Is internal comms a communications discipline like any other – one that should be the responsibility of the corporate comms team?: Or is it a specialist discipline that calls for specialist practitioners? Welcome to the Likemind Debate, a monthly email dialogue brought to you by Likemind.

Rhodri Harries, managing director of PR and digital communications agency Kaizo, argues that internal comms ought to be carried out by the corporate communications team to ensure consistency. Steve Doswell, a director of the British Association of Communicators in Business and a communication consultant himself, maintains that it should be distinct from the rest of a company’s communications output.

Dear Steve,

Why would internal communications be separate from external communications?

It goes against logic to separate these two disciplines, when it is critical that consistent messages are provided to all audiences.

Fundamental to any effective campaign is to understand the motivations and drivers of your audience and then develop integrated strategies that ensure the correct messages are delivered in the correct medium. Why would it require a ‘specialist’ to do this for only one audience?

The role of the internal audience, as part of the whole, is more important now than it has ever been. Previously, a disgruntled workforce would have been an internal issue that would impact on productivity and performance.

Today, the immediacy of the internet, through blogs, microblogs, and social networking sites, means the same disgruntled workforce can become a news story, quicker than the original route cause. Virgin, Dominos and Marks & Spencer are just some examples of brands that have been affected by such negative coverage this year.

It is imperative that any news is delivered with this in mind. Timing, format, share ability, creativity and integration are critical. Having a separate activity developed by internal communications specialists is over-complicated, confusing and perhaps misguided.

Communications is constantly evolving and previous boundaries in marketing disciplines have already been blurred and broken down. A Canute-like approach from internal communications to maintaining the need for a separate discipline can only fail.

Cheers, Rhodri

“Previous boundaries in marketing have already blurred. A Canute-like approach from internal communications to maintaining the need for a separate discipline can only fail”

Dear Rhodri,

Why would any organisation treat the management and engagement of people who run, embody, reflect and recreate the organisation they work for as a branch of marketing? Employees’ relationship with their employer is much more than a consumer interaction.

Similarly, internal communication is about more than ‘news’ or the simple conveyance of messages from on high. It reflects and reinforces the culture of the workplace, it helps employees to adjust to change, to improve processes, to become better at what they do. It does this effectively by facilitating the big conversation and the learning that takes at the heart of any healthy organisation. Much of this takes place face-toface in localised settings away from the major setpiece communication events and deliverables and this is often where the internal communicator’s influence in stimulating the internal debate is most apparent.

The internal communicator often serves as a proxy, representing the reality of on-the-ground workplace perceptions to the organisation’s executive team, based on the hard evidence and, for employers, sometimes unpalatable truths of engagement surveys. It’s perfectly true that internal communicators draw from the common tool-kit of audience segmentation, channel selection and message-making it shares with other communication disciplines. But it’s also increasingly at home with the techniques of process improvement, change and organisational development that provide a now constant dynamic in workplaces in the UK, Europe and beyond.

Internal communications has to be versatile and adaptable and, as a fledgling profession, it has moved a long way with the tides of change. In short, who are you calling a Canute?

Best regards, Steve

Dear Steve,

I agree that internal communications needs to be versatile and adaptable, which is why hiving it off as a separate discipline, where it risks being too introspective or stagnating, cannot make sense.

The crux of the best communications these days is that many external as well as internal audiences can define a brand as much as they simply consume. We’ve moved beyond basic interaction to full scale involvement based on understanding, empathy, emotion and of course cultural fit.

Of course communications isn’t just about ‘news’, it’s about creating, stimulating and facilitating conversations both big and small.

The internet plays a part in this. How would consumer-developed mass Facebook groups for brands such as WD40 to Coca Cola to Wispa exist otherwise? Why would IBM and Barclays use social networks to shape and drive internal communications, and why would many businesses use sites such as LinkedIn to talk to both customers and their own people?

