Have you ever wondered what exactly an internal communications function does?
In this episode, Jenni discusses the role of the internal communications function and the five-step model to get started. She will help you think about what your company might already have in place, and how this could be improved.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Blog: How to master internal communication when you are not a communications professional
Blog: What is internal communication?
Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about internal communication functions. I want to talk about what they do. I want to talk about whether or not you need one. And I wanted to talk about this in a podcast episode because there are so many smaller organisations that just don’t have one.
Some are thinking about it. Some have someone doing internal communication stuff on the side of another job. And having set up four communication functions in my career, I’ve learned a few things along the way in terms of how to get them started and what I’ve learned and different pitfalls and things that might be helpful if you’re starting to look at this.
Now, the format of these podcasts is chaos to calm. So, for this one, I’m going to chat briefly about the chaos that comes from not having an internal communication function. And then I’m going to talk about how to set one up as well as what that should do for you inside the organisation.
What are the steps you need to take to set up an internal communication function?
Now, I have a five-step model for setting up a communication function that links to internal communication planning. So I’m going to take you through that to help you understand a bit about the steps you’d need to go through if you want to get one started in your organisation.
Now, not every organisation needs an internal communication function. My usual advice is that when you’re approaching the magic number of around 150 people, then it’s time to start looking at your communication infrastructure.
And I say magic number because 150 is what’s known as Dunbar’s number. And it comes from anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who calculated that 150 is the optimal size of social groupings for humans. And the theory is based on brain size and average social group size. And he suggests that anything larger than 150 requires sort of processes, laws, other sort of norms that help to create stability.
So, with that in mind, if your organisation is approaching 150 people, or it has more than 150 people, it’s time to look at internal communications, whether it’s setting up a function, whether it’s just looking at the structure of communication, the processes, all of those things. When you’re getting into the realms of that 150, you need some sort of structure in there. And that structure has to be linked to how the organisation communicates across all of the different employees and the different groups.
It’s needed because this is when things can really start to break down. It’s where that chaos can really come in. And I talk a lot about this when it comes to the chaos inside organisations. And my book, Influential Internal Communication goes into more detail about how communication can fix chaos. So I’ll pop a link to the audiobook and the printed book into the show notes for you.
Are you clear on the purpose of your organisation?
So you can start to see where the chaos will come into an organisation where there isn’t a function or there isn’t structure. But sometimes there is an internal communication function in place, and there’s already elements of chaos. And this can start to happen where there isn’t a clear sense of purpose for that function. It can creep in when there aren’t boundaries, when people aren’t clear about how it aligns to the organisational strategy. And all of this is quite easily fixed, but it’s easy to let it sort of run away with you and let different stakeholders pull on your time and draw the function into different areas.
So we can have chaos where there isn’t a function and you’ve got growth and you’ve got over 150 people. We can equally have some chaos if the function isn’t aligned to the corporate strategy and isn’t supporting the organisational goals and looking at business outcomes. So we’ve got two different sides to this.
But if you’re setting up a function, how should you do it and sort of what should you do? So I’m going to go back to my definition of internal communication because I deliberately separate out internal communication inside an organisation and also the function. So, internal communication is everything that gets said and shared inside of an organisation. And as a function, its role is to curate, enable and advise on best practice for organisations to communicate effectively, efficiently and in an engaging way.
If you’re setting up a function, or even if you have one already, you have to be clear about the purpose of it. I talk about this being your anchor point as a function. There’s no sort of right or wrong on this. That’s my definition. But whenever I’m working with communication teams, we always have the conversation about what is the purpose of your function, because it’s so broad as a concept that if we don’t define that, we’re easily led into different places.
So, making sure you’re very clear about the purpose of your function will allow you to make sure that all of your processes, all of your ways of communication, everything is set up for success.
What can you use to guide you through getting the function started?
So, I want to take you through the model that I use to get the function started. And it’s also the same way that you would get your strategy or your plan started. And there are five steps to it, and it covers sort of both of these aspects.
So, it’s likely that the purpose of your function might not necessarily be known until you’ve completed the first two phases or steps of the model. And that’s okay. It could be something that comes over time because the purpose of the function should be there to support the organisation, it should solve the business problems, it should help enable change, it should help be a catalyst for growth, it could be any number of things, but you might not know that until you’ve done some research and done some insight gathering. And that’s the first step.
1. Insight.
So we need to look at any existing data that might exist on employees. So we need to understand a bit about how people feel about communication. We need to know whether there are any engagement surveys, because that can help us understand how people feel. And that can help us understand things about people’s relationships with the leadership team. It can help us understand what it’s like to work there and get a sense of the culture. So being able to understand that and look at that data is important. If that doesn’t exist, then you’ll need to do that.
So, if there’s no data and no insight, then we need to do that. And that can be done through surveys, focus groups, one to one interviews, lots of different ways of doing that. But we need to really understand what’s going on inside the organisation and have data to do that. Otherwise, you’re just doing things based on opinion, and probably the people that shout loudest. So, we need to make sure we’ve got data to support the things that we’re doing.
And you can also include insight into other stakeholders. So, you might want to look at customer research, any other stakeholder really, to make sure that you’re getting a whole picture of the organisation. If it already exists, like I said, that’s great. If it doesn’t, you need to kind of start there.
2. Business intelligence.
And I call it business intelligence, because this is where you’re looking at the material that really already exists about the organisation. So, things like annual reports, internal presentations, marketing material. And it’s also where you’ll start to look at the flow of communication across the organisation to understand how it works.
