The IC juggling act

When I started out in the world of internal communication, it very quickly became abundantly clear that IC is a tricky juggling act.

In many companies, IC teams are small, sometimes relying on a sole practitioner or even having IC as part of someone’s ‘real’ day-to-day job. This means that just being able to write isn’t enough.

It’s also not enough to be able to create nice presentations or interpret and boil down large quantities of raw data into a manageable form.

It isn’t even enough to do all that and be able to update an intranet using some fancy wysiwyg tool.

The IC role – from director to grassroots, coal face comms – needs all of the above and more, especially in this ever-changing social media-driven world.

You need to have the right influencing skills, solid negotiation skills, advanced time management capability and nerves of steel. Calmness should be a prerequisite.

Of course, senior managers and the majority of your audience only see the outputs of IC – the ‘communications’ produced by internal communication. The analogy of a duck comes to mind: you can see the head, body and feathers calmly wading across the water; you can’t see the frantic paddling going on underneath, powering the engine (I know – ducks don’t have engines).

Where I worked prior to my current post, there were two of us in IC – I was lucky enough in 2010 to be able to recruit someone to work for me so that we could concentrate both on the day-to-day tactical comms and the longer-term strategic comms.

But it’s still the output which gets seen and critiqued / criticised.

Communications are always the first to get hammered in a people survey, but I think it’s down to people’s interpretation of what internal communications are and what the IC team is responsible for. We don’t write and publish the canteen menu…

So, now in my new position, I want to make sure that both senior teams and end-user audiences are fully aware of what IC does (and doesn’t) produce and realises what a tough job it can be at times.

What a difference a half-year makes

Blimey. If I didn’t have enough change and crisis communications experience six months ago, I’ve certainly added a few more strings to that particular bow.

I’d still like to remain fairly anonymous, so I won’t outline the details of said change and crisis comms onslaught, but suffice to say, the company has gone through some big moves recently.

We have a new CEO and a new direction after some pretty troubled times, but the biggest challenge at the moment is influencing stakeholders and managing those relationships, some of which previously existed and some of which are brand new.

The new CEO is the fourth one I’ve worked under at the company and is certainly the straightest talking of all before him. Throw out that book of business jargon and wash your mouth out of those hyperboles: he’s more about saying it like it is and being completely open and honest. It’s a breath of fresh air.

But since plans to change the business fundamentally have been underway and ready to launch for a few months – and under the previous CEO – getting the balance of old and new messages has been a juggling act to say the least; where messages around growth, improvement and investment have been seeded since the start of the year, the new CEO’s approach needs to be fused with those messages and the hyperbole needs to be softened to appeal to the CEO’s direct nature.

Influencing senior stakeholders when they’re champing at the bit to announce large-scale changes to their department while trying to build a relationship with their new boss is a tough gig. There’s an increased feeling of stress at a level where usually most people feel more relaxed about change, given their proximity to the fine detail, knowledge of job security and advanced position on the change curve.

This is where existing relationships come in most useful – I’d rather maintain existing than concentrate on building new relationships (ideally, of course, I’d do both simultaneously). Getting your classic stakeholders the attention and time can help to build the CEO relationship as they will start to go into bat for you on things you’ve supported them with.

As our CEO continues to communicate in his own way, I know I need to make sure the existing messages are still valid, albeit re-phrased.

The Third Way

The key to good internal communication is said to be two-way dialog, ensuring we are allowing people to ask questions, get answers, contribute to what the company is aiming to achieve and feel that success is in part down to them. We all know that having top-down communication as the only method of information from leaders is not totally desirable from an employee’s point of view, especially for those from Gen Y, Z and whatever’s next in this (somewhat-short-sighted-at-its-creation) alphabet of generational pigeon-holing. But is two-way dialog enough? I suggest that there’s a third dimension, the third way in three-way communication.

Recently, we’ve been discussing an online global communication tool for our parent company, one which will be unprecedented, really, in bringing people and information closer to each other and making inter-company collaboration and global working far easier and at the fingertip length demanded by so many workers in this day and age.

