How internal communication can become successful

Before I go into depth, I would like to clarify some terms - boring as it may be. What do I mean when I talk about internal communication?

By "internal communication" I mean the regular processes by which information is disseminated internally. In a start-up, this can be exhausted with the weekly jour fixe in which everyone participates; corporations employ entire communications departments that share information via multiple media.

On a meta-level, every executive we engage in discussion with will invoke the importance of internal communications. It is credited with being able to motivate, communicate overall, strategic direction, explain complex issues, and provide essential context for everyone's work. While this is certainly true (in part), my experience shows that this attribution of importance is not usually reflected in the day-to-day behavior of the executive.

In fact, internal communication often enjoys some attention only when management has the perception that a change process needs to be accompanied. Outside of such phases, the concern with it is only stepmotherly, is often very non-committal in terms of process, is set up with little regularity or is handed over to specialists.

On the receiving end of internal communication, two basic patterns run through all the structures I have been privileged to get to know: First, employees never feel sufficiently informed, and second, they distrust official, internal communication. The effect of the second pattern is fatal, because it reinforces the first. If I don't trust a communication, I also place less value on following it up, even if it should be comprehensive. In the end, the true source of information is considered to be the grapevine and the personal network within the company.

Central vs. "Trickle-Down"

To understand how this frustrating assessment comes about, we must first analyze how internal communication is generally implemented. As I understand it, there are two basic approaches here.

The first approach is central communication (hereafter: the central approach). The management has something to communicate and passes this on to the employees. This can be done by circular email, townhall, or any other format. As the size of the organization increases, this form of internal communication is often bundled and professionalized in one place. This is usually done as a staff function of the management or as a spin-off in marketing. Centralized communication frequently and to the greatest extent possible concerns those topics that management believes affect everyone.

The second approach is communication along the line (hereafter: the trickle-down approach). In upper management, decisions are made that are passed down from hierarchical level to hierarchical level and are ultimately intended to reach the last link in the chain. Information "trickles" through the system, so to speak. This can also be used to target specific organizational branches, which is why it makes sense to use this route for topics that are not necessarily considered relevant to everyone. As early as the 1930s, Barnard motivated the hierarchical organizational structure by the fact that precisely this form of communication is made possible by it [1].

We often experience hybrids of these two higher-level approaches to communication. For example, management may announce generalities with pathos, and then the details are supposed to flow down the line. A division manager may receive a piece of information from his or her supervisor and then initiate centralized communication in his or her area of responsibility.

At first, this sounds both plausible and practicable. How is it then that the result of internal communication is often so unsatisfactory? There are many reasons for this ...

Managers cannot communicate

In both approaches, the system relies heavily on managers' ability to communicate, both one-on-one and to a group, both orally and in writing. Management must be able to communicate, regardless of the level of hierarchy in which they operate.

In our experience, however, this comes up against limits that are not only caused by possibly limited individual competencies, but are also drawn above all by the fundamental structure of the system. We observe ...

• ... a regular misjudgment on the part of managers as to what is of interest to employees and what is not. Employees are very often underestimated and reduced to their executive role in the system. The fact that contextual knowledge can have a meaningful effect is disregarded.
• ... especially in top management, executives who are disconnected from the reality of their employees and are therefore hardly able to identify the critical points in their communication.
• ... especially in middle management, executives who are closer to their employees than to the organizational goals. In the form of self-protection, they hide behind the fact that they have no part in unpleasant decisions and show solidarity with their employees. As a result, the corporate explanation and justification of the content to be communicated comes up far short.
• ... in the case of the "trickle-down" approach, the effect of a "silent mail" principle. From stage to stage, the original information is enriched and changed by interpretations.
• ... the impact of the typical organizational focus on technicalities. Interpersonal aspects are all too often given lower priority than professional and technical issues - and communication is one of the interpersonal aspects. Accordingly, the prioritization of internal communication in day-to-day business is shaped accordingly, unless major changes are involved. Who hasn't heard the saying "Oh, I forgot to tell you!"?

Internal communication is not marketing

It is obvious that all of the observations described above point to the fact that internal communication is suffering, both in terms of its quality and its quantity. However, it seems plausible that most of the difficulties described could be countered by having a specialist or team of specialists focus on the topic of internal communications. This is exactly what we observe in larger organizations.

However, the specialist helps above all in the question of the style and dramaturgy of a communication. Since he himself is often distant from the people concerned in the organization, he cannot disclose sensitivities regarding content. When it comes to the question of what needs to be communicated, he depends on the willingness of the managers to communicate. As a rule, he is not allowed to get close enough to management events to be able to separate the important from the unimportant and take the initiative himself.

In addition, there is a fundamental danger in using communication specialists. In order to reach people, internal communication must meet the cultural expectations of employees in terms of form and style. Depending on the organization, these are highly specific and often cannot be easily reconciled with the learned knowledge of specialists in the communications field. As a result, communication then appears too slick, too professional, too much like marketing, undermining credibility from the employees' perspective.

Last but not least: In the end, internal communication supported solely by management is nevertheless not absent. The centralized communication instance does not take care of division-specific communication in day-to-day business. Thus, the observations presented in the previous section still remain virulent in their effects.

This reveals that the specialist does not solve the problems. He can only improve the quality and quantity of internal communication if management has truly internalized the importance of internal communication as such and his role in it.

However, the installation of a specialist or a team of specialists often follows a completely different logic: management realizes that internal communication is not working well and wants to put it in the hands of people it believes have the necessary tools. The decision is an expression of the perception that it is not working, but not an expression of understanding what the problem is. Rather, management is driven by a desire to have this troublesome, interpersonal issue off its feet and thus deal with it even less ...

Intransparency creates mistrust

The centralized approach and the trickle-down approach always have a management instance as the original source of their information. Such models would then undoubtedly be reasonable if information in an organization only ever arose at the top. However, this is typically not the case: Management aggregates the majority of information from the organization via reporting processes, draws conclusions from it and then directs information back into the organization. In other words, the basic information is in the organization, and the communication emanating from management thus contains a consciously filtered excerpt of what the organization as such already knows anyway and, in addition, derivations from the information with regard to future action.

The information only appears new to the organization because the reporting flows are hidden and not public to the company. Because of this secrecy, employees in their day-to-day work can at best gain partial knowledge in their own domain of expertise and are dependent on official communications for all other information.

It is quite obvious what this does to employees:

1. they are aware of the intransparency of the information flows. This automatically creates mistrust, since it can always potentially be assumed that "the whole truth" is not being shared.
2. Correctly assuming that only snippets of information are being provided, the employee helps himself or herself by exchanging information with colleagues - in other words, floor talk. If different or complementary information comes through this channel, which is not available through the official communication channels, more trust is usually placed in the grapevine. This is simply due to the fact that the employees who share information - unlike the management - are not assumed to have any obscuring intentions.

Thus, it becomes obvious that the two common communication models, the centralized and the trickle-down approach, have significant conceptual weaknesses in addition to the particular challenges they pose to management. The emergence of mistrust and the fuelling of floor gossip are so fundamentally inherent in both approaches that avoiding them, if at all possible, takes a great deal of effort.

Transparency is the basis

Personally, I believe that the system based on the two approaches described above cannot in fact be cured. In my view, completely new paths must be taken for effective internal corporate communications.

We ourselves only became fully aware of this during the Corona crisis and the remote work it entailed. It prompted us to actively think about the design of our internal communications and to completely redefine them, because we saw them as an important means of keeping the organization socially and economically on the same page during the crisis.

However, one important prerequisite already existed beforehand. Long before the crisis, we had already introduced, first implicitly and later explicitly, a transparency requirement that read:

"All information and decisions generated in the organization are internally public, unless their publication is excluded for formal reasons (laws, contracts, data protection)." [3]

This applies to everything without exception and thus has the effect of making public not only the work results in the teams, but also, if necessary, more sensitive information such as the economic data or the minutes of the management.

This requirement has a fundamental impact on internal communication: the information shared becomes verifiable and decisions are traceable. The information filter by management, which costs employees their trust, no longer exists.

Creation of a cross-functional communication team

When Corona began, we made a significant new decision: We formed a cross-functional team to maintain internal communications.

We offered everyone to participate and the team was self-organized. Management was represented to provide explanations of decisions and context when necessary.

The team had two missions: to maintain day-to-day communications within the company and to design the agenda for an initially weekly, remotely-conducted townhall for all employees.

The team has existed - with several personnel changes - for 3 years now. The current composition is as follows: two managing directors, a people lead and agile coach, a product owner, the data protection officer, a colleague from accounting and a software developer. I myself am one of the contributing managing directors.

It has turned out to be important that the team is broadly anchored in the organization. This is achieved by having different roles represented. The views of the issues to be communicated are thus sometimes very different, but at the same time they are as culturally homogeneous as the diversity of the organization allows. In the team, as in the organization in general, we meet on an equal footing. The better argument counts.

Continuity and great participation.

Currently, the team meets 4 days a week for 30 minutes each. One team member is responsible for documenting the results and facilitating the meeting.

