Internal Communication is not about producing news anymore. I sincerely believe that. Actually, it should never have been about that in the first place. But since this was perceived as a way to showcase the value of Internal Communication, I guess that’s why some perceive internal communication as being those guys who produce the employee magazine and the news for the Intranet.

All this will change. The rapid changes in technology and the emergence of social media has forever changed the way we communicate. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, WhatsApp and LinkedIn must be considered as relevant channels to reach your internal audience. As a consequence, younger generations expect to engage with executives on social media and expect more authenticity in leadership communication.

The purpose of Internal Communication?

A recent published report from CIPR inside found that the purpose of Internal Communication is unclear. While CEOs seem to understand the importance of internal communications, they seem to be confused about which role internal communication should play in the organization. CEOs stats that Internal Communication (IC) is a strategic function, but examples given on how IC operates are mainly tactical (ICKollectif, The Next Level, 2018).

Personally, I have the same experience. Too often, IC ends up being those guys writing Intranet articles after being told that they are responsible for bringing the organizations values to life. That’s not done with an article or with a couple of roll-ups visualizing the values. If you want your internal communication department to really deliver value, this needs to change.

Apply the COPE Mind-set (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) and let someone in External comms or PR take care of producing the great news stories about your organization. Or establish a content team that takes care of production and ensures coordination with other stakeholders, such as marketing and employer branding.

The future Internal Communications department should focus on three things:

1. Enable people to communicate and share knowledge
2. Let colleagues experience the company purpose in the moments that matters to them
3. Inspire colleagues to act

Enable people to communicate and share knowledge

Executives should get prepared to communicate more themselves. By “themselves” I am not talking about booking the usual camera guy and communication professional to write a script. I am talking about making authentic communication themselves.

For instance, by filming themselves while capturing the thoughts of the day, interviewing a colleague or just have a regular conversation on Yammer or LinkedIn with colleagues and stakeholders. Internal messages are competing with Instagram stories, Snapchat streaks and Facebook likes. An Intranet interview with the CEO written by a communication professional will struggle getting the desired attention.

As a communication professional you should prepare yourself to transform into an advisor for the leadership team, and facilitate communication activities. In order to do so, you should gather data on what kind of content, and which channels work for their specific audiences.

In general, you should start having a discussion with your executives about the important focus areas for the upcoming year. Based on this, you create an overview of how you can support these focus areas.

An example of becoming more focused on linking your activities to the business objectives could be this: Let’s say your HR leadership team wants more people to seek internal jobs. By working closely together with the employer branding team we can help developing some great stories, make job offerings more visible and maybe even arrange events, where you can meet expats. You can measure the success by tracking the amount of job applications for internal jobs.

In general, you should make sure the leadership team is committed to the plan you create. Meet them, present a plan and get their sign off. Then follow up frequently. Give them some kind of overview of activities each month and evaluate at least every quarter.

Let your colleagues experience what the purpose of the organization is

There is a difference between telling what the organization stands for and let people experience it. If you want to have impact, you need to give your colleague an experience they remember. My favorite example comes from the airline industry. More specifically the way they do safety videos.
Regardless of what kind of video you create, you give people an experience. You can choose to give them a boring experience like Continental Airways that they will not remember, or a great experience like Air New Zealand. They connect a boring topic with a great experience. And suddenly they have our attention. Have a look yourself.

Performance reviews do not work, but what to do instead?

Let’s just briefly go back to why we – per tradition – are doing the reviews/appraisals in the first place:

1. Performance improvements: The overall purpose: Helping/pushing the employee and organization to get better results.
2. Feedback and acknowledgement: We wish to boost people performance and motivation by providing feedback and acknowledgement – and in the same time, point out undesired behavior or other wrong doings.
3. Compensation: We tie salary and bonuses to performance, and the review is supposed to be a fair way to calculate the compensation.
4. Talent management: Review scores are used to compare employees, keep records and act as base for decisions regarding promotions etc.
5. Poor performance. The review process and scores constitute a paper trail for performance improvement programs and termination.

It’s all good reasons, and in some areas it actually works. The individual goal setting strengthens focus on what is the most important, and ensures that people everywhere in the organization work on the right tasks. The management level get to discuss what good performance is, and what a good performer is like, so that we can recognize what we should push for. It also creates visibility and transparency on low performance – and it provides a ‘safe’ and fair way to deal with something that many finds difficult.

But the upsides do not even out the downsides, and what we should do is stop doing performance management, and start doing Performance Leadership instead.

Performance Leadership is about creating an organization based on people, rather than perceiving humans as a resource, and on commitment and enablement rather than commandment and control.

Here are 8 elements of Performance Leadership, that replaces the annual reviews:

1. Quit giving ratings.

At all.

