Executive Summary 4: Controlling the elephants in the room
Russell-Olivia Brooklands (ROB) FIIC
Creator of the Shareable Justifiable Confidence Model - which can support you as an Internal Communication Specialist, while enhancing psychological safety at work, lowering operating costs and increasing brand value.
The insights Darren had been involved in over the past couple of weeks had been so momentous he felt he needed to summarise them again for when the time would come to share them with the whole leadership team. So once again he sat down at his laptop and began to type.
'The Finance Playbook
Millions of line managers can handle budgets perfectly well, even though they’re not qualified accountants.? They’re supported in doing this by their organisation’s Finance Specialists, who:
With some appropriate modifications, the IC Specialists could perform a similar role: progressively supporting ever-more line managers to fulfil their internal communication responsibilities.?
With TFVP practices to back everybody up, you can progressively remove the possibility of line managers ever again having a duty to fulfil an unreasonable expectation.? You can make that expectation forever reasonable, and forever retire that possible source of Impostor Syndrome from their careers (which would likely have benefits for their productivity, well-being and value-adding potential).? But how can you achieve this?
IC Practice Governance
This has the potential to become an adjunct to any organisation’s existing corporate governance.?
It can work only if the IC Specialists are in The Sweet Spot, particularly when it comes to the following working practices:
1.???? Language Standards
2.???? Briefing Process
3.???? Channel Mix
4.???? Outcome Feedback
5.???? IC System Feedback
This requires the design of these practices to be TFVP, which will be possible only when IC itself has a transparently valid purpose.
The purpose of Internal Communication
A business communication, which never has any direct or indirect tangible impact on the behaviours of its audiences, is simply a waste of time, money and effort.?
Therefore, all your organisation’s communications, whether internal or external, must directly or indirectly prompt and/or enable their audiences to take or avoid actions – either immediately or at some point in the future.? (This is true of an advertising campaign, the internal launch of a new IT system, the announcement of annual results, or even a fire exit sign.)
Ultimately, those behaviours are of value to your organisation only if they directly or indirectly enable it to fulfil its reason for existing.? However (and it’s impossible to over-emphasise this) what makes IC different from its external cousins is how those behaviours fulfil the raison d’etre.
Marketing and PR communications (and even Investor Relations) are creating brand promises – in order to induce the audience to buy the organisation’s products and/or services (or shares).?
Internal communications, on the other hand, exist to help (directly or indirectly) get those promises delivered (and, if possible, improved upon).?
So, the purpose of Internal Communication is to help your organisation fulfil its raison d’etre, by directly and indirectly prompting and enabling employees to consistently deliver, and to improve on, its brand promises, as elegantly as possible.? (In this context, ‘elegantly’ means ‘efficiently, effectively and easily.)? And while there’s an inescapable logic to all this, there still needs to be a sound commercial case for making it happen.
The financial case
It may be useful to think about ‘costs’ differently when it comes to Internal Communication, because some of its financial outlays are vital for your organisation to function.? But many of them are needless waste.? So, what if you were to think of the necessary expenditures as investments in the organisation’s ability to fulfil its raison d’etre, and everything else as needless costs?
Necessary investments
A.??? IC Budget
B.??? Production time
IC Specialists, clients and approval group members
C.??? Audience time
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‘Wasteful production & distribution costs
These can make the necessary investments unnecessarily high.?
1.???? Moving goalposts: internal clients changing their minds about what they want.? These changes inevitably mean it takes longer to produce a finished piece of work (which, apart from the waste involved in having to pay for that extra time could – if we refer back to the TRACELACE minimum hygiene criteria – put the Timeliness criterion at risk).
2.???? Ditched projects: the goalposts don’t get moved, but removed.? The IC Specialists do loads of work on a communication project, which gets binned before it sees the light of day.? So, all the time invested in it up to that point has been wasted.
3.???? Wasted audience time: communications waffling on for longer than necessary, or being received by people who simply don’t need them (and falling foul of the Relevance minimum hygiene criterion).
Communication failure costs
These inevitably arise if a communication has failed to do its job.? More insidiously, though – even counter-intuitively, perhaps – the business can incur many of these communication costs because people aren’t communicating.?
4.???? Repeat communications: If a communication is supposed to address a long-term issue, it can be redone if it doesn’t work first time.? This means having to make the investments again (perhaps several times).?
But what’s happening in the meantime?? Or what if the issue is a short term one??
a) It makes no difference, because the communication wasn’t needed, and the investments were money down the drain.
b) It will incur one or more of the following failure costs?
5.???? Rework: This can come from two sources.?
a) It could be duplication of effort: people doing a load of work that others have already done, but nobody’s thought to tell them.?
b) It may be the time people are having to spend correcting their own or other people’s mistakes and misunderstandings, which can arise from:
6.???? ?Missed opportunities: These can manifest in different ways.?
a)?? short term issues: the business’s opportunities to either save money, or generate additional income or good will, have immediately been missed.?
b)?? long term issues:
7.???? Lost audience good will: This impact can vary.?
a)???? The direct impact on employees could include an increase in disengagement, lower productivity, possibly industrial action, or higher staff turnover (with inevitably higher recruitment, training and possibly overtime costs).?
b)??? There are also risks of an indirect impact on customers.? If ill-informed or demotivated employees are communicating with customers, it can mean more complaints (possibly incurring compensation payments) and/or fewer sales, re-sales or referrals.? In extreme instances: court cases, legal fees, (and possibly compliance fines and higher insurance premiums).
8.???? Brand damage: Beyond unhappy customers, the availability of social media platforms can mean some employees may say brand-damaging things in the public arena.?
(They may do this because they’re disengaged and disgruntled, thanks to poor communication from their boss or elsewhere.? Or it may be more innocent; maybe they’ve misunderstood something their boss said, because it wasn’t as TRACELACE as it needed to be.)?
9.???? Purpose failure: Ultimately, if the business’s internal communications keep going wrong, it can start failing to fulfil its very purpose.? (Sometimes such failures can happen in a particular department – eg IT – of an otherwise healthy organisation.)'
About the author
We are Russell+Olivia Brooklands (ROB) - and we've been working in the field of Internal Communication for over 25 years.?We specialise in enabling IC Teams to get everything they want, to do the job exactly the way they want to do it – for good.? If you're an IC Manager we can help you secure all the:
…you desire (and may not yet have).
Some people don't dare to dream this is doable.? But in fact it's all within your grasp.? And imagine what a difference it could make to your day-to-day working life, and your long-term career, if you had it all. We’ll be delighted to explain how you can make it happen.? Message us if you’d like to have a chat.