Best Practice Stifles Innovation in Internal Comms
Guest essay
The following is an excerpt from Innovative Internal Communication: How Creativity, Curiosity, and Technology Can Create Lasting Impact published by Kogan Page.
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It’s September 2023 on a bright, cold day in Manchester. Communication professionals have gathered together for a conference. This is potentially a ripe breeding ground for an indulgence of our love affair with ‘best practice’—perhaps there will be a raft of speakers presenting on different best practices we must follow to be successful in communication.
But wait. Who’s this coming?
It’s Helen Reynolds, Founder of Comms Creatives. She sweeps onto the stage wearing a colourful striped dress and her signature red lipstick and you already know this is going to be anything but boring.
Above Helen is a big yellow slide with seven words in bold letters:
There’s no such thing as best practice.
Mic drop.
This is a bold statement, one that will surely rankle the sensibilities of many internal communication practitioners. Because as a professional community, we seem to be very much in love with best practice.
Let’s back up a bit. What’s a practice anyway? And what could possibly be wrong with having some best ones?
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What’s best practice?
A practice is simply a specific way of doing something. It could be a method, an activity, a process or a technique. A practice is something that is established, in other words other people have done it before. Typically, practices are based on the accumulated knowledge and experience of people who have come before us: experts and professionals in a particular field who have figured out what works to attain a goal.
So if a practice is a specific way of doing something, then a best practice is considered the best specific way of doing something. Best practices are considered effective in solving a specific problem or achieving a specific goal. They’re viewed as reliable as they’ve stood the test of time and they’ve been used by others with successful results. Best practices are tried-and-tested ways to get a job done so you don’t have to start from scratch and come up with a solution by yourself.
Internal communication best practices are widely accepted methods or approaches that are considered to deliver optimal outcomes for communicating inside organizations. These practices are based on past experiences of other communicators, experts and thoughts leaders who have observed and documented what works to achieve a goal. Best practices are often considered a safe and proven path to success. For example, best practices might outline specific ways to communicate with remote employees or how to communicate in a crisis.
Best practices are considered the most effective and efficient ways to complete these tasks and they often serve as guidelines or road- maps for internal communicators to follow. They’re typically shared as recommendations in our field, offering us a structured framework to solve tricky problems. This structured approach can be reassuring; it can feel like a safe approach in which risk is minimized and uncertainty is reduced.
The proliferation of ‘best practice’ in internal communication
I started getting curious about best practices in internal communication about a year ago. I noticed a pattern emerging across the students I teach, the comments I was reading on social media, the direct messages I was receiving on online platforms and the content I was reading from internal communication vendors, industry experts and training providers. I began to notice two words cropping up everywhere: ‘best practice’.
Once I noticed the trend, it was suddenly everywhere. It reminded me of when I got engaged and began to notice shiny engagement rings everywhere. I had never noticed them before and now they were everywhere I looked. Similarly, when I was pregnant with my daughter it suddenly seemed that there were pregnant women everywhere. My husband rightly pointed out that they’d always been there, my brain just hadn’t been actively noticing them before. My dalliance with the words ‘best practice’ followed the same pattern; once I noticed the phrase cropping up in one area of our profession then I spotted it in another, again and again. Those words appeared to be everywhere in the internal communication community.
The Institute of Internal Communication (2023a) produces a range of factsheets and guides for its members, which ‘provide practice advice and best practice tips’. The Masters in Internal Communication Management run by Solent University (Institute of Internal Communication, 2023b) is designed to give students ‘a deep understanding of theory and translate this into high-impact strategic internal communication that is underpinned by best practice, enabling them to operate at the most senior levels’.
A Google search for ‘internal communication best practice’ gave me 502,000,000 results. I didn’t even know the internet was that big. I found content with headlines like:
‘14 internal communication best practices for 2023’ (Clear, 2023)
‘7 internal communication best practices you should follow’ (Sinclair, 2021)
‘17 internal communications best practices for a stronger employee engagement’ (LumApps, 2023)
I see the fascination with best practice in the students I teach, too. I teach a certificate in strategic internal communication and I always ask new students what they’re hoping to learn over the course of the programme. One key phrase keeps appearing in their answers, again and again. Can you guess what it is? Yep, you got it: ‘best practice’. Students tell me things like:
‘We are bringing in a new intranet next year so I’d be keen to understand the best practice approach to doing this.’
‘I’m a team of one and I’m also quite new to internal comms. Helping me to understand best practice for how to do my job would be very useful.’
‘We have people who don’t sit at desks so I’d like to know best practice for reaching non-wired employees.’
I also see the tendency towards a best practice approach reflected in my work with clients. Now in fairness, most of the clients I work with hire me specifically for my curiosity-based approach. I mean, my business is called The Curious Route, after all. But occasionally a client will want to avoid the hard work of curiosity and take a best practice shortcut instead. They don’t want to be told that they need a deep understanding of their people or to create tailored communication solutions to meet their specific audience needs – no. That sounds too much like hard work. Instead, they ask me this: ‘What’s the industry best practice? What are other companies doing? Let’s do that.’
Fitzpatrick and Dewhurst (2022) rightfully note that ‘There’s a tendency in internal communication to think that you can apply a solution from one place and hope it will work everywhere. People think “Well it worked over there, so it has to work here”.’
The appeal of best practice
The lure of best practice in internal communication is obvious. I get it, I do. Everyone wants a simple, efficient solution that has been tried-and-tested already and has proved to be successful elsewhere. Best practices offer a sense of security and structure in what can often be a chaotic and challenging field. I’ve identified four key reasons why best practice is so alluring to internal communicators.
