However, there are two significant obstacles preventing continuing development in practice:

- Senior managers don’t always appreciate that  internal communication, if practised strategically, will improve employee  engagement

- Though keen in principle to develop practice,  many internal communication practitioners are reluctant to push the boundaries.

As one focus group participant put it: “Internal communications practitioners are not brave enough”. Opening up internal communication to provide employees with more of a voice is going to be very challenging in some organisations. So, quite naturally, internal communicators sometimes back away from going down this path.

This is not to decry the critical importance of keeping employees informed through professional, timely, relevant communication which is what most internal communicators spend most of their time on. It’s just to say that on its own this is never going to shift employee engagement that much.

We’ll be talking to senior managers in 2012 to get their side of the story. In the meantime, how brave are we, as an emerging profession, prepared to be to move practice on to another, more strategic, level?

To read the full report go to www.pracademy.co.uk

The key findings suggest that internal communicators know that they hold the key to employee engagement but senior managers fail to see the benefits; only 24 per cent of practitioners believe that the board think communication is really important.

Internal communication practitioners say they spend most of their time on basic functional and operational communication. However, 81 per cent want to give more attention to employee research and feedback and 71 per cent want to spend more time on strengthening line manager and team communication – two important drivers for engagement.

The research reinforces anecdotal comments made by many CIPR Internal Communication Certificate and Diploma students. As one survey respondent said, “senior leaders have a very cavalier attitude to employees, they don’t trust them.” It is clear to me that internal communicators want – and need – to get in to the driving seat and leaders are doing themselves and their organisations a disservice by not encouraging more employee research and feedback.

With employee engagement levels stagnating in the UK at around 35 per cent, a quick way to tap into innovation and engagement through internal communication is staring senior managers in the face. However, I believe that practitioners have a responsibility too. They can’t always expect organisations to hand opportunities to them on a plate, they have to articulate the business case and demonstrate how the internal communication adds value to employee engagement and performance.

I will be presenting more details from the research at the CIPR Inside “Face the Change” Conference on 6 October and the full report will be available free of charge from the end of October. Register here for your copy.

The bigger question is why aren’t practitioners a bit more assertive, like their colleagues in HR or marketing, in pressing their case? What do you think?

And then some of them come back again. It’s often a bit of a consultancy merry-go-round.

Sometimes it’s hard to work out what’s a fad and what’s a genuine paradigm shift in thinking. For example, some organisational psychologists believe that employee engagement is a fad. I think this is a bit limiting and agree with the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) that employee engagement is more than just a passing phase. It’s a further, deep, realisation that people respond to being treated as people, not just cogs in a wheel. Of course, this is not new in itself. However, employee engagement, in its broadest sense as outlined by MacLeod and Clarke,  challenges the reward, recognition and performance management school of HR thinking that still holds sway in many organisations.  We’ve been focused on performance management for a long time now and engagement levels remain doggedly low at around 35 per cent. Clearly, it isn’t working.

The answer is not another fad tool or buzz name for getting people to talk to each other more. The truth is that the answer to raising levels of engagement is staring senior managers in the face. All that’s required is to recognise that internal communication is a fundamental component for employee engagement, if, and it is a big “if”, it is practised professionally. By that I mean keeping employees informed in ways that they value and giving employees a voice based on them feeling well informed. It still amazes me that internal communication is not always mentioned in the same breath as employee engagement.  A recent Dale Carnegie white paper is a case in point.

This past week, I’ve been involved in analysing the results of a survey I’ve been running with Sean Trainor, the Chair of CIPR Inside and Uber Engagement consultant.  It was designed to see what practitioners are spending their time on and what they’d like to spend their time on. We’ve had 350 responses and the results are very revealing and suggest we have a way to go before employee feedback is a commonplace activity.

More details about the research will be highlighted at the CIPR Inside conference on 6 October.  This is going to be a different kind of conference. Not only will there be some great case study presentations about practice, there will also be some theatre and a session on establishing some fundamentals for the development of internal communication as a profession.

Ultimately, it’s fundamentals that count, not fads.

But I am fascinated by what numbers can tell you. Seventy per cent of change management projects fail to achieve their objectives – that’s a telling stat.

In my own research I recently examined twelve leading academic and consultancy studies representing 10,928 respondents. What I found is that general employee satisfaction with internal communication ranges from 53 per cent to 64 per cent. Around 60 per cent of employees say they understand where the organisation is headed. These are great benchmark figures that can be used by all practitioners as the basis for objective setting and measurement in their own organisation.

Because of the disparity in a lot of existing survey tools, my supervisor at UCLan, Dr. Mary Welch, has developed a new organisational communication survey that is based on academic theory. I’m going to be piloting it in the autumn and we’ll see how it goes. The aim is to develop a widely accepted, robust, survey that includes linkages between internal communication and employee engagement.

In the meantime, I’m doing some practitioner based research about internal communication with the CIPR Inside group. This incorporates a survey asking practitioners about the way that internal communication is currently practised and what they’d like to focus on more in the future. We’ve already had more than 300 responses and some interesting trends are emerging. The survey is being combined with focus groups and interviews and the initial findings will be revealed at the CIPR Inside Conference on 6 October. The full report will then be made available later in the year.

More than 70 papers were submitted and delegates from around 20 different countries were present. As a venue for an academic conference, it’s hard to beat, in Vila Bled, on the shore of Lake Bled in Slovenia.

A wide variety of internal communication perspectives were presented. These ranged from change and crisis communication, to employer branding, engagement, identity in virtual organisations, networks, language, ethics, culture and education. The scope of topics and academic interest is clear evidence that internal communication is firmly on the agenda within academic public relations circles.

Three themes emerged at the conference:

- There is a lack of established internal communication theory

-There is a growing demand for internal communication education

- Internal communication is an inter-disciplinary activity; it cannot prosper from an isolationist position.

For some delegates, the first two themes are problematic; how can we teach internal communication if there is no theory? This does pose challenges. However, the approach taken on CIPR Internal Communication qualifications is to provide relevant insights from the fields of management, psychology, communication, engagement and public relations. This enables practitioners to think more deeply about practice and manage their approaches more strategically.

The longer term solution is for academics to develop theory rather than bemoan the lack of it. Bledcom 2011 is a start. It would have been great to see more papers that tackle this issue more directly. Roxana Maiorescu from Purdue University captured attention with a breathless and walkabout presentation style on her paper on applying Goffman’s concept of framing to internal communication. This was a rare example of an attempt to use established theory from another field to move internal communication theory on.

Nigel de Bussy from Curtin University, Australia, provided some ground-breaking research that shows a clear association with internal communication, based on dialogue, and corporate financial performance. This is a paper that will provide practitioners with some great evidence to show the C-suite how internal communication generates real financial returns.

Laoise O’Murchu from the Dublin Institute of Technology, provided the results from her current PhD research and a model of internal communication assessment that again will have a real practical use for practitioners.

Former CIPR Internal Communication Diploma student, Laura Smith, like Roxana, made a brave attempt to do something new, this time in relation to the ethics of internal communication. This is a topic that rarely gets a mention and as internal communication continues to grow in importance, the ethics of what we do is bound, finally, to generate wider interest.

There were many other interesting presentations, too many to mention here. All the slide packs will be made available later this month.

My own presentation included a review of the way that internal communication is measured.

Bledcom 2011 is a watershed in the professionalization of internal communication. It is now up to academics and practitioners to pick up on what was presented and to move it forward.

In 2009 only 11% of Torbay Council staff felt that morale was good. As a result, an internal communications function was set up from scratch with limited budget and minimal resources. Nicola Moorhouse and her colleagues should be immensely proud of the work they have done to transform the way employees engage with the council. Nicola has introduced an engaging approach, which, through involving employees at every stage, has led to an incredible increase in morale to 68%!

It’s always good to have a measure to demonstrate the impact of communication. However, the chair of CIPR Excellence Awards judges highlighted that this still remains an issue in many of the entries submitted.

