The Internal Comms Museum of Horrors

Welcome to the Internal Comms Museum of Horrors.

For years, we’ve been carefully collecting some of the most terrifying artefacts ever discovered in workplaces across the country.

• The 47-slide town hall deck.
• The intranet page last updated when Theresa May was Prime Minister.
• The leadership video in which the CEO appears to be reading a ransom demand.
• The newsletter so enormous it could reasonably be submitted for the Booker Prize. If the Booker Prize accepted nominations cluttered with ClipArt and squashed photos.
• And, of course, our most valuable exhibit: the all-staff email containing absolutely nothing relevant to 93% of the people who received it.

You may recognise some of these exhibits. You may even own some. Don’t worry. Security has been informed.

But underneath the silliness is a serious point. Internal communication practices have a habit of hanging around long after they’ve stopped being useful. Channels multiply. Content accumulates. Formats become traditions. And eventually someone asks:

“Why do we do it like this?”

Only to receive the chilling response:

“Because we’ve always done it like this.”

AAAAAARGH!

So, grab your complimentary audio guide and follow us into the darkness.

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Exhibit 1: The Email Crypt

Our tour begins underground. The air is cold. Outlook notifications echo through the darkness. And there, preserved behind reinforced glass, is one of our oldest specimens:

The All-Staff Email.

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Researchers believe it once served a useful purpose. Unfortunately, over many years, organisations began using it for absolutely bloody everything…

System outages. Leadership announcements. Charity bake sales. Organisational restructures. New starters. Lost umbrellas. Changes to pension arrangements. Somebody leaving a Tupperware container containing what used to be lasagne in the third-floor kitchen.

ALL. STAFF. EMAIL. The logic is seductive. “We need everyone to know this.” Therefore: “We must email everyone.”

Except sending something and communicating something are not the same thing. When every message is important, nothing is important. Employees learn that most internal emails probably aren’t relevant to them, so they scan subject lines, mentally categorise them as SOME CORPORATE THING and return to the work they were doing.

Then something genuinely important arrives. And Internal Comms cries: “WHY HASN’T ANYBODY READ IT?”

Because you've trained them not to.

This is why a proper Comms Strategy should consider audiences, relevance, timing and channel choice before somebody instinctively reaches for Send All.

• Does everybody genuinely need this?
• What do they need to know?
• What do they need to do?
• Could it be targeted?
• Would another channel work better?
• Is email even the right format?

Or are we emailing 4,000 people because Martin has lost his Pokemon water bottle?

CURATOR'S NOTE: Martin's bottle was subsequently discovered next to his laptop.

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Exhibit 2: The Intranet Catacombs

Please stay close to your guide. Several visitors entered this section looking for the expenses policy in 2023. They have not been seen since.

Welcome to The Intranet Catacombs.

At first glance, everything appears normal.

There's a homepage. Some news. A navigation menu. Perhaps a nice picture of six ethnically diverse colleagues pointing enthusiastically at a laptop.

But venture deeper and things become disturbing... You discover departments that no longer exist. Profiles belonging to people who left four years ago.

Policies marked DRAFT. Policies marked FINAL. Policies marked FINAL FINAL.

And lurking in the darkness: Expenses_Policy_FINAL_v7_NEW_USETHISONE2.pdf

Nobody knows which document is correct. Nobody knows who owns the page. Nobody is brave enough to delete anything. So, it stays. Forever.

This is how intranets become digital landfills.

The problem is rarely that organisations don't have enough content. It's that they've accumulated too much of it without sufficient governance, ownership or thought about how employees actually look for information.

And when people can't find what they need, they develop workarounds.

• They ask a colleague.
• They message HR.
• They save local copies.
• They create their own Teams folders.
• They bookmark an ancient document.

Soon your beautiful “single source of truth” has approximately 46 competing sources of truth.

This is where Intranet Design needs to be about much more than making SharePoint look pretty.

