Finding the right direction: internal communication can add real value to your organisation

Communication World, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Rodney Gray

Internal communication is in a bad way. Communicators across the board complain that their expertise and contribution are not sufficiently valued by top management. And employee opinion surveys commonly reveal low satisfaction scores with communication.

What can we as communicators do to add significant value to our organisations and earn recognition both for ourselves and our profession?

One way that we can make a "step change" to improve internal communication is to survey employees and use modern statistical techniques to analyze survey responses, When we understand exactly which factors will make the biggest difference to overall communication satisfaction among employees, we can concentrate our efforts on them. In this way, we can add considerable value to the business and truly prove our worth as communicators.

COMMUNICATORS NOT VALUED

In our roles, we are expected to manage the totality of internal communication so that employees are as effective as they can be in their jobs, committed to business goals and motivated to stay and contribute to the organisation. To do this, we create various communication systems and programs that help employees carry out the business strategies.

What's required is clear enough in theory. But despite this, all is not well in many otherwise successful organisations.

* Executives frequently complain that communicators have little or no idea about how to support the business. IABC Fellow and consultant Jim Shaffer, of the Jim Shaffer Group, has found that many executives can't see how communicators "add value" and they also hold negative views:

* "Aren't they the folks who put out the employee newsletter?"

* "They don't understand our business."

* "A lot of the time, quite frankly, they're just in the way."

* "I'm worried about the business; they're worried about deadlines."

* Fewer than half of all employees may be satisfied with communication they receive in their organisations. In Australia, only 42 percent of employees, on average, are satisfied, based on communication audits in a dozen public and private sector organisations with 100 to 20,000 employees.

* Communicators often feel their skills and efforts are not valued. In surveying employees, our company hears:

* "We're not on the top team and not consulted about the big decisions."

* "We only get called in when something goes wrong--usually too late."

* "We're not paid as well as line managers or even human resources."

* "We are the first to be retrenched when the cuts come."

So how did we get into this predicament?

One way to find the answer to this question is to ask employees. Employee research reveals a lot. It now seems clear that for years many, maybe most, communicators have concentrated on the wrong things by continuing to focus mainly on traditional communication tools such as print and electronic media. These have been shown repeatedly to have little impact on satisfying employees' overall communication needs, and are of questionable value in facilitating necessary organisational changes.

WHAT EMPLOYEES SAY IS GOING WRONG

Exhibit 1 shows the results of more than a dozen communication audits in Australia. Although we can't assume these findings necessarily apply elsewhere, similar results have been reported from the U.S. and the U.K., and the picture appears to be similar in other developed western countries.

These results are not good. They show that employees are not very satisfied with communication, even in leading organisations with enlightened communicators prepared to put their communication to the test. Hardly a strong vote of confidence in our profession.

Clearly some organisations are better than others, although the best overall satisfaction score was only 52 percent positive. Some organisations had areas of significant weakness. For example, only 15 percent of employees in one major organisation were positive about cross-functional communication.

What's more, focus groups conducted with thousands of employees in dozens of organisations confirm these findings.

TIME FOR COMMUNICATORS TO REFOCUS

Correlational modelling techniques can identify the key drivers (correlates) of employees' satisfaction with internal communication. (It should be noted that the relationships are statistical correlations, not necessarily causal.) These vary from one organisation to another, but in most cases not by much. There was a remarkable similarity in the correlations found. Typical correlations are shown in Exhibit 2.

The problem is that many communicators spend most of their time on things likely to have marginal impact on employee satisfaction with communication, rather than on things that will have the most impact, Exhibit 3 shows the top priorities in Australia--the areas where there are poor results, and where the factors are likely to have significant impact on overall satisfaction with communication.

For example, helping the CEO and senior executives improve their relationships with the workforce is far more likely to improve employee satisfaction with communication than, say, working on the intranet, e-mails or publications. Again, these findings are confirmed by what employees say in focus groups.