Exploring different channels of Internal Communication

Any time an organisation decides to implement a major project or deploy a significant initiative; one major part of the roll out programme has to be communication. In order for the project to succeed it is vital that the employees or members understand what is happening and that you enlist their support and cooperation.

Your challenge is how to deliver your message all the way through the organisation and in this article, Bob Hayward, Managing Director of OPC (UK) Ltd, one of the worlds foremost strategic internal communication companies, explores some of channels through which you could send that communication.

Communication ways and means

With internal communication across groups large and small it is not enough to work on creating a great message. You also have to consider the ways and means of delivering that message and the audience(s) you are trying to engage.

Top down or bottom up ~ formal or informal ~ there are lots of ways and means define the channels of communication. Let’s explore some of the ways and means.

The two main channels are often described as the formal and informal channels of internal communication so let’s start there.

Formal channels

These range from; intranets, e-mail, newsletters, periodic presentations by the Boss, Open House or Town Hall Sessions and even good ole Team Briefings or Staff Magazines, Notices and Posters. All can form part of the mix of internal communications.

What about the famous internal memo or memorandum to give it the official title. It is a short brief message to another member of the same organisation. Typically such memos today are sent by e-mail.

• Large Group meetings

These enable a one-to-many broadcast of information and are often used to allow the Leadership of an organisation to speak to a large number of people 100’s – 1000’s) in one go providing them with an overview of the topic and convey a sense of the Leader’s commitment. Good speakers can issue a rallying cry and create enthusiasm within the audience that support to the call to action for some time afterwards. Unfortunately not all Leaders are great speakers and it is easy to dampen everyone spirits and create reluctance among the ranks. Dressing the event up with music, banners and razzmatazz may not change an essential weak presentation.

Of course these can be videoed for later consumption in a number of formats and broadcast live across the world with full multi-media support across the internet so there reach can be staggering, but…

A one-to-many broadcast does not allow the type of internalisation that the vast majority of us require in order to understand the message in terms of our reality and begin to adapt our own behaviour in the light of the new information.

• Town Hall Sessions

These are normally site or region specific so tend not to be over 50 people, while they are set up on a formal basis with notifications and invitations the event is run on less formal lines to the large group meeting.

Typically once the Leader has opened the event with a short presentation the session is then opened up for a lengthy question and answer session.

When people come to have specific questions answered the Town Hall approach can be very powerful. The invitation is the key to laying out the theme of the event and to provoking thought before hand. With a hot topic, like a controversial implementation or organisational change programme the questions will flood in, with a charismatic Leader people will be keen to rub shoulders but may be self conscious about asking questions. As an on going means to sustain internal communication Town Hall Meetings are less successful because they rely no the audience setting the pace through there questions.

This many-to-one style of communication does give the members of the organisation a valuable opportunity to listen to direct answers, to see the expressions on their Leader’s face. Members often rate Town Hall Meetings higher than the Leader who hosts them, who can find them frustrating because they are not in complete control of the agenda and may feel they were not able to get their main points across.

While presentations skills are less important, handling questions under pressure is a skill in its own right and some of the best presenters in the world struggle during a TV interview.

Open Space Sessions

These required skilled facilitation from some one used to working with this approach but it is a very powerful way of bringing reasonably large groups of people (50 to 500) together to work through a nominated topic.

The session opens as one large group in a wide circle, the facilitate lays down the rules and expectations and then facilitates the creation of the agenda for the rest of the time. Individuals then sign up to work in smaller groups on those parts of the agenda that are meaningful and relevant to them. The agenda and groups are then confirmed before the small group work begins. The small groups are empowered to work things through themselves with only a small amount of intervention from the facilitator. The small groups later report back on their outputs.

The uniqueness of open Space is that the agenda creation and sign up process enables people to follow their interests and passions, as group gather around shared interests idea sharing and creativity is sparked. The down side from the Leaders point of view is that the group set the detailed agenda under the main theme and the Leader’s pet topic may not be attractive to the group and therefore gets left off the agenda as no groups form around it…

The level of understanding and commitment generated through Open Space events is high because of the depth of debate created but it is not possible to ensure to topics covered from a number of Open Space events on the same theme across an organisation are consistent.