With this in mind, I attended the International Association of Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) summit in Lisbon last week. I met lots of interesting people representing agencies that measure the impact of communication for clients. As far as I could tell, delegates were overwhelmingly working in the field of external communication measurement. Three themes emerged from the summit:

- Measurement of PR campaigns and programs needs to become an intrinsic part of the PR toolkit

- Create and adopt global standards for social media measurement

- Institute a client education program such that clients insist on measurement of outputs, outcomes and business results from PR programs

The same points could equally apply to internal communication. In my experience in talking to hundreds of internal communication practitioners who have studied CIPR qualifications, the inclusion of measurement in plans is quite rare. Standards for internal communication measurement do exist, though they are perhaps outdated, particularly in relation to measuring internal social media and linkages to employee engagement. When it comes to education, CIPR Internal Communication qualifications do include a focus on measurement of outputs, outcomes and business results.

My Phd thesis is focused on the measurement of internal communication, so it has been interesting to understand issues in the external communication measurement world in more depth. The aim of the research is to test a new internal communication measurement tool being developed by Dr. Mary Welch at the University of Central Lancashire that could ultimately become a robust standard for the industry that is the basis for sound planning.

A student on the current Internal Communication Diploma is conducting research for her assignment to explore the notion that employee engagement can actually go up in times of major change. I think she is on to something really exciting and look forward to seeing the results.

At the LGComms Academy in Nottingham last week I ran a short workshop on “Engaging and Supporting Teams in Difficult Times”. There were 22 communication practitioners in the room and when I asked where their leaders were at the moment, it soon became apparent that some were taking refuge behind closed doors. In many ways this is a natural, defensive, human response to managing change. However, it is not the way to engage people.

What are leaders afraid of? Often it is not having all the answers to difficult questions. But employees don’t expect leaders to be all-knowing “gods”, they are just looking for credible information and an opportunity to have a say.

It seems to me that we know what to do to engage people:

- Provide relevant, timely information
- Provide opportunities for people to have a say and take what is said seriously
- Ensure that line managers interact with people as people, with empathy.

It’s simply that the basics go out of the window when the going gets tough.

There’s more on this topic at the LGComms Academy blog and the slides for the workshop can be downloaded here.

The new group, led by David MacLeod, has a remit to “ensure that a range of practical opportunities are made available for organisations wanting to learn about engagement. It will share good practice, generate debate and offer support via a new website”.

This is a major step forward in the engagement movement as it is still largely misunderstood and undervalued by most managers.

So it was no surprise to see that the press release issued by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, includes a lot of talk about the need to continue to spread the message. However, the message seems a bit mixed. For example, David Cameron emphasises engagement and growth, with Employment Relations Minister Edward Davey arguing that, ”it’s right the private sector should lead this taskforce”. This implies that, as engagement is now all about growth, it does not apply to the public sector. However, Nita Clarke ignores the growth point and suggests that instead it is the way that the workforce “is positively encouraged to perform at its best” that is key. Interestingly, MacLeod talks about engagement leading to ‘better for less’ in the public sector, something that would seem to be equally important as private sector growth.

The emphasis on private sector leadership and membership of the task force is compounded by the heavy orientation towards the HR profession; thirteen members are HR directors and only two are communication professionals. This flies in the face of evidence from the earlier MacLeod and Clarke report and a CIPD report that found that the three main factors that influence employee engagement are:

- Having opportunities to feed your views upwards
- Feeling well informed about what is happening in the organisation
- Thinking that your manager is committed to your organisation.

Given the obvious importance of internal communication for employee engagement, it is disappointing that people from the communication profession have been given a very minority voice on the task force. Is this indicative of the lack of voice the internal communication profession has in management, despite the good work that the CIPR is doing through a very active internal communication sector group? Maybe more communicators will be involved when further appointments are made to the task force. I hope so.

Despite these reservations about the message and task force membership, the new initiative is to be applauded. In times of austerity, employee engagement is more important than ever and it’s a good time to re-emphasise the benefits both to organisations and employees.

My paper, “Valuing internal communication; management and employee perspectives” is also being written as part of my research for a PhD at the University of Central Lancashire. I must thank my supervisors at the university, led by Dr. Mary Welch, for the excellent support they provide.

There are plans for a Masters in Internal Communication at the university – a great initiative which shows how seriously internal communicaiton is now being taken.

