What are IC's Critical Success Factors?

If the end game is to get everyone to be able to Share Justifiable Confidence in your IC practices, what are the Minimum Hygiene Criteria those practices would need to meet?? As with everything else to do with Shareable Justifiable Confidence, you need to have a starting point everyone can agree is valid.? And if you think about this clinically (ie in the way the medical profession would) it seems logical to start by identifying the risks which those Minimum Hygiene Criteria would need to guard against.?

But what are those risks, and how might people be able to share justifiable confidence that they’re the right risks?? It’s actually pretty straightforward if we return to our validated purpose of IC:?

To directly and indirectly prompt and help enable employees to deliver and improve their organisation’s brand promises, as efficiently and effectively as possible.

How will people know this purpose is being fulfilled?? If you look at it, it has certain Critical Success Factors implicit within it, does it not??

Perhaps the most obvious factor is surely employee performance.? Logically, then, all IC practices need to be designed and implemented in a way which supports that performance as well as possible.

And we would say that, implicit within employee performance is employee well-being.? Stressed or sick employees are unlikely to be able to give of their best, and may even walk out the door in greater numbers.? And a high staff churn is surely going to undermine efficiency, thanks to the loss of skills and the increased recruitment costs.

Then there’s the idea of improving the organisation’s brand promises.? That means employees doing more than simply going through the motions.? It’s about enabling them to derive greater fulfilment by adding extra value.

So, by simply looking at the purpose of IC (in which – given the ‘workings out’ which support it – we hope everyone will be able to share justifiable confidence) we can identify three Critical Success Factors which can tell us if that purpose is being fulfilled:

1. Employees’ performance
2. Employees’ well-being
3. Employees’ desire and ability to add extra value.

Inevitably, IC cannot be wholly responsible for any of these. That's not the point. The point is that it needs to be conducted in ways which minimise risks to these factors. (This may not sound very sexy, but in fact - as we'll explore in upcoming articles - it's key to smashing your glass ceiling, for good.)

With these success factors spelled out, we can start working our way towards those Minimum Hygiene Criteria, by thinking about how Transparently Unfit IC practices could put these success factors at risk.? So, mapping out the risks is what we’ll look at next time.

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’d like to better understand how you and your team can enable key decision-makers to have justifiable confidence in all your working practices, we now have a FREE Career Self-care Session available.

In just 60 minutes you and your team will be able to:

1. Evaluate where you are at the moment: what are all the niggles, frustrations and concerns that could be keeping you from having everything you desire in your working lives?
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We’ve popped a link in the comments so you can see if it could be a ‘fit’ for where you are now.?Or you can drop us a DM; we’re always happy to chat.