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Malcontents vaporised

24 Sep 2009

I recently went to a presentation by a London council on how they evaluated their internal communication. Up came an impressive bar chart. The fact that the five bars on the left exceeded the four on the right meant that the staff recognised all of the corporate priorities of the new council, more than the priorities of the old council.

Fantastic, we have ‘buy in’. “The lies of the old regime are being erased from people’s minds”, says the presenter. A cheer goes up in the room. “Thoughtcrime is fast being eliminated”. Another cheer. “The remaining malcontents will be vaporised”. Another cheer. Okay, I made up that last bit.

Traditionally, internal communication has been more vulnerable than other aspects of PR to the charge of‘engineering consent’ in the manner of Orwellian thought police. With external communication in the media and on-line, there is usually a multiplicity of voices to balance the messages put out by us PR folk. This is not always true internally, where there is often greater pressure to absorb and reproduce the corporate view, uncritically.

But things are changing, and organisations need to be prepared. Digital media has given new impetus to informal gossip and networks that previously relied on face-to-face communication. Much of this communication does not recognise hierarchies and allows for fast communication from the bottom of the organisation to the top, and across continents. In the current economic climate this can be accelerated by speculation in external media.

Organisations need to rise to this challenge and engage constructively with what appears to them as subversive communication, or even active dissent. In the past there has sometimes been an assumption that when the values and messages of the organisation are cascaded down, the feedback channels will reflect passive adoration and unquestioning acceptance.

Showing how you are valuing and using criticism from staff doesn’t always come easy. But without it, the long term credibility of internal communications will suffer. We should think less about ‘engineering consent’ and more about creating a two-way process of challenge and critical acceptance.

Ian Coldwell

24 September 2009

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Malcontents vaporised