My abstract

The role of communication is becoming an increasingly important factor in the understanding of the value of intangible organisational assets. Communication within organizations is linked to higher levels of performance and service, generating communication capital and social capital, grounded in organisational relationships. It is therefore important for managers to be able to assess internal communication. Many well established tools developed in the 1970s are still used, such as the Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ), the ICA Audit, the Organizational Communication Development audit, and the Organizational Communication scale. The paper will examine different approaches to assessment and explore the gaps between management and employee perceptions of required content and channels for internal communication.

Internal communication audits typically focus on who is communicating with whom, the issues that receive attention, the volume of information sent and received, levels of trust and the quality of working relationships. Valuable as these perspectives are, this highlights the general starting point for internal communication audits and research; the managerial perspective on process rather than individual employee expectations of content. The paper will review journal articles and management reports to analyse how far research addresses what employees require in terms of channels and content and the links to effective information sharing and decision making.

Academics often place an emphasis on the individual in models of employee questions that line managers must answer. A focus on an individual’s role at work is usually drawn from work conducted in the practitioner survey field on employee engagement (for example, Gallup) that suggests that it is the role and work that are the most important engagement factors. However, this is to sideline or underplay the connection to the wider organisation and the significant impact this has for engagement. A new model of employee questions to be addressed through line manager and corporate internal communication will be developed. The model will incorporate a better balance between individual and internal corporate communication. It will highlight the importance of employee voice, based on being well informed and will make connections to organisational support and identification. The model will form the basis for internal communication measurement that can be associated with higher levels of engagement.

Finally, in a fast changing internal communication environment, traditional approaches to assessment may well be outdated. They are focused on process, volume and channels rather than content, dialogue and social integration. The paper will, therefore, explore the impact of social media within a framework of medium theory. As media change, for example from print to television and more recently to internet, this affects the way people think and relate to each other. There has, to date, been minimal application of medium theory to internal communication and it could be argued that its second media age has yet to arrive, with practice focused as it is on a model of transmission of messages from senior management (the few) using email and newsletters (broadcast channels) to employees (the many). The dawning of a new age of social integration in internal communication raises challenging questions about theory that will be examined and incorporated into proposals for new models of assessment.

However, surveys for surveys sake are a 21^st century management disease and engagement surveys have a number of inherent problems:

1.       They measure the wrong factors

2.       They are mainly quantitative

3.       They are conducted too often

4.       The expenditure would be better used for more communication with employees

5.       They might be used as an excuse for not involving employees in day to day management.

Senior managers should take a long hard look at engagement surveys and consider whether they are still fit for purpose. What’s the ROI of a big annual engagement survey? It’s difficult to know, it’s probably  just a tick box exercise.

The first and most fundamental question to ask is “what definition of engagement does the survey company use?” Different consultancies use different definitions to construct their survey questions. This is important as the emphasis on different factors, such as organisational identification, can vary significantly. This also makes benchmarking incredibly difficult. In my view, too many surveys focus on the aspects of the job itself as drivers for engagement, though they use different questions to establish this. This ignores wider aspects of organisational engagement that can be as significant, if not more significant than the job you do.

Most engagement surveys are self-completed questionnaires that are quantitative in design. There are many well known shortcomings in a quantitative research approach. For example, one survey question I’ve come across is “How satisfied are you with your pay and conditions?” I know that many people answered this negatively in the vain hope that if everyone did the same then maybe they’d all get a pay rise. If you want to know why employees are disengaged or do not trust senior managers, then much more qualitative research needs to be done.

I’m surprised that surveys are often done annually, especially when the overall results are almost always within one or two percentage points of the previous year (and all the years before that too). Instead I’d recommend more targeted, shorter, pulse surveys, regular focus groups and a company-wide survey every five years. This is linked to the fourth point. I don’t know how much money is spent on employee engagement surveys in the UK. Let’s assume that 500 large organisations spend around £100,000 each year. This amounts to £50 million. Think about the improvements that a re-investment of this money in better internal communication could achieve.

Finally, the fact that an organisation has an engagement survey is not a replacement for involving employees in day to day management. It would be better to do away with the big annual survey and re-use the money saved to support line managers in regular two-way dialogue with employees. This would lead to higher levels of engagement, more innovation and better customer service.