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Is Internal Communications Dead?

Simon Rutter

External Contributor - Award-winning Sr Communications Strategist

June 5 2024

Are you wondering how you should be investing in keeping internal comms relevant at your company? Simon Rutter shares his advice.

The role and purpose of internal communications has been long debated, both inside and outside the profession. But in recent years there have been growing concerns over its future, with persistent question marks over its impact, relevance, and adaptability. 

So, is internal communications dead? In this blog, I’ll look at seven reasons why traditional internal communications could be on the way out, and what practitioners can do to build and shape the industry so it’s ready for its next exciting era. 

1. Identity crisis

Fundamentally, internal communications should be rooted in corporate strategy. The very function of internal communications is to ensure every employee understands your business strategy, and their role in delivering it. Done properly, this creates purpose, meaning, and unity for your people, which translates into engagement, productivity, and performance.

It’s that simple, and that hard. Why?

Many internal communicators have become torn by the ever-multiplying and often conflicting demands on their services from stakeholders. For example, senior leaders may want corporate ‘strategic’ messages to be broadcast in a certain way, while employees want to be engaged in conversation about issues that matter more to them personally. 

This chronic anguish over ‘who do I really work for?’ has created an identity crisis for internal communicators. 

What can you do about it?

  • Create a simple internal communications strategy that is clearly aligned to your business strategy
  • Contract with your leaders on this, and clarify your expectations for their support when you hold the line 
  • Agree how to handle non-strategic communication requests 

Setting the strategy is the easy part. The key to reclaiming your identity as a value-adding internal communications function is to share this strategy, secure endorsement, and back up your words with actions – which will mean saying ‘no’ regularly. 

2. Do we have a business strategy?

This one might seem odd, but hear me out. With the speed of global markets, rapid changes in consumer behavior, and the pace of innovation, the time horizon of corporate strategies is receding by the minute. Most experts concur that the maximum timespan any business can realistically plan for today is one to two years. 

As a result of this volatility and unpredictability, some businesses simply don’t have a strategy, preferring short-term planning and targets, while others are creating strategies that are vague, have too many priorities in them, or frequently change. 

This is a major headache for internal communicators, as our job relies on understanding, simplifying, and storifying the strategy for the companies we work for. If there isn’t one, or in any of the other situations I described above, then it means we are not doing our job properly, and are at the mercy of communicating the whims of senior leaders simply for the sake of it. This adds little to no value to our organizations, dilutes our potential impact, and creates unnecessary noise that confuses and irritates employees.

What can you do about it?

  • Clarify what you do have by way of a company strategy or plan 
  • Get more actively involved in the corporate strategic planning process, so you can pivot if needed 
  • Craft an internal communications strategy that matches your organization’s priorities – even if short-term 

No matter what state your company’s strategy is in, focus and flexibility are essential to maintaining our ability to do our jobs.

3. Cameo, not centre-stage 

Where internal communications sits in an organization is a perennial bone of contention for practitioners. However, this misses the point. It doesn’t matter whether we report to HR, Marketing, or another function – the problem is that in some cases, we have been subsumed by our masters. When this happens, we end up simply as a support to a support function, doing SOS (Sending Out Stuff) work to keep us busy and seemingly productive. 

This further confuses senior executives about the point of internal communications. In a world of continual economic headwinds, this is not a good look. Furthermore, it relegates us to a cameo role in our organizations, unable to effect real change and struggling to make our voice and value heard. 

What can you do about it?

  • Ensure you have representation on the senior leadership team of your reporting function 
  • Question any activity that can’t be linked back to the corporate strategy
  • Collaborate with functional peers and jointly present to the executive team

Regardless of what the line shows on the organizational chart, we can still have a substantial impact on our businesses. 

4. Curator or creator? 

In many organizations I have either worked at, or now consult into, communications are coming at employees from all sides. In days gone by, internal communicators would centrally control and provide air traffic to the various messages. These days, with the proliferation of technology, hybrid working, and reduced resources, that’s not possible. 

According to Gartner predictions, 46% of enterprise communications leaders recognize that digital distraction and information overload are the top challenges for their organizations.

Our role now is increasingly to curate and filtrate the information employees receive. We can do that either by providing templates and messaging guides, or managing the channels people use to communicate. Either way, our role is more passive, and we can be perceived as shadowy figures who hold sway over content calendars and maintain intranets, but are not at the heart of driving their businesses forward. 

