By Marc Wright & Fiona Robertson

 

 

Building a Communication Plan for your company or organisation can apeear a daunting task, so I always try to break the job down into 5 areas.

 

1 : Strategy

This is the mainstay of your communication plan; it will help you make decisions throughout the toolkit. This module helps you avoid your communications strategy gathering dust in forgotten drawers of the executive suite. Follow the steps to create a strategy that is relevant to your business.

 

2 : Structure

How do you structure your communication team? This section gives you advice on :

 

• Functional location - where does internal communications sit in terms of reporting lines, and what effect does that have ?

• Geographical location - is your team centralised, distributed around the operating functions or virtual ?

• Career path and development - where are you recruiting staff from and how do you develop them ?

• Investment - how much do companies spend on internal communication, and how do you measure up ?

 

 

3 : Systems

Systems describe the actual technology and processes that you use for Internal Communications. The channels at your disposal have grown considerably from the days of just printed newsletters and noticeboards. Nowadays, you have the full toolkit of plasma displays, videos, team meetings, live events, intranet sites, web-streaming, audio broadcasting via radio and phone, texting, blogs, wikis and, of course, the ubiquitous email.

This section explains all the different systems, from traditional, to electronic to web-enabled so you can decide which to foster and which to ignore in order to achieve your strategy. We also look at the the question of communication channels; whether it is better to funnel all communication through line managers or to adopt a multi-channel approach.

 

4 : Standards

Communication standards are something that you can set in order to improve communications in your organisation and create value. They are all about how you want managers to talk, look and behave whenever they communicate with or listen to staff and colleagues. This is called ‘Climate Management’ and is a key tool for your Communication Plan.

Be aware, though, that merely setting standards will make little difference in your company. Standards only become standards when they are adopted by managers and staff so this section will help you choose and establish communication standards :

 

• that make sense for your business

• that nudge rather than shove people towards new behaviours

• that add value

• that demonstrate clear personal benefits

• and which can be measured.

 

It’s better to have a few embedded standards around the organisation than dozens enshrined in a manual that no-one opens. The most important – and hardest – standard to establish is that you are the company’s expert and leading authority on Internal Communication. Without a Moses, there can be no Ten Commandments.

 

5 : Skills

The fifth ‘S’ of communication is all about skilling up your staff. This section will help you develop training courses for all your levels of staff in:

 

• writing

• presentations

• email

• writing for the web

• listening skills

• leadership

• climate control.

 

1. Strategy

 

Your communication strategy must start with your business strategy.  The trouble is, few businesses are able to describe their real business strategy overtly.  So how do you marry your communication plan to a business plan, if no one above you can tell you what it really is ?  

This should not be a frustration to you; very few businesses have a CEO with a clearly articulated vision.  This is because few people in life have a clearly articulated vision; mostly, we are driven by the first four of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs : creating security for ourselves, keeping the threats to our safety at bay, companionship, self-esteem and so on.  Few of us have a guiding principle higher than making a success of ourselves and our companies.

However, every business does have a covert, unexpressed business strategy and it does not take rocket science to discover it; to do so, look at :

• where your company is spending the big bucks

• what type of attitude gets rewarded and promoted

• what keeps the CEO awake at night.

By going round the functional heads of the organisation and doing your own audit of what is going on, you become proactive rather than reactive.  This can raise your profile and credibility among the senior team, as well as establishing Communication as a strategic business tool.

Creating a communication strategy is all about making the covert, hidden business strategy open and engaging for your staff and colleagues.  And to do that, you need to ask yourself another question :

• what are your people thinking ?

Company Spending

This is the easiest one to deduce.  Study the FD’s budget for the present and coming year and see where the Board are investing.  That huge IT project may be low on your list of communication priorities; it’s astonishingly boring, is owned elsewhere in the company, and the benefits are unclear and long term.  Think again; go and interrogate the IT Director, talk to the IT suppliers, find out from HR the plan for training and implementation. 

And look at any unusual investment plans – new buildings, possible acquisitions, new advertising campaigns.  In short, if the Board have committed money to it, then you need to have it in your communication plan.

Become conversant in how to read a balance sheet.  And try to take a number of bearings on any piece of information.  As well as your senior management, talk to industry analysts and stock brokers about your company and the competition.  Do you have a strong balance sheet and a war chest for future expansion ?  Is your stock price under pressure and the quarterly earnings short of target ?  This hard financial data will tell you more about your company’s strategy than any Vision statement. 

Who Gets Promoted ?

Look at the recent promotions and hirings at a senior level in your company.  These are significant decisions by the Executive team and will tell you a great deal about the organisation’s current character. 

Use the Myers Briggs scale to establish what personality types are being favoured in these hirings.  This is the strongest indicator of your organisation’s personality.  Are the senior team a broad mixture of introverts and extroverts, sensing or intuitive, feeling or thinking, judging or perceiving types?  Or do they conform to a particular type?  And does that type conform to an industry type or do you stand out from the competition?  A bank that recruits senior candidates who are extrovert, intuitive, feeling and perceiving is going against the grain of most financial institutions, and that will have a definite effect on its business strategy.

