Editorial
According to Wikipedia, Internal communications (IC) is the function responsible for effective communications among participants within an organization.
There are quite a few “participants” that are actively supported by IC, but I would argue that one very important category of these participants flies below the radar at most organizations.
Every IC professional feels their main mission is to support communication from the top management to the rest of the organization. While IC does add a lot of value here, most senior leaders are already excellent communicators.
Other clients IC serves are middle level managers, like directors of IT, HR, finance, operations or sales. These people need to share what their teams are doing but yet again, they are already quite good at communicating themselves.
The internal communicators I want to talk about in this article are the internal service providers. In a company, except for the people who serve customers directly or work specifically on products, almost everyone else works for somebody else within the company — they work for their internal customers, and they are internal service providers.
How Do Internal Service Providers Communicate With Internal Customers?
What is an internal service provider? They include:
- The product manager: They manage a product and have to communicate to sales and product support what the product is doing, how it is positioned and more. They must also learn how the product performs from internal customers, what the customers are saying and what the competition is doing.
- The safety coordinator: They must create a safe environment for employees by managing work related risks, training employees, learning from mistakes and managing incidents, to name a few. They have to do this by communicating back and forth with employees.
- Benefits administrator: They manage the benefits available to employees and support them in accessing these benefits.
In a slightly larger company, internal service owner positions are either at the contributor level or team leaders. Their communication skills are not always top notch and their proficiency with digital tools might be limited.
I’ve gotten to work with many people in these roles. When I interact with them, they are able to tell me every detail of how one is supposed to interact with them and why their work is important. Often, they transfer their energy and mindset to me, so when I perform a related task, I am more motivated and less stressed.
Unfortunately, these people can only communicate directly with a small number of their internal customers. This is where digital tools come into place. However, the problem with the vast majority of digital workplaces is that they are not designed to support this specific type of internal comms. As a result, these tools manage mostly to create noise and disruptions. Much like junk food, they make you slower and less satisfied.
In addition, employees that have to perform different tasks supported by different internal service owners have inconsistent experience.
Are You Involved in Internal Communications?
If so, I urge you to consider these people.
Helping your company’s travel coordinator better communicate with business travelers might not sound as sexy as talking with the COO about opening a new plant. But these internal service providers are the ones that keep a business running, whether that’s helping employees travel, having supplier invoices paid on time, putting safety rules in place or providing maintenance materials on the shop floor.
Besides improving the company’s mechanics, your colleagues will benefit greatly in the process. Internal customers will be more productive and efficient because they will receive better service. The biggest benefit, however, will be for the internal service providers, as better communication skills and proper use of digital tools will reduce the amount of time they waste on trivial questions and pointless errors.
Get Reworked Podcast: A Community-Based Approach to Employee Communications
Are You Involved With Intranet Management?
In this case, the opportunity is even greater, because the intranet is the best medium to support and improve the delivery of almost any internal service.
The traditional approach involves “representatives” of departments and asks them what they think the employees need with respect to their department. Despite the research and guesswork, this process is inefficient and ineffective. Because the wrong people are involved in the intranet design process, intranets become news feeds attached to cumbersome, obsolete information dumps.
There is a better way to design an intranet. You simply must drill down a bit more. Employees typically look for information with the objective of performing a task. For every relevant task within the organization there is somebody who owns that topic. This person is, you guess it, the internal service provider.
For these individuals, the intranet must become a natural extension of their job. They’ll do the same work as before, but with a better tool that allows them to have clearer, more streamlined communication with their internal customers.
With the help of the intranet, the internal service expert can communicate to employees why the task is important, work instructions to be followed, best practices, what tools to use and when, and who to call in case support is needed.
Engaging these people from the very beginning of the intranet design process, providing them with communication training, and offering simple conceptual and technical tools to facilitate service delivery will make intranet implementation and maintenance a lot easier. Also, the intranet itself will be of greater use to the employees and deliver a much higher impact to the company operations.
Related Article: Your Employees’ Experience Is Broad. Your Intranet Needs to Fit
How This Approach Solves Traditional Intranet Problems
Sponsorship: Simply speaking about the intranet as a way for employees to communicate better has an unclear ROI and is less likely to get support. Speaking about improving process execution and delivery of internal services of the employees is a lot easier to quantify and has a quick ROI, which makes executive support a lot easier to attract.
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Content creation: It’s often hard for intranet managers to convince their contributors to come up with “relevant” content. In fact, the term “content” is used mostly by IT, comms and marketing, while other professionals seldom use it. They speak about SOPs, operational changes, best practices, FAQs, training material, support people, apps, feedback and so on.
With just a little guidance, service providers will be able to gather all these types of information and put it into a structure that makes it easy for their internal customers to consume.
Content maintenance: When there’s no real ownership of the intranet, having obsolete content is a continuous problem.In the proposed model, content is designed to support the delivery of a service, which gives service providers the incentive to keep it relevant and updated. Likewise, they’ll be more likely to ensure their content is easily searchable because doing so positively impacts their ability to do their job.
A Rewarding Path
I know this is not a beaten, easy path. Initially you might not have all the skills required, but you can easily acquire them as you go. If you have a genuine interest in creating an impact in your organization, I truly believe that this is the best untapped opportunity. It will have a lasting effect on all your colleagues, customers and shareholders as well! And it will make management even happier than before!
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