Adding value, RTO struggle, and new job listings
Insider Comms for internal comms
Heads up! Juneteenth is observed in the U.S. on June 19. Here are some ideas on how your organization can recognize the holiday.
Internal Comms and Business Value
A new white paper from Poppulo refreshes the conversation on how internal comms can add value to the organization. The authors set the stage with a dose of medicine:
Communications have in the past not focused enough on business goals. People knew that good communication programs made employees feel valued but neglected to tie these communications efforts to tangible business results. But in today’s environment, leaders are seeing how employee communications directly impact the bottom line.
The crux of their argument is that “strategic internal comms leads to engagement,” and engagement leads to higher productivity, lower attrition, increased morale, and all the feelings. Engagement, in short, leads to better business results.
The authors offer three ways to increase internal comms’ business value and influence:
Link the impact of employee engagement to executive priorities
Upgrade to orchestrated communications to drive operational excellence
Create a personalized multi-channel content strategy that impacts the bottom line
I won’t steal their thunder. You can read more about that strategy here.
I do have one quibble, though. The authors’ focus on employee engagement and its ties to productivity leave out internal comms’ role in promoting behavioral changes that affect the bottom line in at least one tangible way.
Benefits and perks—like on-site counselors through an EAP, medical plans, or LinkedIn learning classes—cost companies hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars every year. If employees don’t take advantage of these kinds of programs, the organization flushes money down the toilet.
Internal comms has a vital role to play in informing employees about and encouraging them to sign up for costly benefits and perks. Getting them to do so is a tangible, bottom-line way you can increase IC’s business value.
Longtime readers know that I am a firm believer in comms supporting business goals. Indeed, item number one in my six-part guide to creating an effective editorial strategy is on driving business outcomes.
Before you get started on your strategy, you need to ask questions about company goals. For example:
What are the company’s stated goals?
Are the goals achievable?
Or are the goals aspirational?
Is the goal broad? Specific? Or purposefully vague?
Are the goals company-wide? Or are they specific to a department or region?
Go deeper 👇.
To Be or Not To Be … in the Office
Swinging pendulum. Spinning heads. Whiplash. Choose your metaphor. A year ago internal comms pros with office-based employees were throwing their hands up over plans to return to the office—RTO as it’s become known.
A year deep into the pandemic business leaders were optimistic that Covid was on the retreat and that employees could return to occupy their very expensive real estate.
But Covid didn’t retreat. RTO plans were pushed back time and time again to a point where the comms strategy became “we’re monitoring the situation and we’ll update you when we have more information.”
Year three of the pandemic and executives, most of whom climbed ladders IRL in offices, are pushing to get employees back into the office. A March survey of 200+ NYC-based executives found that 76% think “in-person work is critical to their company's bottom line and revenue.”
For every study that shows remote work diminishes productivity, there is research to counter the findings.
Nevertheless, white-collar employees are in no rush to RTO. As Dealbook noted earlier this week, “It’s probably not shocking that people who are lower on the org chart tend to be less enthusiastic about returning to the office than the senior leaders and executives who thrived in the in-person Before Times.”
“For many C.E.O.s and managers, that’s how they worked. That’s how they succeeded and that’s the only way they know. All of this was completely false; it was totally a fake story we’ve been telling ourselves.” —Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab program at the think tank New America
One employee at NBCUniversal sums up the employee P.O.V.: “As much as we grumbled about going back to work, we all understood that it was going to happen. But the second we started going, we realized how silly it was.”
Internal comms is again stuck in the middle: struggling to inform employees of an ever-changing RTO policy while both sides—execs and employees—hash it out.
The struggle is real.
Internal Comms Catch-Up
💰 Staffbase acquires a majority stake in Dirico (Staffbase)
💪 Enhance Internal Communications to Engage the Modern Workforce (CMS Wire)
📋 3 Ways to Build a Proactive Internal Communications Habit (Brilliant Ink)
✍️ The Five Most Dreaded Words at the Office: ‘Let’s Start a Google Doc’ (WSJ)
Hiring
Deloitte - Strategic Communications Manager: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D.E.I.) Institute (Fort Lauderdale)
F&G - Internal Communications Manager (Des Moines)
Palo Alto Networks - Senior Manager, Employee Communications - Editorial (Remote)
UKG - Lead Employee Communications Strategist (Remote, U.S.A.)
Yea, Right
“One of my strengths as an employee is my ability to multitask.”
Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter | Mister Editorial archive | editorshaun@gmail.com
Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I work in employee comms at Splunk. The views in this newsletter are my own.