In these situations, we have to wonder, how long before IT take over the tools, and AI checks the calendar for date clashes? Scary? It may already be happening. 

What can you do about it?

  • Establish your role as a creator and gatekeeper of corporate positioning, messaging, content, and channels
  • Form an editorial committee with your regular communicators to outline your plan, and clarify roles and responsibilities 
  • Use data to measure what is working and what isn’t, and course-correct if necessary 

Taking a more proactive role in the content that’s created and disseminated throughout your organization will create clarity for employees and ensure consistency and predictability, which will bolster your value. 

5. Talked ourselves into a corner 

For as long as I can remember, internal communicators have been shouting about the need to focus on strategy. However, the cold, hard fact is that in 20 years, global levels of employee engagement have not moved, and are in fact plummeting. 

Of course, the responsibility for this doesn’t lie solely with internal communications. But if your people understand your strategy and can see how their job contributes to it, they are far more likely to be engaged in their work. 

So, are we simply talking a good game but failing to deliver? Or, when the pressure is on, have we reverted to what we’re comfortable doing, what’s expected, rather than pushing to be truly strategic and impactful? As such, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. 

Now, some of this has been caused by the sharp increase in non-strategic work we’ve been dragged, unwillingly, into (more on this in number 6) – but the result is the same: we’re busy being busy, and that’s not what we’re here for. 

What can you do about it?

  • Make sure you have any type of strategy, no matter what shape or format it is in 
  • Don’t be afraid to interrogate requests for you and your team’s time – simply asking ‘why?’ can shut down a lot of unnecessary work
  • Track you and your team’s time to see how much of it is spent on strategic and non-strategic work

You can’t talk your way into being strategic, so get a strategy together and start taking aligned action if you want to change perceptions of internal communications in your organization.

6. Taken too much on 

This is a personal bane of mine, and many other senior internal communicators I know. For several reasons, internal communications has often become the dumping ground for everything from organizing parties to managing distribution lists. Whether through widespread misunderstanding and confusion about our role, or our own lack of capability and conviction (or a combination of the two), the result is the same: we’ve taken far too much on, a substantial portion of which is not our accountability or responsibility. 

This has left us overwhelmed, in constant firefighting mode, and with little to zero time to educate our stakeholders on what it is we should be doing. If all we’re seen as good for is prettying PowerPoints (that ask comes up a lot), then we may as well be dead as a profession, because that is certainly not adding value and makes us worryingly replaceable. 

What can you do about it?

  • Draw up a charter of what you and your team are and aren’t responsible for 
  • Before any project begins, check it against this charter to determine whether you should be involved, and how 
  • Have RACIs in place for each project so it’s clear what you’re responsible for, and what you’re not

Many internal communicators are people pleasers, so it’s natural that we take too much on. But it’s only by stepping back and being clear on our responsibilities that we can be effective in our jobs. 

7. A little more conversation 

While internal communications has moved from one-way to two-way, there is growing momentum behind the importance of listening in organizations. Employees expect to have more of a voice in today’s organizations – not just about how they are communicated to, but also on what issues their organization communicates externally. 

Listening, then, is a critical skill for leaders and internal communicators, as it helps to build trust, engagement, and psychological safety. In this new world of ongoing dialogue, old-school internal communications – controlling the message and the channels – is being eschewed in favor of constant shaping and re-shaping of messages based on employee feedback. 

Which begs the question – is our original purpose redundant, and do we now need to be comfortable as facilitators of employee listening, or even the voice of employees (back to point number 1 again?) While we have some of the tools necessary, there are new skills we will have to learn if we are to create listening cultures as a driver of improving business outcomes. 

What can you do about it?

  • Look at your current forums for listening to employee voices 
  • Consider the role that employee feedback plays in your internal communications strategy 
  • Educate your leaders on the importance of listening, and the role internal communications can play in building a listening culture

As internal communicators, listening is our superpower. But we must be prepared to fundamentally reimagine our role if we want to focus on being at the heart of this quiet workplace revolution. 

Long live internal comms!

So, there you have it. Internal communications is dead. Long live internal communications!

Joking aside, some of our traditional areas of focus are vanishing, new ones are emerging, and the skills required to prove our commercial value are changing. But far from being dead, internal communicators have a fantastic opportunity to adapt, grow, and stay relevant long into the future.
 

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