Good intranet design asks:

• What are employees actually trying to accomplish?
• How should information be structured around those needs?
• Who owns the content?
• When should it be reviewed or removed?
• Can people find the right answer quickly?

Because adding a gorgeous homepage to a chaotic information architecture is essentially putting a lovely new front door on a skip.

And while you're here, perhaps check whether your intranet still contains an article wishing everyone a Happy Christmas 2021.

We'll wait.

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Exhibit 3: The Hall of Corporate Nonsense

You are now entering one of our most dangerous exhibits. Protective eyewear is recommended.

On the walls you'll see several authentic examples of Corporate Bollocks, painstakingly preserved in their original PowerPoint format.

“We will leverage our differentiated capabilities to accelerate strategic value creation.”

Fascinating. Nobody knows what it means.

Nearby:

“Our people remain at the heart of our transformational journey.”

They've just been told their department is being reorganised.

And over there:

“We are delighted to announce an exciting evolution of our operating model.”

Redundancies.

Corporate language usually doesn't start maliciously. It creeps in. A phrase appears in a strategy document. Somebody repeats it in a leadership presentation. It enters the annual report. Comms picks it up. HR adopts it.

Within six months, everyone is “driving”, “leveraging”, “embedding”, “aligning”, “unlocking” and “transforming” things.

Nobody is simply doing anything anymore.

The problem is that employees don't experience organisations through corporate terminology. They want to know:

• What's happening?
• Why?
• What does it mean for me?
• Do I need to do anything differently?

Good internal communication translates organisational complexity into language people can actually understand. That doesn't mean dumbing things down. Quite the opposite.

Explaining complicated things simply is considerably harder than repeating the complicated language somebody gave you. It's also why Tone of Voice and Comms Strategy matter.

An organisation should sound recognisably like itself whether it's announcing results, explaining strategy, communicating change or reminding people not to microwave fish in the communal kitchen.

• Human.
• Clear.
• Appropriate.
• Consistent.
• And ideally containing fewer sentences that sound like they were generated by putting an MBA textbook into a NutriBullet.

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Exhibit 4: The Leadership Video Dungeon

Please don't be alarmed by the gentleman on the screen. He is not being held against his will. That is simply how he always looks on camera.

Welcome to our audiovisual collection, home of the legendary:

Corporate Hostage Video.

You know this one... Senior leader. Empty meeting room. Uncomfortable chair. Camera approximately twelve feet away. Script positioned slightly to the left of the lens.

“Hello. Colleagues. Today. I would like. To Talk. To talk to you. About our exciting. Our Exciting. New. Strategy.”

Blink twice if you need assistance, Richard.

Video Production can be one of the most powerful tools in internal communications.

• It lets employees see leaders.
• Hear emotion.
• Understand tone.
• Meet colleagues.
• See something rather than read about it.
• Explain complex ideas visually.
• Tell actual stories.

But somewhere along the way, organisations occasionally decided that “using video” simply meant filming somebody reading an email aloud.

That's not video communication. That's an audiobook with a face.

If you're going to use video, use what video is good at.

• Show something.
• Tell a story.
• Use graphics or animation to explain complexity.
• Film employees doing the thing you're talking about.
• Ask leaders questions instead of forcing them to memorise paragraphs.
• Keep it conversational.
• And for the love of all that is holy, allow people to blink.

A strong internal video should feel more human than an email, not less. The same applies to production quality. It doesn't always need a six-camera shoot, drone footage and Hans Zimmer composing the soundtrack.

Sometimes a straightforward, well-planned leadership film is exactly right.

The important things are the idea, audience, message and execution.

Start with those. Not: “The CEO wants to do a video.” Wonderful. Why?

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Exhibit 5: The Campaign Graveyard

We now arrive at the saddest part of the museum. Please observe a respectful silence.

Here lie hundreds of internal communication campaigns that were tragically taken from us before their time.