Work-Out

Work-Out started life at GE with Jack Welsh’s desire to engage and challenge his large multi-national workforce. A troubling aspect of the business is selected as the theme; a cross function team is selected to work on the topic for X number of days using a given creative problem solving process. Participants are invited to volunteer and take the recommendations to management and see them through to implementation.

Involvement in aspects of decision making or design of the final stage of implementation are great ways of secure high levels of engagement from those involved in the Work-Out. But Work-Outs take time and are typically configured around smaller groups of 6 to 8 people but there are examples of groups as large as 200 being brought together.

It could help you secure local implementation of a project provided those who attended the Work-Out can champion the recommendations successfully to the rest of the people in their location. As with Open Space understanding and commitment are high but consistency of ideas across a number of Work-Out groups is unlikely.

Management meetings

The governance of many organisations is through Management Meetings that happen on a fixed regular basis and through a planned matrix structure ensure the each level and each function does actually get to talk to each other.

While the larger Town Hall Meetings of the Large Group broadcast session allow for an overview to be given out the focus of management meetings is the exchange of a far greater level of detailed information which the Managers at the meetings interpret and use to make decisions. Within the confines of the meeting much can be achieved in the exploration of the message and it’s meaning where all the facts are available and all delegates are willing to share openly. These can be done using Web / Video / Phone conferencing facilities.

Unfortunately such meetings can be poorly run or made a playground for internal politics rather than a mechanism for internal communication. As each meeting is made up of different people it is not easy to control the spin or bias that each person uses to convey the message, but in many such meeting the group if effective in their relationships will challenge those of track and bring them back toward some level of calibration with the main stream interpretation of the message.

Team Briefings

Specific meetings arranged to cascade information throughout an organisation where the attendees of the meeting at level 1 are tasked with leading a meeting with their own people at Level 2, and then those attendees lead sessions for Level 3.

While Management Meetings are designed to be a full exchange of the detail in order to make decisions, Team Briefings are purely there to pass information in one direction ~ down. They do allow for greater interactivity than Large Group Broadcasts as they are typically run in local teams or functions so anything from 4 to 40 people. They are typically led by that Team’s Leader or the Functional / Geographic Head and therefore people are less self conscious about asking questions at the end. They also allow for each Leader to interpret the main message and make it more meaningful to the local population. These can be done using Web / Video / Phone conferencing facilities.

On the downside, they rely on the ability of the Leader to present and to handle a question and answer session, it is fortunate to find yourself working with a middle manager comfortable with both aspects. There is little or no facility in most organisations to reverse the process and send messages or questions back up stream so if the local Leader is unable to answer a specific question that group may leave the session frustrated and off track. Of course as each new Leader makes their own interpretation of the message they may stray from the ambitions of and meaning from CEO as well as the reality for the next level down.


That is probably enough for today, we will complete the formal channels in the next article by considering the power of 1 to 1 meetings and the Published Word as means of communicating key messages before we move on to informal channels of communication like the Grapevine and Blogging.



About the author

Managing Director of (OPC) UK Ltd, a Christian and father of four children, Bob is a highly experienced consultant, facilitator and speaker, specialising in strategic internal communication and employee engagement. His approach is heavily influenced by the work of Deming, Senge and Bengt-Arne Svennberg.

Bob has developed a significant number of mission critical implementation projects for British, Swedish and Global companies. Bob’s focus is to clarify and give birth to management ambitions in the hearts and minds of all their people through democratic implementation that enables listeners to have their say. Clients include;

• SEB Group
• Husqvarna
• Kommunal
• Volvo Power Train
• Somerfield plc
• Peugeot, Express Fit UK
• Vodafone

Contact details

Bob Hayward, Managing Director ~ OPC (UK) Ltd
Creating involvement and behaviour change across a critical mass rapidly

Phone ~ +447798 930755

website ~ www.opcuk.com

brochure ~ www.opc.se

blogsite ~ http://bobhayward.blogspot.com

Back to Newsletter 10/2006