I have never been very impressed with the employee communications services offered by most public relations agencies. I worked with a three-person team from one of the major global PR agencies once, and was astounded to find that none of the three had any internal communication experience at all. When I asked about it, I was told, “Employee communications is just PR to an internal audience.”

My falling jaw nearly hit the table. My belief that these practices existed so agencies wouldn’t leave billable dollars on the table was reinforced.

PRWeek, the independent publication chronicling the industry, is focused largely on the agency world. For example, very few of the nominees for PRWeek Awards come from outside the agency world. So it is with special delight that I offer kudos to Publishing Director Julia Hood for her editorial in the January 12 issue (subscription required) that argues forcefully for maintaining a strong internal communication effort even when budgets are being slashed and times are tough.

Make that especially when budgets are being slashed and times are tough.

My first department manager, back in the mid-1970s at ARCO, was the first person I knew to challenge internal communication budget cuts during a downturn. “When your ship is sinking,” Dave Orman said, “you don’t throw your radio overboard.” I’ve always maintained that the time to cut internal communications’ budget is when times are good.

Hood emphasizes these points when recounting a short item buried in the January 5 edition of The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). According to the story, Bank of America called off a town hall meeting that had been scheduled for its own employees along with those of the freshly-merged Merrill Lynch. The Journal supposed that the meeting was scrapped as a cost-cutting measure but also suggested that the cancellation may not have been the best of ideas.

Following are some choice nuggets from Hood’s editorial:

Employee communications is tough at best, and unfathomably difficult during a mega merger that is a by-product of acute financial distress on the part of the acquired company. Even for companies in less dramatic circumstances, there is a lessonhere not to miss opportunities to communicate with this most critical of stakeholder groups.

There is a temptation to let employee-engagement initiatives slide when the job market goes cold, as if staffers will naturally be inclined to stick with their companies, however dissatisfied they are, rather than risk the uncertainty of a new job. But employees whoa re merely riding out a recession before launching a job search is the last group of people you want to retain. Conversely, the cost of recruitment or, worse, the risk of enforced attrition that means you can’t rehire to replace a star who suddenly departs, should convince anyone that it is vital to hang on to the standout individuals. Even in the bad times, high performers will get poached.

Indeed. Even among the companies announcing massive layoffs, there are critical open positions being filled. Your company’s top performers are getting calls from headhunters right now.

Retention isn’t the only reason to communicate frequently and effectively when times are bad. Morale, commitment, productivity, engagement—all are bolstered by good communication and suffer from a lack of communication. Information abhors a vacuum. Rumor rushes in to fill the void when facts are not available.

Sure, communications costs money. During my time managing internal communications at an employer in the mid-1980s, I voluntarily cut my department’s budget, scrapping a classy monthly four-color feature magazine and introducing a weekly desktop-published (using Ventura Publisher 1.0), photocopied, and stapled newsletter that provided employees with timely information as the company sunk into hard financial times. When budget cuts were ordered a few months later, I proudly noted that I had already reduced mine in an effort to lead by example. But this was an instance where no good deed goes unpunished. “These cuts are from your current budget, not your budget two months ago,” the company president told me. At that point, I invoked Dave Orman’s analogy about not throwing the radio overboard when the ship is sinking. The president replied, “What if it’s the radio that’s causing the ship to sink?”

What was there to say? He didn’t really believe the cost of internal communications was the cause of the company’s financial woes. He just wanted to be clever when telling me to shut up and do as I was told.

But cost, Hood writes in her editorial, is not the point. “Employees,” she writes, “are looking for leadership, candor, and vision, not ROI. With all the digital channels available to us, there is no place or excuse to hide from your own staff.”

So I’m raising a glass to Julia Hood, my hero of the week.