Addressing the trust crisis in internal communications

The 2024 Institute of Internal Communication IC Index report is published today, focused on what UK employees think about internal communication and particularly about trust in businesses and leadership. Sequel’s head of Insight, Paul Jones, shares his views on the impacts for IC.

Sixty-three per cent of UK employees have trust in their organisations. But when it comes to trust in senior leadership, employees are less sure. Trust in line managers is high at 75% but trust in the most senior leader drops to 55%.

Great communication – not good communication – protects trust, even in turbulent times. With four in 10 people saying their organisation has restructured in the past 12 months alone, the need for great communication, especially about change, has never been clearer.

We’ve seen evidence of this challenge ourselves in our own Insight work. When we start working with a new client, often employees will tell us that bad news is often brushed under the carpet. And when there’s a communication gap, that space allows rumours to breed quickly.

In other cases, we see that change news can be spun to sound more positive.?One example: in a focus group we were running for a client, attendees told us that senior leaders had been banging the drum for an “exciting new way of working” as part of some business changes.

But this communication approach had damaged trust in the messaging, because it wasn’t really a case of “an exciting new way”; it was more like “going back to how we used to do things a couple of years ago with less staff”.

You can’t tell people the sun is shining while they’re getting soaked by the rain (something many of our politicians might like to ponder during this election period).

To put it another way: “The building knows the truth”. And in these days of hybrid working that ‘building’ is virtual, as well as a physical place.

Interestingly, the IC Index report mentions that one factor which also boosts trust is digital connectivity: levels of trust are much lower for those who don’t have a digital identity at work.

With the breadth of communications options available to us in 2024, it’s easier than ever to bring front-line workers ‘into the digital family’. Typically, they won’t need access to the full suite of tools that desk-based colleagues use, but ‘light versions’ – such as Microsoft’s F licence packages – can give them enough to stay in touch and feel connected – to the business, and their colleagues.

And we hear yet again that line managers are a vital cog in building trust, with a key recommendation of the IC Index report reinforcing the need for businesses to support their line manager audience.

Perhaps this explains the number of clients asking us to run communication training sessions for their line manager communities right now. We’re helping line managers to understand the value of communication and its impact on engagement, why they should be taking comms seriously, and how to have effective and productive conversations with their teams.

That people side of communications continues to be fundamental to business success, despite the growth in AI-developed messaging.

And you can’t have an IC report that doesn’t include AI. In the report 39% of people say they don’t trust – or don’t know whether they can trust – communication developed with AI. And that’s understandable, given the rapid development of the technology and how it’s being applied in all forms of creativity. If you want to hear ‘Elvis’ or ‘John Lennon’ singing a modern Taylor Swift song, just head to YouTube.

But obviously AI isn’t going to go away: we heard from Microsoft the other day that its Copilot platform will soon be bringing a raft of benefits to intranets, including the ability to generate and build SharePoint pages. So technically you could use AI to write a story, find an image to illustrate it, and then build the news article on your site.

Of course you’ll still need editorial, design and IC expertise to oversee the process (if you’ve used AI to create a PowerPoint file recently you’ll know that there is still some way to go before the robots take over completely), but the direction of travel is very clear.

People who have higher overall levels of trust in their organisation are more comfortable with AI being used for communications, so checking the overall sentiment in your organisation before weaving AI into all your comms is a must.

https://www.ioic.org.uk/knowledge-hub/thought-leadership-research/ic-index.html

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