Internal communications - it's not rocket science

Do we do more than communicate?

I have been looking at the syllabus of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Diploma qualification and was wondering how wide it's appeal is to people in the communications profession.

It was suggested to me that PR is about more than communication - what professionals do goes far beyond the simple act of communicating. The CIPR says that PR is:

"the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics."

...a description that implies more than sitting people in a room and getting them to talk to each other.

From a change and IC practitioner's point of view I think I see the point.  To be honest, a large part of what I do has little to do with the narrow practice of communications.  I find myself involved in debates about the substance of a business strategy, whether it is understandable enough to be workable or whether a management team are committed enough to actually work together.

When I talk to my colleagues in our advertising agency I hear about shaping products and designing services - not just about making neat ads. Friends in lobbying, consumer PR, crisis and business to business tell similar stories.

This is a fundamental truth about what we do.  If you adopt too narrow a brief you miss the point about communication.  Making people love your strategy, your product, your workplace is about so much more than just talking to them or even listening to them.

Making a difference as a communicator means taking a broad approach that encompasses understanding strategy, being able to challenge the received wisdom and seeing yourself as a strategic partner.

But I wonder how many people see it like that?

 

Bulletin board buffoons

Most newspapers do it these days.

They invite a reader to share a dilemma and then ask readers to share their advice.  I suppose if you think about it as entertainment it is harmless enough but sometimes it does feel a bit wrong.  

I'm sitting here looking at an article where someone is getting well intentioned but bonkers advice about her teenage daughter.  Recently I saw some potentially disastrous advice given to a man with a suicidal wife and still shudder at the insensitivity dished out to the man who was coming to terms with his father's homosexuality.

The problem is that anyone can comment and, let's face it, many of our fellow human beings should be encouraged to keep their bizarre or ill-formed opinions to themselves (I know this is dangerous ground for someone who writes a blog...).

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but why do we think that they all deserve a platform to express their views?

For internal communicators this is a real issue.  I used to manage an internal bulletin or discussion board for a company at which I used to work.  I firmly believed that it was good for the company to give people a space to ask challenging questions.

For a couple of years I used up endless personal credit with senior leaders defending the right of some quite obnoxious people to be rude to the executives.  

And did it do any good?  Probably not.  The miserable gits moved on, little actually changed and the company went broke anyway.

Now I have reached the view that quite a few Linked-in fora are probably not worth the time of day.

My blood pressure probably can not cope with the aggressive tone of some contributors or the fatuos observations of others.  In fact the spam postings make a couple of the sites just about bearable.

What surprises me is that the fora from which I have un-subscribed are run for the benefit of communicators.  Somehow I'd expect my fellow professionals to be better quality posters.

As comms professionals we regularly get called upon to manage all sorts of infantile debates in workplaces.  Childish behaviour is often cited as one of the fears that prevents organisations experimenting with social media internally.  But give IC people a platform and we're as bad as anyone else.

Having said that, Charlie Norblum's Communicative Leadership group on Linked-in seems to be attracting a higher class of contributions than many such fora.

So, for the time being I'm cleaning up my social media subscriptions.  And I'm left with the question - is the sum of human happiness or workplace engagement enhanced just by letting any buffoon expose their ramblings to the rest of us?

Liam

PS - I do appreciate the irony in a blogger saying this!

How frank can your news pages be?

I’m shockingly old.

That brings the licence to say things which can be passed off as the ramblings of a grumpy old man (normally that is).

And it brings the curse of thinking I’ve heard it all before.

One discussion that ranged when I was starting out in communications, back in the days of quill pens and a working day that finished at 5 pm, was about the independence of the house newspaper.

I remember the fiercely even-handed approach of Rail News (back in the day when the trains worked). BA News was nicknamed ‘The Friday Firelighter’ by managers who were regularly wrong-footed by its news reporting.  And I’m still smarting from the telling off I got from the editor of the BP internal magazine when I tried to sneak in some outrageous puff about the achievements of the IT department.

Companies placed great store by the credibility of the paper or the magazine to tell it how it was and to defend their audience from an avalanche of turgid internal propaganda.

