the first of its kind at the time; an intensive four days looking at internal communications planning and the skills of a communication manager.

Its weakness was that it didn’t lead to a specific qualification.  There was some sort of cachet to be had by running it at a business school and handing out a cod certificate at the end.  But no one ever failed.

Yet today, if you are willing to make a tiny bit of effort there’s an amazing selection of training on offer – everything from introductory certificates to full masters degrees in internal communications.

And the providers are increasingly impressive.  The Institute of Internal Communication has always had some good reviews and anything done by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations gets my seal of approval (but I am biased).

It would be great if the quality of the learning on offer led to an improvement in the quality of the debate that happens at conferences….

Liam

Liam FitzPatrick

BlackBelt Internal communication training

Warming them up for bad news

If you live in the UK you can’t have failed to have noticed that the Government is preparing us for some REALLY BAD news.  Next week we expect the Government to unveil the result of its deliberations into how it proposes to cut the deficit.

So for the last couple of months we’ve had dire warnings about pensions, reports on student finance, leaks about the abolition of government department and pronouncements from business leaders about the inefficiency of local government.  If the news isn’t really,  really bad I don’t know if I’m going to be relieved or mildly disappointed.

At the very least I’m banking on a plague of toads and the return of Watneys’ Red Barrel.

But does ‘warming up the audience’ or ‘managing expectations’ work with an internal audience?

To be honest, I don’t actually think I’ve ever really seen anyone try it properly – although it’s talked about a great deal.

I think that managers are in fact naturally nervous of anything that might ignite speculation of a negative sort and HR is always quick to smother anything that could taken down and later be used in an employment tribunal.

And when employers do lay out the gory details of what the future holds, the capacity of people to ignore bad news seems to be enormous.

I worked at one place where employees continued to buy shares when the bankruptcy of the business was being daily announced in the media and heavily suggested by the senior leaders. 

At one company in real difficulty with a terminally overwhelming debt mountain, questions to the CEO on the intranet touched on subjects as vital as the price difference between chips and sauté potatoes in the canteen and the lack of knives in the staff kitchen areas in Pittsburgh.  All this at a time when we were making mass lay-offs and closing sites around the world.

My point is not that you shouldn’t pre-warn people of bad news – in fact I think you are obliged to.  But rather that you shouldn’t misunderstand the sheer difficulty of getting the message over to people.

Liam

CSR - the secret tool of employee engagement

In the Chime group of companies we have a sister business - Corporate Citizenship - who are leaders in the field of sustainability and social responsibility.  And recently we held an evening seminar looking at the connections between better employee engagement and CSR.

The session was quite timely given how much has been said in the UK about the Big Society of late (it's a loose idea from the British government that citizens could be encouraged to do more for each other and rely less upon the state).  I have also seen a thoughtful recent paper from The Doughty Centre at Cranfield University on the connection between CSR and employee understanding. 

It was also partly prompted by the some work done by my colleagues for the Corporation of London in which they found that employees who get the chance to volunteer through their workplace report higher levels of personal commitment to their employers.

There does seem to be a real link to engagement generally - when people feel their organisation is doing the right thing they seem more willing to stick around.  I am looking for data to see how it impacts on advocacy and discretionary effort but intuitively one would suspect that there has to be a link.

In the conversation, a number of ideas emerged about how you ought to communicate around CSR.  In summary they were:

Make it a planned exercise - not just some ad hoc stories on the intranet.

Focus on what people can do to get involved - not just reporting things that other people have done

Make it a conversation - not just telling people what you want them to do...what do they think you should be doing?

It's about stories - bring it to life with real case studes about the work people have done and what they have learnt from the expereince - don't peopl drown in data and dull exhortations.

Leaders need to lead - if people don't see the bosses taking part, they're not going to join in.

It has to be compelling and exciting - not just worthy.

Talk about challenges as much as successes - no one believes you're perfect and it's more credible if you explain the journey...

Take time to measure the impact of communications.

If anyone is interested in seeing the materials we presented at the session - do get in touch.

Liam

Publication or communication?

I was in an interesting meeting the other day when one of the attendees burst out with the line "that's publication - not communication".

I was rather jealous that I hadn't thought of the line.

Liam

From a 'Welsh Perspective"...

I was at a conference the other day discussing employee engagement.

And from the floor came an observation made 'from a Welsh' perspective'.

The observation was in fact quite generic and applicable to anyone in the room.  It had nothing to do with green green valleys, rainy weather, bible black nights or a language devoid of vowels.

Which sort of left me wondering what a 'Welsh perspective' on employee engagement might look like...

Liam

Management writing - all a load of guff?

Thanks to David Ferrabee for a recent twitter I found myself reading a cracking book for the last few weeks.

It’s The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart – part review of some of the major thinkers on management science in the last 100 or so years and part personal story about his experiences as a strategy consultant.  If you want to hear an attack on management consultants you'll find some good material here.

Stewart suggests that many of the most lauded writers in the field of management – people like Mayo (of Hawthorne effect fame) and Taylor – were little more than charlatans who falsified their data.  I imagine that the laws of defamation prevent him being quite so robust in his condemnation of contemporary gurus like Gary Hamel or Waterman – you get the impression he doesn’t hold them in high regard.

I can’t judge whether I believe him or whether his allegations are the product of a wild and embittered mind.

However, he does make a powerful central point.  If you are claiming to be scientific, your hypotheses need some sort of predictive value and your evidence need to be open to challenge by your peers.

Otherwise, he suggests, you are little better than a snake oil salesman promising fantastic results. 

Which is why I sometimes struggle with some of the amazing data that gets chucked around our field.  In recent years I’ve seen facts claiming multi-billion losses caused by poor employee retention or the vast profits that can accrue to companies that communicate well.

There's food for thought in here - especially when you dragged into yet another conversation about the amazing wizardry that comms people can perform...

Liam