by Lindsay Bogaard

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Lindsay Bogaard began working in the field of Organisational Communication in 1999. She is now the Director of Bogaard Arena (www.lindsaybogaard.co.uk), and VP of Professional Development for the Dutch branch of the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators). Lindsay has an Honours Degree in Creative Arts, holds post-graduate qualifications in Broadcast Journalism and Communication Management and has won awards for her work in business and in corporate film production.

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This chapter identifies a gap in how organisations typically approach internal communication.  To frame that up, here are some questions:

 

 

 

- do you think the difficult bit about business is strategy implementation?

 

- do you think communication has an important role to play in strategy implementation?

 

- do you support the premise that everyone in an organisation is a communicator?

 

- do you think most employees could be better communicators?

 

 

 

If your answers to the questions above are all YES, then perhaps you agree with this statement:  Employees need guidance, tools and skill-building support around communication if they are to actualise their objectives as efficiently and as effectively as possible. The gap articulated in this chapter is that this need is not being met. 

 

 

 

While Internal Communicators play an increasingly valuable role in the areas of leadership communication, employee alignment with strategy, and in the facilitation of key content sharing, they generally spend little or no time supporting frontline employees in the communication challenges that they face as part of their jobs on a daily basis.  This diminishes the organisation’s ability to implement strategy by creating abundant opportunity for disconnects and misunderstandings, which wastes man-hours.  In turn, the impact is reduced employee efficiency, performance, motivation, and results.

 

 

 

The discussion around this topic is potentially very deep.  The author is offering insights based on experience as a way to explore this perceived 'coalface' gap.

 

 

 

What kind of communication requirements are employees typically faced with?

 

 

 

There are many more considerations in modern business to deal with than there used to be.  Developing legislation, professional practices and the rapidly evolving organisations we work in need ongoing attention.  Consequently, people at the ‘coalface’ (i.e. frontline employees) find themselves collaborating with a far wider and more diverse group of stakeholders than before.  More importantly, the skills people are expected to use in order to be able to interact with others effectively are more sophisticated than they used to be too.  Since email, the Internet and other virtual connecting technologies took off in the 1990’s, the task of connecting with others has become increasingly dynamic and complex.  What we need to interact about, who we interact with, how we do it and how fast we can deliver through those interactions is steeped in communication capability.  Today’s employees need to be outstanding communicators to deliver to their objectives, but the inclusion of deep communication learning in their development plans and the offer of employer support to enable great communication performance are rare.  

 

What kind of communicative challenges can this lead to for employees?

 

 

 

A 2007 study of over 100 IT Project Managers in a major energy company found that there were four key communication challenges at the root of many project failures.  These project failures are called 'escalations', which occur when a project does not follow plan and results in some kind of unexpected cost, like a delay or an increase in resources.  When this happens, the situation is escalated to leaders who help explore what went wrong and how it can be fixed.  Two of those challenges found to be:

 

 

 

Sharing meaning effectively:  Misunderstandings were being created because parties simply did not share the same idea about what the words they were using to communicate actually meant.  This challenge can easily arise as for example, a word or phrase is so frequently used in one part of an organisation that an extended meaning is attributed to it.  This extended meaning will then not be known in another part of the same organisation, but could be assumed to.  Take, for instance, the phrase ‘refer it to the steering committee’.  In team ‘A’ this could imply that a project decision will be made at a higher level of authority.  In team ‘B’, it could imply that delays will be incurred as further viewpoints are sought.

 

 

 

Creating and using a communication plan.  In many of the IT projects researched, the project managers were reluctant to create and use a communication plan.  This was partly due to the lack of availability of a fit for purpose communication planning template.  On closer inspection, a stark contrast between the way you would use a project plan and the way you would use a communication plan was throwing people off.   A project plan is designed to dictate the chain of events.  In fact, the better the project plan and the better the project manager, the more likely the plan will play out as designed.  The name of the game in project management is ‘deliver your plan’ and IT Project Managers are rigorously trained to use their approved plan as a bible.  In communication however, a plan needs to be much more reactive:

 

·         based on feedback from activity 1, you may change activity 2

 

·         based on reactions to messages with stakeholder x you may amend them to work better with stakeholder y

 

·         if a surprise takes place, a whole new set of communication activities may be suitable. 

 

The differences between how a project plan and a communication plan need to be handled are broad.  However, IT project managers had invariably never been trained to use a communication plan, despite its relevance to the success of their work.

 

 

 

 

What kind of communication activities are employees involved in?

 

So again, the gap is that the need for guidance, tools and skill-building for employees on how they can communicate more effectively as part of their roles, is not being catered for.   In bridging this gap, forget communication being about the ‘what’ and think of it as being more as being about the ‘how’.   If you look at communication activities simply as being about anything that involves the preparation of, and the sharing of meaning with others, then employees regularly take on several of the following activities in the course of their work (and many more):  

 

fig Bogaard 1 - What are you communicating?

 

 

Based on that, some of questions employees are likely to be asking themselves are:

 

SERVICES: How can I access translation, copywriting or visual design services?

 

RESOURCES: What do I do if I need dedicated communication resources for my project?

 

TOOLS: What tools are out there to help me put together a communication plan or do other communication tasks?

 

TACTICS: Where can I get advice on best practice approaches - for example: how I can ensure my stakeholders are up to date with developments from my project when they’re busy with other priorities, how I can use communication channels to communicate with lots of people at once, how I can convert stakeholder hostility into support, or how can I improve the effectiveness of communication within my project team with processes and best practices etc?

 

TRAINING: What courses are available to help me improve myself as a communicator - either inside the company or as recommended external training?

 

SUPPORT: What help can I get from my communication department? 

 

  

 

What kind of support can an organisation offer to bridge this gap?

 

 

 

There are four parts to this answer and the most obvious is about learning.  Communication learning can include awareness about what communication actually is, how powerful it can be, how relevant it is to all of us, and how specific communication challenges that come up can be overcome. 

 

 

 

Employees regularly deal with very different communication challenges, depending on their seniority, discipline or function and on the culture of the organisation they work in.  A tailored learning package can identify those challenges and build a relevant and effective learning experience around that.

 

 

 

The second part of supporting employees to be effective communicators is resource awareness.  Do your employees know the answers to the questions listed under the diagram above?  This is a communication exercise in itself.

 

 

 

The third bit is about having the availability of coaching for on-demand need.  Each communication situation is a unique opportunity for an experienced and creative communication response.  Even seasoned corporate veterans need objective advice to optimise their results.

 

 

 

And the final piece around supporting employees to be effective communicators is about recognition.  If leaders recognise that communication is important, that communication is a competence and if they reward good communication performance, then the quality of communication will improve. 

 

 

 

What are professional organisational communicators doing instead of supporting employees?

 

 

 

Take the IABC Research Foundation’s recent report: ‘Best Practices in Meeting the Top Employee Communication Challenges of the 21^st Century’.  The study identified the four critical challenges faced by communicators worldwide and it involved extensive research: literature reviews, analyses of IABC Gold Quill Award winners, interviews with 22 communicators on three continents, and an online survey completed by 472 organisations from four continents.  The challenges identified in the report are:

 

 

 

1 Motivating employees to align with the business strategy - creating a line of sight between employees and the organisational strategy

 

2 Leadership and management communication - educating and engaging leaders and managers in their role in employee communication (this was further clarified as meaning that leaders throughout the organisation need to communicate and engage their employees in the business strategy and visibly demonstrate what it looks like)

 

3 Managing information overload - breaking through the communication 'clutter'

 

4 Measuring the ROI of internal communication - linking communication to business results.

 

 

 

The one thing pulling all four of these challenges together is that the main objective of every one of them is communication.  There is nothing here about improving communication when it plays a secondary role in the achievement of other people's objectives. 

 

 

 

Why does this Gap Exist?  From the professional communicators' perspective...

 

 

 

1. Communicators want to own what they're doing to be able to show they add value and they want their value to be important:  In the 1990's Internal Communicators were sick of  being labelled as the people who did newsletters and websites.  Indeed, Internal Communication is potentially a very powerful business tool.  So intent on being taken seriously as valuable contributors, internal communicators have carved out a role for themselves as being ‘strategic business partners’ while sidelining crucial requirements from deeper in their organisations.

    

2. Communicators are responding to demand: people in the businesses don't always know they can be more efficient and effective by honing the ways they communicate.  Internal communicators don't want to spend time creating demand around that and are neither in the best position to do so.

    

3. Communicators are responding to the requirements of their sponsors:  If employees aren’t demanding help and if leaders can't feel the pain points around communication at different levels in the organisation, then communication roles and responsibilities will focus on current and real requirements of the business.

    

4. Communicators aren't trained to enable others to be better communicators: arguably, improving the communication performance of others is a different role from that of the more traditional communicator.  

    

 

 

Why Does This Gap Exist?  From the employee perspective...

 

  

 

You could say it's the nature of the beast:

 

 

 

A) It is human nature:

 

 

 

1. Communication is usually the sub-objective, it is often the overlooked objective in a piece of work.  "We need to upgrade a system with a supplier" inevitably has the sub-objective of "we need to work on the same page as our supplier on liaising effectively around the system upgrade."  The focus is on the system upgrade, not on the process of communicating around it.

    

2. Admitting that you need help in doing your job can feel like you're admitting you can't do your job properly.  Not a natural flag people want to wave.

    

3. Communication is a bit like swimming - most people can swim OK - why would you need help when you can stay afloat already?

    

4. Just as it's easy to think you know how to communicate, it's also easy to think you know what communication is:  for example thinking of communication as being about the company newsletter, the website, or about being a visual designer is a strong diversion for thought around improving communication.

    

 

 

B) It is the nature of communication:

 

 

 

1. Recognising poor communication and knowing what to do about such instances is a skill in itself. If poor communication is unidentified, there is no demand for change.

    

2. Communication impacts different people at different levels, working on different subjects in different ways.  Leaders may not feel the pain points several layers lower in the organisation (or won't consider them significant enough to deal with), so don't allocate budget to fix something that doesn't seem to be broken.

    

3. 'Fixing ' poor communication is not really possible.  It's not that black and white.  There is never a 100% solution.  You can't 'fix' it but you can facilitate moving things to a more advantageous state.   People shy away from this kind of 'woolliness'.

    

4. Poor communication is almost invisible and very difficult to measure.  How do you know if a stakeholder group could have been engaged in a better way if no-one complains?  How do you know if efforts spent on improving 'connectivity' between your stakeholders worked if you can't prove what didn't connect as a result of the work?   Take for example, the underskilled Project Manager.  Who can say that if he / she had been more communication savvy that the project outcome would have taken 2 months less; or that the cost of his /her poor communication practices cost the project an extra 78,000 dollars and 2 months more than they would have done with insights x, y or z?

    

  

 

What is the cost of poor communication on behalf of employees?

 

 

 

If you could count the ‘micro’ instances of poor communication that occur with employees every day and add up the impacts, the results would be staggering.  The cost of poor communication is extremely high, as it brings about inefficiencies, performance losses and frustration.  See point 4 above to find out why this part of the chapter doesn't qualify that statement in a more concrete way.

 

 

 

What do other people think about this gap?

 

 

 

The author contacted various communication specialists in different industries and from different parts of the world to comment on the 'gap' outlined in this chapter.  The responses were as follows:

 

 

 

Susan Dorflinger is the Director of Global Employee Marketing at GE Real Estate based in Conneticut.   She sees that the transference of communication expertise occurs incidentally if professional communicators work effectively with leaders and managers in the cascade and realisation of business strategy anyway.  In describing that reaction more specifically, Susan writes:

 

 

• "by holding manager communication workshops with those individuals who manage people, the communication executive can review the fundamentals of communication, while outlining how and why it's the manager's job for being accountable for the translation of business messages

   

• by defining communication as a process where information is given to a person or group of people to achieve a shared understanding, managers leave knowing that communication is not a tactical event or a vehicle, such as email

   

• by sharing simple examples of communication planning and providing assessment worksheets to help the managers answer the ever-important question on employee's minds: 'what does this mean to me?' ensures that managers can take responsibility for communication

   

• by working one-on-one in developing communication action plans for the managers to execute, managers are drawn to seeing that two-way interaction establishes them as great communicators

   

• and finally by supplementing the workshops with monthly email messages to managers on topics ranging from business updates to leadership and communication tips builds on the foundation for further development of expertise.

   

 

 

With a little energy and a lot of passion for seeing results, the communication executive in any organization can directly influence the notion that everyone is responsible for communication - the trick is in redefining communication and making use of the word effective."

 

 

 

Rob Briggs is the Senior Manager, Communications for RBC Wealth Management - British Isles, based in London and Jersey.  He sees that communicators can help others in the organisation by molding and shaping the inevitable flow of information:

 

 

 

"Yes, I can identify with the premise as I recognise some of the symptoms. It's a challenge and it's about pushing back on our own idle assumptions about what communications actually is. Communication goes on around us all the time - the best we can do is a bit of traffic planning - we do not and cannot control the fact that information flows, nor can we control the enormity of its power. We can (and should) help people in business to mold and shape that flow, and (to mix metaphors) to carve a diamond from that jet-black coal you're mining. 

 

 

 

I'd consider looking at ways in which two-way conversations can be facilitated, rather that providing top down tools. Poor communication can be seriously costly. A lack of understanding or awareness of societal expectations (implicit and explicit) can result in such significant brand damage that the firm goes out of business. The more usual tolls we see are process inefficiencies coupled with significant employee attraction and retention issues. 

 

 

 

Since the advent of email, and short term pressures of shareholder demands for constant growth, managers have lost sight of their primary role - to set information in context for employees. The simple coping skills equation sums up the core of our dilemma succinctly: too much information x  not enough time = information ignored."

 

 

 

An Anonymous Internal Communicator: sees that some employees can sometimes be be needlessly neglectful of communication and use communication professionals as assistants:

 

 

 

"My view point is that employees in our department tend to use the few comms people there are in the organization to do the last 10-15% of their job.   What I mean is that if you're doing your job properly, that it is also important that the updates, progress, setbacks, successes, etc. get communicated within the organization and there is a process in place for how that gets done.  Comms shouldn't be delayed or "forgotten" or "handed over" to a communication person to pick up that dropped ball."

 

 

 

David Murray is the Editor of the Journal of Employee Communication Management with MyRagan, provider of a forum and resources for an online community of communicators.  He concurs that the 'coalface gap' exists and describes his understanding around why it's there:

 

 

 

"Yes, I agree that most communication and arguably the most crucial communication happens down, through and all over the organization. And yes: to the extent that professional communicators can help non-communication managers and others do a better job, they can wield a powerful and useful influence in the organization.  That said, a number of practical problems get in the way:

 

 

 

1. Communicators have limited budgets and time, both of which can be consumed VERY QUICKLY as they consult with or train non-communication managers in the organization.

 

2. Communicators are trained in mass communication, but not necessarily in inter-personal communication. (Which is why communication departments themselves are not always managed particularly well.)

 

3. Non-communication managers aren't necessarily receptive to the help of the 'PR person' in managing their departments.

 

 

 

In short, the theory is spot on, but the practice is problematic and so many communicators conclude that the best thing they can do is focus on the 'big' official and unofficial company-wide communication and hope to set a consistent tone that helps everyone else in the organization do a better job of communicating."

 

 

 

Mia Shaw is Mercer's Corporate Communication Manager for Australia and New Zealand.  She articulates the main of communication as she sees it, and how the 'coalface' issue fits within that:

 

 

 

"I do identify with the perspective raised in your chapter, however I don’t necessarily agree with all of the issues raised. Communicators in organisations face many challenges – the biggest is getting the communication and engagement balance right to meet the needs of the organisation and its people.  All employees within the organisation are communicators; however some employees have more of a prominent role than others, for example, senior leaders.

 

 

 

It is the role of senior leaders within the organisation to clearly and openly articulate business strategy – what it means for the organisation, how the organisation will achieve it, what success looks like and the role employees play in that process – and other key initiatives to employees so they are willing and motivated to go above and beyond their job requirements. If the internal communication team has the right people and structure in place it can work with those teams and/or employees to address some of the issues raised in your chapter. Communicators should be working with employees at all levels to provide advice and address issues or gaps at a strategic business and a local business/team level to avoid the cost of poor communication. 

 

 

 

Mercer’s What’s Working study in 2006 found that engaged employees who are inspired by leadership, guided by management, equipped with the right tools and managed by the right systems and processes deliver superior performance and business success.  By regularly “pulse checking” employees within the organisation and sharing this information with senior leaders/management helps communicators understand the issues and to stay one step ahead. Most importantly, it ensures the organisation develops solutions that address communication and engagement issues to ensure its employees, and ultimately the organisation, is performing at its optimal level."

 

  

 

In contrast, Prof. Dr. Siegfried Schmidt is a internationally recognised communication researcher.  He was keynote speaker at the Philosophy of Communication Conference in the UK in 2007 and his comment on the ‘gap’ from the academic perspective is sharply objective:

 

 

"Fundamentally, the concept of communication in business is still seen as modelling the exchange of information, which is misleading.  Today’s research insights from psychology, the cognitive sciences and communication theory understand that when people receive messages they don’t copy and save them to their brains, or paste them to others, they interpret them in their own closed cognitive system, which is where meaning is formed.  A message is simply a collection of letters, symbols, images and signals, which are interpreted in very different ways by different people.

