A friend who works for the IT division of a large financial
services company received a company email yesterday. A full
five-scrolls-of-a-Blackberry long, it began by announcing that as employees
were no doubt aware, in response to the global economic crisis, departments had
been “rightsized” in 2009. Over subsequent years, teams had “responded to the
new economic situation by engaging external talent to fulfill specific project
requirements and respond to client needs”. However, as the result of a “detailed
resource analysis”, it was now imperative that these resources be “optimized”
and the company would therefore be embarking on a “major reinternalization
program”.
A simpler way to write this email might have been: “A lot of
your colleagues were fired five years ago. Since then, the rest of you have
been hiring consultants to replace them because you had far too much work to do
and the clients were starting to notice. But the last bill from Accenture was
eye-watering so you need to fire the consultants, now.”
Apart from being badly written, this email is liable to
inspire panic in anyone who actually manages to understand it – crucially, it
doesn’t explain whether managers are allowed to hire new employees, or are
expected to do the work themselves. In fact it’s the perfect example of why HR
departments should be kept well away from internal communications.
Many companies do internal communications less well than
external communications. The victim of lack of time, lack of money, and
horrific internal politics tends to result in an un-coordinated approach
whereby a continual stream of organisational memos by HR drowns out any
interesting stuff on strategy, new tools or indeed anything that would help
employees do their jobs better or feel proud to work for the company.
The rather worrying result is employees who may know their
company has an equal opportunities policy, but who have no idea what its
objectives for the year are (or indeed how what they themselves are doing
contributes in any way to the company’s success).
Digital offers lots of innovative ways to communicate better
(or to use current jargon “engage”) with employees, from social intranets or
wikis to internal apps. But the baseline has to be writing in plain English so
that people can understand what you’re saying. The rest is a nice-to-have.
