What is internal communications?
Earlier this year, I shared a post on LinkedIn about how I personally defined internal communication (IC). I had drawn up a brightly coloured heart-shaped scribble after a rather challenging conversation with someone who clearly wasn’t a natural communicator. The conversation had made me think I needed to have a good answer to what IC actually was…So I came up with this scribble.
Since then, the wonderful Emma Sykes from Care & Reputation kindly offered to make it into something more professional (thank you, Emma) and the result is here. The heart remains, but following feedback from various people, we have added in customer experience as well as employee experience. Because the two really do go hand in hand.
Going back to the post on LinkedIn, people really loved: ‘We are the beating heart of an organisation’, and also the idea that IC is the conduit of getting shit done. The post on LI had a great response with people sharing their stories of how they define IC. Frustratingly because I had shared it on various Groups, including Internal Communications Best Practice, and Internal Communication, amongst others, brilliant responses were in different places. So, and because so many people liked, shared and commented on the posts, I wanted to pull some of them together in one place.
We loved what Helen Lawrence at the Happy Learning Company said, “For me IC is about helping keep people connected, included and inspired to take positive action. It's about ensuring people feel valued, equipped and enabled to play their part. It's about enabling and encouraging two-way dialogue and ensuring people work together as one to achieve a common purpose.. For me, IC has the power to help engage an entire workforce when done well, providing leaders with valuable support :-)”
Peter Knott contributed by saying “ Internal Communication is the all-essential 'glue' that binds together an employee brand. The voice of both the employer and the employee must be open and honest, and when it is so, a company can truly become a great place to work, grow and develop.” Here here!
Sam Kumm from the Leukemia Foundation made a very valid point about how much more meaningful an impact we can make if we’re working with others. She said “I agree that as IC and Employee Experience (EX) professionals we aspire to be all in the great graphic above but I challenge whether that is desired versus actual impact. I am of the view, and my experience has been, that IC and EX cannot achieve this single-handedly but rather can deliver much more meaningful and valued impact through collaboration and partnering with other relevant functions that also contribute to the above including CEO, OD, Culture, Leadership Development, Change and HR, Projects, Strategy etc.
Our unique quality is seeing the organisation with all its messy moving parts and becoming the valued advisor that helps guide leaders and the business to share their message in the right form to the right audience at the right time. Less doing and more influencing and advising!”
There were so many more comments to sift through and we absolutely loved the fact that a simple scribbled heart became such a powerful talking point. We’re delighted to have instigated the conversation and hope that this little drawing can help other internal comms experts explain what they do too. If you’d like to receive your own file of this drawing, please contact: hello@cosymeerkat.co.uk
