The internal comms audit: why face-to-face communication is what we all want

For the last month at Cosy Meerkat we’ve been busy doing internal communications audits for some of our clients. We’ve carried out a number of employee surveys and have been struck by what they’ve shown us about how people really want to receive company news and information.  

If an internal communications audit is a new concept to you, the idea behind one is fairly simple: they help you improve the effectiveness of your communications. Ideally, you want an audit to provide you with a combination of quantitative data, such as a survey, and qualitative data, a focus group for example. It should give you a complete picture of what staff think, how your various comms channels are used and how effective your messaging is, allowing you to see how well you’re aligned with the overall business strategy and to come up with evidence-based improvements where necessary. They’re best done yearly, but, in reality, not many companies do this because doing a comms audit properly takes time and resources. It is possible I’m a bit biased, but I genuinely believe they’re an invaluable way of making sure what you do is targeted and effective and, as such, they’re worth the investment. 

What has stood out from the data we’ve been looking through recently is that people value face-to-face communication above all else. 

Our surveys* found: 

●      Face to face was the preferred communications channel for three in four employees

●      Roughly one in five (22%) believe the business social networking tool Yammer to be their least useful communications channel

●      Four in five say their most favoured comms channel going forward would be team briefings 

When people were asked in qualitative surveys about the communications channels they accessed under their own steam – for example, their intranet – this quote summed up the overall feeling:

“It's very tough in our current environment. If it is not specifically fed to me by a directed email or conversation, things get lost or skipped as we just become too busy. In turn, this makes self-service channels ineffective. If we had more help, were less busy with work, those channels would become more effective.”

There’s a clear contrast between the perceived benefit of digital communications compared to those done face to face. Now, of course, it is possible this is another side effect of the pandemic; meetings taking place via Teams or Zoom, the pressure to be ‘on’ or available all the time without ever getting the face-to-face support from mentors or managers – we’re all much more appreciative of how nice it is to talk to a real person now. But the fact is face-to-face communication has always been one of the most popular internal communications channels because it answers a basic human need. Decades of research has proven we need social interaction in all aspects of our lives in order to stay motivated, happy and healthy.  While the digital world has made communicating incredibly convenient and easy, it can lead to a feeling of disconnectedness. And that’s not good for people, which means it’s also not good for the businesses they work in either.  

So, it seems, at least for the companies we’re working with, the future of internal comms is old school face-to-face. But there is a problem here. Because while there seems to be a widespread recognition that line managers are an important comms channel, line managers themselves don’t feel particularly well supported. 

At the end of last year I did a LinkedIn poll which showed how much line managers are valued as communicators, with comments such as “line managers are where enterprise-wide communication efforts succeed or fail” and they’re “a crucial factor in lending credence and accountability to other comms channels.”  Yet, according to our research, 65% of line managers believe they need more support when it comes to communications. Add to this a few revealing statistics from Gallagher’s most recent State of the Sector report and it’s clear there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to improve things. According to the Internal Comms experts they surveyed:   

●      81% said there’d been an increase in expectations of people managers as communicators

●      Just 34% have equipped managers with comms training 

●      Only 46% of organisations have made it easy for them to feed back information

If you think it’s possible the line managers in your organisation could do with more support then we’d recommend, as a start, running a communications workshop specifically for them. You might also want to give those who struggle with comms the opportunity to shadow those who are good at it, as well as considering making communications a specific part of their remit so they have a clear definition of what is expected of them within the wider agenda. You could even give line managers their very own communications channel; demonstrating their importance to the organisation as communicators as well as giving them somewhere to go for support and to feed back information.  

If you’re not sure whether it’s a problem then it could be a sign you need to do a communications audit either internally or by going to an external agency. What’s clear though is that businesses which continue to simply push information out to staff through their digital channels and then sit back and consider their internal comms box ticked do so at their peril. While digital might have been a great short-term solution to the extreme nature of the pandemic, now that lockdowns are, hopefully, a thing of the past, the best way to make sure your employees are hearing your messages is to communicate them face to face. Perhaps now really is the ideal time to make sure the communications channels you’ve been relying on to get you through the last couple of years are genuinely fit for purpose for the future.      

*Data from four surveys totalling approximately four thousand responses conducted during the month of March 2022.