2. Decouple salary and bonus from performance

Pay people fair based on market rates. Everybody in the organization play an important part in achieving the goals – and if they don’t, move them to a job where they do, or let them leave. The high performer can only do her stuff, when back office is supporting. Shift focus from pay to purpose, and from individual profit-optimization to collaboration and team performance.

3. Give regular feedback

Feedback should be given every time a task or a sprint is done, orally and/or in writing. Create a culture, where it is natural to both give and ask for feedback. Every PowerPoint presentation, workshop or any other kind of deliverable your employee is responsible for, should be rounded of with a few words. That means daily or at least weekly feedback. In agile projects weekly feedback sessions are already common (the retrospective).

4. Ask the organization

To capture what your employees are doing on projects and other types of tasks that may not be visible to you as manager, ask around, and perform regularly 360ᵒ evaluations, including all relevant stakeholders. Use this input as supplement to the personal feedback.

As an example, I have met companies, where they once a year ask everybody to (anonymously) give feedback on everybody using points. Each person have 1 point for every employee and can give one person all the points, or everyone 1 point. This highlights the ‘hidden’ high performers, and sees through the ones only managing upwards.

5. Handle poor performance instantly

Do not wait to handle low performance. Deal with it when you spot it, and handle it as part of the regular feedback. Find the best way to facilitate and counsel, based on the employee and the situation.
6. Talent management

Most managers knows who their talents are, without having to rate them beforehand; so build a separate process for this. Use also the input from the 360ᵒ feedback to discover any hidden talents.

7. Have moving targets

Keeping the strategic direction for the organization is as important as knowing the overall purpose; but how we get there should be flexible and adaptive to the changing environment. Set and reset targets on quarterly basis, keeping alignment with the overall direction.

8. Focus on the meaning

Make sure that the individual targets are meaningful for you and for the employee. Working on tasks that makes sense and have a meaning gives high motivation – and opposite: working on tasks that does not makes sense, is one of the major motivation killers, and why people leaves companies.

Having said that, there is no one-size fits all in this. Every company have to find their own pace and way forward, and what work in some organizations, may not work in yours.

What we normally advice is, that when the management team collectively have taken the informed decision to scrap performance reviews, you start experimenting with the different elements in performance leadership, and continuously adjust and evaluate it along the way.

Remember, performance leadership is about people, culture, commitment, and enablement.

You are doing it with the very best intentions, and I guess that you are doing them right now, if you didn’t finalise them just before Christmas. Performance reviews.

You probably do it to provide feedback, to appreciate and acknowledge the employees and their contribution, and to make employees improve their performance. You use it as a fair tool to distribute compensations, to evaluate and keep track of talents, and less positive: you may also do it to collect a paper trail in case you need to fire someone.

The secret – which your HR organisation very likely have discussed internally for some time – is this: It does not work (perhaps except for the paper trail-thing). In best case it is useless, but in most cases it downright demotivates your employees.

This is part 1 of 2, where I point out the problem. In part 2, I suggest a solution.

The problems about performance reviews

As I see it, there are three main problems with performance reviews:

1. The ratings
2. The timing
3. The managers

Lest go through them, one by one:

1. The ratings are demotivating

Most companies uses a 1-5 scale to evaluate the employees once a year. Since the distribution of ratings tend to skew against the higher performance and hence devaluates the rates (and we don’t trust the middle managers to be objective), some companies uses forced or ‘guided’ bell shaped distributions, like this one:

Weekly ‘happiness measurements’ are actually quite easy to run, easy to manage and the reporting takes very little of both you and your employees time. But why do it?
First of all to ensure that the team discusses how people in the team are doing. It may sounds a bit redundant if you also have 1:1s, and feel you have a good relation to the team members, but this creates the ‘room’ for the team to get to know more about each other: Everybody in the team gets an idea on how things are going. Everybody get to say how they are doing, and everybody is heard. It strengthens the relations, and ensures that each individual is acknowledged for their input.
It basically builds common understanding, strengthens team empathy, how the team work together, and in the end adds to building a strong team that cares about each other and their joint deliverables; resulting in better value for the customer.

What is then the actual output of a happiness measurement?

The way we do it, we get two things:

1. An instant measure of the temperature in our unit. A here and now: how are people doing? How did that steering committee meeting affect how the project manager liked going to work last week? Are anybody about to drown in work, or bored with their current assignments?
2. A trend curve, like the one below. It give you an option to follow employee ‘happiness’ over time. It should be interpreted with caution, but can be used to discuss and highlight what is going on in the unit during a timespan; i.e. how the team or the entire unit is affected (if at all) by the shift in management, by changing the workplace design or by a change in strategy.