If, however, your organisation is hiring people who resemble the industry norm, then this speaks volumes about the covert business strategy : more of the same, steady as she goes... what Jim Collins identifies as the “Flywheel Effect” (Jim Collins Good to Great - Random House).

Ask The CEO

Make an appointment, or better – a series of appointments - with your CEO, where you can follow your agenda rather than his or hers.  The quality of your communication strategy will depend on the quality of the relationship you have with your ultimate boss.  

Many CEOs do find it quite lonely at the top and have few people they can spend time with, reflecting on the broader direction of the business.  Go to the meeting with some models you can talk through, (see below).  And listen carefully to his or her language; to what they talk about first and what they ignore all together.  Try to distinguish between an issue that is front of mind because it came up five minutes before you met, and their longer-term goals.

Try questions such as :

• “If we didn’t invest in Project X, what would happen?”

• “What other organisations or CEOs do you admire?”

• “What business theories/books do you find attractive?”

• “What keeps you awake at night?”

• “What do you want our staff to think and feel about working for this organisation?”

• “If you didn’t do this job, what would you most want to do?”

• “Describe something that happened in the past that gave you the most satisfaction from this job.”

Measurement & Research

When you have gathered your data, remember that it is not your job to decide on whether a particular strategy is good, bad, desirable or otherwise.  Your job is to create a communication strategy that matches the business strategy.  This means that, whatever the true, covert business strategy of your organisation is, your mission is to make that overt, understandable and attractive to as many of your staff and stakeholders as possible. 

So the next step in building your communication strategy is to establish people’s level of awareness and their attitude to things that are really important to your business.  Track your employee attitude surveys for the past 3 years and look at any significant changes.  Gather as much desk research as possible and – if it does not exist – commission it.

Use an external agency to design and conduct your employee attitude survey - but make sure that they have expertise in Internal Communication and not just HR practices.  An external agency will be able to benchmark your scores against industry norms, or you can use the reports published by companies such as Ragan, Melcrum and Sinickas, or trade associations such as IABC, CiB and the IVCA.

Creating Your Communication Strategy

So, once you have established your company's real, covert business strategy, and established where your staff and colleagues are in terms of their understanding and feelings toward the company, you can now build your communication strategy.

TAs I have worked with comapnies in Europe and the US I have found three main strategies for Internal Communication that are commonly developed within organisations:

• Information Openness

• The Supportive Climate

• Performance-Based Communication.

Information Openness

This is a tried and tested strategy based on Jack Gibb’s work on his 5 managerial information-sharing practices.  Implemented fully, it can be a very powerful approach to Internal Communication as it focusses on demystifying and clarifying information around the organisation. However, it does encourage a centrist approach to communication : a telling to the many of what has been decided by the few. 

As organisations have become more transparent with their information, this approach may become less relevant.  The information that a company really needs to survive and thrive can often come from sideways and bottom-up ideas – particularly from customers and the marketplace.  If, as a communicator, your strategy keeps you in the corporate centre, dishing out company wisdom from on high, you run the danger of becoming irrelevant to the operational parts of the business and your strategy will fail.

The Supportive Climate

This is why many companies adopt a different Internal Communication climate, which focuses on the managers throughout a business and helps them change the climate in an organisation.   What does this mean?  Well, just as a parent or a teacher can make a trip or a lesson interesting, inspiring or depressing, depending on their mood, so a manager has the greatest effect on the many micro-climates around your business.  They can encourage teamwork or stifle innovation, all depending on three things :

• what they say

• what they do

• how they look.

What managers say, the language they use, the inflection they put into their voices, and the quality of the information they have affects the way they think, as well as the way those around them think.  We can see this phenomenon in the language of priests and the mantras of politicians.

What managers actually do confirms what they really believe.  It is their actions, decisions and what they choose not to do that are the little moments of truth which set the micro-climate. The role of the communications professional in this strategy is to support other managers to be better communicators, rather than trying to do all the communications yourself. Roland Draughon of Gavin Hodges describes this kind of communication strategy as a targeted communication process.  Such a strategy can be viewed as happening and succeeding when the message sent is :

• the message received,

• the message responded to (feedback from receivers),

• and the target audience has been influenced,

• and is exhibiting the desired behavior(s)

• and taking desired action(s).

This is a pretty good mechanism for any communication strategy because it does not end up as a thick report, languishing in the bottom drawer of the desks of senior management.  Instead, it is a living process that marries the real covert messages that your organisation is sending to real understanding among your staff and colleagues.  Not only that, but Draughon relates it not to words but to feelings, behaviours and actions in the workplace. 

And what is really powerful about climate control is that it can be taught.  Managers are often unaware that the office environment where they work is being created by themselves.  A boss that comes in very early in the morning may just want to clear her emails before the first meeting but actually she is creating a culture of early-starting.  Staff will start to create unwritten rules about when is the ‘right’ time to get in of a morning. 

