Where to start?

Usually the issue with internal communications is too much noise – a busy environment with too many messages going out. The upshot being employees are over-loaded, posters, emails and web pages become wallpaper and getting employees to absorb a message, let alone change their behaviour, demands high levels of creativity and pin-sharp targeting.

But recently we’ve been in discussion with two clients with barely any internal communication channels at all, or at least only very informal and irregular ones. So we’ve been faced with the rather lovely challenge of determining where our clients should start, with the added note that there isn’t too much money to spend on our inventions.

In the case of one client, the request to have an intranet fairly quickly led to the conversation of whether one was necessary. If it was a depository of company information they needed then let’s build a very good one of those and think more innovatively about social media channels we could use to build the discussion and innovation processes they were also looking for. Intranets can quickly become monoliths that employees rarely visit, therefore some leaner, separate tools with very specific purposes might be a good way to go.

Another discussion, this time for an NGO, focused a good deal on the question of appropriateness. How do you reach out to employees in the field who wouldn’t want to see too much money being spent on internal communications, since this diverts funding away from the organisational cause? But how do you also deal with growing complaints that internal communication didn’t happen and the managing body was too remote from the whole.

In this instance, developing a perfectly pitched internal brand appeared to be the starting point from which to build appropriate communications bit by bit.

Sometimes it might be better to slam dunk employees with internal communication if they’re not accustomed to it, wow them with the inventive medium you use as well as the message. But on the other hand, that may raise too many questions and certainly set expectations for communications in the future. So, on balance, probably a gradual build is best. These are recessionary times, after all…