As every
marketer worth their salt will tell you, you have a limited number of windows each
week to email promotional material, the top one being Thursday afternoon. Even
then, most recipients will immediately press the delete button.
What they
don't tell you is, the same pretty much applies to internal communications.
Internal
communications is generally the most misguided of corporate comms activities, for the
simple reason that few chief executives are willing to admit that their
employees may not actually like them, and even fewer comms executives are
willing to contradict the chief executive. The result is generally a deluge of
intranet newsflashes on the latest raft of senior management promotions,
corporate jollies, and initiatives dreamed up by head office. Unsurprisingly,
hardly anyone reads this stuff.
How to
fix the problem? The main answer lies in approach.
Put simply, you need to work out who your audience is, what
they're interested in, and how they want to find out about it. You wouldn't dream of
producing external communications without knowing the answers to these
questions, so why should it be acceptable to do this for an internal audience?
Write with your most cynical audience in mind. Most senior managers think
that the majority of employees are satisfied with their jobs, and with the way
the company is run. Conversations around the water cooler in offices around the
world demonstrate this is simply not true. Information on a new initiative is
likely to be better received if you explain in concrete terms why you are introducing it - perhaps
because a competitor is increasing sales in a specific product line, or because
you think it will help you attract a new type of customer. Reach for a string
of clichés and
abstractions and employees will switch off - or worse still, roll their eyes.
Recognise that your employees are your number one external
communications channel- and really believe it. Acknowledging that bad
communications with employees leads to lost sales tends to focus the mind. No
one has "reading the intranet" as part of their job description, so
when you publish news, you're competing with a whole host of other
distractions, not least the employee's work! This means you need to bring the
same level of imagination and rigour to the production of internal comms as you
bring to external comms. It really isn't the poor relation of communications-
it's the most important part.
Employees need to feel internal comms supports their
ability to do their jobs.
They need to be able to find the information they need, quickly, and connect
with the people they need to move projects forward. This takes internal comms
to a strategic crossroads of comms, HR, knowledge management and, increasingly,
IT: collaborative portals that help people work better. It's a far cry from
programming emails for a Thursday afternoon.