After all, what’s the point of shelling out a small fortune on fancy writers and posh typesetting if no one believes a word of what’s printed there?

I do wonder to what extent this tradition carries through to the news pages of most intranets?

Clearly no organisation wants communications to look like they have been outsourced to the North Korean information ministry.  But (irony alert), what’s the point of shelling out a minimum of resources for an instantly alterable noticeboard if you don’t control the exact wording of what goes up there?

Some time back I watched and cheered from the side-lines as a communicator defended the intranet from dull, self promoting nonsense produced by an internal department.  “We’ve worked hard to build a readership – I’m not having it scared away by this crap” I heard him say.

But it’s a tough challenge for many communicators.

On the one hand leaders need channels that are respected and valued by staff.  Whilst at the same time, many leaders want their own version of Pravda to publish air-brushed hagiographies.

Standing your ground is a valuable skill that in-house practitioners need to learn at an early stage.  But I think the trick is to be smart about who gets told to bog off and who gets coached to try better.

So who is teaching that apart from the school of hard knocks?

 

Strategy or stuff?

I've been helping a client with some benchmarking interviews in the last couple of weeks and I was struck the other day by something I heard.

One of our interviewees, the corporate head of comms in a global manufacturing company was telling us her story.  She was explaining that, for the first couple of years in her job she didn't really bother to focus on developing lots of channels. 

This threw me a little.

In every role I've ever had I've tried to buy some credibility by delivering something tangible and fast.  Although I've had the strategic game plan in mind, I've always preached that no one wants a comms manager who doesn't deliver stuff.

But our interviewee rejected this as nonsense.

Her take was that if you start the conversation with a newsletter or by fiddling with the details of delivery, you'll struggle to get attention about the issues that really matter.

So, she said that she'd spent time working on getting the senior leadership to understand how comms could help them, what their role was and how they could get better at it.  When she felt that she'd made headway there she started looking at her channels and other tactics.

She's made me question a few things.

Most of all, I do wonder whether we should all stick to our guns a bit more - which isn't always easy when there's pressure to deliver things...

Are US communicators different?

A quick look at blogs and websites recently has got me thinking.

Are internal communicators different in the US to the rest of the world?

What got me thinking was the reaction to a recent post I made about writing skills.  My comments about the relative unimportance of writing upset a few people - most of whom were in North America. 

The comments I received from this side of the pond were generally complementary and supportive.

So I've been taking a bit of a look at blogs recently and, on a wholly unscientific basis, have started to wonder if there is somethng in this point of difference.

For a start they don't call it 'internal' comms - it's 'Employee Comms' over there.

And there is a preoccupation with writing and tactics - elsewhere it's all about giving CEO counsel, supporting business strategy and producing really scary powerpoint charts.

Compare Ragan.com and Melcrum.com to see what I mean. The former is dominated by technical content, whilst the latter likes to position itself as the forum for senior people (albeit with a few money-spinning diversions into Sharepoint courses!).

And look at the blog of comms doyen Shel Holtz.  Here is a posting about the need for comms people to explain who customers are to staff - is there something significant in the fact that someone so highly regarded in the business in the US is blogging about something many people elsewhere would see as comms 101? (No prizes for pointing out that I often rattle on about basics).

This isn't one of those 'Isn't the US rubbish' posts.  Why?  Because I think the US has been at IC longer than the rest of us - the sheer distances involved in running corporations in a mono-lingual market mean that Americans got a head start on the rest of us.  They've been doing newsletters and IC while we were still sending messages around by butler and cleft stick.

I also don't think that the issue boils down to "we're startegists and they're tacticians" as there are plenty of both sorts over here in Europe.

I have no real basis for saying this, but I suspect it's something to do with different employment traditions on either side of the Atlantic.  The European approach to workplace relations is a funny mix of obligation to protect labour from the excesses of capital and a view that people work harder when they are loved.  I doubt many US CEO's would be happily signing up for an EU style employment framework.

