Simply-Blogging

Spam addict...

I suppose I should be careful what I say here as I have been guilty of marketing email in the past - but how much spam flies around the world of Internal Communications?

I only mention it because I have just spent an hour of my Sunday tidying up some of my mail and realise that in the last week I got an average of four mails a day from people trying to get me to go on one of their IC courses or to read something about IC.

Clearly I'm not counting the real spam that tries to sell me stuff I don't need at all - like medication or the chance to launder the ill-gotten gains of a dead Nigerian politician.

I'm sure that much of the stuff aimed at me as a communicator is very good and of a high quality but does anyone read it all?

My problem though is that most of it is my own fault.  It comes mainly because it's generated by bodies of which I'm a member (the CIPR and the IABC) or from publishers like Ragan or Melcrum (and I can't face unsubscribing as I'm terrified I'll miss something!).

I remember once telling Victoria Mellor that people always comment about the volume of mail that Melcrum send and she pointed out that it works.  Whilst some people get irritated by their in-boxes getting a daily note, it seems that bulk mailings get results - without them some people wouldn't know about courses or products that are of use to them.

I've been talking to Marc about it and debating if Simply-Communicate will do a daily bulk mailing and I don't think we're going in that direction.

But could it be that there are more people than just me who take a strange delight in this sort of spam?  Could it be that internal communicators can't really object to receiving spam because we've all done it at one stage or another?

Perhaps I could start up Spamaholics Anonymous?

Liam

Hooray for the CIPR

Congratulations to the CIPR and to Kevin Ruck for finally sorting out a proper qualification for people entering the profession.

The big selling point is that it is actually properly accredited - you can trace a quality link back through the CIPR to the UK's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.  This means that if someone turns up with this qualification on their CV you can tell something about them.

Of course there is the Kingston University course - which is certainly accredited (I was even an external examiner on it for a brief period of time) - but it's aimed at more senior people and involves a longer-term academic committment (which isn't to everyone's taste).

The problem is that the professional bodies have kept their hands out of accreditation for too long.  The CiB offer a series of excellent courses but, apart from their relationship with Kingston, they don't really have a quality assurance process to match that applied by a chartered body like the CIPR.  The IABC's Accredited Communicator Qualification has yet to receive the respect in Europe that it enjoys in North America.

I suppose I should declare several interests.  Simply are supporting the programme for the first public courses and we're offering an in-house option to our clients.  On top of that I've been a member of the CIPR for far too long and I regularly rant on the subject of learning in their magazine.

So I know a little of Kevin's journey to pilot the syllabus through.  And it started with a search for a suitable qualification that he could promote to a corporate client.  After a years of searching he couldn't find anything really suitable so he started working with the CIPR on defining what he throught was needed.

I'm most excited because I think it marks the beginning of better recognition for IC professionals.  Although it's an entry-level qualification, it provides a quality benchmark against which other training courses will be judged.  Obviously courses like Melcrum's Black Belt have an excellent reputation and have nothing to fear, but others have much to worry about.

Liam

Handy little site

I have just come across this wiki - it's a sort of "How To" site with loads of great ideas (and a few to take with a pinch of salt).

Having just spent the last week drafting an on-line change communications manual for a client it made me wonder (but not for the first time!) if the whole world could be this simple!

Liam 

Why do communicators talk like idiots?

Just found this excellent posting which says it all!

Liam

Ethics

I have found myself in several conversations recently about job losses and how best to communicate them - hardly surprising eh?

Inevitably people say that you have to be "open and honest" and tick off all the reasons why being secretive or economic with the truth is a very bad idea.  Which I don't disagree with.

However, practice is somewhat different for most commuicators.

There are the stockmarket rules that govern timing and managers who don't want to give the impression that cuts are being made because the company is going broke (even though that's exactly why cuts are being made).

Then you have to contend in international companies with the uncertainty caused by different regulatory regimes governing job losses.  You mmight want to give people some idea of when thier employment will cease, but its pretty hard to predict it in Germany, Italy or France...

Finally, the awful truth can be that HR is in such disarray that they can't actually work out the figures or Finance are driving the timing so that the job losses have the best whole year effect on the balance sheet.

Under these circumstances openness can be foolhardy in the extreme and 'honesty' becomes a rather wooly, subjective concept.

But if IC doesn't keep true to some values where will it all end up?

I have found two things to be useful recently.

Firstly, getting in early in the conversation and setting out the options with pro's and con's clearly spelt out.  Painting a clear picture of the risks faced by the company has been really useful and it moves the conversation from wishy washy hand-wringing to a sensible management debate about how best to manage internal and external reputations.

Secondly, find a test of what's right.  My working code is "is this fair?"  - if you can't be completely candid or the bluntest interpretation of fact is too damaging at least you can ask if what you plan is fair to all concerned.

The idea is that trying to see the best interests of employees is the minimum that a communicator can do.

I wonder how other people approach the issue?