New Values Launch 2022

• One email. Three posters. Never mentioned again.

Wellbeing Week

• May it rest peacefully beneath 700 other intranet articles.

New Strategy Launch

• Survived for approximately 11 days.

Cyber Security Campaign

• Password was Password123.

Many internal Comms Campaigns don't actually fail because the creative idea was bad. They fail because they weren't really campaigns.

Somebody had something to communicate. So, Comms created an email, an intranet article, perhaps a poster and, if everybody was feeling particularly adventurous, a Teams background.

Then everyone moved on.

But if you need employees to understand something, remember something or change behaviour, one communication is rarely enough.

A campaign needs:

• An objective.
• An audience.
• An insight.
• A central idea.
• A journey.
• A reason for employees to care.
• Different touchpoints.
• Repetition without simply sending the same thing eight times.
• And some way of establishing whether anything actually changed.

This becomes even more important during Change Comms.

Organisations often have multiple projects shouting for attention simultaneously.

New technology! New structure! New behaviours! New values! New office! New process! NEW FONT!

Each project believes it is the most important thing happening in the organisation.

Employees experience all of it at once.

A good communications strategy looks across that landscape and asks how messages connect, compete and affect the same people.

Because your employees don't organise their brains according to your programme workstreams. They just know everyone keeps emailing them about transformation.

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The Exit Through the Gift Shop

Congratulations. You've survived.

Before leaving, please return your audio guide and take a moment to consider whether any of the exhibits looked... familiar.

Perhaps your intranet has become slightly archaeological. Maybe every communication request ends up as an email. Perhaps your leaders have all developed Corporate Video Face. Maybe your organisation's tone of voice contains enough “strategic alignment” to tranquilise a horse.

Or perhaps nothing is obviously terrible. Things just feel a bit... messy.

That's exactly where a Comms Health Check can be useful. Internal communication problems rarely exist in isolation.

• The newsletter isn't engaging because the content isn't relevant.
• The intranet isn't working because governance has collapsed.
• Managers aren't communicating because nobody equips them properly.
• Employees aren't engaging with campaigns because they're drowning in competing messages.
• Leaders sound corporate because nobody has helped them find a better way to communicate.
• Channels multiply because there isn't a clear Comms Strategy determining what each one is actually for.

A health check lets you step away from the daily production line and examine the whole ecosystem.

• What's working?
• What's duplicated?
• What's missing?
• What do employees actually think?
• Where are people struggling?
• What should you improve?
• And perhaps most satisfyingly: What can you stop doing?

Because improving internal communication doesn't always mean adding something.

Sometimes the healthiest thing an organisation can do is ceremonially escort a pointless newsletter, abandoned SharePoint site or 47-slide town hall deck into retirement. Thank it for its service. Wish it well.

Then change the locks.

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Please Visit Again

Internal communication has changed enormously.

Technology has changed. Workplaces have changed. Employee expectations have changed. Video has changed. Intranets have changed. The way organisations manage change has changed.

Yet some internal comms practices remain stubbornly preserved, wandering through workplaces like Victorian ghosts carrying an all-staff distribution list. That's why periodically reviewing your Comms Strategy, channels, content, intranet, campaigns and employee experience matters.

Not because everything old is bad. And not because you need to chase every shiny new communications platform that appears.

But because “We've always done it this way” is not a communication strategy.

So, have a look around your organisation. Open some cupboards. Check the intranet basement. Read your last ten all-staff emails. Watch that leadership video again with the sound on.

You might discover everything is in surprisingly good health. Or you might find something that belongs in our collection. If so, don't worry. The Internal Comms Museum of Horrors is always accepting donations.

Although we're afraid the 47-slide town hall deck will have to go into storage. We've already got sixteen.

If you’re not sure and want to see if one of your artefacts is suitable for our museum, just reach out and one of our friendly curators will be happy to advise.

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