First, she says, HR and PR continue to fight over internal communications turf. Internal communications should be a PR responsibility, she suggests. Personally, I think Employee Communications needs to be its own department, not aligned with either PR or HR (although working in partnership with both). PR focuses primarily on external audiences. I’ve seen too many instances when employee information needs have been ignored because they were not identical to external messages. Not that HR is a better home for internal communications, since HR is too focused on feel-good messages. (According to a 2002 study by IABC, in 72% of companies worldwide, internal and external communications are part of the same department; that department is usually called Corporate Communications. Among the companies in which internal and external communications are in different departments, employee communications usually reports to Human Resources.)

Next on Jana’s list is the fact that in most organizations employee communications does not have a seat at the management table. No argument here. The question is, why don’t we have that seat? Answer: We haven’t earned it. The profession makes grandiose promises of alignment, improved productivity, decreased turnover, higher employee job satisfaction…but (according to the Accenture study, at least) we’re not delivering. Most of the employee communications departments I see are focused on cranking out intranet and newsletter copy. The communicators in these departments don’t know the models, they don’t know the strategies, and they listen blithely to the pundits who insist that they don’t need to know these things because internal communications requires nothing more than good writing skills and common sense.

Third, Jana says, junior PR people handle employee communications. The IABC Profile study shows the mean number of years in the profession as 11 with a mean age of 39. Twenty-three percent of the respondents were responsible solely for internal communication, 16% for external, and 57% for both. I don’t know how junior you can be with 11 years of experience. But even if this is true, the question, again, is why. The answer, again, is that in the absence of meaningful results, organizations aren’t willing to make the investment in higher-powered staff. Even more distressing, the profession as a whole has failed miserably in publicizing the benefits of strategic employee communications and the successes that have been achieved when it is applied. We’re in serious need of some outreach.

Fourth, too many people provide input to communication materials. Isn’t that a fact! As Schilder notes, “During the writing and editing process, materials go from clarity to ‘inadvertent obfuscation’ and ‘purposeful omission.’”

And fifth, managers and supervisors don’t communicate with their staffs in a manner consistent with the messages produced by the internal communications department. That’s because the communications department has not established any processes that make it easy for managers to do so. There are companies (Hewlett Packard, IBM and Cisco Systems leap to mind) where the communicators actively engage managers and supervisors to ensure not only that messages are consistent, but that they are localized for employees in various departments and locations. Consequently, these employees have “line of sight”—that is, they understand how their jobs fit into the big picture, how their efforts contribute to larger goals, strategies and plans.

I really don’t have any argument with Schilder’s points, other than the nitty little statistical issues listed above. In fact, Schilder’s list (no pun intended) simply reinforces the anxiety I’m feeling after reading the Accenture study. The reason for the failure of internal communications is the failure of communicators to focus on measurable business results that are meaningful to management. It’s time to quit whining—about where we report, about the lack of a seat at the management table, about the fact that we’re not taken seriously enough. If we can start to produce results that will help our business leaders sleep better at night, the rest will follow.