Much of the regular trend tracking and internal communications industry analysis is based on practitioner views, which often feels like IC professionals marking their own homework. So, it’s refreshing to see a new report which is based on the views of employees on internal communication performance and practice in organisations.
Based on research with 3000 UK workers across a balanced range of organisations by size and sector, I think that this report just became my ‘go to’ source of current industry practice performance and insights. It comes from a research collaboration between Karian and Box and the Institute of Internal Communication, and builds on the excellent IC UK 2021 report, also from Karian and Box, which I’ve often referenced over the last two years in my IC teaching and consultancy work.
The presentation of the data and insights in the report is really clear and accessible. If you’re familiar with other IoIC publications and their house style, you’ll instantly recognise that this distinctive report is something created by the Institute.
Perennial problems
First of all, let’s get some of the no brainers and more obvious stuff out of the way, because they are here in abundance. That’s not a criticism of the report, it’s important to give a comprehensive view of practice, but if you’ve worked in IC for as long as I have you might experience that familiar and disappointing sinking feeling when you read it.
For once it’s not about our Achilles Heel of IC measurement that dominates, after all why would employees be really aware of this, but some of our other perennial challenges are very apparent in the findings.
As usual line manager communication, and the confidence issues and lack of communication competence and skill within this group is there on page 56. This problem has held internal communication practice back for years, although the report highlights the opportunities which exist for practitioners to help line managers communicate about the things they are best placed to do.
For example, line managers are best at communicating about team priorities, goals and performance, rather than organisational strategy, where employee belief in this as the right way forward for the organisation (page 38) plummets if line managers communicate about it instead of the CEO. As the report highlights “This is a big challenge for the largest organisations, where workers hear less frequently from their CEO”, and guess what, employees want to hear a lot, lot more about organisational strategy and goals (page 25).
This particular insight was music to my ‘eyes’, and is an interesting contrast with the finding in this years Gallagher State of the Sector report that for the first time (on average) more internal communicators (74%) said that the purpose of internal communication was to support culture and belonging, overtaking our assumed long-standing purpose of creating strategic alignment (67%). Maybe as a profession we aren’t such a culture vulture after all.
Other familiar themes which are there in the report, include the intuitive proximity effect, which impacts negatively on trust in organisational leadership. As the report highlights on page 48, “as the distance between CEO and employee increases, CEO trust declines while direct manager trust remains relatively consistent.” For as long as I can remember, employees have consistently rated the effectiveness of communication with their immediate manager more highly than communication with distant leaders, and good communication builds trust.
Finally, we are still not doing enough on employee listening, facilitating dialogue and the methods we most commonly use to gather feedback from employees are seen by them as being the least effective (page 62 to 65). The annual employee survey is at the top of the least effective list.
When will organisations finally ditch performative annual employee surveys in favour of more effective methods of listening and when will IC practitioners rise up and say no to their practice being judged by these proxy measures of IC performance?
The golden nuggets
There are some real golden nuggets of insight in the report.
One of my favourites, that every internal stakeholder who demands more content and channel airtime from IC about their pet project should see, is that “A quarter of UK workers spend ‘hardly any time’ reading or viewing news and updates from their employer.” In fact, it’s 15 minutes or less per day AND “Around two in three UK workers say they prefer to see, hear or read communications from their employer as part of their team meetings. This means that they’re probably not headed to your intranet or spending time reading newsletters outside of these meetings” (page 34).
This revelation reminded me of something in a favorite IC book I often reference, Bill Quirke’s ‘Making the Connections’, where he points out that employee’s mental capacity, or brain space, to absorb and process information should be treated as a strategic resource. It is something I have often preached in organisations where I have worked, and I was delighted to see evidence to back up that view.
Do you often get requests for elaborate more ‘engaging’ content from internal stakeholders. Well guess what, it’s a bit of a waste of everyone’s time, because most employees prefer the written word (page 36). However, as the report points out, this might be a case of simple demographics, with younger workers preferring more variety in communication formats and channels.
I suppose that there might be a risk to IC practitioner job security here, which the report doesn’t pick up on. If the written word is the most preferred format, then maybe the threat that writing internal content using generative AI will really take off in IC and steal your job, is a real one?
The section in the report on what employees want to hear more (or less) about (page 24) made me reflect on what we are good at communicating about and what we aren’t.
The report reveals three polarising topics for employees about which “Equal proportions of UK workers say they receive too much or too little information about the organisation’s purpose and mission, diversity and inclusion, and the organisation’s values and culture.”
These are all difficult topics for internal communicators to communicate about well, often because none of them are really baked into how organisations do business and conduct themselves. I’ve often said to internal stakeholders that ‘just saying it, doesn’t make it happen’, and there needs to be some firm foundations on which to build communication about these topics and others, such as sustainability. If there aren’t ‘the comms’ are doomed to failure.
There are also some interesting characterisations of employees in the report in the ‘Look who’s talking’ section (page 18) and the section about understanding and belief in organisational strategy (page 30). Again, there are some parallels here with Bill Quirke’s characterisations of employees as ‘Hot shots’, ‘Unguided Missiles’, ‘Slow Burners’ and ‘Refuseniks’ when it comes to understanding and acting on organisational strategy. I’m not sure that, as far as audience segmentation and targeting goes, the IC 2023 Index characterisations are any more helpful that Quirke’s in a practical sense. Whilst I love the reports employee avatars of ‘Unconvinced Cynics’, ‘Confused Followers’, ‘Miserable Moaners’ and ‘Informed Cheerleaders’ how would you practically identify and target these groups with remedial communications in your organisation? I think this requires methods of stakeholder and data analysis that are beyond the reach of most internal communicators, their skills and available technology.
My last golden nugget is the revelation that CEOs can get away with communicating with employees by impersonal methods such as email (page 52), although the frequency of their communications are key to driving engagement. Employees would much rather have face to face and interactive communication with departmental leaders. That feels like a nail in the coffin of our beloved in-person and virtual town halls with the CEO, which became so popular during the pandemic. Again, maybe we are putting our efforts on face-to-face communication in the wrong place?
If you work in internal communication, I’d thoroughly recommend reading the IC 2023 Index. You’ll find some analysis of familiar themes and challenges in the report, as well as some clear opportunities for adapting IC practice.
Martin
Image credit – Institute of Internal Communication
The IC Citizen 