An index worth taking note of

The recent IC index 2023 report carried out by the Institute of Internal Communications in partnership with the excellent team at Ipsos Karian & Box is well worth a read. Reading through it, a few things stood out for me which I thought I’d share below.

Firstly, this is an ambitious and excellent piece of work. The first of its kind. It is not a survey of communicators saying what they think but finding out what the audience think, the people that communicators are trying to reach. So well worth listening to what they have to say.

I guess firstly - and logically - we shouldn’t be surprised (though maybe a little grateful) that the report confirms that people score organisations with dedicated internal communications team higher than those who do not have a dedicated team across a range of categories. These include higher engagement, higher trust in the CEO and manager’s feeling better equipped to lead conversations about local action. If those scores hadn’t come through then we’d have needed to take a long hard look at ourselves!

I was pleased to read that nearly three quarters of the words used to describe internal communications are positive.  Words such as “useful”, “informative” and “trustworthy”.  A word missing from the top five at least was the word “interesting”. One of my mantras has always been that we must strive to make our communications interesting. If we want people to make the time to engage with and consume what we produce then it is a big help if they are interested in what we (on behalf of the organisation) have to say.

Conversely, and recognising this is a minority of the responses, some of the negative words used are a good watch out. If our outputs are seen as “scripted”, “formal” or especially “boring” then we will constantly be fighting an uphill battle for people’s attention.

The table listing what employees want to hear more (or less) about is very illuminating. Top of the list of what employees want more of is “pay and benefits”.  This got me thinking. In my recent roles, it is true to say this is a topic that HR leaders can be nervous about talking about publicly. To some extent how decisions are made on pay can seem like something of a dark art, involving some mysterious salary benchmarking though without sharing any data or detail.  For me, this is a topic that cries out for greater transparency.  This IC Index confirms that there is both a desire for more clarity and a big opportunity for the organisation to build trust.

If someone reading this can say that in their organisation this is something they’ve got right then please share how, it would be valuable.

Page 30 of the IC Index report tells us that “1 in 4 UK workers neither understand nor believe in employer’s strategy”.  I’m never sure how helpful headlines like that are. The way I look at anything that says "1 in 4 don't..." is that "3 in 4 do", in this case either understand or believe in their organisation’s strategy. This seems a better starting point. Breaking it down further we learn that 45% of people can be described as ‘ambassadors’, meaning they are both clear on strategy and believe in it. So just under half. Is this a good starting point or an indictment on efforts to date? Is your glass half full or half empty?

One thing that stands out is how time poor people say they are. The research reports that people say they have less than 15 minutes a day to view news or updates. This can’t be a big shock. Remember, it often feels like we are bombarded internally and (don’t forget) externally every minute of every day. My question here is how good are organisations at prioritising or thinking about how to lesson noise?

I find this is one of the unintended consequences of businesses beginning to recognise the value of internal communications, in that every leader increasingly wants to communicate the work they are doing. You know the thing “everyone needs to know this…”.

This highlights how the communicator needs to be great at diplomacy as well as ruthless at prioritising. And these can only happen properly when they understand what their audience really wants. This comes from great listening.

Which is a great segue into my last point. The report tells us that 45% of workers say their organisation is good at showing how their feedback is used to help inform decisions and actions. Indeed, in bigger companies (those employing over 10,000 people) this drops to 37%.

This resonates with research work I’ve been doing with Mike Pounsford and Dr Kevin Ruck on listening over the past few years. One of our findings (in report 3) being that while people were generally very positive about how their organisations listened to them, they were considerably less positive about the actions that will deliver effective listening – in other words companies who “say” but don’t “do”. You can read more about this in our listening reports here and in our book “Leading the Listening Organisation” due out early next year.

So, a few thoughts there, what do you think? Let me know where you agree or disagree.  Most of all have a read of the report. It's good. What else will catch your eye?