Communication Ammo, by Sean Williams

The newly launched CommScrum features a terrific multi-author piece on issues in internal communications that outlines several huge issues in the function.

• Mike Klein wants to reclaim the term Employee Communication, owing to the multi-audience impact of employees.
• Dan Gray says the boundaries between internal and external communication have fallen, with alignment no longer the sine qua non, and fusion the future.
• Lindsay Uittenbogaard says that employee ambassadorship needs “20 cans of Red Bull and a red-hot poker” and continued emphasis on alignment.
• Kevin Keohane outlines the disparate “belief systems” about employee communication that cloud the ability to see employee communication leadership as “connecting up the core factions to deliver value to the organization and its people.”

You’ll want to read the post, but here are my thoughts.  I believe internal communicators need to respect each of these constituencies.

Information provision is still important — a gatekeeper/distributor or merely a systemic means of access for employees is the change afoot here. People still need information that helps them do their jobs. Tactical support.

The human capitalists – HR wants there to be a predictive model, hence the focus on engagement and free will — they want to believe that persuasion isn’t needed, that pushing the right buttons will lead to further discretionary effort in support of business objectives.  Certainly, a few of the Gallup 12 questions will apply in the new order, but not the ones that focus on the purely social aspects of workplace. Systemic methods of finding collaborators and achieving objectives will be welcome, whilst ersatz sentimentality and misguided cheerleading will not. Look, everyone knows better now what companies are in business for – earning money for their owners. No more corporate Kum By Ya, if you please.

The experientialists – Branding agents want the internal constituency to be like customers – send your messages overtly, and subliminally through design, color, etc., at the worst; understand the customer’s motivation and make employees understand it too, at the best. Advertising and direct marketing don’t work on employees – it’s too one-way and too asymmetrical and employees can smell a sales job a mile away.  It’s the potential disconnect between brand ideation and reality that represents the second largest threat to success.

The influencers – Keohane writes: “A third camp is (and often the most seriously flawed) the PR and change camp, where internal/employee comms is all about defining “publics” and then influencing them using spin and external PR techniques.”  I’d argue that this has been on the decline for a while now.  After a brief flirtation with indentifying peer influencers and doing internal outreach, a la a traditional campaign, most of us have come to our senses.  Nevertheless, involving employees in a meaningful way (the “cultivating influencers” model) could have widespread positive impact.  But again, there can’t be a say-do disconnect – the walk must match the talk.

The changelings – “Communications is change.  Change comes from workstreams.”  Change isn’t an event. We are very close to realizing the Deming concept of continuous improvement, where so many aspects of the business are changing so often that there is no pause.  Here’s where the engagement concept fails so utterly – with no new normal, no one ever gets comfortable, or attains much mastery of the work environment.  The flexible, excellent communicators live in this change and adapt easily to help the organization manage through the issues that arise.

The executives – “It’s all about leadership communication.” A large proportion of it is about leadership (I suppose I’d type myself into this camp), but not in the sense of leaders making pronouncements from on high. Too much managerial communication focuses on managers sharing the strategy with the hoi polloi.  Managers need to be the primary communication agent in the organization, knowing how the strategy will affect their departments and teams and drawing the linkages for them to improve line of sight to the overall objectives.

The managerials – “It’s all about line managers.” Only insofar as the organization has line managers. Of course, in manufacturing, union stipulations, work rules and (European) Works Councils govern much of how the operations will function. The line manager may not be able to participate as fully as the managerials would prefer, though their role in any model can be as robust or lean as required. This is a tough one to generalize about.

The KM brigade – “It’s about intranets and managing knowledge.”  It’s only about intranets if you have enough employees using them. At Goodyear, about 32,000 employees use PCs, and about 43,000 operate complex machines. You don’t want a worker building a truck tire to be looking at a monitor, no matter how compelling the content, and the process of knowledge sharing is person-to-person, which we know is far superior to person-to-database.

The storytellers – “It’s all about big pictures and stories, since the dawn of time it always has been.” Well, stories are still important, dang it.  Organizations are made up of people doing things that help the organization succeed. There are good, compelling, interesting stories about these people. Stories still capture our imagination, perhaps now more than ever.  Do we watch American Idol in the states because it’s great art, or that the story lines are so interesting?  Good employee communication makes dry topics interesting with humanity.

We didn’t even get into the concepts of two-way communication – the process of fostering dialogue to build understanding and commitment, generate improvement feedback and otherwise create an organizational impulse to participation rather than passivity.

The future of employee communication does depend on communication leaders’ ability to tie these many perspectives together.