Internal communications

What internal communications is

Internal communications is the written material a business sends its own people: the announcement of a change, the update that follows it, and the explanation managers give when they are asked about it in the corridor. The job is not to keep morale up. The job is that staff know what is changing, before a customer asks them, and believe what they have been told.

It is not the employee handbook or an HR policy document, which state rules and are read once. It is not a staff newsletter of birthdays and photographs. And it is not a press release pointed inwards; the people reading it can see the building, so anything that does not match what they can see costs you more than saying nothing.

When you need one

You need this when something is coming that staff will not like, and you know the wording will be picked over. You need it when staff are finding out about changes from customers or from each other, which they will always resent more than the change itself. And you need it when the last few announcements were written to sound positive, nobody believed them, and the channel now gets skimmed and forwarded with a comment attached.

You do not need this for good news that speaks for itself, or for a team of six who are in the same room all day. And if the underlying problem is that the new way of working has never been written down, an announcement will not fix it; what you need is the procedure written out, with the announcement a short covering note on top.

The rules it is written to

An internal announcement that spins bad news does not just fail once. It teaches everybody that this channel softens things, and every future message is read through that filter, including the ones that matter. Credibility is the whole asset, and it is spent far more easily than it is rebuilt.

• What is changing goes in the first sentence. Not the context, not the background, not the thanks. The thing itself, in the words a person would use telling a colleague about it.
• Name what gets worse. Every real change costs somebody something. Saying it plainly is what makes the rest of the message believable, and staff have already worked it out anyway.
• Separate the decided from the undecided. Say what is settled, say what is genuinely still open, and say when the open parts will be answered. Vagueness offered as reassurance reads as concealment.
• Name a person to ask. A named person with a real way to reach them, not a shared inbox that answers in four days.
• No opportunity language for bad news. A restructure announced as an exciting new chapter is the fastest way to lose a room, and the phrase gets quoted back for years.

The hard cases are the ones this is bought for. A price rise means your staff take the calls, so they get the reasoning and the permitted answers before customers get the letter. A restructure means jobs, so the message says who is affected, when they will know, and what the process is, and it goes out before the rumour does. A policy nobody likes says who decided it and on what grounds, and does not pretend there was consensus when there was not.

What you get

The announcement. The message itself, written for the channel you actually use, in a length people will finish. Usually one screen. Where it must be delivered in person first, you get the spoken version as well as the written follow-up.

The manager's brief. One or two pages for whoever takes the questions: the likely questions with plain answers, the questions that have no good answer and what to say instead of improvising, and the things not to say because they are not decided.

The staff FAQ. The practical questions in writing — dates, pay, process, who to contact — so the same answer reaches everyone rather than six versions travelling by corridor.

A worked example

An illustration. A heating and plumbing firm in Winnipeg with 40 staff is raising its service call-out rate in January. Twelve of those staff are technicians who will be standing in a kitchen when a customer sees the new figure on the invoice, and four are in the office taking the phone calls.

The draft opens with the rate, the date and the amount, in one sentence, before any explanation. The second paragraph says what got more expensive, in plain terms, and says the increase does not fund a pay rise, because the technicians would have assumed it did and found out otherwise. The third says what is not changing: existing contracts, the warranty, the no-charge callback within thirty days. The manager's brief gives the technicians three sentences they can say at a kitchen counter, along with the honest answer to the question they will actually get, which is whether the company is in trouble. The announcement goes out to staff nine days before the customer letter, which is the part that matters most and costs nothing.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What is changing, who it lands on hardest, and what has already leaked. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts, based on the number of pieces and audiences.
3. The facts. What is decided, what is not, who has signed it off, and the dates. This is usually the slow step, and no announcement can be written around a decision that has not been made.
4. The draft. Two to three working days, because this work is nearly always against a date.
5. One outside read. Somebody who is not in management reads it and says what they would assume, what they would suspect, and what they would ask.
6. Delivery. Final announcement, manager's brief and staff FAQ, with the running order of who is told what and when.

A single announcement is usually a week end to end, and can be done faster when the facts are settled.

What it costs

Internal communications is not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so it is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. What moves the price is how many audiences need their own version, whether managers need briefing material, and how compressed the timing is. A single announcement with a clear decision behind it is the simplest and cheapest version of this work.

What happens next

Most announcements are telling people about a new way of working, which then has to exist in writing, so a procedure usually follows within a fortnight. Where the change is large enough that staff need teaching rather than telling, that is training material. And a price rise announced inside has to be said outside as well, in the same words, which is pricing page copy and a customer letter. This piece of work is finished on its own, and nothing further is assumed.