My conclusion?  I think Brits can forget that the US is a foreign country, with foreign traditions and an alien culture.  When it comes to comparing professional practice in the field of communications it's wrong to apply similar standards

Liam

Can we be progressive in a recession?

Thanks to @ResEuropa for his updates on EU matters I noticed that there is a move afoot to improve maternity rights.  Votes in the European Parliament have led to the adoption of proposals that would see maternity leave increased across the Union to 20 weeks - a measure that the European Federation of Small Businesses estimate will cost €121bn between now and 2030 (far more than the recently approved increased in the EU budget).

To be clear, I'm a fan of the EU and its socially progressive agenda.  I might be well past the age when I could benefit personally from a mandatory two week paternity leave but I believe it has to be a good thing.

However, the times in which we live pose some challenging questions for all of us about what we can afford.

When in the UK half a million public sector jobs are at risk it can seem inappropriate to demand things like pay rises, changes to working hours or additional benefits.  This week sees UK firefighters and London Underground workers strike and doubtless they will be criticised for being out of touch with reality.

But my question is simple.  Should a progressive agenda for things like parental leave, better conditions of employment or basic decency at work suffer because of the current economic situation?  

Or just because a combination of poor oversight of the global banking industry and a gamble on state borrowing have created a crisis should that justify a backward shift in employment rights for ordinary people?  

Just a thought....

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

Can ugly people make it in internal communications?

As I look around at the generally very nice looking people in my office I am reminded of something that a boss of years ago said to me - 'ugly people don't get on in communications...'

My old boss was given to making Napoleonic statements like that without any foundation beyond his own post lunchtime prejudices.  And I always assumed that he was talking rubbish (otherwise you'd have to question why I never got sacked) until today.

I just saw this posting about careers and looks.

The theory goes that attractiveness as a career boost only applies to women - the reverse is true of men.  I'm stretching it a bit but it might be that ugly men get on in comms....

Oh dear, I wish I hadn't had that thought...

Liam

Database madness

Once upon a time every problem needed a survey to solve it.   People used automatically to reach for a questionnaire when confronted with a challenge at work.  I'm all for sensible workplace consultation and I'm the first to suggest research, but everyone has the experience of despairing when confronted with an email in-box full of invitations to answer 'just five quick questions on the types of speciality teas available in the fifth floor kitchen...'

Now a new menace has emerged.  It's the obsession with the office database.

It seems that few workplace problems can not be solved by the creation of a new database.

In the last year I think I've heard databases proposed as the solution to poor collaboration between academics, wasteful procurement processes and staff absenteeism.  

All great ideas, but they just don't work.

People never supply the data that they are meant to for a wide variety of reasons - pressure of real work, misunderstanding or sheer bloodymindedness.  The database itself remains a secret so someone else creates another identical one, or they are designed to solve a problem that doesn't really exist.

The common feature to all the issues which demand a database - or indeed a special survey - is that better human communications could go a long-way towards solving so many of them.  If we could build better networks between real people, get colleagues chatting more in real situations away from Facebook or its intranet equivalents how better life would be.

Liam

Twittering pests

I’ve been off Twitter lately – mainly because I’ve been quite busy.  And also because I never know how happy my clients are when I give away my location and a description of what I’m up to.

It seems though that people do seem to lose all sense of discretion when they go on Twitter.

We’ve had trade unionists twittering in the middle of labour negotiations, politicians saying what they really think of their voters and heavens knows what else.

In fact, I can’t help wondering what the point of it all is anymore.  The bulk of the follows I get are from people hoping that I’ll follow them and buy stuff or from PR’s plugging stuff on behalf of clients.

Eighteen months ago I couldn’t see what Twitter was for.  Then I went through a phase when I quite enjoyed seeing what mates and some competitors were up to.  Now I’m swinging back the other way.

The problem with communications is that the minute you find a channel that works everyone wants to stuff it full of noise.  So whatever the NEXT BEST THING is going to be I won’t get too attached as it’s bound to be broken within two years (or a few weeks after I get around to discovering it).

Liam

Liam FitzPatrick Bell Pottinger Change and Internal Communications