The first version of this platform fell short of expectations and had some teething problems which thwarted its adoption at our company. It was a shame because its intentions were spot on – connect to people around the world, share knowledge, experience and expertise, get answers quickly from international colleagues, and so on. The system did all that and more. BUT (that’s a big ‘but’, fyi), the layout, navigation, site performance and governance were poor. Shame; right target, wrong arrows.

After seeing version 2.0 (yes, it’s really called that), I’m confident that people will be impressed and that adoption will follow.

This is where the third dimension of communication comes in: one-way communication is top-down, broadcast, closed, information-only, etc; two-way opens up conversation and dialog between leaders and employees, encouraging feedback, response and interaction. The third way is about colleagues discussing the issues amongst themselves, without their managers being involved (or it might involve them at lower levels within the organisation).

A select group of us has been asked to be advocates for the new system and spread the love of v2.0. The conversations and influence we have with our peers will be crucial to ensure a wide adoption of the system. When we’re in meetings, emailing colleagues or simply having informal water cooler chats, we are going to be walking, talking adverts for this system.

Which made me think – how can we make sure that we are ‘breeding’ advocates of the business at all times, so that the positive vibe is being passed around in the canteen queue, at the staff gym, in team meetings and on bus journeys home? If we can nail this third way of communicating – lighting fires, as I’ve heard it called – we can increase the effectiveness of our communications exponentially. This isn’t a revelation by any means – Leandro Herrero has written books about what he has coined as viral change. (I recommend “Disruptive Ideas” which has the sub-headline of “10+10+10 = 1000″.)

How much influence can leaders have on these informal peer-to-peer conversations? Seemingly quite a lot if the right people are involved at the right time. I’m not talking about being dishonest or underhanded, trying to ‘brainwash’ people into believing the corporate spin (trust me, that would be worked out VERY quickly by our more-intelligent-than-average workforce); rather that by communicating better with those who have a lot of clout in the workplace and getting their buy-in and trust, there is much to be gained from their infectious impact among their colleagues.

Getting the basics right, wherever you are in the world

I’m not saying for one second that we get the basics right at our company, but we’re on the right track.  However, I do see examples of where the basics in Internal Communications are being missed.  One of those companies is RundFunk, a German company who will remain anonymous.

To give you a bit of background, RundFunk operates in a difficult industry in Germany, where there is some stiff, cheaper competition, and they haven’t made a profit in a couple of decades.  In fact, the losses are in the hundreds of millions of Euro.  People who work for RundFunk are largely pessimistic about the company’s future and after some considerable bail-outs, there is some complacency about the reality of the situation.  The most recent bail-out from a large venture capitalist conglomerate has signalled make-or-break time for the senior execs at the company and they need people to be forward-thinking instead of backward-lamenting.

Next week, I’m starting a 6-week secondment with their Internal Communications team to help them start getting the basics right.  They aren’t doing a bad job of internal comms, but their messages – through no fault of their own – don’t relate to the strategy of the business at all.  This has resulted in communications which are completely separate from the business performance, goals, strategy and so on.  The existing internal comms are essentially ‘people communications’, e.g. “we had a party to celebrate moving into the new building and family came along – wasn’t it nice.”  The missing piece would have been along the lines of “and this new working environment means we’ve got better kit and better conditions in which we can be more collaborative, because of the open-plan arrangement, and more creative in newer, funkier surroundings.  We need to work on our product innovation and that means EVERYONE getting involved and being part of the company” and so on.

It’s not rocket science, but the incumbent IC team have lost their way a little.  After years of losses, a management structure which has evolved for the last three years and more change than they can handle (coupled with a lack of visible direction and support from the top), they have retreated back to the ‘easy’ messages of “aren’t we all having fun (even though the company is doing REALLY badly at the moment, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.)”

The channels they are using are sophisticated enough: newish intranet, streaming, high quality video (high quality both in content and production) and consistent templates for emails.  The visual quality of their e-communications is actually better than ours, but there are very few face-to-face and two-way communication events, an area in which we have improved significantly over the past 18 months or so.