The manager who regularly brings their team together to celebrate individual achievement will encourage peer recognition.  A manager who displays their anger can create a climate of fear, while the manager who hardly shows any emotion at all will create a climate of non-engagement and indifference.

By training managers in understanding climate control, you can make a huge difference in opening up communication channels and engaging staff. Of course, managers are affected by the way their managers behave so climate control does also have to be understood and managed at the top.  It’s a twin-pincer strategy:  encourage the behaviours you want at the micro- and the macro- level at the same time.

Performance-Based Communication

The third strategy, and the most recent to appear, is Performance-Based Communication. 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 belong 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.

This is a very useful approach if you find yourself with limited resources and if your department is undervalued.  (The two facts are often not unrelated).

Far better to succeed in a small project than to fail across the board.  Use measurement systems find out what staff actually value of the communication you put out. If this shows that the quarterly magazine is being ignored, then bin it and instead use the money to make a difference in a carefully defined project in a distinct part of the business.

Once you have success with one of the operational barons and can prove the value of your intervention, just watch your budget and your influence grow as you get called in by other parts of the operation.

 

2. Structure

How do you structure your Communication team?  This part gives you advice on:

• Functional location: Where does internal communications sit in terms of reporting lines, and what effect does that have ?

• Geographical location:  Is you team centralised, distributed around the operating functions, or virtual ?

• Career path and development: Where are you recruiting staff from and how do you develop them ?

• Investment:  How much do companies spend on internal communication, and how do you measure up ?

 

 

Functional Location

Unless you are setting up your team from scratch, where you are based and who you report to are probably fixed.  However, this section will tell you how to balance your Communication team depending on where you sit in the corporate hierarchy, whether it's in Corporate, Marketing or HR. These reporting lines can influence strongly the type of IC capability that you have, and it can be helpful to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each position.

 

The Corporate Communicator

Corporate Internal Communications have the advantage of a stronger link to the CEO and the levers of power but they tend to focus on top-down messages and ‘sending out stuff’.

Advantages:

• You are closer to the seat of power

• Your get status from having the ear of the boss

• It’s easier to co-ordinate internal and external communication.

Disadvantages:

• Operational managers can distrust or undervalue your work

• You can become remote and irrelevant from day-to-day business

• You could become closely associated with a senior executive who will eventually leave.

 

Jim Shaffer and Roger D’Aprix argue forcibly that Communication knows no function and that it should permeate all departments and divisions of an organisation, rather like IT does.

 

What to do about it

• Imagine for a second that the world does not revolve around the Corporate Centre but, like Copernicus, you have discovered that this is an illusion and that like those other planets called Sales, Operations, Manufacturing, Logistics, etc, you all travel in complex orbits around the customer. 

• Then try imagining what life might be like on Planet Despatch. 

• Then review the last 3 months of communication you and your team have been sending out to this planet. 

• Examine your employee attitude centre and then go walk about that Department asking people what they thought of your newsletter, or the management conference, or the last video. 

• Then move your desk there for a month.

• Then do a piece of internal communication either exclusively for or exclusively from this Planet, and then gauge the result.

• Then, when the month is up, choose another planet and move in there for a month. 

• Carry on doing the same work, and attending the same senior meetings, but become a nomad.  Don’t ask for permission – just do it.  And, as you camp out on each of these different planets, do some good by building on the communication tools you find there.

 

After six months, you will have developed a completely new view of your universe, a view that not only puts the Corporate Centre in its right perspective but also teaches you the subtle relationships and interdependencies of the different functions and silos in your company.

 

The Marketing Communicator

A Marketing-based team will be closer to Internal Marketing techniques, which use the tools of advertising to get staff to buy into new ideas and messages. Budgets tend to be spent on high-profile videos and live events.

Advantages:

• You are surrounded by people who understand the power of good communication, design and how to use media.

• There is more money around (you just have to find ways of tapping it)

• It’s fast paced

• It’s brand-focussed

• You are closer to the customer.

Disadvantages:

• External communication is given more money, attention and status

• Strategies are short term and your boss is more likely to be impatient for results

• Focus is on ‘stuff’ like videos, brochures, websites, rather than people’s attitudes and developments

• Kevin Thomson, author of Emotional Capital, was an external marketeer who became a leading Internal Communication strategist.  He argued that you can apply external marketing techniques to internal audiences to improve morale, innovation and productivity.

What to do about it:

• Use the language of marketing to present your boss with a proposal for a 'living the brand' programme, with the promise that it will improve customer service - which will increase customer brand loyalty, giving higher levels of repeat purchasing and hence greater sales.

• Then go to the HR Department and sell the same programme to them, using the language of People Development.  This will give you the best of both worlds (and budgets) to create a truly involving communication programme across the whole organisation.

 

 

The HR Communicator

HR-owned departments tend to have a more involving approach, with a stronger emphasis on enabling people through communication training.

Advantages:

• There are some key HR models that can be used to improve your internal communication

• Your boss is a specialist who will respect your own specialism

• HR professionals are capable of taking a longer view.

Disadvantages:

• HR does not carry as much clout or kudos as other departments

• Decision-making can be slow

• Budgets for non-training initiatives can be small and vulnerable to cuts.

