Steve Doswell considers how the role and perception of internal communicators in an organisation has changed in recent years

A few years ago, the influential consultant and author Bill Quirke asked ‘What will internal communicators be called in ten years time?’ It was a fair question: over the last 20 years, we’ve grown increasingly comfortable with the idea of the internal communicator, even if explaining what we do remains a frequent task (although people do now ‘get it’ where once they didn’t). However, it would have meant little to earlier practitioners, back in the day when the precursor to the IoIC was founded as an association of ‘industrial editors’.
 

Internal communication (IC) is an emerging profession, with growing consensus around a recognised path to accreditation for its practitioners. In time, this will reduce the diversity of backgrounds from which people traditionally arrived in our domain, taking in journalism, PR, marketing, IT, office administration and myriad operations roles. The default tended to be print journalism, because their main role was producing staff publications.
 

Being technically adept has long been part of the required make-up of the IC practitioner who has kept up with an office technology revolution, from desktop publishing in the 1980s to the current state of affairs.There is now less emphasis on the printed word – although a mastery of language is arguably as important as ever - and more on face-to-face and other forms of communication, including forums, groups, emails, videoconferencing and live events.
 

The internal communicator has had to learn other skills, drawing on the toolkits of change management and even organisational design. There are signs of a stronger gravitational pull towards HR than before - IC has certainly adopted the ‘business partner’ model of internal consultant model first seen in HR. Increasingly, in multi-national or global operations, the IC practitioner also needs to be adept in cross-cultural communication.
 

Crucially, the most impactful change – the one that is elevating IC up the corporate food chain - is the demand for strategic nous which in turn requires a depth of business understanding that was perhaps neither essential nor widely in evidence a generation ago. This is captured in the idea of the internal communicator as trusted advisor, a description that reflects a corporate player seen to be influencing decisions rather than merely implementing them.
 

If there is a sea-change in the role and outlook of the internal communicator, it is from a primary concern with channels to one that’s focused on the whole organisation’s overall communication capability. It’s a point made well by Mark Wright, editor of the Gower Handbook of Internal Communication (quoted in Rachel Miller’s excellent blog Diary of an Internal Communicator at www.rachallen.com) who says that the communication professional should no longer manage communications but should instead help everybody to communicate better within their organisations.
There’s ample evidence of that shift in the huge attention now given to equipping line managers and leadership teams to be effective communicators.
 

The case for IC per se is now acknowledged as never before, so that the place of internal communication within the management mix is now much more of a given than it ever was in the past. However, the financial crisis and accompanying recession have scythed through IC budgets and teams. The remorseless drive for value and cost-reduction by employers struggling for growth in an ailing economy means that, for many hitherto separate IC operations, downsizing and even a wholesale loss of identity through being subsumed into a larger multi-disciplinary function may never be more than one restructure away. As ever, amid the corporate politicking that invariably accompanies decisions of this kind, the personal clout of the head of IC will influence the function’s standing and fortunes