Efficiency
Best practices are seen as efficient. They provide a clear roadmap for achieving desired outcomes, which means we don’t need to figure it out ourselves. It seems possible we can save time, energy and resources by following established methods. I mean, someone else has already used this approach and it worked for them—so why not just do what they did? Won’t we get the same positive outcome? This makes particular sense in the context of the ultra-busy internal communicators who are operating in tiny teams with no budgets, who say they simply don’t have the time to innovate or experiment due to mounting workloads. Best practice offers these busy communicators welcome shortcuts and roadmaps to help them get their job done quickly with the limited resources they have available.
This sentiment was echoed by Simon Rutter, an independent consultant with 20+ years’ experience in the world of internal communication. He tells me ‘Internal communication practitioners are so busy that they often haven’t the time to stop and think. Creativity needs space and time. In the absence of adequate resources, internal communicators turn to best practice advice in order to get the job done quickly and move on to the next task.’
Reducing risk
The second reason we tend to love best practices is because they feel so safe. Practices that have been tried before with successful results are seen as safe choices that reduce the likelihood of us failing. In Chapter 3, we saw that fear of failure is one of the obstacles to innovation in internal communication. Taking a best practice approach is a way of reducing risk and thereby mitigating the chance of failure. It’s bit a like a comfort blanket. We cling to it and we feel safe in the knowledge that other people have tried this practice before and it worked for them.
I’ve seen this play out first-hand with clients. One client with several large manufacturing plants wanted to come up with new and more effective ways to communicate with their frontline factory workers. We discussed what they know about their employees, how we could deepen this understanding and looked at the current channels they were using. We began to throw around ideas of how to make progress, including deep audience research with groups of employees and some experimental new tactics to engage their attention. But the client got nervous. ‘What if it doesn’t work? What if these experiments fail? I think we should just play it safe and apply the industry best practices instead,’ they told me. ‘Can you do some research into what our competitors are doing and we’ll roll that out.’ This is not an uncommon approach for organizations that are conservative, traditional and thoroughly risk averse. Best practice approaches are very appealing for their apparent ability to reduce the risk of failure.
Expert consensus
Best practices often emerge from the consensus of experts and thought leaders in internal communication. We can see this in our examples above, where reputable organizations like the Institute of Internal Communication and Solent University actively promote best practices in our field. These practices represent a collective wisdom that has been tested and validated by people we perceive as having more expertise and wisdom than us.
I understand this more and more as I teach more students every year. Many people who work in internal communication have no formal communication training. Some make a lateral move into internal communication from HR or administrative roles and look to industry experts to lead the way. They hungrily consume blogs, newsletters and thought industry articles, thankful for the advice and unquestioning of its validity.
I spoke about this in confidence with one of my younger students. She’s early twenties, extremely smart and admirably self-aware. She told me, ‘I joined my organization as the assistant to the CEO. I started getting tasks related to communication, it started with an employee newsletter and then came employee events and webinars.
‘I’ve now been moved into a full-time internal comms role and from the outside it would probably look like I’m doing a good job. But underneath I’m sort of panicking every day because I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing. I spend a lot of time reading internal comms blogs and content on best practice. It’s essentially free advice, and my god I need it.’
I hear this sentiment repeated in my interview with Paul Bennun, a very experienced internal communication and people leader. He tells me that the best practice approach is most appealing when you’re early in your career or you’re not sure of how to get things done. ‘Best practices can act as a guidance to people and help them to find the right approach to take,’ he says, adding contemplatively, ‘but of course there’s really no such thing as best practice.’
Predictable outcomes
And, of course, we are drawn to best practices because of the tantalizing promise of a predictable outcome. There’s an expectation that if we follow established methods then we can reasonably expect consistent and reliable outcomes that others have had before. It worked for them so it’s going to work for us too, right? This predict- ability gives reassurance and comfort, and of course we all want that. The predictability of a best practice approach provides reassurance to decision-makers and senior stakeholders in the business. Knowing that established methods are being followed can instil a sense of comfort and ease, due to the belief that by using best practices will lead to success. This is highly attractive to leaders because it creates an environment where outcomes can, in theory, be anticipated with a reasonable degree of accuracy. This enables forward planning and goal setting.
One internal communicator I speak with says he leans on the predictability of best practice as a way to get approval for budgets and resources. ‘Where I work,’ he tells me, ‘everything has to go through multiple layers of approval. The more creative or innovative your idea is, the less likely it is to be approved. I’ve learned over time that you’re more likely to get the green light if you explicitly link the project to a best practice and show how the same approach has worked for companies X, Y and Z before. And if the company is one of our direct competitors you’re even more likely to get a yes.’
The limitations of best practice
Now you might be thinking that all of this sounds great. A safe, tried-and-tested approach with a predictable outcome that delivers efficiencies—what’s wrong with that? Why on earth would we want to deviate from best practices? What on earth is my problem?
Well, simply because best practices limit us. Is it realistic to think we can simply transplant tried-and-tested practices from one organization to another, irrespective of the cultural or situational differences? In my view, no, it’s not.
Let me explain in more detail and set out my stall here. Be open-minded and I’ll see if I can convince you that we need to fall out of love with best practice and have a love affair with curiosity instead. Let’s have a look at the specific reasons why I think best practice limits us:
Context matters
It’s unstrategic
It looks to the past
Because of the language
It stifles innovation
🤔
To continue reading, purchase your copy of Joanna’s book, Innovative Internal Communication:
Get a 20% discount using the code IIC on Kogan Page’s website
Otherwise, buy from an indie bookstore or from Amazon
Joanna Parsons is the CEO of The Curious Route, an internal communications consultancy practice based in Dublin, Ireland.
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