Liam

What a brilliant idea....

I've just been sent a promotional flyer inviting me to adopt a word. 

Yep - here it is - it's a christmas charity thingie for a great charity...check it out.

Liam

It's amazing what you find when you Google yourself

Found when I was googling the other day that my alter ego in Ireland has a website of recipes for baking called Simply Bread - how cool is that?

Liam

Don't panic, don't panic!

I'm a bit worried.

Apparently there's a war being waged that I missed.  Ok, maybe the recent coverage of the US elections and the Ross/Brand dirty phone calls distracted me.

But it seems that HR have been battling with unseen evil forces to snatch control of Internal Comms and despatches from the front line suggest that the tide is turning in their favour.

This great news comes to us courtesy of Ian Buckingham and his blog on The Change Board

I suggest you take time to read it (well at least half way down).

His point is that HR is wresting control of IC from other less worthy people.  The problem is that IC seems to be run by a bunch of unprofessional hooligans who don't know better than to write everything down.

Where has this man been living?  Maybe he's been hanging out with John McCain on the Iraq-Pakistan border.  But his picture of IC professionals is completely alien to me.

And apparently "face to face communication via line managers is proven, time and again, to be the most effective communication"- which could go down in the 'attacking Panzers with cavalry' book of outdated tactics...

Of course face to face is valuable, but anyone with any experience knows three facts:

1) It isn't proven to be very much

2) It is only effective when it works - which isn't often

3) ...and it only applies to subjects in which the manager is expected to be the expert - for other issues employees are happy to hear from other people (which might be by paper).

Ian rambles on a bit more and (to my embarassment) repeats a few of my personal prejudices about big bang engagement programmes - but with him leading us into battle internal communicators should be going AWOL as fast as they can.

Liam

Just Plain Nuts

Reading HR Magazine this week I came accross this great interview with the HR boss of Cable & Wireless in which he mentions a feedback campaign called "Just Plain Nuts". 

Apparently you can tell your boss about something at work that is driving you mad and see if it can be fixed....

But best of all... in this edition is an article on HR Metrics which opens with the phrase "Directors need to transform the airy cliche about people being their greatest asset into a guiding principle of business strategy."

Sound familiar?

I have been growing increasingly impatient with some of the waffle I've been seeing recently on the subject of metrics for IC.

My problem is that I can see that if you do x and have result y, then you can start building a measurement strategy but what if you can't show how Y results from X?  And that's what most of IC is like - although you wouldn't believe it from most of the stuff that seems to be written on the subject.

Last week I saw 3 different pieces of nonsense which went into great lengths to describe mathametical formulae for showing that as a result of superior communications some sort of amazing business result could be attributed.  In one case there was a particular emphasis on showing a specific ROI figure (which, if credible would have stunned any passing finance director).

The only difficulty was that cunningly hidden away was an assumption that communication was the sole or main causal factor at work.

So, for example, HR want more managers to conduct performance reviews and ask communications for help.  If suddenly the number of reviews increases five fold should IC claim the credit?  Of course not - well at least not until we've seen what else was happening by way of leadership, systems etc....

I have always taken the line that we shouldn't obsess about the figures - mainly because the energy involved in getting close to an accurate figure isn't justified by the marginal benefit it brings.  In short it is enough to know that you are moving things in the right direction and at the right sort of speed.

So, do you remember the scene in Dead Poets Society when the students are told to rip from their textbooks an essay explaining how to calculate the greatness of a poem?  That's just plain nuts isn't it?

Liam

End of an era

Off to Cranfield this morning to start my last ever Black Belt course...

It's going to be funny saying goodbye to something that has been such a major part of my life for a long time.

Way back in the mid 1990's I attended a three day course run by consultants Smythe Dorward and Lambert which marked the beginning of my career in IC.  The course, in retrospect, was pretty odd - but then in the UK there wasn't much of a body of knowledge on the subject.

But as my career rolled on and SDL stopped running the course (and stopped existing) I saw more and more the need for such a programme.  Where could communicators go to get a common baseline in the skills, theory and good practice that they needed to do a decent job?

By the time I left Marconi in 2004 there was really nothing out there.  The CiB sponsored a variable bag of one day skills courses and there was a year long academic programme at Kingston University which got mixed reports (depending on your taste for academia).

With Sue I tried hawking a course around - first to the CIPR and then to some professional conference organisers with little luck.  Finally we got Melcrum to take a punt on the ridiculous idea of a four day course at a university-type place with a limited number of students.

I was doing martial arts (badly) at the time so we came up with the name 'Black Belt' and I scratched together the marketing copy and we were off...

So three years later we've had what must be four or five hundred people through the course, created a benchmark in IC training and put people in touch with each other all round the world...

And now, other committments mean I have to step away and let Sue carry on with it....

It's going to be odd not climbing into the car every six weeks or so to go to Cranfield though...but watch this space...

Liam