Fire the consultants, now

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.