Spinning straw words into gold

There is a problem in internal communications, well a few actually.

Multiple departments with multiple creators of employee communications inevitably mean pockets of quality but a whole bag of meh.  You leave your internal communication experts to write the big pieces – the CEO’s keynote, the employee mag, but they’re just the tip of the comms iceberg. It’s all the other stuff that’s being churned out every day that’s the problem.

Multiple creators of employee comms are the biggest cause of erosion of one consistent voice inside organisations. Even if the internal comms team is bang on brand, it’s nigh on impossible to keep TOV consistent across all comms.

And it matters, it really matters. A consistent tone of voice drives trust, ask any brand marketer. Quality, effective internal communication also impacts a range of engagement KPIs.

Everyone’s an expert in their own field, they’re not experts in writing effective comms. Why should they be? Yet they’re expected to write them. The IT department generating comms about an organisation’s transformation programme, finance telling employees about changes to pensions, facilities writing notices about the photocopiers, and so on.

Mike Klein adds weight to this argument in his recent piece for ‘Changing the terms’* when he says,

“We don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources, here’s your toolkit”, is a frequent comms-department response to a change owner or business manager asking for support for a key initiative.

Abdicating responsibility, driving down the quality and missing the opportunity to, as Mike says “actually help justify more resources over time”. It’s not on.

The cumulative impact of the varying quality of the day to day is what’s leaving the biggest impression on your employee audience…unless they’ve stopped reading them altogether.

Spinning straw words into gold thread. The answer is Muse.

*Mike Klein ‘Changing the terms’