I consider myself a complete communicator (try and ignore the hubris) having worked, variously, in external communication, internal communication, public affairs, investor relations and reputation and issues management. I try to see the whole picture, from the ‘who, what, why, where, when, how’ communication point of view. (Not necessarily in that order, mind. Probably start with the ‘why’ and the ‘what’.)

This is an interesting piece (I digress, but it’s worth it) pondering why the various communication disciplines have to be separate. They’re not. There’s no strange voodoo in internal communication and you don’t need a doctorate in the dark arts to communicate externally. It’s about objective, target, message, medium and measurement, all as part of the over-arching business strategy.

One thing that I am certain isn’t included in the communicator’s remit, however, is ’employee engagement’.

I have said it before and I will say it again – good communication has its part to play in engaging employees, by making them aware of the company’s vision, mission, purpose and values, by delivering regular updates on the organisation’s progress and by humanising the leadership (amongst other things). But engagement is not communication and communication is not engagement.

Rather, an engaged workforce (read ‘loyal, committed, passionate, dynamic and happy’ and please note I do not include ‘agile’) is the result of getting a number of things right – management skills, equipment levels, working conditions, pay, benefits, work/life balance – all of which are HR functions.

The only possible scenario in which communication could lead engagement is one in which the communication of the results of an engagement survey (and the actual survey) is viewed as the engagement itself. But this, surely, would be to say ‘we expect employee levels of satisfaction with the status quo – let’s call it employee engagement – to increase year-on-year as our communication team tell them more about it’. Sometimes with the subtext ‘and God help you if they don’t’.

But that couldn’t happen, could it? It would imply that the organisation, and what does for its people, is perfect already – and that the failure to engage with it is down to the employee and their lack of understanding.

So why, therefore, am I seeing an increase in the number of communication jobs advertised with engagement in the title? Twice this week – a Head of Internal Communications (sic) and Engagement and a Director of Communications (sic) and Engagement.

Were I of a suspicious nature, I would be tempted to speculate that ‘engagement’, so recently the Next Big Thing, is on its way to becoming the Last Big Thing. ‘Engagement’ has become a box to tick, something to measure, and the things that actually drive employee motivation continue, as they always have done, sometimes well, sometimes badly, behind the scenes.

Of course, if you’ve been running an employee engagement survey for the last four years, then you can’t just ditch it overnight (you can, actually – but that’s another story) so you need to find a home for it – and where better than the communication department? They’ve got plenty of time on their hands and no-one really knows what they do anyway.

Some conclusions, therefore:

• Let’s stop talking about employee engagement and talk about employee motivation, or satisfaction, instead. The change in language would a) distance us from the industry that has grown up around measuring and reporting ‘engagement’ and b) place the responsibility for staff satisfaction back where it belongs – with HR
• Monitoring employee sentiment is an ongoing and regular thing, not a yearly survey. By all means do a yearly survey if you must – and if you can afford it – but it should be run out of HR. Alternatively, you could provide regular updates from your communication listening groups (you are running those, right?) to your leadership team – and encourage them to do something visible in response
• Let’s keep focused on demonstrating – and finding new ways to demonstrate – the value of strategic communication, and what it entails, to the organisation’s leadership. Show a united front (all communication disciplines working together seamlessly), educate – and disabuse of the notion that the communication department has spare capacity for projects that are losing favour or have become inconvenient

The thing about being an old communicator is that, over time, years of experience become clarified and whittled down to very simple basics. Sometimes this means seeing things in stark relief and the way ahead, for you anyway, becoming incredibly clear.

Reading the CIPR Inside document ‘Making It Count – The Strategic Value and Effectiveness of Internal Communication’, published in November 2017, occasioned one of those moments. Being honest, it was one of those ‘oh shit’ moments.

The issues identified by the CIPR document were (and this may not be an exhaustive list, so read the damn’ thing yourself) as follows. (The summaries following each issue point are drawn from the report, but are my own words.)

IC’s ‘professional branding’

(The term ‘professional branding’ is used (by me, here) to mean how IC is viewed when it isn’t in the room.) IC is tactical not strategic, it lacks business acumen, it is not measurable, its function is unclear. Communication within an organisation is seen as important and valuable – but is spoken of (by senior management) in broad terms that do little to suggest an understanding of tangible benefits or the risks of not doing it.

IC’s ‘place’ in the organisation

CEOs responding to questioning about the value of business functions highlighted IC as important but, understandably, said that the areas that generated profits had the most value. The impression is that IC practitioners, on the other hand, fell that they are wholly undervalued and, in some cases, merit a place on the board.

What IC actually is

Many IC practitioners surveyed used the terms ‘IC’ and ‘engagement’ interchangeably, a confusion which hints at a lack of professional clarity. ‘Culture’ was also thrown into the mix. CEOs mentioned IC strategy, but were talking IC tactics. It appears IC is often a simple delivery system and not the instigator or shaper of the message.

What IC delivers to the organisation

Motherhood statements (from senior management) such as ‘Internal communication is extremely important…..it’s right up there and (I) would rate it at a nine or ten, because if you don’t communicate effectively with your people….. you’re probably going to have a dysfunctional organisation’ imply no real understanding of IC delivery or benefit. 

How IC is measured

I first became aware of IC as a discipline 23 years ago – before I became aware of a thing called the world wide web. Before I had a mobile phone. It is not a new thing and there has been plenty of time for it to ‘mature as a specialist discipline within the broader communication function’ – and I have experience of several organisations where it has.

The CIPR report shines a useful and timely light on the issues confronting IC as a discipline. It should be treated as a call to immediate action.

