The future of internal communication, that’s quite a grand title for a blog post huh? It was a subject that came up for discussion when I facilitated an afternoon of conversation for the Institute of Internal Communication recently. There were around 100 of us in the room and the conversation took place as part of the IoIC Annual Conference. I’d been asked to come in and facilitate something a little different so I figured it would be useful to get the delegates talking with each other in among a day and a half of presentations. It certainly felt very useful though I expect our snap decision to hold part of the session outdoors in the sunshine helped.
People talked about what they wanted the future of internal communication to be, and perhaps more importantly, how could they make that future come about? Here are a few things people talked about that interested me:
Future
- Increase communication skills of the workforce – decentralise
- The impact of social depends on the culture – autocrats should be worried
- Social risks and opportunities – lose control, gain understanding
Bold thinking being demonstrated here. I was pleasantly surprised to read this as I sometimes work with internal comms teams and I find their desire to control very limiting. Expressing a desire to let go more feels very useful to me.
- Facilitate, coach and enable
- Move from craft to coach, doing to enabling – more informality
- Anarchy
Coming from a background of facilitation I guess you’d expect me to highlight these. There was lots of talk of developing a coaching culture and even a a murmur of anarchy! It’ll never catch on, surely? 😉
There were a couple of things I was less comfortable with, including:
- Communications as part of engagement scores
- How do we get others to adopt communication principles?
Resist the temptation to measure everything I say, and if you are serious about coaching as part of the role of internal communications, that has to be the answer to the adoption question, no?
There was also some talk about being a part of HR and/or merging internal and external communication. I’d be interested to know what HR practitioners think about that.
Making it Happen
I like it that people were willing to give this next conversation a try. It’s easy to think about what might be, less so to start to plan how to make it happen. There was some discomfort borne out of ‘we’re not the decision makers’ coming from a few voices but hey – if the IoIC can’t decide how to make it happen – who can?! Here are a few things that stood out for me, and I’d be keen to be a fly on the wall in 2013 to learn how much of this has begun to happen.
- Build bridges. At the top level to improve our understanding of decision making processes and at the front line to understand what is needed there. Then connect the two.
- Get out there – be seen
- Invest in digital – HR and IT as delivery partners
- Learn from listening. Trust and openness, don’t shoot people down the first time they make a mistake, we all make them
- Define guidelines – ask the audience
- Social media restrictions come from a place of fear, re-educate
I enjoyed this session very much. It’s useful fun to spend time with different people and gather different perspectives, that’s definitely a big plus about my line of work.