Issued by: Actuate


Sounds simple, perhaps, but the practical implementation is tricky. Because here's the thing: successful internal communication is not, as many believe, a process of bombarding employees with endless newsletters, blogs, intranet sites and poster campaigns. As well-intentioned and potentially individually successful as these may be, together they only serve to send conflicting, uncoordinated and confused messages to employees.

It's something Bill Quirke, internal communications specialist and managing director of UK-based specialist internal communication consultancy, Synopsis, feels passionately about. At a recent internal communications workshop organised by South Africa's own internal marketing specialists, Actuate, he said, “Internal communicators have become so enamoured with communicating that we've forgotten why it is that we communicate. Instead of communicating with the goal of turning business (or brand) strategy into action, most internal communication only serves to confuse people, expensively.”

Quirke is one of the leading authorities on internal communication and the management of change, and his company Synopsis, lists British Airways, Vodafone, Intel, Shell, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Rolls-Royce and Unilever among its clients. His presentation outlined some of the key mistakes companies are making in communicating to their employees, the effect this has on their bottom line and what they need to be focusing on in order to improve internal communication.

His take on things is that communication is a means to an end, a tool to turn various business strategies into action “If internal communication is not producing a business result then not only is it not adding value, its destroying value because more likely than not its muddying the waters and confusing people,” he says. His presentation included some statistics to which marketing specialists would be able to relate, “While only 9% of customers are lured away by the competition, 68% are turned off a company by the attitude of employees.” The problem is that employees are unclear on what the brand promises and equally unclear about what they need to be doing to live out that promise when dealing with customers.

On this point, Quirke lists some worrying statistics taken from a study conducted by Harris in the UK on the effectiveness of internal communications in companies. He quotes, “50% of people don't know what the business' strategy is and less than a third of all employees believe management provides clear goals. If 50% of your people don't know what the strategy is, that means half your people aren't clear about what they should be doing. And that means that you aren't getting a return on half the investment your company makes in salaries each month.” It also means that the investment that marketing departments make each month in building the company's brand is continually being undermined by employees who have been given no clear direction as to how to ensure that the ways they behave are congruent with the brand identity.

So where exactly is internal communication going so horribly wrong? Firstly, marketing departments, who have long seen themselves as external communication specialists, need to invest more in communicating internally.

But before businesses start communicating with their employees - something that usually happens with great passion but very little direction - Quirke says they need to ask themselves:

What do we need our people to be doing for us?

What is stopping them from doing it?

How can communication help fill the gap?

In practical terms, Quirke says businesses need to be more concrete, more specific, more directive and less vague when communicating with employees. “Although business leaders know what they want to communicate they frequently don't know how to translate their strategic goal into a message that employees can use practically. So they'll tell employees, ‘We need to increase cooldrink sales by 6%' but this doesn't tell people how to increase cooldrink sales. What they should be telling them is how to strike up a conversation with the customer to ensure they buy more cooldrinks. Then employees know to say ‘Would you like a drink with that?' every time a customer places an order.”

The leap from strategic intent to practically applicable communication is not a big one but it's a vital one and the challenge for business leaders is how to translate complex ideas into short sticky messages that hook the audience in and encapsulate the main points. “Remember that informal communication dominates in the workplace, so leaders need to write things to be said, not to be read,” advises Quirke. He adds that companies need specialists for internal communication in the same way that they need specialists for investor relations. “You wouldn't let just anyone communicate with your shareholders and in the same way, you can't let just anyone communicate with your employees. They are the machine that makes business happen and if you don't communicate with them effectively, the machine won't run as it should,” he says.

In closing he reiterates his main point, “So to recap, work out what the desired outcome is and use communication to achieve it. And accept that it is only in measuring that outcome that you will be able to tell if your communication has been successful or not. Because communication is not about making employees feel happier and more satisfied in their jobs. It has a very real business purpose and that purpose is to facilitate the process of turning the business' strategy into action.” If communication's not doing that, Quirke concludes, all it is doing is confusing people - expensively.

Visit our PRESS OFFICE: Actuate is a results driven internal marketing consultancy. Aligning your employees' behaviour with your business objectives is our focus, with a constant view on your bottom line.- more....

[16 May 2008 17:08]

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