HR is the default home for Internal Communications and there is more support and expertise for IC from this sector than any other.  Consider the large consultancies such as Mercer and Towers Perrin who have developed strong IC practices.  And publishers such as Melcrum and Sift have an HR dimension to their work.

What to do about it:

• Stand out from the crowd.  Make Internal Communication the glue that binds HR to Operations, to Marketing and to the Corporate sector. 

• Market and communicate what HR is doing throughout the organisation in an internal advertising campaign.  This will have two beneficial effects : 

  • Your HR colleagues will rise to the challenge and become the dynamic, go-ahead, engaged bunch of people that you say they are. 

  • And other functions will be queuing up to have you on their side to promote themselves internally.

• Create a network of champions for internal communication throughout your organisation; this will give you a virtual team to augment your own permanent staff and increase your influence and capability.

 

 

Team Locations

A key decision that should come out of your communication strategy is where your team should live and work. In fact, if you are uncertain of your company culture, just look at where the Communications team traditionally sits. If they are all based in Head Office, then you tend towards a command-and-control culture; if they are dispersed around the regions, then yours is more of a distributed or matrix culture.

 

• By putting your Communications team into the heart of the business’s operating units, you will produce communication that is more closely tailored to the needs of your different populations and, in return, you will receive more accurate feedback on what people are actually thinking.

• If you centralise your team, you will get greater consistency of top-down messages, less duplication of effort and some cost savings.

• If you run your teams from virtual bases – especially if they’re working from home – you will encourage communication systems biased towards email and your intranet.

   

What to do about it:

• Use your own team to pioneer new ways of working, such as blogs, wikis and webinars, to road-test the productivity of these new methods. 

• Find ways to work smarter (rather than harder) and surround yourself with the best quality suppliers and consultants you can afford.

 

 

Career Paths

Is your Communications team made up of dedicated professionals who will spend their entire careers in communication roles, or do you use it as a development opportunity for general management?

Do you recruit on experience and skills, or do you ‘grow your own’? And how do you reward your Internal Communications team : is there a glass ceiling, or is there a career path to the Board?

These characteristics will have a marked impact on the type and effectiveness of communication in your company. The ‘video girl’ or the ‘newsletter writer’ can become great repositories of knowledge about the stories and personalities around the organisation. But are they able to turn that knowledge into competitive advantage for your organisation? Not as long as you keep them in a process-orientated role.

However, if you can train them on the wider aspects of Internal Communication, they can become internal consultants who will add real value, with measurable outcomes.

 

What to do about it:

• Join the International Association of Business Communicators and enrol in their professional qualification of Accredited Business Communicator (ABC).  For more information see their website: www.iabc.com

  Attend at least one conference a year on internal communications - and send your staff on training workshops.

• Encourage your staff to take sabbaticals in other parts of your organisation, and even in your supplier base.  Six months with an agency will develop a team member dramatically, and agencies will often leap at the benefit of building longer-lasting relationships.

 

 

Budget

Your structure will be determined by budget.

Spending on Internal Communication per head is increasing faster than any other functional budget, simply because companies are becoming more knowledge-dependent and staff are becoming better educated and more aspirational.

The reality is that, whatever you are spending on Internal Communication, it’s probably not enough – but then we would say that, wouldn’t we ?

Tips:

• Build support at Board level for Internal Communication by allying your projects to the big money investments going on in your organisation; 

• Alternatively, use research to optimise your current budget spend.  With the money you free up, choose a particular small-scale internal communications project that will give you a quick-win in terms of savings or greater productivity. 

• Then use this evidence to launch two more projects, and build from there.

• Fight for a training budget and keep it.

 

 

3. Systems

 

Let's look now at the wide variety of Systems - or technology and processes - that you can use for Internal Communications.  These have grown dramatically in recent years, thanks to the rise of the internet.  Some you can control, some you can’t – but all have to be recognised in an Internal Communication plan. 

We have grouped them here in chronological order, from the traditional, through media-based to web-enabled.  We then address the thorny question of communication channels.

 

Traditional Systems

Newsletters

Newsletters and magazines have taken a bit of a dive in recent years, mostly because you can make a good financial case – saving ten of thousands of pounds or dollars - by moving them online.  But the printed medium still has a valuable role to play.  We find them scoring particularly well as a read-on-the-way home medium and they are particularly useful for staff who are not online during the working day. 

If your staff do a lot of bus and train commuting, then a magazine or newsletter which they can pick up as they leave their office is still a cool option.  Provided, of course, the content is targeted, of interest and well written. Just don’t make the mistake that one company did of moving from portrait to landscape; readership plummeted as people could no longer read the newsletter when they took a comfort break; it was too wide for the cubicle!

 

Noticeboards

Posters and noticeboards have become an irrelevance in modern day life.  If it’s information that changes regularly, it’s better online.  If it is significant information, then be aware that the reading of it is a very public act.  Best avoided for straightforward information.  Use that public space instead for marketing information to staff; the latest campaign, your values, information about forthcoming events. 

And why use noticeboards that people have programmed themselves to ignore?  Use the inside and outside of elevator doors, where you have a captive audience.  Applied vinyl billboards can be very effective here.  Or replace your notice boards with plasma screens which display information more attractively and give you more control.

 

Team Meetings

Face-to-face meetings are one of the most popular forms of communication, particularly in small team groups, held regularly.  Human beings are social animals and we like to interact with our peers. 

The quality and effectiveness of this media is driven by the person who is holding the meeting.  Make it your job to provide them with the training, support and materials to run effective team meetings.

It is the simplest of communication media, but the hardest to get right – and the stakes are high for your organisation’s productivity.  If you do nothing else, understand the strengths and weaknesses of team meetings in your company and build a strategy to support and improve this vital communication channel.

 

Live Events

Live events have the advantage of getting people together to focus on one particular message at a time.  It is probably the only system you will run where you have such a strong control on the environment, the messages, the behaviour of management and the assessment of feedback from audiences. 

They are also the most expensive, high-profile and time-consuming medium in Internal Communications. 

 

Media-Based Systems

Videos

Video is a powerful tool that many communication managers use to boost and enhance their communication programmes. This is because videos give a consistent message and can communicate emotional issues well. 

But traditional corporate video, like television programmes, is a pull medium; your audience have to want to watch them for them to be effective.  To make a video compelling to watch requires great skill, good subjects and significant investment.

There is a move to use video more in corporate communications as a feedback and side-to-side communication tool.  This means giving cheap, domestic cameras to staff and allowing them to tell their own stories and messages from around the company.  The result, properly managed, can be liberating for organisations.  No longer the sole domain of top-down, one-to-many communication, the democratic use of video cameras around an organisation is something you might want to consider in your Communication Plan. 

This is particularly true if your organisation is large and distributed.  Featuring people’s stories from around the country or globe will do more to spread knowledge and best practice than any amount of emails or reports. 

 

Plasma Displays

Plasma screens – large, bright, flat TV screens, have come down in price and are now becoming accessible to corporate communicators’ budgets.   This means you can now replace noticeboards with plasma screens, which are considerably more versatile and effective in getting broadcast messages across. But beware - they are not just a channel for communicaiton but also a public advertisement of how well you are doing your job as a communicator.  The same revolving powerpoint slides about the company barbecue day after day will make your  colleagues wonder what you do for a salary.

 

Telephone Conferencing

If you are a multi-national or are geographically-spread, then your company will rely heavily on telephone conferencing.  It’s relatively cheap, easy to set up and saves on travelling time.  However, it is a medium with major drawbacks. 

Telephone conferencing cuts out all the visual clues that are key to good communication.  On a telephone conference, you cannot pick up the nuances of irony, humour and, most importantly, dissent since you cannot see the colleague in Mexico shaking their head, or the team member in France who does not say a thing because others more senior are on the line. 

Some judicial training is helpful for anyone who does much telephone conferencing, and it is essential for managers who chair such meetings. 

Video Conferencing

Video conferencing does bring in the visual dimension – it can be amazing to put a face to the name you have been talking to for months. This system will become submerged into web-conferencing, with small video cameras on PCs, since it offers both a cheaper solution and participants do not have to leave their desks. 

Training does exist for video-conferencing but currently there is little help on how to come across well on webcams on VOIP channels like Skype.  The important aspect is not so much mastering the technical side of these meetings but understanding what effect your image is having on the person at the other end.  For example, think about your background; does a messy office cubicle give the image you want to convey?

 

Phone

It seems strange to include the phone as a system in communication but its role is changing with the rise of email and i-messaging.  I heard a senior communicator at Yahoo say that when she got a phone call, it was a real event as they happened so rarely. 

For younger generations, speech over the telephone is no longer the primary communication vehicle in companies.

 

Email

The moment you send an email, you lose control of who will see it and how it will be interpreted. An email, written in the heat of the moment, could one day be used in a court of law to prove malice, incompetence or shady dealings.

Your communication plan can help establish the rules of email etiquette – or ‘netiquette’ – in your company so everyone can sleep easy about the thousands of emails they send each year.

 

Texting

Texting is another generational system.  It appeals strongly to the under 25s in your company, particularly in the UK –though texting is not widely available or practised in the US. Texting has become the defualt medium for telling people low level news such as I'm running late for a meeting.  Mobile phone companies use texts widely as a form of mobile i-messaging, and it’s great for instructional information.  As a system however, it is limited for getting across more complex or emotional issues. 

It does have a possible role as a form of fast polling device as almost everyone has a mobile phone.   Just don’t use it to sack people!

 

Radio Broadcasting

This is a system that is used in some retail stores and factories, where a consistent message can be sent to staff in their working environment via a DJ or through recorded interviews and announcements, interspersed between music.  It's a bit Big Brother for most coommunicators' tastes.

 

Business TV

Business TV is a costly medium that has to be managed very carefully to succeed.  It is a push medium – sending out messages to an audience whether they are interested or not.  The danger of Business TV is that senior managers can love it as a platform for pushing out messages, but actual viewing figures can be disappointingly low. Nevertheless there are some successful long term business TV channels – BMW has a very fine and effective network for dealers and Tetra Pak run a quarterly programme for its factories worldwide. However, it tends to succeed best where the audience can interact with the material and messages, and where programmes can be targeted to specific audiences. Cost per head is prohibitive compared to web-based alternatives.

 

Phone Broadcasts

This is the medium whereby pre-recorded features or interviews are sent down the line.  Staff can call up a special number and listen to the message at work or home.  This medium is being superseded by intranet sound files and podcasting.

 

Web-Enabled Systems

Intranet Sites

Every communication plan has to think very long and hard about this system of communication.  Intranets are far more than a communication medium; in some companies, they are the company.  In the not-too-distant future, the intranet is where we will all go to get most of our daily work done.  This means that the intranet is not a system purely for the communication department – it belongs to the whole organisation. 

The role of the Communications department is to operate as a publisher, setting the standards and structure of the intranet, but allowing the rest of the organisation – the subject experts – to write, edit and monitor the content.

This means that the investment in your intranet and your intranet strategy is something that will eventually be discussed and owned at Board level – it’s that important – more important possibly than the bricks and mortar that make up the physical buildings and work environment you inhabit. A good intranet is one that allows staff to do their job as quickly as possible - whether it's filling in expenses, dealing with a supplier or managing a project online.  They are hard to get right as few companies are prepared to invest the millions that have made consumer interent sites such as Amazon and eBay so easy to use.  Gerry McGovern - an intranet expert from Ireland recommends that the best way to manage an intranet is to work out that top 10 things that people come to your site to do and then make them as user-friendly and efficient as possible.  If you can get the top 3 right then you are doing well!

 

Web-Streaming

Pictures tell a thousand stories and moving pictures tell even more.  As band capacity on networks increases exponentially, we will be seeing more and more capturing of information and its dissemination via web-streaming. The big change here has come with remote hosting sites such as YouTube that allow you to store and access video material for free on the web.  While this is not appropriate for corporate applications there are hosted servers that are password protected - or you can talk nicely to your IT colleagues about setting up one on your intranet platform.

With the next generation of mobile phones, the dissemination of video files will happen anywhere and anytime in your organisation.   Anything, from a senior management briefing to a customer complaining, can be captured and sent anywhere, inside or outside your organisation.  Microsoft run a system called Academy Mobile whereby video podcasts are made available to all sales staff through their mobiles. This can be an enormous source of good in communication terms; it also means that all spoken presentations have the potential of becoming public property and being sent round the world. 

The technology is only just starting but your communication plan will benefit from anticipating this huge step change.

 

Blogs

Blog is short for web-log - a log that anyone can write and publish online.  The clever bit is that blogs are interactive.  They invite others to respond and comment on what they have just read.  It's like a cross between an email and a webpage - a medium for one person to talk to many, but with the many having the chance to answer back. 

A blog is different to a message board or a chat room in that it is driven by the thoughts and writings of the blogger.  Other people can then respond to the blog and post their own views online - but these are tributaries off the main stream; the reader will always return to the blogger's column.

But describing a blog through its technical capability is like describing Pride And Prejudice as a medium-sized book with stiff covers.  The technology is irrelevant; what is important is what you do with your blogs, and how they fit in your communication mix.

 

Wikis

A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but it also allows anyone to edit the content. The term 'Wiki' also refers to the collaborative software used to create such a website.  A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Most wikis are open to the general public without the need to register a user account. But the technology is also being adopted within companies where private wiki servers require user authentication.  Here, the prime use is to capture knowledge about products, services and customers within an organisation. It is a powerful system because it is run by the staff themselves and pushes the communication down to the person with the greatest knowledge and expertise.  But beware, while the software is generally cheap and accessible, the amount of time your staff could end up investing in creating and capturing knowledge will be immense.

 

RSS

Really Simple Syndication is a system whereby you can include other people’s content on your own intranet.  Obvious examples are news headlines and stock market prices. The advantages to you are that you can just set up the RSS and your intranet will become updated automatically.  Providing, of course, that the data comes from a trustworthy source.  RSS also means that your colleagues can now decide which information they want to have drawn to their desktops, a process that gives them unprecedented power over internal communicaitons.  Thus an engineer could end up only reading blogs and articles that appeal to her interests - and your centrally produced communications will never touch her desktop.

 

Podcasts

Podcasting is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s).

It became popular iwith the automatic downloading of audio onto portable players or personal computers.  "Podcasting" is a portmanteau word that combines the words "broadcasting" and "iPod." The term can be misleading since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable music player. 

Podcasting enables you or anyone in your organisation to create self-published, syndicated "radio shows," and gives broadcast radio programs a new distribution method.

Listeners may subscribe to feeds using "podcatching" software (a type of aggregator), which periodically checks for and downloads new content automatically.

The advantage of podcasting is that your audience can choose to listen to the broadcast at any time they want, either in the office or on the move.  It's the only communicationmedium people can use effectively while they are doing something else like walking the car or driving to work.

 

I-Messaging

Instant Messaging requires the use of a client program that hooks up to an instant messaging service, and it differs from e-mail in that conversations are then able to happen in real time.  Most services offer a "presence awareness" feature, indicating whether people on one's list of contacts are currently online and available to chat. This may be called a 'Buddy List'. In instant messaging programs, the other party in the conversation generally only sees each line of text right after a new line is started. Instant messaging applications may also include the ability to post an away message, the equivalent of the message on a telephone answering machine.

The appeal of instant messaging in the office is that it is silent and people can have a conversation with a colleague or friend without anyone around them knowing what they are saying.  Such systems are taking over from email as a way of collaborating and getting an instant response to a query.  They are also used for gossip!  The key issue about i-messaging is that it is generally not recorded and therefore there is no formal paper trail of the conversation. In hi-tech companies, staff can regularly be found to be i-messaging during a meeting – even during a face-to-face conversation.  You may have protocols about the use of i-messaging but it really is down to the individual.  If they have access to the internet, then they can i-message whoever and whenever they want.

 

VOIP

Voice-Over Internet Protocol is just a different way of routing phone calls. It is a piece of software that gives you free telephone calls over the internet.  All you need is a broadband connection and a headset - any headset that connects to your sound and microphone ports on your PC or laptop. 

And it really works - even phoning the other side of the world - so you now have a hi-fi alternative to bunching around the teleconference starfish and paying the phone company a small fortune for a one hour meeting. And because VOIP can take a video signal along with the audio it has opened up video-conferencing to a mass market.

 

Web Meetings

Collaboration software is now becoming available that supports the total management and conduct of meetings over the Internet, providing structure to increase their effectiveness and obviating the costs and time of travel.

These can be used for two types of meetings :

• presentation-style (one-to-many) meetings and

• agenda-driven (many-to-many) types of communication. 

Webinars are a very time-efficient way of getting detailed, instructional messages out to your remote colleagues without them having to leave their desks. ou log on and listen to (and watch) a subject expert present on a particular issue.   You can ask them questions and generally contribute.  You can also download a webinar after the event and watch it in your own time.  This communication system lends itself well to distance training. These systems have been developed by the large software companies and will be eventually bundled with other desktop applications.  This means that, one day, the IT department could present you with a default choice of which system you have in the company.  It is therefore worth understanding these systems better and influencing any IT purchasing decisions to get the one that suits and integrates with your business best.

 

 

 

Communication Channels

Then there is the issue of how you structure your communications:  do you use a single channel approach, with communications coming down from the top?  Or delivered exclusively through managers and supervisors at team meetings?  Side-to-side, via intranet; or bottom-up, from staff to managers?  Or do you combine a number of these channels?

There has long been a debate in Internal Communications about the benefits of communicating exclusively through line managers.  It goes back to some flawed research in the '80s that ‘proved’ that staff preferred to get their news from their immediate supervisor.  It’s true that people like the personal touch from some one they know and trust, and who will listen to what they say.  But, although it is a powerful channel, you run big risks if you use it as the only one.

In every other sphere of communication, whether it be politics, entertainment or education, we see audiences reaching out to both their local communities and national leaders.  We read about our local councillors and listen to them at meetings but we also want to hear what Presoidents and Prime Ministers have to say on a particular subject; we love to hear our local bands but still buy the CDs of international chart toppers; we listen to our tutors and teachers but buy the books, or pay through the nose, to listen to the gurus of our favourite subjects. The point is the human mind needs different reference points in order to come to a conclusion.  Just as sailors take three bearings to work out their position, we want to hear the views of people at different levels in the workplace in order to make up our minds on the key issues.

Then there is the rise of technology.  There was a time of course when the supervisor was king because he was your priest or the lord of the manor and there were no other communication channels than the pulpit or the village pump.  That model continued in the 20th century with the hegemony of the foreman and office manager.  But, as all the web-enabled enthuse, that model is broken and it’s never going to come back.  Whatever your supervisor says will be undermined by access to all the other sources of information available from in or outside the company, at the click of a mouse.

Human interaction in small groups is the most effective way for people to communicate, providing that the person who is leading that group is a competent communicator - and therein lies the rub.  A sizeable slice of supervisors hate the communication side of their job; they just are uncomfortable in that role, and no amount of training is going to substantially change that. By putting all your resources in this channel, you risk at best boring a third of your staff and, at worst, alienating them completely.  At least senior management have to engage with their own communication skills and do something about it; in today’s environment they won’t get to be senior executives otherwise.

 

4. Standards

 

 

There are three categories of Standards that you can usefully apply to your communication plan :

• How you look

• What you say

• How you behave.

 

 

How You Look

You will be familiar with one of these already.  How do you use the company brand in Internal Communication – is it with the same standards that are applied to external communication ?  At the risk of becoming the brand police, you could ensure that wherever the company brand or brands appear, they do adhere to brand guidelines.

