Is Internal Communication still relevant today? Insights from our London Event "Elevating Human Connection at Work" - Part 2/3.

Is Internal Communication still relevant today? And how will Generative AI change internal comms?

These were two of the main questions in the lightning talks Howard Krais, and I gave at the event I held together with SWOOP Analytics in London on September 21. I will share some insights from these two lightning talks in this blog.

This is the second part out of three blog posts from the event. Read part 1 here.

Is Internal Communication still relevant today?

Howard Krais , the co-author of "Leading the Listening Organisation" , gave an interesting lightning talk, reflecting on how internal communicators can stay relevant in the organisation.

Howard shared the results of two surveys from the VMA Group —one from 2006 and one from 2023. In both, communicators were asked what channels were most important in their business. In 17 years, hardly anything has changed. It's primarily one-way channels.

It looks like organisations have a channel mix that is unsuitable for listening to the organisation and enabling connection and knowledge sharing.

One of Howard's key questions was whether we are helping our people understand how our businesses respond to today's significant challenges, such as:

• Change happening inside and outside the organisation
• Technological changes/Digital/AI
• Wellbeing at work and ESG
• Trust
• Geopolitical situation(s)

We need to listen to what's happening in the organisation to determine what people think. What are people talking about? What are they concerned about—and what are they excited about? What are the dominating narratives?

And with a predominantly top-down channel mix, we are not set up to do this properly.

Howard shared something that I have experienced as well: Settling for less.

He shared an example where we would say that "20,000 reads would be a good number" in an organisation with 100,000 employees while "30.000 would be amazing"—hereby saying that not reaching the vast number of employees was "good."

We can't expect to reach anyone in the organisation through our comms channels, so one thing we could invest more in is ensuring that the leaders understand and feel confident about their role in the communication process.

According to Howard, internal comms people have many opportunities to make a difference.

We should focus on:

• People-centred change—doing change with our colleagues and not to them. This again requires a thorough understanding of what's on their minds and the narratives in the organisation (I recommend the recent book from Frank Wolf on that topic).
• Create better opportunities for conversation that lead to better understanding.
• Listen properly - we need more than an annual survey. As Howard said, people are not necessarily experiencing survey fatigue; they are just tired of answering surveys when they feel their answers are not valued.
• Build connection and community.
• Measure outcomes/behaviour change. I might add that it could also be interesting to look into how narratives change over time.

To do this, we should rethink our approach to internal comms. Focus on many top-down messages, don't necessarily support every leader, and do less channel management. Focus instead on building trust, making connections, and supporting lasting change.

Howard's excellent lightning talk made me think about this: How would your work in internal comms change if it were not about giving all the answers but instead asking the good questions...?

Howard's talk inspired me to rethink my approach to gathering intelligence, and this was reflected in my latest coaching session with an internal comms leader, where we discussed setting up a listening strategy for the department.

This could be both a way of reframing why conversational activities are needed and what to extract from them and a way to define activities that help gather insights before and after certain change activities.

"Generative AI and its Impact on Workplace Communication"

Let me start with this: What if an organisation that has been using Viva Engage for the last ten years suddenly achieves a significant advantage over its competitors - thanks to Generative AI?

What if an organisation using Viva Engage for the last ten years suddenly achieves a significant advantage over its competitors?

Before Generative AI, no one would have imagined the opportunities it offers to make sense of all the data and conversations on the platform in a new way.

Soon, it could be possible to analyze this wealth of data (anonymously) and understand far more about how people in the organisation react to specific changes, what key concerns are, and what drives engagement.

For instance, Generative AI could help identify emerging trends, pinpoint cultural shifts, gauge sentiment and morale, customize communication strategies based on team preferences, predict engagement drivers, and detect communication silos that hinder collaboration.

These insights would enable more strategic and impactful internal communications.

I brought up this example because we need to understand that Generative AI is not only a productivity tool. It can fundamentally transform our work with internal communications.

We need to understand that much of our current work will be devalued. As I showed during the presentation, you can already build decent-quality bots that can help you do, let's say, 60 % of the task, such as creating articles, interview briefs, headlines, summaries, etc. In a few years, no one would expect these tasks to take longer than 10 minutes to complete.

Just look at what Salesforce is trying to do with their new service "Agentforce."

Subsequently, I would imagine that it will not take long before you can buy a similar agent force for the internal comms function—or you will build your own. My prediction is that many of the things we do today in internal comms will become self-service solutions over time.

The cost of content production will decrease significantly. Just have a look at this fake influencer promoting SWOOP Analytics

This is created by sharing a link to the Swoop homepage, and Heygen does the rest.

Or, as many might have heard by now, create your own "Botcast" with Google's Notebook LM .

Here, I just uploaded Swoops Benchmark Report from 2023 about Microsoft Teams Collaboration, and within minutes, I had a conversational podcast. These are just two examples of how fast you can create content today, and it will only improve over time.

We might also soon see glasses with generative AI - exemplified by Googles Project Astra and Meta's recent improvements.

This is not going to change Internal comms overnight, but understanding that eyewear could become a new internal communication channel in the future is essential. If we get the metadata right, among other things, it would enable us to communicate at the right time and place.

Watch this video about Google's Project Astra to get a sense of it:

This led me to discuss how we can get started and identify good use cases for generative AI in internal comms. I presented the four roles that Generative AI can play when they help us at work.

The roles are:

• Producer & Assistant (e.g. producing content)
• Advisor (e.g. brainstorm ideas, feedback on content)
• Super (Re)searcher (e.g. conversational chatbots that can find content in a knowledge base of unstructured data)
• Autonomous Employee: (e.g. automation with Generative AI tools. Replying to mails, sending out personalised video messages via Heygen, writing and sending out newsletters etc.)

First of all, this time, change is different. It is different because of the transformative potential and how fast this will transform our roles. We will likely see a mix of small and big leaps in the evolution of LLMs and the implementation of Generative AI in new hardware, giving us an unimaginable number of opportunities.

Therefore, we can't consider this change to be linear. You cannot learn about Generative AI once; you must explore and experiment continuously.

I shared a few of my learnings from training more than 60 organisations in Denmark, Germany, Norway, and Sweden and from teaching hundreds of people at my open courses here in Denmark.

The first learning is that you need to explore the potential of Generative AI as a team.

People can learn the basics of Generative AI on their own, but to get the full value of GenAI in a team, you must define use cases, assess potentials, and evaluate them continuously.

I offered different "learning journeys" and presented examples of teams investing over a month to explore and evaluate the potential of Generative AI.

The first step to learning about Generative AI doesn't have to be complex. It's about exploring potential. Once you have spotted the potential, you move on and discuss risk, ethics, data complexities, etc.

Everyone needs to have a basic understanding of generative AI. It will help you understand its potential in transforming internal communications - and hopefully also enable you to give a qualified answer to questions like "Isn't there an AI for that?" from stakeholders.

After Howard's and my presentation, we started the workshops. I will share the outcomes of these and my final reflections in the last part of the blog in a couple of days!

About me:

I help organisations understand the potential and start using Generative AI in Corporate Communications. In the last year, I have helped more than 60 organisations start their journey with Generative AI, including The Norwegian Sovereign Fund (NBIM), Telenor, Falck, JYSK, Ramb?ll, SWECO, COWI, Tryg, the Danish Metro, Sopra Steria, DLG, The Danish Foreign Ministry, Denmark's National Bank, Nuuday, and many others.

I offer keynotes, one-day workshops, AI Design Sprints?, and tailored learning journeys. To learn more, contact me on LinkedIn or at [email protected] .