The Very Best Online Podium

From the moment you walk through the revolving door to a business office until the time you leave, you pick up a hundred little clues concerning how the organization functions and what it values. With regard to internal communicators, it’s in the same way important to look closely at these subtle messages as it is to design an award-winning communications strategy. Here’s how come.

When you ask yourself “What are generally we saying throughout that organization, and what do we should say? ” you will quickly developed a list of themes, initiatives, and values that you currently promote. You’ll examine employee communication materials, internal newsletters, your Intranet site, and much much more other vehicles that you hope are doing the “heavy lifting” of internal communication for your needs. You’ll be capable of spot the gaps between that which you DO say and what you want to say to ones team. To date, so good.

Nevertheless evaluating the published materials and beautifully designed website content misses the purpose. Employees are very sophisticated in regards to evaluating internal messaging. They can quickly spot the difference between the Party Line and the way Things Really Work. That’s so why internal communicators who focus on the formal vehicles chance missing the channels that will speak most loudly to help employees.

As an example, you may talk about risk-taking until you’re blue inside face, featuring risk-taking employees in your internal newsletter and giving awards to men and women that went out on some sort of limb. But when your employees hear regarding the CEO bashing a person (or worse, firing him) for taking the wrong risk, your energy has gone to squander. Not only that – you look enjoy hypocrites, for saying another thing and practicing another.

So am I asking ones internal communications chief to overpower the CEO’s behavior? Of course not. That’s not realistic, but what is realistic is to call attention to the gaps between what is said to be valued, and what is actually valued, in the organization. Regularity (HR people call it Alignment) is a key.

That is why – speaking of risk-taking – leading the internal communications function is not for the faint of heart. If you happen to lack the guts to inform the emperor when he’s naked, you must find another profession.

Here’s an additional example of mis-alignment with internal communications. Your company may view itself since fast-paced, team-oriented and customer-focused: nearly every company does. It will only take one old-school, preachy “don’t people dare” memo from HR to blow that perception. The first time your employees read a typical, thoughtless “expense reports filed a lot more than 30 days late aren’t going to be processed” bonehead HR memo, your rah-rah internal communications efforts choose dust. People aren’t stupid. They know the location where the rubber meets the road.

This is why effective internal communications get stem to stern – from the Podium to the Paystub. Just about every communication vehicle, from an all-hands email blast to your CEO’s Town Hall assembly, should stem from the same set of objectives and values. It’s easy to meet this goal, in the event the top leadership team gives the word. podium