Throwing another interesting flavour into the mix, the CEO and many of the senior team don’t speak German, so face-to-face communications from these people are invariably in English.  That’s a sticking point, as I’m not going to be able to “do a Fabio Capello” with them and get them to speak the local language within a few months – we’ll have to work around that issue, topping and tailing CEO stand-up events with a German intro and outro, and chairing a Q&A session in both languages, using local people to translate as applicable.

I’m not going to go out there with an all-singing, all-dancing Communications Plan and Strategy, which gives them a ton of work to do in an unrealistic time-frame, as this will achieve nothing; arriving in a totally different company in a different company and culture and imposing my ideas on them – regardless of whether I speak German or not – will only get me resentment from those I’m trying to help.  After all, I’m going to need these guys to be my people on the inside, to give me the People View, instead of the Exco View – without knowing what people are really thinking, we’re never going to work out which communications are most suitable for them.

(As a quick aside, Wedge recently wrote a great piece about choosing between stakeholders and audiences when it comes to what to communicate – have a read.)

I want to help them develop their own Comms Plan after we’ve got a better idea of the strategy of the company (it’s there – it just hasn’t been articulated clearly yet), but in the first 2 weeks or so, I want to get them thinking about key messages to weave into their existing communications – key messages which reinforce what the company is trying to achieve.  In plain German.  Not in Anglicised/Americanised Business German – yes, it exists: sitting in meetings a few weeks ago, I noticed a peppering of business terms throughout the German conversations, which, on the plus side helps non-native speakers like me keep track of the meeting, but which also can alienate the Germans in equal measure.

It’s the same in any country and language – if you communicate in real language instead of business terms, people understand what you’re talking about and realise that you don’t need a Harvard MBA to know what business goals and strategy are.

The basics, in this case, will be making sure that there is a clear communication from the CEO and senior leaders of the organisation, in ‘normal’ language, to let people a) know what’s going on, b) understand what the company is aiming to achieve, and c) give them the opportunity to speak up and question things.  I’m also going in there looking for quick wins which make the current IC team feel comfortable and empowered to make these simple changes themselves.

I’ll report on how I get on at a later date, but would be interested to hear from anyone who has experience of working in another country and language, and to hear what your biggest challenges and successes were.

Engagement: what does it really mean?

Engagement is a word which has a thousand definitions if you speak to Internal Communications professionals. At the moment it seems like the Comms fashion to dislike the word or disapprove of its use.

It’s only when you look at the dictionary definitions of engagement that you get a proper idea of what it means.

In IC where I work, we have a mantra: engage, inform, involve. ‘Inform’ and ‘involve’ are pretty self-explanatory but ‘engage’ needs a little more clarification for most people.

Dictionary.com has the following notes on ‘to engage’:
1. to occupy the attention or efforts of (a person or persons)
2. to secure for aid, employment, use, etc.; hire: to engage a worker; to engage a room.
3. to attract and hold fast: The novel engaged her attention and interest.
4. to attract or please: His good nature engages everyone.
5. to bind, as by pledge, promise, contract, or oath; make liable: He engaged himself to repay his debt within a month.
6. to betroth: They were engaged last week.
7. to bring (troops) into conflict; enter into conflict with: Our army engaged the enemy.

In some communications, I know that the last definition comes into play, but I’m more interested in the explanations around holding fast, grabbing and securing.

For me, engagement is about grabbing employees’ attention, keeping their interest and securing their commitment and confidence when it comes to how the business operates and where it is heading. If you can’t get your people interested in what you’re doing, then you’ve either got the wrong approach to internal comms or you’ve got the wrong employees.

Do people understand and support the reasons for business decisions?  Are they interested in what is going on in the organisation and do they want to get involved and put their opinions across?  Would they stay late, if they could, to get the job done?  If the answers to these questions are ‘yes’, then I believe you have an engaged workforce, or at least the makings of one.

I know some companies have separate functions to Internal Communications dedicated to Employee Engagement, but I believe that engagement is intrinsic to the IC department.  There are numerous studies and countless theses written about employee engagement, which no doubt go into FAR more detail than I have outlined here, but with engagement being a relatively simple term, I believe it shouldn’t be over-complicated.

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts…