Warning: Christmas is cancelled

Back in the late 90s I worked for a major hotel company. It had its good aspects, but one of the deciding factors in making me realise I was in the wrong place was the CEO's decision to cancel Christmas.

'What? Cancel Christmas in a hotel company? Surely that way madness lies!' I hear you say. Of course, our CEO didn't cancel the customers' Christmas - just the one for staff which happens, traditionally, in the darkest days of January, when hotels are at their quietest.

Working in a hotel in the run-up to Christmas is punishing. Head Office staff were expected to pitch in, so while my efforts out in the hotel estate were brief and less than impressive, I did get to see the routine that saw staff regularly starting their days at 5.30am and finishing by pouring the last of the night's party goers into taxis at 3am the following morning.

Throughout December, staff worked regular 14-16 hour days with departmental and duty managers in particular often working near round the clock for three or four days at a stretch with probably no more than three days off across the whole month. It's a grinding schedule, but hotel folk are used to it.

There's quite a bit of pleasure to be derived from seeing other people enjoy themselves. But more so, there was always the knowledge of a decent bonus to be had at the end of the year, and the opportunity to plan and deliver one heck of a staff party once the tinsel and trimmings had been taken down at the end of the festive period.

Staff Christmases were the talk of the business. These often two-day blow-outs were legendary. In many locations the hotel would close to the public while the staff let off steam at parties that had been planned for months and dreamt of all year - and would be delivered thanks to the generosity of the corporate pocket.

But in my second year running internal comms for this 250-hotel strong group, there was no chance to 'party like it's 1999' (even though it was!) because, in mid December, the CEO decided we all needed to tighten our belts.

The Millennium had seemed the perfect opportunity for the business to make money. Lavish events were planned across the business to tempt in punters - and the sales team, optimistic to a fault, pitched these parties at pretty precipitous prices. The revenue forecast looked impressive - but the actual conversion of glossy brochures into hard cash was rather less so. 1998-99 had been quite a tough year economically. Corporates seemed less prepared to shell out on Millennium parties than our Sales Director anticipated, and many people seemed undecided on whether to celebrate Christmas or New Year in their local hotel (or indeed one of the flagship venues). Too many were opting for neither.

Almost unheard of, but many of our hotels decided to close for New Year - the demand simply wasn't there. Instead of the expected boost to revenue, most hotels were failing to hit their targets. True, they were just as busy in the run-up to Christmas with party nights, office 'do's and the regular Christmas lunch trade. Most were also steady over Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but their expected revenue delivery was about 20% above 1998 - and the lack of New Year bookings over the Millennium meant that such forecasting was way too optimistic.

The decision to premium-price Millennium events was seen as coming from senior management, yet the CEO's decision was that everyone in the business would take a hit. Bonuses were cancelled for everyone at management level, while the planned staff events due for mid-January were cut completely. It was an irony that the decisions were conveyed to me by my boss from a management 'away weekend' at the Forte Village in Sardinia.

I had to go away and write a message for hotel managers to cascade to their teams explaining that due to us missing our targets, it wasn't feasible to hold staff parties in January 2000. This was an across-the-board decision despite the fact that a number of hotels across the organisation had met their targets and some indeed had waiting lists for events - including top-priced Millennium celebrations.

I was one of many middle-ranking employees who fed back reservations to the top team over the next 24 hours. Post-New year celebrations were a tradition in the business - it was wrong to cancel them. Staff out in the hotels were working as hard as ever in the run-up to Christmas and this announcement could even damage business further. This was hitting those people who generated revenue for the business excessively, especially as it had been Head Office dogmatism that had led to the relative failure to sell the Millennium effectively. And, one size fits all would go down especially badly with the venues and teams that were operating successfully.

But, the message went out and was received every bit as badly as we anticipated. For all my wordsmithery, and days spent preparing General Managers for what was due to hit, this really was polishing a turd. Hotel management teams - the people who really drive success in any hotel business - were massively demotivated. The end of year bonus really mattered to them and all felt they'd been tarnished by the faults of a few (and the 'few' were generally in the Head Office sales operation). More junior staff felt cheated. Their bargain with management included the big January blow-out. Just two weeks before Christmas, a very remote management had reneged.

From a senior management perspective, this probably seemed like a quick and efficient means of reducing costs and emphasising the 'we're all in this together' impact of missing sales targets. But it came across as an ill-thought-out move: a knee-jerk reaction which simply didn't consider the consequences of lowered morale and lost engagement.

Could I and my colleagues have done more to change the senior management decision? Even now, more than a decade on, I think not. The top team had physically and metally taken themselves away from the business and were focused much more on managing upwards - militating their failure in the eyes of the conglomerate board above them, than turning a failed sales strategy around through the efforts of the 45,000 people who felt penalised across the business.

Mentally at that point I was in the departure lounge. I no longer felt enthused to give my discretionary effort for a management team I felt to be wholly out of touch with the core of the business. I also felt more than ever that IC was merely a tactical tool for this particular business rather than at the heart of its engagement strategy. In fact, I failed to see any engagement strategy.

Two days before Christmas, my boss, a board director, took us for lunch at the Waldorf. The reception from the hotel team was professional but frosty. I often wondered if they'd taken the opportunity to spit in the soup. My boss was oblivious. Her complete lack of empathy simply highlighted the class structure which operated in the Boardroom. They could do what they liked - somehow they saw themselves as being above the busines, while the rest of the business had to pay the price. Indeed, for my boss there was a complete disconnect between cancelling all our hotels' staff celebrations and splashing out on her platinum corporate card for a slap-up lunch for her own team.

Over the coming months, those who could get out of the business did.  The knee-jerk reaction to the Millennium sales failure was the biggest own-goal this business managed over a two-year period of mismanagement. Shortly afterwards it was broken up and sold off. Most of the hotels remain, but under different brands. Doubtless, many shrewd and successful hotel GMs still remember the catastrophic consequence of a CEO cancelling Christmas.

Institutes, inertia and a time to break out of the circle

Last Friday, I was chased for my annual subs for the Institute of Internal Communication - and organisation I've been a member of in the UK for 20 years. It didn't take me too long to decide that I didn't want to renew.

Under its British Association of Industrial Editors guise, I began to make the switch from consumer magazine journalist to internal communicator, successfully acquiring a Certificate in Industrial Editing. As the organisation morphed into the British Association of Communicators in Business, I became one of the last people to be awarded a Diploma in Business Communication. Under its Communicators in Business Guise, I was a national committee member and was made a Fellow of the organisation. But, as the recession bit and my career direction turned more to academia, CiB (or the IoIC as it now is) and I began to diverge in thought and action.

Today, internal communication plays only a small part in my business output. I write about it, but have found that B2B and B2C work is both easier to pick up and, at the moment, more satisfying. For me, that's because too many businesses have shown their true colours during the economic downturn: turning to organisational communication not to help engagement and build for the future, but to slip back into the default of command and control - telling people what to do if they want to still have a job.

It has been dispiriting. At a time when we should be making a paradigm shift to more open, transparent, enabling and effective communication, underpinned by a far wider armoury that should be built on the opportunity of social media, top teams have been slow to change, and communicators have been weak in championing the necessary cultural shift. There are, of course, pockets of brilliance - but the practice or organisational/employee/internal communication has actually moved far more slowly and covered a lot less ground than it thinks it has in the past two decades.

The fundamental for me is the focus on and rewarding of output over outcome - reflected ingloriously in the organisations supposed to represent the organisational communicators' role and advocate its ascendancy.

The revolution hasn't happened: the 'new' has a distinct whiff of emperor's new clothes; and organisational communicators remain in low earth orbit when we could be reaching for the stars.

I'm going to keep on doing what I'm doing - though probably ever more in b2b and b2c. Internal communication isn't dead - but it seems to need some radical new medicine.

Squaring the employee engagement circle?

I started a discussion on LinkedIn in the Melcrum Communicators' Group about Employee Engagement being a misnomer. My argument - shown below - comes from my feeling that though we've coined the term, we haven't really agreed a strict definition of what EE is. But there's a stronger point emerging in my mind too: that's the feeling that to place the responsibility for EE with IC devalues it and makes it unattainable. Anyway, some of the heavy hitters in the field are now weighing in to the debate. It'll be interesting to see how it develops further. Please do get involved, either by commenting on this blog, or here in the Melcrum Group if you're a member.

Here's my opening question - and the response (with names removed) to date:

Is employee engagement a misnomer?
So, employee engagement's the holy grail for successful organistions. But why have we coined this phrase? It hardly sounds inclusive does it? Doesn't the employer need to be engaged too? And in fact anyone who works alongside the organisation like your key suppliers and any temps/contractors or outsourced functions. So are we limiting ourselves by a poorly thought-out name?

The problems organisations face in this post-recession world are pretty-much common to all: keeping the best performers; continuing to drive productivity; growing market share; attracting the right people.....and for those already there, doing more with less. And there's a growing consensus that the best way to deliver on high productivity demands is to have an engaged organisation. Macleod defines this as being underpinned by four enablers:Leadership, Engaging Managers, Voice and Integrity. All are vital - but perhaps difficult to achieve if we continue to call it 'Employee' engagement.

So is it time to ditch the term - and what could succeed it as a more relevant shorthand for what we're all striving to achieve? And are MacLeod's enablers sufficient?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Posted 5 days ago Delete discussion

Comments (12)

MK

Not just ditch the term--cremate and bury it too.

The one-way nature of the term belies the cynicism exhibited by a good share of organisations who see it as a way to generate extra productivity cheaply--and by practitioners touting unsustainable returns on investment for ginning up one-way "employee engagement" schemes built on implicit promises that organisations may not be willing or capable to honour.

Engagement is at a minimum a two-way street. But in the current environment, where organisations have been pulling back from a lot of traditional commitments,multi-directional re-engagement across the stakeholder universe becomes vital. And, playing a pivotal role, organisations may need to reshape their workforce relationships completely to be able to engage their workforces to support their customer and stakeholder agendas.

Employees have more external credibility than corporate spokespeople these days, and while internal communication needs to continue to support employee productivity, it needs to raise its game to support employees as a credible external communication channel. Abandoning the inward--and often cynical--mentality embodied in the term "employee engagement" is a crucial step.

ST
I think the majority agree (and repeatedly agree) that the term 'employee engagement' is imperfect and for all sorts of reasons.

Here are my top 3:-
1. the term 'employee' is myopic
2. 'employee' and 'engagement' are two highly misunderstood terms in their own right - put them together and it creates a different order of magnitude in ambiguity (and let's not even discuss 'employee-brand-engagement')
3. employee engagement 'professionals' have been dining out on this ambiguity for years without shifting the results, driving even more cynicism.

I do not believe that a name change will not get over the deep-rooted cynicism (think: Consignia-->Post Office, Personnnel --> HR) as you point out Mark the term has been coined so why not capitalise on it? (Ironically, the four enablers you reference from "Engaging for success" introduce even more ambiguous terms e.g. "strategic narrative")

I do believe the priority for the profession is to keep the name and raise their game.

P.S.
There are currently 3 debates running on professions changing the name of their offer:-
1.change management
2.internal communications
3.employee engagement

They have at least 3 things in common:
1.They all talk about holistic offers with very specialist disciplines, so therefore difficult to define and ended up with generic terminology.
2.The impression of distressed professions lacking confidence in their own ability.
3. Angels dancing on the head of a pin.


JW
"Keep the name and raise their game" just about says it all for me. I recall you saying something similar recently about the need to focus on action rather than re-definition.

I think no one word or short combination of words will ever accurately reflect what we'd all like it to and this should not deflect us from striving to do our best for our companies or clients.

IW
Agree with J, let's not use management science terms to define the hell out of this so we lose touch with the people with whom we're supposed to be 'engaging'. Remember it's not the language our people speak.

TQ
Agree with MK and others. It feels like just the latest catch-all phrase to describe what the organisation wants - like "employee/internal branding" and "loyalty" before it. And while it implies a two-way relationship, the reality is usually trying to extract greater productivity and ideas from the people in the organisation.

Conversation with Liam Fitzpatrick recently when we were presenting a masterclass on internal comms - he also highlighted the degree to which it's become meaningless because everyone can re-define it to encompass whatever they're doing at the moment.

It also calls to mind an issue that I don't think is much discussed yet amongst we comms professionals - where do we draw the line between permissible expectations of our employer organisations and over-reaching demands that encroach on people's personal lives? Communications sent home?

Much of the talk of recent years smacks of one-way demands, even when dressed up in the talk of personal development - "emotional engagement", "bringing our whole selves to work", etc. Why? Who benefits?

And in my experience it's often not accurate either - emotions can be negative as well as positive, but those are not welcome at work, presumably.

BJ
The problem is that employee engagement is a term coined to provide a common focal point for addressing a multitude of problems. Like most such terms it will mean different things to different people and be used to drive different agendas. Ultimately it boils down to language and the fact that as human beings we can seldom be sure that any word or phrase means exactly the same to one person as to another. If be killed the term and cremated and buried it we would still be left with finding something else to convey all the term is intended to convey.

The real issue is not the term, but the fact that it has become part of the management lexicon and so joined the ranks of management speak. It has thus become part of a top-down solution to improve organisational performance and so will - for that reason - always arouse suspicion amongst the very people that are supposed to be engaged.


Mark Shanahan - second contribution

Excellent responses and builds. I dislike the term employee engagement but I'll use it as the common coinage here. But I'd like to throw out a further question: why are so many organisations making employee engagement a responsibility of internal comms? To me, comms is just one enabler but the 'task' of employee engagement still seems to reside firmly in the IC camp in a number of organisations I work with. Is there a more appropriate place in the existing organisation for employee engagement: a place where it can be co-ordinated and driven truly effectively? Or do we need to create a new function that enables the kind of multi-directional approach that MK raises?

It strikes me that however good the IC effort, we'll never reach engagement nirvana if its not matched by the right leadership behavours, systems and policies, culture and environment elsewhere in the organisation.

AS
I find it interesting that management theories seem to have decided that certain things coming together will facilitate employee engagement (though no two agree on what), but they look at completely different ways of describing highly motivated and successful leaders. One group of leadership gurus found that the examples leaders gave of their "career best experiences" had something in common. Those experiences occurred when they were working in an organization that needed the competencies they were good at and were passionate about. Isn't it just that simple for employees? Before offering/accepting a job or promotion, employees and employer need to agree that 1) the candidate would be good at the job (not just someone who excelled in a previous job and was due a promotion), 2) the organization needs and rewards the things the employee is good at, and 3) the employee feels passionate about getting the things done the job requires. They call this the "sweet spot." Applying this concept to having the majority of employees finding their sweet spots would mean that the organization would know what kinds of employee skills and behaviors are truly needed and valued, there would be a training/development program geared to finding and developing people with those skills, and making assignments of people based on what they truly enjoy doing. I'm not sure how employee communication would make any of that happen.


KD

Hooray! a debate about a term that's not properly understood, not universally defined and probably no better at getting to beneficial organisation outcomes than good, old fashioned job satisfaction.

I wonder if the fad gurus have got organisations so fired up about another sticking plaster solution to what essentially is poor management, that they don't care that it's not universally agreed and if there is no proper (and tested) definition, it can't be measured in any way accurately.

Iit's highly unfashionable - not to mention financial suicide - for consultants to be so post modern in their views, but I too wonder about the ethics of trying to "engage" employees past the normal activities of their role. The decline of trust in organisations, the slavish attention to the shareholders means that employees KNOW - whatever the management says - that they are a cost on the balance sheet and can be "trimmed". In which case, where does the whole concept of engagement fit in?

And even the definition of the term is so managerial, it's doesn't really allow for the possibility of two way discussion(MK). However, unlike AS, I do think that IC has a role to play here if only to support the whole idea of voice that is a major part of some of the older (and less fashionable) models which once guided the development and creation of jobs. This thinking also had feedback as a crucial element of how employees feel about their role and while this is primarily line manager led, it can also be a corporate responsibility.

But for me, the key objection to the whole notion of engagement is that it doesn't work without trust. Trust has been (and still is) in short supply, with UK public sector organisations in particular glancing nervously over their shoulders wondering when the 14-26% cuts are going to hit, and who will get the chop.

OK - rant over and I'm going to go and watch some mindless TV.

ST
So many views, so little consensus, and no surprise. I rest my case on why I believe noone will ever come up with a better terminology than 'employee engagement' despite its flaws.
I AM AN EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT CONSULTANT - GET OVER IT!
Despite the valid diversity of viewpoints I cannot believe that anyone would ever question the role that employee communications plays in engagement.
However, I do believe that when your only tool in your toolkit is a hammer, every problem is a nail.
Without putting a spanner in the works (pun intended) how about a debate around the value of measurement vs communication in driving employee engagement?

AS

In spite of my earlier comment, I do believe communication plays many different possible roles in enhancing the chances that engagement can occur. I even wrote an article for Melcrum a few years ago about Linking Communication to Engagement--and the link happens through research. So...I don't see the issue as the value of measurement VS. communication; they work together.


AMcK

This debate is important - both parts of your question are entirely valid Mark, as is each response above. I remember a heated debate on this and getting very frustrated - to me this definiton is a great example of how our industry has taken something that's hugely emotive and means something different to each person, and tried to over define and over-process it. If I remember rightly, the whole concept arose out of decades of academic research (the concept of 'affective commitment' isn't it?) that became trendy c. 2000 with the talent wars etc.

So each employer knows that if people feels good about the work they do they do it better and will contribute more. And each person in the organsition (at all levels and roles) feels more equipped to give their best if the culture allows them to and they feel it supports them, is genuine and initiatives not contrived. So we want to spread a positive emotion, and then go at it in a formulaic and programmatic way? I guess it's about balancing the risk - but for comms practitioners this is a very difficult balance.

Internal Comms is crucial to any engagement 'programme' as Angela says. How can we achieve any progress across an organsiation without effective communication of some sort? But Mark's points on the wider ingredients of the content and perception of comms (leaders' behaviours, policies etc) are also pertinent. Should the IC team own engagement? We go full circle to owning that emotion, that 'click', that feeling of connection that engaged people and engaged organisations have.

Like any good role brief, I think it comes down to clearly defining what the end goal (success) is to be and then both sides understanding what they're asking of each other. Maybe that would bring clarity to Sean's prompt above. And I hope there'd be different answers from place to place...

Making comms integral to business strategy

I've got a '10 top tips' piece in this month's Communicators magazine from CiB that bears repeating here:

10 top tips on making internal communication integral to business strategy

Internal communicators have a tough job in tough times – helping to engage people across the organisation in getting the job done, often against a backdrop of shrinking budgets, job cuts and everyone being asked to do more with less.

Many communicators haven’t experienced a recession before, and aren’t clear on how to bring the best value to the businesses they serve. But by focusing on business outcomes rather than communication outputs, they can demonstrate real value to their organisation – both in keeping engagement high, and in preparing for the upturn.

Here are my ten top tips on making communication integral to business strategy:

1. Understand key business drivers Make sure you understand where your organisation is heading; why it has chosen a particular direction and how it plans to get there. That way you can tailor communication to provide direct support for the strategy.

2. Understand the people drivers Know what makes people get up for work and keep coming back and make sure you know how communication can keep them engaged.

3. Recognise that there’s only one business strategy Your communication plan must be a recognised part of that strategy. If you’re operating in parallel, there’s far more room for a disconnect.

4. Internal Communication is part of the business planning process Long gone are the days when a decision is made and then we communicate it. Make sure you and your team have a voice at the business planning table.

5. Create a compelling narrative Work with your senior team to create – and regularly update – an honest, open storyline that explains where the business is; its key challenges and how everyone can play a part in delivering successful outcomes. This should underpin all communication activity.

6. Plan, prioritise and be decisive They key to effective internal communication in a downturn is doing a few things well. Focus on what’s essential and be ruthless in ditching the ‘nice to haves’.

7. Set objectives, success criteria roles and responsibilities The object is to move the business forward – work out how communication will do that; and how you’ll know you’ve achieved your aims.

8. Think impact, not output Internal communication is about helping people achieve business goals. So find the way to achieve that goal most effectively rather than automatically opting for the ‘prestige’ communication tools.

9. Empower others Effective internal communication is the responsibility of everyone in an organisation – it’s not just down to the comms team. But give people the skills and tools to play an active and positive part and make it easy for them to comply with the process.

10. Be an objective expert Be seen as the fount of communication expertise that will improve your organisation’s fortunes. Keep in close and direct contact with key leaders and influencers at all levels. Don’t be submissive or subversive and work on influencing the influencers.

Mark Shanahan is a director of Leapfrog Corporate Communication which bridges the gap between strategic consultancies and tactical communication agencies. He will be leading the CiB ‘From Output to Outcome’ training course in London on April 28th. Full details are available at www.cib.uk.com.

New course date for 'output to outcome'

I'll be running a revamped and updated version of my From Output to Outcome course through CiB on April 28th in London.

Here's the blurb:

The global economic downturn has placed ever greater responsibility on internal communicators to add tangible value to their organisation. That means being seen to deliver more for the business than simply managing corporate media. This courses links internal communication directly to business strategy so that communicators are delivering communication outcomes that directly contribute to driving the business forward.

You will learn how to:

• make communication an integral part of the business planning process


• use challenge and build with business leaders


• shine when the going gets tough


• think impact first, media second


• make communication a process - not a series of set-piece events


• use the line more effectively to manage messages and response


• manage the communication needs of different audiences


• embrace 'horses for courses'


• create learning loops.
  

There will also be hints and tips on how communicators can be the conscience, challenge, diplomat, creative genius and commercial guru every organisation needs when times are tough.

About the tutor

Mark Shanahan began his career with a three year stint on Which? magazine, before joining the PR department at Nationwide Building Society in 1989. He subsequently held communication management roles at Barclays Bank and the Forte Hotel Group and has been a director of Leapfrog Corporate Communications for the past nine years. During that time he has worked on major change programmes within Diageo and Orange and has also worked with a wide range of private and public service communication clients, including Aviva, the BBC, CMS Cameron McKenna, Northamptonshire County Council, UBM and United Utilities.

Full booking details are here

Is it always the communicator's fault?

This seems to be becoming my Monday morning habit now - warm up for the working week with a blog entry. Actually, it's a habit I'll aim to break swiftly. However, the pace of work did pick up last week meaning I hadn't got too much time to stop and take stock of what was going on around me.

One thing I got caught up in towards the end of the week was the debate around CiB's proposed change of name - part of the package for the organisation to focus ever more on internal communication and, eventually, reach the status of chartered Institute.

Some freelancers are getting irate on two fronts. One, that the CiB awards are now focused only on IC categories, and two, that they haven't been made aware of the name change proposal.

On the first point, I'm fully in favour of CiB tightening its criteria, sharpening its focus and making a concrete move to grab the internal comms high ground. It's a brave move and one that probably should have taken place years ago. But all credit to the Board who are making it happen now. More power to them.

I found myself - from a position of ordinary member without office - defending them on the second point as six or eight freelancers chipped in that they hadn't heard about the name change.

From what I can tell, it's a proposed change that will be voted on in May. It has been actively discussed for almost two years, and has featured in Communicators, the chairman's blog, Council papers and on the CiB website. Yet this was clearly seen as not enough.

One member said: "For an organisation that aspires to be the Institute of Internal Communications this is really a very poor example of communication. Members should not have to read a chairman's blog or delve through the website to know what is being planned. When internal comms fail it is the fault of the communicators not the audience."

And thereby lies the rub with volunteer-run member organisations. They can't be a one way street. For one thing here we're talking about the early stages of a significant shift that's designed to put CiB at the heart of the internal communication debate. But the key communication campaign was never set to start until the new year, so we're all getting our shots off early on this one anyway.

Second, in a volunteer-run member organisation members should have to do a little work to ensure they're connected with what's going on - especially if they are communicators themselves. Surely we should be interested enough in the organisation to take the time to read what's sent out? Surely we should be helping to set the agenda not meekly following it - or rumbling on discontentedly when it doesn't fit our personal circumstances?

Sometimes I despair.

Communication is a two-way relationship. However good the communication, there will always be some who choose not to listen.

It seems we can take the horses to water, but we can't make them walk on it.

To work with the leaders, be seen as a leader

It's easy for internal communicators - however senior we are - to tag along for the ride as second class citizens in leading our organisations. In too many, we're valued for our skill in turning the ideas of others into neat communication packages.

While the going's good, it's easy to breeze along and pick up communication awards without really trying. Yet the best communicators will come into their own now, not for their ability to craft clever messages, but by being an essential part of the leadership team, prompting, challenging and directing to help steer the organisation through to safer waters.

This week's Melcrum Source newsletter points to some of the characteristics communicators need to show if they're to be valued rather than tolerated at Board level. They're all good, and I don't question any of the points Geri Rhoades puts forward.

She opines:

• Be courageous.
• Be curious.
• Point out the possibilities.
• Be knowledgeable.
• Listen.

I'd add a few more:

• Be challenging - no-one in your organisation will know more about internal/organisational communication than you. Show your expertise (as long as you can justify it.). Challenge the status quo and be an effective contributor to business debates, not a scribe or a doormat.
• Be a leader - run your own team in an exemplary way and take that leadership into the boardroom. Even if you don't have board status, act as though you do (without being arrogant). Demonstrate you've a right to be there by virtue of your skills and input - and of course back them with excellent execution. Act as an equal among function managers - they may have more resource, but are no more expert than you.
• Be different - most boardrooms are stuffed with lawyers and accountants who 'get' the balance sheets and operate by them. Then there'll be HR people who understand the policies and the impacts...but perhaps aren't the most creative tools in the box. Sales will be figures-led, and marketing will be interested only in customer impact. Comms, in whatever form comes from a different angle. You absolutely need to know what makes the business tick and what drives its success, but you'll be best placed to talk about what drives those within the business. The tools of communication are merely a start point now. You need to have a very high level of political business knowledge and awareness of the impact of each of the drivers. But you'll earn more than grudging respect if you have mastery of what engages people to deliver those drivers.

Slow on the uptake

Melcrum's Source for Communicators took me aback slightly today when among Kathy Collura's five suggestions for communicators coping with employee angst she stated: Connect the employee communication plan with the external communication plan The messages about jobs, paychecks, retirement and benefits are specific to employees but these messages should be linked to the business and industry messages going to external audiences.

Hello Kathy, but where have you been this past decade? Or is this just a sign that employee comms in the US is some way behind Europe.

For all my time in Leapfrog and even before, I've dealt with issues communication - as have most of my peers around me. Today's employees are shareholders, customers and vociferous members of their employer's local community.

Even back in my corporate days we looked at issues and defined the appropriate audiences for them, cutting across the artificial internal/external boundaries.

Employee communication should never be dealt with in isolation. If it's to be credible, it has to be bound up into one seamless corporate communication plan that identifies all of the audiences to be engaged, and builds the appropriate relationships with them.

It's quite shocking that Melcrum and Collura seem only to be waking up to this now.

Cutting closer to home

Before trimming back my more strategic consultancy work to concentrate on the MA, I was an associate of one of the UK's better-known HR consultancies.

For the six years I was involved with them, working on occasional projects, they worked hard to build a communications and engagement practice. However, I saw today that even the best are struggling in this credit crunch when I received a note saying:

"We have taken the decision to move to a purely associate model for the delivery of Engagement and Communication Strategies. Whilst many clients recognise the importance of this work, the current economic climate means that it is not sustainable to continue to retain internal resource in this area. There will be a total of 7 post closures......"

Now, from what I can tell, they are creating other HR consultancy roles, but not in IC so some pretty skilled practitioners are going to be out of a job. This is the first time that the current downturn has struck close to home for me. I suspect it won't be the last.

In the great scheme of things.....

My second term at Brunel finished last Friday, which will undoubtedly usher in a change of pace over the next few months, when I can lean more towards paid work with less emphasis on studies until September. It was a good term work-wise, and my last four essays have produced three A grades - not bad for someone old enough to have fathered more than half the class!

What the academic work - especially a term taking a close interest in 20th century European history - has taught me most though is the peripheral impact of so much of the work I'm involved in that pays the bills.

At the moment, only about a third of my work is internal communications but I'm coming ever more to the sense that in the great scheme of things, it's a 'nice to have', not a 'must have'.

Would the credit crunch have been averted if we'd had better internal comms? I doubt it. Would China's human rights be better or Darfur a nicer place if corporations engaged their staff more closely? Somehow, I think not. Would the forecast 10,000 job losses set to hit London be avoidable if our CEOs tapped into the business potential of employee comms. Well, a few certainly....but I expect quite a few who'll go are from the so-called back-office functions.

Jaundiced as I am after 20 years in corporate comms, I firmly believe that 75% + of what internal communicators do could disappear from the business and no-one would feel the difference.

The very best of what's done: the stuff that targets the right audiences in the right way and gives them something personal that directly affects the way they do their job is worthwhile. That's the stuff that's directly business-linked; that builds people's belief and understanding in their business and that directly, tangibly and measurably drives results.

The rest? Nice to have, but non-essential and in an increasingly tight market, undoubtedly under threat.

But business needs to be smart. To cull internal communication indiscriminately will hurt the business more than keeping it as it is. Business leaders must reflect on where the real value lies: trim off the excess by all means, but focus on business objectives and the human agenda collides.

We could be achieving far more with less if we focused on what really mattered.

Recognising business value - not the best use of a comma in a built-up area

Once again it's awards season and I'm frustrated as ever by the internal communications industry's abiding fascination with recognising publications - in whatever form they're produced - rather than their business impact.

Whether it's CiB, IABC or any of the other industry award bodies, we're too often judged in a beauty parade on the look and feel of our publications rather than on how they achieve business success and what value they bring to the organisation they represent. That's horribly skewed thinking.

External publications exist to generate sales and turn a nice profit. Therefore, they need to look good and read well to stand out from the competition. They need to understand their audience implicitly and appeal to whatever the instinct is that generates a purchasing decision.

Internal communication is different - for one thing, readers don't pay for that magazine or intranet - and many choose to ignore the content foisted on them. We can't judge these publications in the same terms.

Shouldn't we be looking instead at their objectives within a corporate business strategy and how well they've delivered on those objectives? Wouldn't it be great to be the communicator who could stand up and say 'My communication won an award because we could show how it contributed to my organisation's success.' It's absolutely about understanding the readership and connecting with them - but to a business end, and that's not all about looking sleek and glossy.

An award based on a measure of true, tangible and measurable business value would be far for powerful to me than simply to have picked up a fairly meaningless certificate in a beauty parade.

Great idea - shame about the old news

Ragan sent me my first daily headlines today - whoopee - a daily round-up of all that's hip and happening in IC. The one that caught my eye was the new research giving the lowdown on the state of IC in the UK. Only one problem: the research is six months old and was first presented at the CiB Annual Conference in May.

So Ragan guys - many congrats on getting your daily headlines out......but you may have shot yourselves in the foot just a tad with your breaking news that's six months old.

We do have the CiB IC Index survey for inhouse IC professionals about to close....maybe some of Ragan's readers would like to contribute? There are just a few days left..... and I'm sure we can share the results with Ragan rather sooner after they're published than today's first effort.

Several steps away from the board; working for HR or Corporate Comms....but the budgets are getting bigger

CiB are running a survey to gauge where in house communicators sit in terms of seniority, budgetary control and to look at the kind of work they're involved in. The survey's also looking at the relationship between CEOs and IC.

I've had a look at the early results, and while it's too early to draw too many conclusions, the function still seems largely split between Corp Comms and HR control; no-one so far is operating at board level, and there are a fair few loan IC-ers out there.

What's encouraging is that there seems to be more budget for IC than a few years ago and, most encouragingly, more budget as a proportional spend when compared with external comms.

The survey's set to run for a wee while yet, so if you haven't had a chance to complete it, why not give it a five minute whirl now?

Do you do, or do you manage?

I've been developing some survey material for CiB this month looking at trends in internal comms - and particularly who's currently involved in-house.

One of the questions fascinating me is around whether today's in-house communicators are actually doing the communicating or managing others to do it for them.

The trend across the board in organisations is to slim down and focus on core business. That means organisations employing fewer, more skilled people directly who are involved in the heart of the business, and outsourcing non core services to specialist suppliers.

I'm beginning to see this more and more in IC where the traditional in-house agency is being slimmed to one or two professionals. They haven't the time to plan, craft, disseminate and measure the impact of the corporate message day to day, so are becoming more and more reliant on 3rd party support to make IC happen. It's great for people like me - but does it mean that in-house communicators will merely become managers of the word, unskilled in actually bringing it to life?

Call me old-school, but I believe great craft communication skills should be the start point for any corporate communication manager. It's not enough to be able to sweat suppliers and bring comms in on budget each year. That way, blandness, dumbing down and poor communication lies.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if this particular perceived trend is borne out in the survey findings.

La mere, la mere

I know when I need a holiday: it's when I start waking up in the night with work on my mind. And it has been happening all week - generally, I've been able to turn over and go straight back to sleep, but on Monday night I just couldn't drift off again. i ended up answering a few emails and editing 34 pages of tender document that a client was about to send out to suppliers.......Funny enough, 34 pages of small print did the trick.

It's great to be really busy but I'm looking forward to hitting the beach in France in not too many days.

While I'm currently enjoying the mix of a change project, writing content for a consultant's new website, a job editing a benefits web package, writing profiles for a careers web site, writing the next issue of my law firm mag and editing a new bartender guide, I'm equally looking forward to putting them all to one side for a fortnight. I'm determined not to be logging on to my laptop all holiday to see how things are progressing without me - I know they'll all do perfectly well without me, and I need to clear my mind.

I won't be clearing it entirely though. if you want something done, ask a busy man, and I'm now in the process of putting a book proposal together covering a small but significant period on one of Britain's historic houses. The National Trust are very interested and we've got a meeting set for early September. But if that comes off, it'll be a labour of love and won't feel like work at all.

Anyway, I'm not in France yet, so it's back to editing benefits.

My generation...not

I'm working on a survey which will be issued in September covering two issues: who are today's internal communication practitioners, and what they think of their CEOs as communicators.

I did a bit of pre-work on this at a conference in Newcastle the other month, and that small sample showed a growing divergence between the old guard and new breed of comms pros.

I'm towards the younger end of the old guard, but started my professional life on a magazine, and have mixed in-house comms jobs with a few years at a PR agency and, latterly, seven years as an independent. My basic toolbox is words - I trained as a journalist and have spent my career either using words or getting others to use them. I gained management experience through seniority and probably age and have gained business experience as the comms guy brought into business projects.

Not so my younger business acquaintances. Very few have come through the journalism route. Their tool kit is their ability to bring in the right people to craft, deliver and measure the messages they manage. They've been trained for management and many have degrees in business studies - giving them a great head start in understanding the drivers within organisations. Many have come from HR or marketing or are stepping through comms as part of a graduate programme. Their perspective on what's important in comms can be very different from mine.

Neither the old guard nor the new young guns have the monopoly on what's right in comms today and there's much we can learn from each other. However, i suspect the survey will show that we're heading to a tipping point where the business skill that is IC will diverge forever from external straightforward journalism. When that divergence finally happens, the trick will be to ensure that communicators never dump the core craft skills of great writing and editing. They're definitely not an end in themselves in IC - but they still make by far the best start point for great careers.

After the Lord Mayor's show

Last week was a good week - hectic and challenging up front, with a curate's egg of a conference to follow.

I'd taken on a workshop at short notice so spent Wednesday in one of those classic windowless conference rooms provided by older hotels talking catering strategies with a disparate group from across the UK and Ireland. There was just time to change when I got home before hitting the motorway for a drive up to Newcastle - 280 miles when I was already feeling tired.

I was peripherally involved in the organisation of the CiB's Annual Conference which culminated in a glitzy awards evening attended by almost 400 people.

The conference attracted about a third of that number and when not trying to talk to members about their issues and thoughts on the Association, I was able to attend some of the sessions - and what a mixed bag it was.

To be honest, the first day worried me. There was no 'wow' factor, and the event was pitched at too low a level. The senior communicators I met were restive, after the likes of Shay McConnon had told us at great length about the basics of business relationship building (a few great nuggets, but stretched to nearly an hour - and delivered quite aggressively!) and Dr. Steven Windmill had told us how he'd won the war....single handed (at least that's what he sounded as though he was talking about). The lesson learned? Never book a speaker unless you've seen them in action. The CiB audience is bright, demanding, savvy - and a bit more senior than one might expect. Ever more, we demand stronger speakers.

Steve Bevan of the Work Foundation took us through some interesting , though not ground breaking, findings from IC.UK Work Foundation Survey which begged the question - is the UK falling behind the field? Social communication hardly got a mention and the survey appeared to show we're still a nation of Generation Xers using our tried and testeds to communicate to (and occasionally with) the Yers and after now rapidly advancing in organisations.

Somehow, it felt like a trick was missed.

Thankfully, Friday showed the upside of the conference Ben Page from Ipsos Mori was great; I particularly enjoyed the crap-cutting Judith Thomas ex-of 10 Downing Street, and apparently (though I'd scuttled off elsewhere), Em Whitfield Brooks and Jim Montague from The Sage had the participants on their feet and singing.

My gut feel was that the conference was pitched too low. We needed more Ben Pages and fewer Steven Windmills - and getting 60 people singing was probably more for a workshop than a plenary session (the fact that half the participants weren't in the room says quite a lot). Actually, we needed more workshops and less chalk and talk.

The evening dinners were carried off with panache and the look and feel of the conference was good - all credit to the organisers. But it suffers from being coupled with the Awards dinner.

Too many people attend conference only as a forerunner to the Awards. Therefore we get agency bias and too may people involved whose focus is creating great media rather than digging deeper into the drivers that will enable communication to unlock organisational success.

I came away feeling that what I know has been validated rather than that I'd learned anything new.

I'd love to go to a CiB Conference in a few years' time and really be challenged. I'd love to come away feeling uncomfortable: feeling that I had to change to keep up. This felt a little too cosy - and dominated by the Awards evening.

I carried most of the conference kit back in my car - and spent yesterday's Bank Holiday catching up on the work I'd missed while up in Newcastle.

This morning's back to reality and the 'down' that inevitably hits after a big week. Anyway, it's straight back in today and little time to reflect.

Thoughts from far down the food chain

There always comes a time in the year when I get a little worried. It's when the phone's not ringing and the workload looks a little thin. I'm there at the moment. I shouldn't be worried. A new piece of work starts tomorrow, and one of my regular magazines will start grinding its wheels in the next week or so.

Yet, for the last three days I've been treading water - and I'm no good whatsoever at the froggy stroke.

I operate fairly far down the decision-making food chain, and am suffering at the moment from slow decision making higher up that chain. In one instance, a project has been far slower to get off the blocks that I'd hoped - my meeting tomorrow morning should move it on, but the decision's not in my hands. What had been budgeted as a medium sized piece of work seems to have shrunk - and even the piece I originally did back in February remains billed but not paid.

