Scott McKenzie’s Collective Conversation Blog

I’ve just about recovered from chairing the CIPR conference on internal communications on Monday. Most people think I relish being up in front of lots of people. Let me tell you now it’s an act! I went home exhausted and ended up lying on the sofa for the rest of the evening.

Anyway, it was a really great day.

Liam Fitzpatrick kicked us off and somewhat controversially suggested that nothing much has changed for internal communicators. That the recession simply meant we had to do what we always have: demonstrate our value. I understand where Liam is coming from. But I do think the pressure on communicators is far more intense. We are being asked to do more with less. And in my view the work we are doing is generally more challenging than it was a year or so ago.

Leona Deakin then gave a fascinating presentation on survivor syndrome. Where employees have feelings of anger and guilt following big changes like redundancies. What struck me was Leona’s explanation that human beings need to feel in “control” and what this meant for communicators in times of ambiguity and uncertainty. Are we able to help our colleagues find this element of control?

We then had an outstanding presentation from Paul and Mary at Camden Council. They demonstrated how they deliver incredible value for the council fromt heir internal comms by closely managing their costs and always being conscious of measuring the value of what they do. What I particularly admired was their flexible approach - they are constantly testing new ideas. And measuring their effectiveness. If they don’t work then the try something new.

We then took this best practice and ran a workshop around justifying the value of internal comms.  I will return to some of the findings from this session in a future blog but it’s fair to say we identified some great practice.

The afternoon session was kicked off by my colleague Niall Cook who talked around the theme of “cutting edge” technology. Niall talked about the “we need facebook ” phenomenon. Where organisations think that because facebook or other social networks are popular they must be important in engaging emplooyees. He really hammered home the point that before you decide on adopting new technology you need to know what you’re trying to achieve. In other words make sure you’ve properly defined the problem before arriving at a solution.

We then had Sharon Saxton from City & Guilds give us the HR Diretcor’s view on communicating business performance. My main takeout was that while being mindful that the numbers are important - performance has a much broader definition. It is about people, it is about behaviour.

We wrapped up with a really energetic and illuminating panel discussion adressing issues like change fatigue, audience segmentation, using mobile technology, making best use of an Employee Opinion Survey among many other topics.

All in all I felt it was a really rewarding and interesting day. If you were there I hope you found it useful. If you were not able to get along make sure you get to our next event at BAFTA in November. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about that event our about CIPR Inside as a whole.

Now I’m going for another lie down.

P.S. - Looking forward to seeing those of you coming to our creative problem-solving event here at H&K tonight!