From Process to People: Is Internal Comms Feeding the Beast or Fuelling the Business? 

Howard Krais:

Here’s a question that should be keeping internal communications professionals up at night, are we managing processes, or are we connecting with people? 

From where I sit, too many IC teams have quietly drifted into the first camp, maintaining a machine that produces content, hits deadlines, and generates reports. Trouble is, we’re in danger of losing sight of the human beings sitting at the other end of it. 

Our channels don’t care about people. They care about content. They demand a relentless diet of fresh material to stay relevant, and we feed them, day after day, week  after week, cascade after cascade, while our reporting tells us how many people opened  something, not what happened as a result. And the trap is that because the metrics  reward activity, we optimise for activity. 

The manager cascade is a telling example. What should be a powerful human connection, a leader making sense of change for their team, has been reduced in many organisations to a logistics exercise. The priority is getting the weekly or monthly pack out  on time. Whether the manager understands what’s in it, whether they have the skill or the  confidence to deliver it, whether any of it is remotely relevant to the people in that team have all become secondary concerns.  

Indeed, Workshop’s IC Trends report at the end of last year suggests that just over 20% of  people managers are effective at cascading information. Yet our priority is to hit the  deadline, tick the box and convince ourselves it landed well.  

The uncomfortable truth is that people don’t process information the way our content  plans would like them to. 

Neuroscience has been telling us this for years, and our own lived experience confirms it.  People have an emotional response to a communication before they start making logical  sense of it. The feeling comes first. The rational interpretation follows. Which means if the  emotional landing is wrong, if the message triggers indifference, suspicion, or eyerolls before it’s been properly consumed, the logic never gets a fair hearing. 

Long term content calendars don’t necessarily help us, as we are liable to be driven by the  wrong things. Effective internal communication starts with a genuinely difficult question, what does the person we are communicating with feel, want, and need currently; and how  does what we’re about to send them connect to that? It means taking what a leadership  team might want to say and understanding what will land, and why? 

This isn’t an argument against process. It’s an argument for the right process. 

The processes that should dominate internal communications work are those of  continuous inquiry, relentlessly asking why something worked or didn’t, what employees  find useful and interesting, what prompts them to react, respond, and care. This requires genuine curiosity about people, not just their behaviour data.

Listening programmes are an obvious case in point. Too many company-wide surveys  are simply exercises in chasing response rates and training people on accessing reporting tools. This ignores the basics that for a survey to be relevant the focus should be  on improvement driven by what employees have said. When we get this wrong, we are  not listening, we are performing at listening. And employees notice. 

The purpose of Internal communications goes well beyond keeping the channels fed and  the leadership teams satisfied. Done properly, it drives performance, reduces risk,  accelerates change, and shifts the behaviours that determine whether a strategy delivers  or quietly stalls. 

This is a serious commercial proposition. It demands a serious approach to  understanding people, not just producing content for them. The question worth asking,  about every piece of work on our respective ‘to do’ lists is whether this is genuinely trying  to change something, such as a belief, or a behaviour or is it just keeping the machine  running? Because if it’s the latter, the machine is winning. And the business isn’t.