Considering that humans have been communicating with each other for at least 50,000 years, and probably longer, it never ceases to surprise me how difficult it can be.
Fortunately, tackling this multi-headed beast is our bread and butter here at Limegreen but even our skills are regularly put to the test supporting internal communications for an international technology pioneer.
To give some perspective to the scale of the challenge; just one of the several divisions we support employs 15,000 people across 25 sites worldwide. English (albeit the US version) is the default language and we are very fortunate to work with a number of extremely fluent non-native English speakers. Exactly how they manage to communicate, often quite complex concepts and ideas, outside of their mother tongue never ceases to amaze and impress.
Despite this intrinsic home advantage, the challenges surrounding multi-site, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-stakeholder communications are numerous. Yet at its core, the company’s key challenge is the same as every other business – how to give employees a voice.
For obvious reasons, the default position for internal comms is “top down.” Management will always have messages that need delivering to the troops. But how to reverse engineer that system to ensure every voice is heard is more problematic.
Of course, there is no “right” answer, but we do have a myriad of choice when it comes to communication channels. Email, social media posts, videos, blogs, podcasts, voice memos and let’s not forget good old fashioned written articles. The list is long and getting longer every day.
Rather than choose a specific medium for a given topic, we’ve learned it’s often better to match the media to the person. For example, a strong communicator with an intrinsic understanding of how to hold people’s attention is ideal for video or a podcast whereas a less confident and erudite individual may be better suited to a written format, which can be edited and worked upon prior to publication.
Another important lesson we’ve learnt is to keep it short and keep it simple. A recent survey of staff highlighted most have less than an hour per week to spend on internal communications and so their overriding requirement was for short and concise communication.
As professional communicators, our tendency can often be to over-communicate when really all the audience wants to know is: What’s new, why does it matter and what’s next?
Last, but by no means least, much of our work revolves around empowering people to take ownership of internal communications themselves in a bid to deliver that often elusive element of authenticity.
Platform such as Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) and Sharepoint have made this easier than ever and a simple mechanic can often deliver impressive results. Just by encouraging people to post a picture of themselves having a coffee with someone they don’t usually work with, generating fantastic results and employee engagement.
So regardless of how big or small your organisation is, the same principles apply. People will always want to communicate. So rather than narrative controllers, we should perhaps look upon ourselves as narrative facilitators and, who knows, maybe in another 50,000 years we might just get the hang of it.
