Breaking the Rule of Engagement: New Opportunities for Internal Communication
Mike Klein
The push for employee engagement has begun its decline, which is something that should cause the spirits of internal communicators to soar.
It may be too early to declare victory, but prominent articles in Harvard Business Review and Forbes reflect increasingly vocal skepticism among HR practitioners and internal communicators at the idea of employee engagement as an almighty purpose for our profession. The unwillingness of the international IC measurements standards team to include engagement in its work underscores this skepticism.
The waning faith in the real value of employee engagement is also reflected in more frequent challenges to the main unwritten IC rule that’s been in place since the turn of the century: The goal of internal communication is to drive high engagement survey scores, across the board, and all other goals and activities were either secondary or immaterial. Now, we see increasing appetite for selective and strategic IC interventions unconnected to the employee engagement agenda.
Why now?
The value of high employee engagement scores has always been difficult to measure. Even with a much-lauded relationship between employee engagement and various measures of organizational performance, the relationship between investment in employee engagement initiatives and actual performance is far more elusive. Indeed, there does not appear to be an established relationship between spending on employee engagement initiatives and employee engagement scores.
The damage unleashed by the enforced focus of internal communication on a one-size-fits-all strategy is much easier to assess:
Organizational initiatives and projects left to falter without adequate communication support
Alienation of stakeholders denied professional communication support by communication departments
Cynicism and resistance from managers and employees whose own experience did not match the experience promised by the engaged organization
Budget wastage on events and collateral designed to drive a feel good effect that drives engagement scores rather than on activities to empower leaders, managers and staff to perform more effectively
Insufficient attention paid to the differentiated roles of leaders, managers, and influencers in driving organizational conversations and prioritization, leading to rumor and misalignment
Seizing the initiative
Now, strategically minded internal communicators must overcome additional challenges, even as they are getting free from the employee engagement straitjacket.
Budgets are a lagging indicator. So, while the IC world is beginning to wake up to the possibility that there is life after employee engagement, the first step will involve wresting control of budgets from those who’ve pushed employee engagement, and also finding internal customers and budget holders who can see the relationship between the alignment of people and resources and the delivery of specific objectives.They must develop and embrace value-based metrics and measurements to justify their involvement in change and other organizational priorities.
Once there are customers and projects, the opportunity becomes more clear to demonstrate value and re-establish internal communication as a serious business discipline by:
Accelerating the completion of projects and initiatives
Mobilizing influencers to share and contextualize messages for their peers
Supporting alignment in the direction of common purposes, visions and objectives
Clarifying desired behaviors and brand attributes
Spreading the adoption of new technologies
Facilitating the integration of acquisitions
Identifying the value created by connections employees initiate with each other through transformational networking
All of these activities not only help deliver real organizational ambitions, their impact on those ambitions can be measured.
Project completion speed can be measured relative to expectations and to projects of comparable scope and budget
The spread and recall of messages delivered through influencers can be compared with that of messages shared through cascades or broadcast communication
Alignment can be assessed through surveys and focus groups and corrected further
Defined behaviors can be observed and evaluated
As for technology take-up and M&A integration, there are numerous qualitative and quantitative ways of assessing speed and value
Transformational Networking
A proactive internal communicator will not only add value by executing to the current brief, but also turn the connections they make during their activities into pivotal assets.
Over time, internal communicators will have the ability to make introductions between key people below C-level.These introductions can lead to connections between like-minded employees, employees with complementary capabilities, or those with common interests.
As a function working across the business, internal communication can move into transformational networking, the willingness to intervene to bring unconnected complementary people together and add tangible value beyond its core communication remit, altering organizational relationships, power flows and knowledge flows.
Indeed, it is only by working across the business and supporting real business objectives that IC teams can acquire the knowledge and connections to play this transformational role.
In closing
During the last fifteen years the strategic, transformational potential of internal communication has been suppressed in the push for employee engagement. But rather than rue lost opportunity, the important thing now is to be prepared for the new opportunities to contribute and to have that contribution measured and valued appropriately. It is in that measurement that we will regain our license to have an impact on our organizations. With that license, our ability to contribute will expand in many ways.
Three Key Takeaways
Overemphasis on employee engagement is coming to an end, creating new opportunities for internal communicators to have a real business impact.
Many of these opportunities will allow internal communicators to demonstrate their value to the business in direct and tangible ways.
Transformational networking offers major opportunities for communicators to reshape their organizations by creating new relationships and altering knowledge and power flows.
This is an excerpt of our 222-page book Disrupting the Function of IC - A Global Perspective. Click here to download.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Before becoming an internal communication consultant, Mike Klein worked as a political consultant in the U.S. for eight years. With nearly two decades of experience in internal communication, Mike has penned a book about social dynamics in large organisations, titled From Lincoln to LinkedIn, the 55-minute Guide to Social Communication.
Mike authors a blog, Changing The Terms, which advocates selective engagement and a strategic approach to internal communication. An MBA graduate of the London Business School, Mike is one of the Contributor of the year 2017 of IC Kollectif.