Online, however, is only a part of the mix. From focus groups to field-based research, effective communications, whether internal or external, starts with people talking to each other formally and informally on both a large scale and on a one-to-one level. It always has and it always will.

That said, any comms professional draws upon outside experts to inform specific areas such as business processes, behavioural insights, or creative design.

Collaboration is key, simply becoming an enthusiastic ‘student’ of a complex specialist discipline doesn’t cut it.

Yours, Rhodri

Dear Rhodri,

Good, so we’re agreed on the need for internal communication to be versatile and adaptable and that collaboration is crucial. These are facets of the contemporary internal communicator. However, she or he hasn’t come to this position merely by being a communication generalist. It’s by recognising the need to understand business – and, specifically, the business or organisation they serve – in ever-greater depth that internal communicators have become adept at contributing to their organisation’s health, measured in terms of employee engagement, retention, productivity or another appropriate gauge of impact.

None of this is to suggest that internal communication and public relations are chalk and cheese but in many ways, internal communication is much more akin to HR than it is to PR. There’s a lot of ‘theology’ around where internal communication fits but that’s less important than recognising that internal communication occupies the space where HR, PR, change management and organisational development all meet. It is a specialist function because it draws from each of these disciplines.

There’s also a perception of spin that public relations finds hard to shake off. I’m certainly not critical of PR per se – far from it. I support the view that PR is about enabling an organisation to deserve its good reputation, rather than a way of papering over corporate flaws. Employees hold in low esteem those employers who treat them as just another audience for a PR campaign. The employer-employee relationship is special and through their professional development, internal communicators are well-placed to articulate and nurture it.

Back to you, Rhodri. Steve

“Internal communication occupies the space where HR, PR, change management and organisational development all meet. It is a specialist function because it draws from each of these disciplines”

Dear Steve,

Truly understanding an organisation, and what drives those within it, is what all corporate communicators need to address if they are to add real value to the business.

We’re on the same wavelength here on the requirements of the modern comms team

; real business knowledge, true audience insights, collaboration and teamwork, and a focus on changing behaviour and attitudes, not just disseminating information. The best corporate communications professionals deliver advice, support and campaigns that create change. This will be in collaboration with HR, it will be in collaboration with operations, it will be in collaboration with the work force, and of course, in the most effective cases, it will be working alongside the senior leaders across the business.

I don’t disagree that in certain sized businesses, internal communicators have managed to form an effective part of the corporate fabric.

But for me this feels like creating more bureaucracy, more corporate baggage and just another level of management. Why create more structure within a business, especially at time when personal empowerment within business is more prevalent and important than ever before?

If a business truly wants to innovate, it cannot isolate its internal communications from its external communications. Collaborate yes, niche no...

Yours, Rhodri

Dear Rhodri,

CiB is changing its identity to become the Institute of Internal Communication precisely because of a firm belief that internal communication requires specialism. We do not claim some towering barrier to entry into internal communication that can only be mastered through years of dedicated study - but there needs to be an appropriate degree of qualification for the role.

Nothing prevents communication generalists from working in internal communication, provided they first learn the particularities of the internal environment. To use a linguistic analogy, it isn’t sufficient to learn ‘Slavonic’; the Poles speak Polish and Slovenians speak Slovene and one needs to learn the specifics of each language in order to communicate effectively in one place or the other. ‘Communications’ is a tool-kit but you have to understand in depth the specific environment in which you will work in order to use those tools effectively.

Rhodri, we share many perceptions about how the internal communicator can most effectively live up to that professional title. Where we disagree is on the central issue of how ‘special’ internal communication is.

Despite Communicate’s generous moderation, we won’t resolve it here. It is a matter of professional theology and identity - yours matters to you and mine to me. However, rather like Catholics and Protestants (or Czechs and Slovaks), we can either choose to accentuate our differences or, while acknowledging our diversity, focus instead on what we have in common. In the spirit of the season, let’s opt for the latter.

Happy New Year, Steve