Living change
I often think that when internal communication really works it’s because we’re right at the heart of things. We work with leaders, challenge priorities and help share their strategies to embed values, purpose and vision for our organisations. We drive change and try to balance what the business wants to achieve with an emotional intelligence and understanding about where our people are. And we know the importance of good listening. We’ve moved a long way as a profession from simply pushing messages out.
Our focus had become creating compelling narratives, building a solid channel infrastructure, equipping managers to have conversations with their teams and measuring the effectiveness and reach of our communications.
And for most comms professionals it was going pretty well. Of course, many IC teams have faced significant pressures over recent years, supporting extensive transformation programmes or finding ways to deliver more with less. But despite that, for the vast majority of our clients, internal communication is well perceived and working pretty effectively.
But then covid-19 struck. Suddenly we’d large numbers of people working from home and significant change messages for people being furloughed or having to work in very different ways. For other colleagues we had to provide reassurance that they were safe in their existing working environments and that they were being supported. With a backdrop that for many of us home lives had been disrupted like never before, whether through families shielding, caring for relatives and friends or dealing with the pressures of home schooling.
So, have the communication needs of organisations shifted permanently in the ‘new normal’? I believe that even before the pandemic, the internal communication landscape had begun to change and change significantly. Internal communication is taken (rightly) for granted in the vast majority of organisations and colleagues now expect to be informed and able to contribute to what goes on. Leaders are more much committed and rather than having to be convinced to take an interest in internal communication, many of them now need to be counselled away from micro-management. Measurement is more common, and often the issue is around lack of co-ordination and not measuring the right things rather than an absence of data.
Covid-19 has brought internal communication to the fore, especially in those organisations where it had taken traditionally taken second priority to external communications. One client told me during the initial stages of the lockdown they were being asked by their leadership team which internal channel had greatest reach, what messages were hitting home and what aspects of the communication did people trust? We’d completed a review with them of their internal communication just a month earlier, so they were able to answer the questions quickly and confidently. The data from our review meant that they were on the front foot as comms professionals and able to influence decision-making at the highest level. They’ve gone on to conduct pulse measures to check that what they’re doing is working and to share insights with leaders who are more engaged than ever in internal communications.
As comms professionals the new world presents us with challenges. But the positive is that more than ever, we are right at the centre of things. The messages have changed for sure. We’re living change on an unparalleled scale, as ways of working have changed so much and so fast. But the importance of having solid foundations has not changed. Leadership commitment, managers equipped to engage their teams and have great conversations, compelling narratives and solid measurement about what’s working and what’s not have never been more important.
Published by James