Would it surprise you to learn that the most senior communications professional within one of the leading petro chemical companies currently uses sensitive state of the art IT technology to monitor webinar and teleconference effectiveness and participation?  

Would you be shocked to hear that one of the most high profile government departments has the slickest team briefing process you’ll ever read or that  one of Europe’s leading utility companies has the highest intranet and so called “social media” involvement rates you’re ever likely to see? 

I guess we all expect major corporates and professional organisations to be at the forefront of internal communication management. So why is it that each of these organisations came bottom in a recent cross industry employee engagement poll? 

The bare faced truth of the matter is that, despite their focus on state of the art technology and exceptional process design, they just don’t get the basics right.  

The petro chemical company has no top level communications calendar, their intranet is an over-burdened supertanker which has run aground on a reef of indifference and employees have started voting with their feet at Town Halls held by their senior leaders. 

The government department employed an expensive creative agency to develop their team briefing collateral but thousands of worthy, well-meaning newsletters are casually cast aside. Forgotten, forlorn and unread because the newsletter content ignores the interests of the audience they have:

-         no explicit link to strategic objectives

-         they discourage feedback from readers

-         they are full of self-congratulatory spin and HR propaganda

 -        they fail to acknowledge the real issues

-         and they lack humanity and authenticity.  

Their team briefing process has become a written cascade because their senior civil servants find it difficult to overcome the traditional hierarchical structure and few have the skills and ability to engage effectively with their line reports. 

Each organisation talks about “inverting the pyramid” and bringing the employee voice to the fore.  But in the admirable pursuit of internal communication excellence they’ve lost sight of the basics and the employee voice is more of a nervous whisper. 

An interesting contrast comes in the unlikely form of a technology company I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the past few years and have watched grow both in the UK and globally. They are true innovators and leaders in the field of technology driven customer communication yet their own intranet is only an afterthought in their ten strong internal communication channel strategy. 

Their directors strive constantly to ensure that they and their line managers work in partnership to prioritise:

 -  global face to face communication and only host webinars and teleconferences as an absolute last resort

-    communication skills training and include employee engagement in their line manager’s performance contracts

-   fundamental communication skills courses in their management development programme including writing and personal impact skills

-   storytelling structures in the way they communicate the evolution of the brand both internally and externally

-    best practice in the way they facilitate their team briefing sessions

-    face to face conferences, events and induction processes and refuse to communicate by email bulletin cascades

-     achieving balance between process management and culture development

It’s refreshing to see that the most effective approach to internal communication is to get the basics right first and foremost. In these austere times it’s just as good to be reminded that, with a professional internal communication team in place, much of the above can be achieved relatively cheaply.  

We all love a flash new toy or two but whether you can afford it or not, whatever you do don’t develop a case of technology envy at the expense of promoting classic skills. With an objective nudge in the right direction and the modest investment of time, easily financed by a relatively simple re-focus of learning and development priorities, there really shouldn’t be any need to re invent the wheel.  

 

We’re all familiar with the cliché that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In fact it’s the philosophy on which process management methodologies like Total Quality Management and Kaizen are based.  But what has process and systems thinking got to do with the subtle arts of people-centred services like HR management, Organisation Development and the concept of Employer Brand?

As some of you will know, I believe the term employer brand is a misnomer. As I’ve stressed in this column previously, Employer Brand is only half the story.  It represents the “promise making” part of the equation.  A more appropriate term is Employment Brand which takes into account the promises made by the organisation about the working practices, values, norms - or put another way - the culture, but also factors in the reality and actual employee feedback about the delivery of the promise.

We’re accustomed to seeing the application of principles like customer relationship management and the management of the customer value chain by our marketing colleagues concerned with the brand projected to customers.  But how many of our HR colleague are applying similar principles to the management of the employment brand.  I would suggest, right at this moment, very few.

The value of a process-focused approach to managing Employment Brand is that it:

- stimulates cooperation between the key internal stakeholders responsible for managing the links in the chain

- it drives consistency in how the brand is interpreted and communicated

- it encourages performance measures at each link in the chain and provides a platform for more effective relationship management at each stage

To illustrate my point, take a wander through the vacancy pages of even premier recruitment sites like Changeboard, and PR Week.  How many simple but explicit errors can you detect in the advertisements?  Now ask yourself how this makes you feel about the capability of the agency in question to manage your account, cv or personal profile with appropriate care and sensitivity.  If you’re the client of the agency, how well do you think they are representing your brand and what are the explicit and opportunity costs of these errors?

It’s a little unfair to single out the recruitment agencies that are largely reliant upon the quality of the briefing they receive from our own ceos, but hopefully it helps to illustrate my point.  It’s tough for HR professional to ensure they are sufficiently in tune with the strategic goals of the business and translating this data into the processes they promote and stakeholders they rely upon as they manage the evolution of the Employment Brand. 

What is clear, however, is that managing the Employment Brand does call for systems thinking.  And this presents another opportunity for collaboration with our more explicitly external facing colleagues in order to bring the brand to life from inside.

Ian