As an old communicator, I’m certain that Engagement isn’t my bag. Employee engagement is not internal communication or, indeed, vice versa. The reason I take an interest (apart from the fact that internal communication helps pull the levers of employee engagement, or motivation, or belief or whatever you wish to call it) is because I once worked for a company where Engagement sat with Communication, as a part of Corporate Affairs.

Straight off, engagement is not the same as internal communication. Engagement is a by-product of the organisation’s culture and its approach to the ‘way we do things around here’. From that point of view, I think most would agree that HR is best-placed to own employee engagement.

Internal communication can – and should, of course – support the growth of, and strengthen, employee engagement by ensuring widespread understanding of the things that make a difference to the employee. These will include, but are not limited to, the organisation’s mission and vision, its purpose, its strategy and progress made against that strategy, its culture, its successes and its narrative.

What is it that makes someone proud to work where they do? An understanding of, and belief in, what the company is doing and how it is doing it, and a clear idea of what part they play in helping it achieve its goals. It’s that old (probably apocryphal) story about the NASA cleaning operative, pushing his mop. JFK, on a tour, stops him and says “What’s your job?’ And the janitor looks at him and says “I’m helping to put a man on the moon, sir.” The one thing that would make that story better is if JFK had recognised and rewarded the janitor’s efforts by making him US Secretary for Labor (sic).

But internal communication is not employee engagement because no matter how successful its activities, no matter how many channels and how much reach, no matter how much interaction, an employee’s ‘engagement’ (or motivation, or belief) can be blown away by perceived (or actual) negative behaviours by fellow workers and management. Which is why EE sits with HR or OD – basically, the people who are responsible for developing the people to ensure the right people have the right skills to manage the people. People people.

Employee engagement is a lot about people development (as well as reward and recognition, also HR functions). Move the engagement function away from HR and all that’s left to it is measurement (given that it’s internal communication which is spreading the good word and  advising on best communication practice).  Fairly soon – and I’ve worked in two companies where it has happened – the measurement of employee engagement becomes the thing itself.

This approach is, clearly, encouraged by those who make their livings measuring employee engagement. According to Gallup’s website ‘87% of employees worldwide are not engaged at work’, which is dreadful, because “companies with highly-engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share”. (I’ll leave you to reflect on the robustness or otherwise of those claims.) They encourage it because, once it’s been delivered a couple of times, there’s simply no way to stop it – it’s a type of corporate substance abuse. I can stop measuring employee engagement anytime I want – just not this year.

To be clear – no matter which firm of measurement consultants is employed, the actual measurement is an employee survey, comprising the same old fifteen to twenty questions. There is nothing to stop this being done in-house, probably more efficiently and resulting in numbers that are comprehensible and – because it’s your system – of some value to your organisation.

Or – and here’s where Communications generally can have a massive impact on the chimaera that is employee engagement – you could simply convince the senior team to get out and about a bit more, find out what the problems are – if there are any – and see about fixing them. Arm them with a few stories – give them some coaching if they need it – let them lead by example. And if they won’t, or can’t, try the next level down.

It’s only a start – but showing and telling your people that you’re interested and involved has to beat faceless metrics tracking movement on an invisible and irrelevant scale.

Being an old communicator means, perhaps, not being as in touch, or as conversant, with some of the latest communications thinking or tools as one might be. (This, of course, is a topic for another time – how to bridge the, dare I say it, growing divide between the younger and the more mature communications professional, who often have to work very closely together and yet have different formative influences and different views on communication best practice.)

Being an old communicator, however, brings a career’s worth of experience draw on. And a network of other old communicators, providing further careers’ worth of experience to plumb. One thing we are all agreed on – and I do hope no-one feels I’m giving away trade secrets – is that it isn’t actually that difficult. All good communication is, at its root, common sense. (For example – journalists like news, customers don’t want to be patronised, no-one likes the wool clumsily pulled over their eyes – simple and, you would think, obvious.)

This piece via the Forbes Communications Council, on the importance of internal and external communications coming together, is, therefore, rather frustrating.

The gist of the piece – and, with due respect to the author, it is important and it makes complete sense, it’s the fact that it needs discussing at all that’s the worry – is that there are benefits to be harvested when internal and external communications work together.

Listed amongst these benefits are (and these are edited):

• Leaders of communications groups can realise efficiencies by uniting teams that develop employee and public content, including stories, videos, infographics and social media pieces
• Communications practitioners may be interested in exploring both disciplines – this provides an opportunity
• When internal communications work together with external, all company stakeholders — from employees to customers — feel heard and respected
• Such an approach can generate stories that employees and external stakeholders see at the same time

And here are a few of my own, just to reinforce the importance of the topic:

• Merging internal and external communication allows you greater control over the corporate message, with less room for re- or mis-interpretation
• Your employees are your ambassadors and your advocates – they should hear and see what the outside world hears and sees
• You cannot – and should not try to – tell the internal audience one thing and the external audience(s) another (which means having an eye on tone of voice as well)
• The internal communication function sits within the Communication Department – it is not a devolved function, and should never be the responsibility of individual business function heads

This is all, clearly, common sense and, despite the qualified assertion that ‘some may say that only senior communicators reach the stage where they can and do blend both internal and external expertise’, seniority (or age) has no monopoly on common sense.

Internal and external communication shouldn’t need merging, converging or bringing together. They are two sides of the same coin, share the same aims and are predicated on the same corporate truths. They shouldn’t be separate in the first place.

It’s obvious. It shouldn’t need explaining and it certainly isn’t some secret wisdom revealed only to those who’ve spent years following the Way of the Communicator.