Internal communications must evolve by taking the lead in engagement, says Steve Doswell 

"The engaging future of internal comms"

At IoIC, we’ve being giving some thought to the changing landscape of internal communication and the way we practise our art, craft, profession or trade (or even science –students on the University of Central Lancashire’s IC masters programme will graduate with an MSc in internal communication). It’s easy to over-claim the state of progress along IC’s long march. But change is happening and I would argue that it’s being driven by three factors.

Firstly, there’s been an uptick in perceptions within the IC sector itself through a growing understanding about the value and impact IC provides to organisations. That’s about education, as more practitioners are pursuing qualifications, training and ongoing professional development.

That’s also about research, as the positive outcomes of IC done well (and the detrimental downside of IC done badly) are increasingly quantified and qualitatively understood. With this heightened understanding comes a growth – perhaps even a surge – in confidence on the part of practitioners better able than ever to spell out what good IC does for their enterprise, backed by an increasingly heavy shelf-ful of evidence.

Secondly, the IC landscape is changing due to advances in understanding of employee engagement. I heard a prominent academic at a PR conference say that our sector should stop talking about internal communication and use the term engagement instead. I go along with the argument we should give more time and energy to thinking about outcomes while continuing to concern ourselves with outputs (after all, we are about professional practice, where both means and ends need to be in synch). But we should surely challenge any attempt to suggest – accidentally or otherwise – that engagement and IC are the same thing or that high engagement is somehow ‘just’ about good communication.

It’s wrong to think IC can do all the heavy lifting to engage employees effectively. However, we can play an influential and benevolent hand in the four key elements identified by the government-sponsored Engaging For Success movement, spawned by the now deservedly-famous Macleod and Clarke report. Giving shape and form to a strategic narrative about the organisation’s journey and destiny; helping to equip managers to lead their teams; nurturing the voice of employees and providing the means for it to be heard and helping the organisations understand and live up to the values they’ve signed up for – IC practitioners have the insights, skills and tools to support all four of these endeavours.

We also have a professional responsibility to take a lead in all four, too. If not, we will miss a once-in-a-generation opportunity to cement the business case for IC. Incidentally, my one concern with the current focus on engagement is that observers sometimes use the word without always pinning down what they specifically mean by it. Engagement is neither a commodity that can simply be bought-in, nor is it a bolt-on widget, a room- spray or a quick-fix additive to the corporate water supply. It demands time, a sustained, organisation-wide effort and perseverance.

Completing my list of IC landscape- changing factors, ‘exhibit C’ is technology. Jam and webcasting technology and social networks are widening access to the means to communicate so that the IC practitioners no longer need to play IC gatekeeper, as in the past. For some organisations, this may be challenging. For practitioners, it’s enormously liberating: it enables us to re- envision our role and frees us to move to the higher slopes of our changing landscape. This year is my 25th in corporate communication. There’s never been a more promising time to be an internal communicator and the view has never looked better. 

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication You can find him on Twitter @stevedoswell