Orchard LABS blogs

people engagement

internal Communications

 

Why isn’t  internal  comms as important

as external comms.

Written by Dai Butcher - Creative Director

Over my career I have worked in many phases of people engagement. I have had the privilege to work along side some very talented people across many industries. I have consulted on recruitment, training and internal communications, helped businesses implement change in the work force and supported leadership to make real impact with their teams.   

 

I have met clients who do it well and clients who do it badly. But generally, it’s not through lack of trying. It’s a square peg ,round hole situation.  

I am very privileged to work for a company that has given me free space in OrchardLABs to really work with clients in these areas. I don’t have a product list that I have to push and I don’t have targets for a client’s value. This has meant that I can work with my clients in the early stages to really analyse the needs of the client and their teams to try and come up with solutions that solve problems. Obviously, we are a business, and need to charge for this consultancy phase but it has led to much more productive and healthy relationships with my clients.    

A project may start with a focus on creating video content for training or communications, but end with team workshops or best practice changes. We build our teams around the client’s needs, we bring in specialists from outside of our business and skills from across our wider agency to deliver truly amazing projects. but ultimately, we create relationships with our clients. I now consider a few of my clients, friends and have spent time with them outside of projects as I would with any of my colleagues. Most recently I spent some time with the Netflix team in The Hague and we had good fun talking about everything other than what we are currently doing for work.  

we sell solutions,

not products

When I talk to new clients about these relationships and our approach there can be a little trepidation. We may be little unusual from the norm in safety or training or HR, and the approach may be little left of field or just “not how we do things” but always, after a week or so of working together, the team slips into a different rhythm.  

You may be asking what this magical “different” approach is?

What’s the secret sauce to OrchardLABs is and why we feel that we are different to every other supplier in our space.  

The truth is….  

We aren’t!!

And the magical  “different” approach is actually just asking a question.  

“Is there a better way to do this?” 

It’s that simple. Nothing more or less than working to find the right direction, the best possible solution within a client’s parameters and budget. We don’t claim to be experts in every field or claim to know more about your team than you do. That’s why our clients are so heavily involved in the projects.

From conception to delivery we work together as a team. Our clients always have the answers to the questions, They just sometimes don’t know what the questions are. And if you don’t know what the question is, then the answer is useless.  

I reference Douglas Adams and the answer is        

            42.           

This was a long rambling intro to what I really came to talk about but if you have ever read a blog of mine you will know that my process is free form. I think and write and it’s my way to dump the thoughts in my crazy swirling brain into some order.  

 

I am creative and that’s who I will always be and it has made me good at my job (I hope would others would agree).  

I digress,  

 

I think the big difference in the businesses that are absolutely smashing their internal comms game, versus the ones that are not, is purely in approach and not in intent.  

 

IF your business communicates with its clients, How do they do that? 

They will either have a marketing team or will rely on creative agencies to deal with the communication to customers/clients. They will have sales team to push products and will rely on designers to make sure it all looks pretty. When a new campaign comes in, they will have a few agencies come and pitch ideas to them, from messaging, to the visuals and the strategy, and they will turn down multiples of these ideas in search of the right one.  The reasons for not liking a pitch may be  

 

  • Agency didn’t understand our audience and the strategy isn’t right 

  • Agency didn’t understand our audience and tone isn’t right 

  • It didn’t look how we wanted 

  • The approach is not very imaginative 

  • We’ve seen this before and our customers won’t engage with it.  

 

All valid and that’s why the creative agency exists, to create communications that hit all of these marks.

But when we do internal communications, we may turn down suppliers/ideas based on the opposite.  

 

  • We don’t need a roll out strategy 

  • The tone is not official enough 

  • It doesn’t look like internal comms content 

  • That’s too different  

  • I’ve never seen anything like this before 

Answer:

how  can labs help?

The truth is that all people are consumers and your teams, are people just like everyone else. Every other company is finding ways to advertise and communicate with your teams every day and making a real effort to ensure that their messaging hits home and creates some kind of emotional connection but when they come to work, we stop trying to engage with them effectively, we leave that to everyone else.  

 

It’s a weird thought right? That every other company that is marketing and advertising to your team is spending more money and time to get it right than you are? 

 

When we point this out to our clients and the absurd nature of our approach to how we talk externally VS internally, it’s like a light bulb has been switched on. It’s very rare that companies come to this conclusion on their own.

This is where we have been operating for the past few years. Helping professionals in HR, Education, Training and Safety, to create better content and communications with internal teams.  

 

A few of you may already be having some objections to this and I totally understand where you are coming from, please don’t think for one second that I believe that you can spend as much on internal comms as your business does on external. The budgets aren't there for you to create content to the standards of the next Mercedes car commercial, simply to explain why flushing paper towels down the toilet is a bad idea.  

 

But there are also employee value considerations. Taking the time to communicate effectively with your teams really helps for them to feel invested in.  I came into the recruitment side of things about the time that the concept of employer branding was becoming huge (not new but huge), Google had installed the balls pits, there was free food and childcare and everyone else was trying to find their way of competing with it. This settled down a lot over the years but the principle remains the same.  

Employees started to say “if I am not valued here, then I will find somewhere I am”. And that’s the part that has stayed.  

 

Data began to show that the recruitment of new employees and the training of them to competence was costing businesses a fortune.  

Retaining staff is a lot easier than replacing staff, not just in time and money but in culture. Creating an environment where teams feel listened to, communicated with and cared about has become of paramount concern for businesses and the content we have created with our clients hashas this at the heart of the approach. 

 

If we can better ENGAGE with our teams we can better RETAIN the people who make up our teams. A happy team is more productive and a business of happy individuals is more desirable in recruitment campaigns.    

 

There are a thousand reasons why you should invest in more or better or more imaginatively curated internal communications. And sadly, to list them and how you do it, would be a book

and I have no desire to write a book right now. Nor do I believe that I am an authority on the subject.

As a team we move in an under populated space. We don’t have many competitors as such. But that’s great. I love working with people engagement content and ideas. It’s applying all of the skills that I love in the creative arts with my passion for training, education and bettering people lives.  

I leave you with a a question. 

What was the last song, or film, or video or novel or blog that you consumed, that made you feel something and you felt the need to share it with others? 

Have you got something in mind? 

 

and then ask yourself this question. Was it something your company created? 

Was it your AGM booklet? 

Was it your induction process? 

Was it your latest training? 

 

Or was it something completely different that you heard in the world that we exist in outside of work? 

 

If you answered YES to it being outside of work? then get in touch to see whether we can help change that for you and your team.  

 

If it was something from work…. Then WELL DONE, your team are smashing it and I would love to hear all about it. 

 

Thanks for reading my ramblings. I look forward to hearing yours.  

Start innovating with your approach.

Get in touch to see how OrchardLABSs can help you and your team with your next project.