Reinventing the role of internal communications
The classic internal communication landscape has changed considerably in recent years, unnoticed by the outside world. In the past, “internal communication” was known as a centrally controlled department that published internal messages in more or less regular editorial cycles via rigid editorial and approval processes.
Today’s world of corporate communications is shaped by professionally trained communications experts and journalists. Newsrooms and rolling planning have found their way from journalism into the world of corporate communications. Integrated communication and cross-channel storytelling derived from omni-channel strategies enable communication trends such as an overarching “employee experience”.
The digitalisation of communication is the secret driver of this great organisational change. Since Covid-19 at the latest, the recipients of the messages (employees) can only be reached via digital channels. The workplace is no longer tied to a specific location — a poster in a lift no longer reaches employees, but a social media post might.
Digitalisation has reached all areas of the working world and social life. Every employee is exposed to an incredible amount of “communication noise”: official messages, e-mails, newsletters, push notifications, alerts, chat messages, group updates and video conferences. At the same time, the internal company news are threatened to drown in the flood of information.
The reorganisation into agile communication teams implied another consequence: the communication spectrum became smaller.
With the focus on top news, communication items with a smaller target group such as project updates, departmental communications and location announcements are often delegated to self-organised structures. Project status reports are now published by project managers themselves on team websites, expert knowledge is exchanged directly in “Yammer Communities” and location announcements are published on microsites.
But with more noise, the call from employees for “relevant” content is therefore becoming ever louder.
Employee experience is more than a buzzword: who should take responsibility to that request?
It is now time to define what the role of the internal communication shall be. Only content producer for internal corporate news and intranet? Or shall it cover the wide range of communication between employees as well?
Existing governance structures of a company provide a clear answer to this: the business owner continues to bear responsibility for the processes, even if the forms of organisation change. The execution of tasks can be delegated — but the responsiblity will still remain within the internal communication.
For each communication process, the internal communication leadership should decide which governance model best supports the respective objectives:
For example, a centralised governance structure is ideal for the top news in the newsroom. For departmental communications, however, a self-organised form of organisation could be considered.
Regardless of which governance model is chosen, both require steering measures to ensure the quality of the processes and to be able to influence them if necessary.
Successful self-organised communication structures are always accompanied by recommended guidelines. The reason for this format lies in the number of actors involved: it is logistically impossible to train all employees to become communication professionals. Complex central specifications and guidelines are therefore doomed to failure from the outset. However, analogous to already established social media guidelines, recommendations and simple assistance can empower employees in a supportive manner. The role of internal communication and the perception of it is thus changing into an advisory and supportive business enabling.
In practice, one can imagine this guidance in various areas:
In terms of processes, this begins with integrated processes for today’s topic owners. If an article does not make it into the top news due to lack of importance or urgency, it would be conceivable to recommend suitable alternative channels for publication. In this way, a short “No” becomes a somewhat friendlier “Unfortunately no, but we recommend you following alternatives”.
Consistency of content can be ensured, for example, through clear, content-based structures. The aim must be to make related content findable from other sources. For this purpose, a company-wide communication taxonomy can be used. In order to make the taxonomy usable even for untrained employees, technical aids are available, such as offering smart context suggestions for correct tagging through automatic text recognition or providing suitable, brand-compliant images in all publication tools in the image selection through smart tagging
In the longer term, even communication advisory teams would be conceivable, offering short webinars for end users and directly answering questions about successful communication in the Com365 world. This would then be the completion of the supporting leadership (keyword Servant Leadership).
Whatever the long-term development of internal communication:
A clear understanding of leadership is definitely recommended.
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