I've also been in pitching mood recently. A few slightly bigger fish have called on me to reinforce their bidding teams and we've put some good, inventive and cost effective proposals together. But the clients - or in one case, the clients' clients are still circling. Now at the top of the chain, a month's delay on internal comms activity is pretty unimportant - in fact they probably don't even see it as a delay. For their consultancy, it's an inconvenience, but there are other pressing projects they can redeploy their consultants on. For their agency, it's a bit of a nightmare. The goalposts keep moving, they keep revisiting a shifting brief; a lot of time is spent meeting the new goals....and then those posts shift again. For me, in this case right at the tactical end of the project, it's sheer frustration. Do I start chasing new work and abandon a potentially attractive project, or hold on in the hope that the clients will finally land on action.

For me it's the above scenario times three at the moment, plus a couple of smaller projects I've pitched directly where I'm still waiting on any response.

It's at times like this that I wish I had the support system of an employer around me. But for the last seven years, when I've reached this point before, something McCawber-like has happened: something's turned up. It's never through luck, and most often has come from a few phone calls, emails and good connections. I hope Mr. McCawber's still on my side.

Let's not get hung up on strategy

Every now and again I get accused, in the most vehement terms, of being a 'strategist' or worse still, a 'strategic consultant'.

It's odd that, since I don't actually believe in communication strategies.

Somehow, a communications strategy aggrandises organisational communication. As far as I'm concerned, successful organisations will have a clear, tangible, measurable and deliverable business strategy, and communication will be one of the tools - I'd say one of the top three tools - to deliver that strategy.

To have a separate communication strategy is to immediately put space between the business strategy and communication - when the latter should be at the heart of the former. All our communication objectives should be to deliver the business strategy and if our work is not enabling that delivery, then we probably shouldn't be doing it.

What gets me too is how often strategy gets bandied around when people are actually talking about the tactics they'll use - the channels, media and messages - to deliver a business objective.

So let's tread warily around strategies - especially one that are not 100% in line with business objectives, the whole area can get communications a bad name.

It's a balancing act

I met with a headhunter this week - always flattering when it happens, and I've got a lot of time for this company as they placed me in roles twice earlier in my career.

I'm now seven years into running a 'micro-business' and frankly, it'd take a lot of money, a great degree of autonomy and probably a saint-like boss to get me back into a corporate role.......but never say never.

Anyway, it was 90 minutes to talk about myself, my strengths and my weaknesses in the context of a couple of big-brand role possibilities. I know I thrive when I'm given the freedom to use my expertise and experience, and equally, I wither when I'm stuck within a command and control environment.

Through several bitter experiences over the past few years, I know now never to touch projects in businesses where communication is run by a calendar or where there's even a hint of bosses looking only to manage upwards rather than for the good of their teams and the business around them.

Instead, I find my most satisfying work comes from organisations looking to use communication instinctively as a means to move their business forward. These tend to be the ones who've built a lot of experience in knowing what really engages their teams, their suppliers and their customers, and who then bring in a small team of 'regular' outsiders to work with closely and often. I've got three of four clients I go back to again and again and always strive to surprise even myself in delivering my very best for them.

It's tough therefore to meet with someone - as also happened this week - who seems quite intent with doing away with all the good within the comms department they've inherited.

Over the last couple of years I've got used to being briefed on a job by someone a clear decade and more younger than me. While I'm a long way from my pension, I am a 40-something, and many managers with a lot of responsibility and a budget to match are in their late 20s/early 30s.

The person I pitched to is around 30, an MBA, fast-tracked through their business and now heading communication having never worked in comms before. They clearly see their HR background as sufficient grounding to be expert in internal communication and engagement. This week I was asked to pitch for a project that will manage all communications as two businesses within the group are merged into one. It's the kind of stuff I've done since Nationwide days in the very late 80s. I've worked through such change both in-house and as a consultant for more than 15 years, yet my 'brief' seemed merely to write down what this manager wanted at the most tactical level, and then present back her 'solution' to her on a costed basis.

That could be great, and a really easy pitch...except her ideas are terribly flawed.

Now my role has to be a balancing act. Client-consultant relationships can be fantastic when both sides are prepared to learn from each other and flex according to the needs of the project. Presented with just the outline brief for the prospective 'change' project, my questions were around how this manager's team would be involved; how we'd bring line management in and what was happening to bring in influencers and key players on each side of the merger together to take the project forward.

But I got an hour's spiel on how the change was being managed centrally; how one of the big management consultancies had already modelled a solution and would be implementing this for the client. Communicatons looked to be a series of newsletters following a key town hall meeting where the assembled mergees would be adressed by the group's top team. the people who normally managed the local IC would be kept on business as usual whilke I - or whoever got the project - would be parachuted in to deliver comms at the behest of the management consultants.

Frankly, that's a recipe for disaster. Yet as a supplier looking for good and interesting work, i couldn't just come out and say that. It was a case of listening, biting my tongue, gently probing around how some issues might be dealt with, and trying to polan a response that would deliver a good job and not offend the client.

Yesterday, I spent many hours on a costed comms plan outline detailing my rather more involving approach. I was polite, provided evidence of why such an approach should work and outlined counter-arguments to the consultant-led, fairly reactive approach....mostly around how change fails when it's imposed on people.

I was less than surprised to get a 30 second call at the end of the day from the particular manager stating that I was no longer being considered for the project as my 'interpretation of her needs was not in keeping with her requirements' (who speaks like that??).

I was equally unsurprised when a former colleague of mine, a comms executive working for the new uber-manager, and my initial lead-in to the project prospect e-mailed me earlier today to say she'd tendered her notice.

Some people seem to think the only way to make a mark on their business is to chuck out everything that has gone before.

Perhaps if they listened a little more and were sufficiently secure to learn from their peers and long-standing team members, they'd make just as strong a mark.....but a positive and lasting one.