So, if you’re making a widget, it’s always a widget example, isn’t it? If you’re making a widget and you’ve got to get the widget from A to B, then what needs to happen to do that? You know, what departments are involved? What are the processes that happen there? That just helps you understand a bit more about the infrastructure in the organisation, which is really helpful. So, once you’ve got these two bits of sort of research and intelligence, you can start to move on to the next step, which is about…
3. Defining the principles for the function.
And this is where the guiding principles can be set up to determine the purpose of the function, but also starting to set around what the strategy is for the company, and this will be things like the functional objectives, the alignment from the business strategy to the communication strategy, and maybe where you might start to set some objectives as well for what you want to achieve.
Now, importantly, the principles also needs to address whether or not you’re going to be building a team or not. So, if you are at that stage where you don’t have a communication function, and you’re looking to build one, this is where you can start to use the data to determine what’s the best way to set up a function.
It might be that you want to outsource 80% of it. It might be that you outsource the strategy, and then you bring someone in to deliver it. There’s lots of different ways to have a function. And the principles should be where you have that sort of check in on the data to make sure that wherever you’re taking that direction of travel for the communications function is really clear.
4. Communication.
So this is the creation of the communication strategy. This is where you’re looking at any development needs across the organisation as well. So you might have identified that line managers need some development in communication skills. But it’ll also include things like a content strategy and a channel matrix, which will help you look at the different channels that you need in the organisation or what channels might exist already.
Now, we’ve got templates for some of these. So, I’ll pop links to those in the show notes so you can grab them because the channel matrix is the one that we come back to again and again, when we’re looking at how organisations communicate, it helps us see a bit of a map of the channels.
So, whether you’ve got things that are digital, whether you’ve got printed material, whether you’ve got things going out monthly or yearly, just helps us get a bit of an understanding of that flow and that rhythm of the organisation.
5. Measurement.
So, this is about being able to measure against the principles or the objectives that you’ve already set up. And measurement will be different depending on the maturity of your function. But it’s important to make sure that things are being done in an agreed time scale.
So, when you look at the five steps and you’re looking at setting up a function, you’ve got to go through the insight and the business intelligence to understand and do that listening piece first. Then, you can start to do your principles and agree what you’re going to be actually doing. And then you’ve got the communication element in terms of what are the channels and what are the content that we’re going to be talking about. And then you can start to measure that.
So, that’s really what you’re looking at when you’re building an internal communication function, but also what you’re looking at when you’re building an internal communication plan or strategy as well.
Now what?
Now, you’ve done all of those things, you’ve kind of got the bones of the function and it can grow and it can change from here.
So, it’s that age old response of “it depends” when you’re asked the question of what should my internal communication function do, because it will depend on what the business needs are. So, when I first set up one, it was, gosh, a very long time ago, but there were about 1500 people in the organisation. We had one head office and I think we had around 16 sales offices around the UK. And the purpose of the function was to create some infrastructure around some channels.
So, I created an intranet. It was the first intranet that I built. And I remember going off to a training course to learn how to code and thinking, “I don’t know what I’m doing here because I don’t know how to code.” And I quickly realised that probably wasn’t the best place for me to be. But it’s all learning. And as you’re setting up functions, you’ll no doubt be doing some of this.
But the purpose of the function also needed to focus on bringing the culture to life. We’d had some CEO changes and it meant there was a lot more focus on internal campaigns, internal events, and all of those things were great fun. And that was the first time I set up a function.
Now, in other functions over the years, as I got into maybe more senior roles or as my career progressed, the organisations got bigger. So, working for global organisations with 30,000 people, the focus there for that function was on processes and systems and risk and looking at how we could save money on collaboration platforms and looking at activities that supported the strategy and a global culture.
So, quite different and I think that’s the thing that’s important. The function needs to be fit for purpose. It needs to be fit for the organisation. And the breadth of internal communication is what makes it such an enjoyable role and such an enjoyable profession. But it means that the leadership team in the organisation have to be very clear about what that function is there to do.
For me, the internal communication function is there to make sure that there is that alignment throughout the organisation to the strategy. You know, we should be advising and coaching leaders to make sure that the way things are done inside the organisation reflect the culture, reflect how things feel, how things should be done around here. It’s about the rhythm of the organisation. It’s about the behaviours. It’s about the tone. It’s all of those things. And I think if you don’t have a function and you think you need one, then you probably do.
But you need to make sure the person that you bring in to set it up knows how to go through the steps, knows what they need to do, and importantly knows that they need to listen first before they start to take action.
Sometimes, when you start looking at internal communication functions, there are difficult conversations with those in senior positions because you’re starting to change things about how they communicate. You’re starting to maybe question some of the content that they’ve been sharing for a long time. So it’s important to have the strength and the confidence to be able to do that. And of course, if you’re stuck, give me a call or drop me an email. I’m very happy to have a chat about my experience and any advice I can give to help you.
Thank you for listening!
In the next episode, I’m going to be talking about how to prioritise work. Now, it seems to be something that many are struggling with at the moment, and I think that’s a bit of a hangover from the pandemic and being in crisis mode for a long time. And I have a number of tools and techniques that I’ve used over the years that I want to share with you to help you take some of that chaos out of that overwhelming feeling when there’s just so much to do and it all feels like it’s got to be done all at the same time.
So, thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, and you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. So, please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me, and details are in the show notes of how to stay in touch.