 

 

 

Ultimately therefore, truly effective communication depends on having the knowledge, interest, intentions, emotions, moral orientations or values of all parties involved, harmonised as far as possible.  This starting point enables a mutual trust upon which a shared appreciation of the meaning behind the communication message can be genuinely achieved.  The success of such a procedure depends upon the willingness of all partners to replace thinking in terms of hierarchies and power relations with thinking in terms of partnership, respect and cooperation.

 

 

 

Building awareness and skills around this approach with communication practitioners as well as with their partners (employees themselves) is an essential first step."

 

 

So where does this leave us?

 

 

 

One of the companies listed in the Fortune 50 states that the mission of their global internal and management communication is to "help achieve sustained business success by leveraging internal communications and relationships to positively influence employee engagement. "

 

 

 

Why is the mission of internal communication so focused on the engagement of employees with leaders when communication is fundamentally about interactions between people at all levels?  

 

  

 

Fraser Likely of Likely Communication Strategies in Canada recently described his perceptions of the role of the internal communicator in an edition of Melcrum’s Strategic Communication Management:

 

 

 

"From what Melcrum employees and those involved with other enterprises and professional associations write about, speak about and discuss online, there appear to be four roles:

 

1.      Communicator (content; delivery; technology; audience etc)

 

2.      Change agent (culture; internal branding; engagement; change management programs; etc.)

 

3.      Head trainer (improving C-suite and middle manager communication capabilities)

 

4.      Performance consultant (operation performance improved through work-level communication).

 

 

 

These are very rough percentages, but I’d say those in internal /organizational communication see communicator as 75% of their role, change agent as 15%, head trainer as 7%, and performance consultant as 3 percent."

 

 

 

Redressing those proportions to put more emphasis on the ‘Head Trainer’ and ‘Performance Consultant’ roles is the key to closing the ‘coalface communication’ gap.  This approach has already been documented by Marc Wright, who outlines Jim Shaffer’s thinking on Performance-based Communication in Module 1 of Simply Communicate’s Communication Plan Toolkit on Strategy.  In it, he says: 

 

 

 

"Building on the work of Gibb and D’Aprix, Jim Shaffer argues for the Communication department to take on a completely new role.  He claims,“The Communication department knows no function.”  That is to say, it does not below to any one function in the business but to all of them. Consequently, the strategy of the Communication Department should be to go out into the business and find areas in the operation that will benefit from better communication; and, having identified these areas, to introduce better communication practices alongside these particular elements of the business."

 

 

 

Effective communication between people can improve efficiency (as fewer disconnects and misunderstandings speed up the shared understanding people have around achieving a shared goal), it can increasing performance as improved communication frees up innovation, increases the quality of decision making and altogether drives more effective outcomes.

 

 

 

The author theorises that central to the ‘gap’ are two very separate areas of communication, which are being confused with each other.  These areas are:

 

 

 

1) motivating employees towards delivering the business strategy (largely through disseminating content about what that strategy is) and

 

2) developing the communication capabilities of employees (through improving not content but communication process and skills).

 

  

 

People communicate with other people dozens or even hundreds of times every day, and the word ‘communicate’ means something specific to everyone based on their experiences and environments.  It is easy therefore, for even ‘professional ‘communicators’ inside organisations to mix up communication content and process, because in practice the two are interdependent. 

 

 

 

Moreover, ideas about the role of communication are determined not by what the subject of communication has to offer but by what budget holders are prepared to commission.  This is predicated by the return on investment that those budget holders can perceive.  It’s unfortunate that the benefits of ‘coalface communication’ are difficult to measure.  Evidence of value from communication done by employees can only be indirect i.e. via customer satisfaction ratings, opinion surveys, or outcome and performance indicators.

 

 

 

This leaves us with the believers and the non-believers.  There are sponsors who believe from a common-sense point of view, that by improving the skills and means by which their employees communicate, their business results will improve.  And they have the freedom and willingness to make investments based on this alone.  At the other end of the spectrum there are those who only want to focus on activities that they can prove will make a difference: using hard interventions to get hard results. 

 

 

 

Hopefully, managing from a common sense standpoint - and not relying on data to justify activities that don't fit so well with that mold - will become more fashionable.  After all, in the spirit of good communication, healthy relationships between leaders and their team members is about the development of mutual trust and the freeing of talents so that exceptional rewards can be gained.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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