The art of Internal Comms

This week. I’m joined by Sophie. We’re going to be discussing internal communications. We’re going to look at what’s an internal communication strategy is why, it arguably it’s even more important than your external communications, and why every successful company needs to have an internal communication strategy in place. Some of the pitfalls of not having one in place, and then of course, some top tips for you that you can take away and create your own internal communications strategy for your business.

I think is most businesses have an external communications plan in place. Don’t they? But not necessarily an internal one. What would you say to, what would you say to that?

Yeah, I think that it’s really common actually, in quite big businesses, as well as smaller ones, that the focus gets put on external marketing and internal activity with staff gets forgotten about.

I think one good thing hopefully has come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is that hopefully businesses realise that their staff area a really important audience, because if your staff are not on board, then they won’t be delivering a great service for your customers. So that’s why it’s, it’s really so important to get them engaged with you.

I’m not sure how many businesses listing will be able to say that they feel every single person within their organisation really understands the company’s purpose and vision and knows exactly what the company’s aiming for. But that’s the sort of level of engagement that I think we’d like to see, in an ideal world, across all the businesses that we work with, because we want to be able to feel that our work forces are 100% engaged and motivated about work.

We’ll go into a few examples that we are a good example of where it can go wrong if you don’t have people feeling engaged at work.

Various parts of your business need to work together to make sure that your workforce is a hundred percent engaged and really motivated at work. And then that starts to impact your external reputation. Doesn’t it?

Yeah, definitely. And I think that as you say, it does sit across so many different elements of the business and that’s why it’s important that it is looked at, as a senior manager board level issue, so that it can be cascaded across all the relevant departments, because you want to get buy-in from all elements of your business, but you also want to make sure that the strategy is being delivered by people from across the company. And you’re getting insights from everybody so that you can really ensure that the activity you’re going to put in place can, is going to deliver what you want it to do.

The number one reason that people say they leave their jobs is because they don’t feel appreciated. So I think that as a statistic is, compelling on its own, really that, when we want to keep us staff new, we invest in them and they’re a good representation of our brand and we don’t want to invest that time in them.

And then for them to leave us unnecessarily, just because they don’t feel appreciated when that’s something that all businesses, no matter what size you are, is able to show. Yeah. And you can fix that as it’s very easily fixed. Isn’t it, there are so many potential issues within internal communications and with the workforce that is just getting your communications?

And it’s very fixable. Isn’t it? For, as you say, no matter how big or small your company is. Yeah, exactly. And I think hopefully we’ll be able to show that in today’s podcast, that you don’t have to be a big business with big budgets to really make an impact on improving your internal communications.

And that it’s not something that should just be the reserve of big organisations and actually small companies need to work on their internal communications, just as much as large ones.

I think we were talking about before the recording Sophie, we were saying, when we want to use some examples of where it might have gone wrong for companies and we thought there was an example for Domino’s Pizza? Wasn’t that quite relevant? Do you want to talk us through that a little bit?

Yeah. So this is from a few years ago now, but I think we thought to be quite a good example because I think all the businesses listening to this podcast will be able to relate. Esentially what happened was two dominoes employees uploaded a video of them messing around at work on YouTube. So the video shows one of the workers putting cheese in his mouth before putting it onto the pizza. He shows him spitting on the food and then gloating, but the food was just about to be delivered to a customer. And then the film ended with the employee saying, this is how we roll it. Dominoes.

Oh, just terrible.

Yeah, absolutely awful.

And it is awful, but it is funny. And obviously that’s why they did it. But from a brand perspective, it doesn’t get much worse. Does it? The results of their stupidity was hugely damaging to the brand. Not surprisingly the video received over a million views. That happened very quickly before it got taken down, the story was trending on Twitter and brand sentiment changed about Domino’s from positive to negative just within one week. And even when you were Googling searches for Domino’s pizzas, the news on page one was all dominated by this, not by any of the positive stories or about the fact you could actually order a pizza.