The next standard you can influence is how your people look.  Staff take their cue from supervisors and line managers who, in turn, take their cue from senior management.  (It is an interesting tribal phenomeneon – most famously evident at IBM during its blue suit period of the '70s and '80s.)  So what your presenters wear at a management conference, town hall event or in that latest video will have an impact on how the rest of the organisation will dress. 

Therefore, have a definite standard in mind when you put your CEO on stage.  If he insists on a pin-striped suit and braces, then that will be the fashion around the management corridors for years to come.  If, like Alan Leighton, Chairman of Royal Mail and Selfridges, he is only ever photographed in an open-neck shirt, then that is what will become acceptable - from postmen to accountants - in those organisations.

Then there is how your working environment looks.  You may think this is not really within the control of Internal Communications but you can influence those finishing touches that make all the difference. 

• Make the posters you put up in your reception and corridors as innovative and creative as your advertising. 

• Use tray mats in your canteen to tell stories about individual successes. 

• Use banners and pop-up stands to promote that company initiative, new campaign or the charity you sponsor. 

• But, most of all, create space so that people can influence how their area looks. 

• Encourage the creation of a team spirit by helping people brand their own area.  Indeed, why not start with your own unit by dusting off those old awards and putting them where everyone can see ?  Or set up a large board with examples of communication that you are proud of.

 

 

What You Say

The way we talk affects and determines the way we think.  So the language we use around an organisation has a crucial effect on the way the company thinks – the way it approaches challenges and projects. 

A good example of this is swearing.  In newspaper offices around the world, the colourful nature of the expletives create a culture that is macho, tough and confrontational.  And these standards are self-reinforcing as newcomers arrive and start to use the same language to fit in. 

But is the language conducive to the work at hand?  And when the language gets formalised in emails sent by managers, then you could be limiting the potential of your staff, as more delicate and sensitive users of language withdraw into themselves or just leave. 

In companies that are failing, you start to find that negative words start to seep like cancer into the everyday talk of the company.  Before you know it, you are talking yourselves into a spiral of corporate depression.

How do you change language?  By changing the language of your senior team in meetings.  Through scriptwriting and the judicious use of advice and direction, bringing them up-to-date with what is and isn’t acceptable language.  Once they start dropping the language of the past, others will soon follow. 

• Instead of talking about what’s bad and what’s going to get worse, start using positive language about what’s good and what could be better.

• Keep it simple.  Try to get the bureaucratic out of the instructions that people bump into as they go about their working day. 

• The Americans do this better than the Europeans.  Where the Brits put up notices saying, “Do not deposit inflammable materials adjacent to machinery”, the equivalent American sign will say “No Trash!”. 

• On the back of those little paper tents that people write their names on in meetings, print the simple instruction, “Think!”  Not a bad instruction for anyone about to open their mouth in a meeting.

• On your intranet, set the standards for writing.  Use George Orwell’s 6 Rules of Better Writing and Active Language. 

• Teach your writers the rule of the inverted pyramid. 

• And remember that writing for the web is different from writing for the page so you will benefit from creating a styles guideline for everyone to look at before they start writing. 

• Combine this with a template for layout, style and metadata to get a more consistent look for your intranet.

How You Behave

The third area of standards is how you behave.  What senior managers do is far more eloquent than what they say.  The Finance Director who preaches financial rectitude and then gets caught fiddling his expenses; the HR Director who espouses equality and then gets mad when someone parks their car in his privileged space; the Communication Director who does not reply to emails;  these behaviours are the true setters of the climate within your office, your building and your organisation. 

Now it’s fine for managers to smoke openly in a cigarette company, for staff to dress provocatively in a fashion house, and for troops to get aggressive on manoeuvres.  As long as that is the culture that you want to cultivate in your organisation.  But if you are in the middle of a values programme to shift the climate from authoritarian to innovative, then by changing some high profile behaviours, you can get there a lot quicker.

Be aware, though, that merely setting standards will make little difference in your company. Sun Tzu was, of course, right when he told the world in his masterpiece, The Art of War, you need to pick the battles you can win.  Standards only become standards when they are adopted by managers and staff. 

It’s better to have a few embedded standards around the organisation than dozens enshrined in a manual that no-one opens. The most important – and hardest – standard to establish is that you are the company’s expert and a leading authority on Internal Communication. Without a Moses, there can be no Ten Commandments.

 

5. Skills

 

There is not room here to outline the many courses you can follow to skill up yourself, your staff and your colleagues throughout your organisation.  There is a richness

of training courses available from specialist communication publishers, such as Ragan, Melcrum and of course simply-communicate.com as well as the two trade associations, IABC and CiB. 

If you really want to become top of the class in Communications, then enrol on the IABC’s accreditation qualification and become an ABC (Accredited Business Communicator). Academic courses in the UK are centred at the Kingston Business School, Kingston University where they teach an excellent Diploma in Internal Communication Management and Bournemouth University where they offer an MA in Corporate Communication.

 

If you don't have time to go on an academic course fortunately Sue Dewhurst and Liam Fitzpatrick have put together a competency framework which outlines the skills you might think of applying to yourself and your team.  You can read about it in the next chapter.

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