There are different input channels for employees. On the one hand, colleagues can contact the team if they wanted to share information with everyone. On the other hand, anonymous access has been created for people who want to ask questions where they do not want any reference to their person.

In addition, the team evaluates the most relevant reports in the organization and has a view of the internal projects that are currently underway. This processes information that everyone has access to anyway; by preparing selected information for communication, there is simply a prioritization of what the team considers particularly relevant to everyone at the moment. However, this also always leaves room for special topics: The principle applies that nothing that concerns people in the company is really unimportant.

The resulting news items are scheduled throughout the week, and those best suited to write something about them (typically the original sources of the information) are asked to do so on that particular day. The posting is done by the authors themselves in a chat channel that is accessible to all employees.

In addition, the team now puts together a biweekly agenda for a one-hour remote employee event. In addition to two fixed blocks of topics (sales and the economic situation), it relies heavily on employee input. However, the employees' desire to contribute is now so pronounced that prioritization is also required here - communicated less in terms of "if" and more in terms of "when".

The Townhall is regularly attended by more than 50% of employees. The event is recorded and made available to everyone afterwards.

This work mode is the preliminary result of continuous development, forced by regular retrospectives. However, further adjustments are of course not excluded ...

The success speaks for itself

Internal communication designed in this way has a completely different effect than the approaches described at the beginning.

• The transparency requirement makes it possible for internal communication to be created by employees for employees. The messages shared are always authentic and comprehensible in terms of their factual basis.
• It is always clear who is the creator of a piece of information, as this is typically also the person who shares it. Queries can thus always be addressed directly to the most qualified party.
• Communication is completely centralized and always directed to everyone. There is no filtering by recipient group that makes any assumptions that some employees need to know one thing but not another.
• For the same reason - the centralization of communication - there is no falsification of information through "silent mail".
• Management is no longer left on its own to select, package and distribute information. Potential communication weaknesses and misperceptions are put into perspective by reflection with team members.
• Over time, continuous, open communication becomes a cultural feature of the organization. Sharing information is no longer an accessory that is forgotten, but habitualized.

In the meantime, the system has become so well established that it is impossible to imagine the organization without it. After we introduced it in 2020 starting in March and then followed up with our annual employee survey in the spring of 2021, we observed that agreement with the statements.

"The goals of our company are clear and evident to me."

and

"I feel appropriately involved in personnel and organizational changes."

had increased by 20% and 18% respectively compared with the previous year. "Communication in the organization" was rated as "good" or "very good" by 85% of employees overall at the beginning of 2021 [4].

In 2023, the statement.

"I am sufficiently informed about company developments."

was found to be correct by 95% of employees [5].

Transferable? - Transferable!

Naturally, the question arises as to whether the model we have chosen is transferable. I am firmly convinced that it can be. However, the real hurdle is not the establishment of the communications team with the appropriate rules, but the introduction of the transparency requirement. From my perspective, it represents a "conditio sine qua non" for the model described and generally requires a significant change in attitude on the part of corporate management in dealing with information. I have spoken in detail elsewhere about this challenge and the further consequences of introducing comprehensive transparency in an organization [2].

Even if the transparency requirement can be mapped in one form or another, the question remains whether it is conceivable to scale the model. Our organization has about 240 employees - so one team is enough. In a larger organization, it is conceivable to anchor several teams that represent certain areas of the company and are in intensive exchange with each other. The communication of the other teams is then a further source of information that can be incorporated into your own communication or not, if it is too far removed from your area of activity.

Go your own way

There may also be other models that come to comparable results ... I do not claim that our way is the last word in wisdom. In any case, however, I would like to encourage you to take a close look at the subject!

There are many soft factors that are positively influenced by effective internal communication: Trust, social cohesion, strengthening of individual decision-making ability, provision of orientation, to name a selection (... note the different prioritization compared to the enumeration on the benefits of internal communication in the first section).

Just because the effects are difficult to measure according to economic parameters, internal communication is not insignificant for the success of a company! For my part, I don't regret a second I spend on the communications team.

Sources

[1] Barnard, Chester I., “Die Führung gro?er Organisationen”, übersetzung der 17. Auflage, Verlag W. Girardet, Essen, 1970

[2] Barth, Stefan, “Agile Organisation: Ohne Transparenz geht es nicht”, Informatik Aktuell, 08/2023, https://www.informatik-aktuell.de/management-und-recht/projektmanagement/agile-organisation-ohne-transparenz-geht-es-nicht.html

[3] tarent constitution, internal, available on request

[4] Mitarbeiterbefragung 2021, internal, available on request

[5] Mitarbeiterbefragung 2023, internal, available on request