Having been immersed back into the mainstream of employee communications for the last six months or so, certain things have struck me. The thing that keeps niggling me is the crazy idea that employee comms people should refer to colleagues to whom they provide comms advice as customers. This is so wrong for so many reasons …

My main beef with the use of customer/supplier terminology in general terms inside an organisation is that it sets completely the wrong tone and context  for open collaboration. The next logical step from using this terminology is bits of an organisation marketing and selling to other bits of the same organisation – and we all know where that ends up!

I think this has been particularly damaging for employee comms. As communicators we are continually fighting to get higher up the value chain, closer to the decision-makers as early as possible and away from the perception that the only value we offer is in doing stuff after all the important decisions have been made elsewhere (i.e  we are just distributors of information after the event).

I believe calling ourselves suppliers has the complete opposite effect and is a barrier to involvement in projects from the beginning and sets us apart from being key members of teams right throughout a project lifecycle. It gives the impression that we can be picked up and dropped at whim when the grown-ups need something doing … that employee comms is some kind of add-on activity and not central to everything. That employee comms is a commodity.

Furthermore, one of the most difficult aspects of being in employee comms is when you have to advise someone, often senior, not to do something they are intent on doing, or to do something very different from what they have in mind. Calling ourselves suppliers simply opens us up to the following retort: ‘I’m the customer, you’re the supplier … just do it!’ And, frankly, who can blame them!

So let’s stop this silliness now. The use of customer/supplier terminolgy inside an organisation is so 1990s … let’s get one thing straight … a customer is someone who pays money for the goods and/or services of your organisation … PERIOD! These are the people we should all be working together to satisfy … not each other.

After careful consideration, I’ve decided to breathe new life into my lovely little blog … a kind of sad one-hit-wonder-comeback-type-thing – I’m sure my therapist would have a term for it.

Anyway, it seems ages since my last post and I’ve increasingly found myself thinking and finding stuff of interest which I would like to share in more than 140 characters but no longer have an appropriate vehicle to do it. I’m also amazed at the number of people who still drop by here everyday and can’t help feeling I’m doing them a disservice by not blathering on about stuff. So … I’m back.

As I’ve aged and wisened (… is that a word?), I’ve decided that I can afford to be a bit more relaxed in the style of my posts which will still be about social media and internal communications … plus some other stuff as it crops up. I’ve also changed the design to mark the new start …

Please drop in for a chat when you’ve got a spare moment …

I’ve been wondering what to do with this blog for a few weeks now. I couldn’t make up my mind as it’s been a labour of love for over a year and I’ve picked up a fine following of interesting peeps along the way.

While I hope it will remain a useful resource for those starting their own corporate social media journeys, I’ve decided I’m pulling the plug on this blog and not posting here again

My role at BT has changed and I don’t have the time to be clever anymore …

Also, while my back was turned my personality escaped and rushed off to the other side of WordPress Land where it’s calling itself: Richard Dennison Uncut. Frankly, I think it’s being very irresponsible and I wouldn’t go over there if I were you. And, if I catch anyone subscribing to its blog feed I’ll be VERY, VERY annoyed indeed. Enough said!

Wow … has it REALLY been that long since I last posted??

In my defence, we’ve just finished a high-stakes game of musical chairs in my bit of BT – when the music stopped, there were 25% fewer chairs to sit on and they were arranged in a different way.

I had to dust off my CV and have a job interview for the first time in more years than I care to mention … fortunately, I secured one of the new chairs upon which my butt is now firmly placed … to recover from the experience, I had to take two weeks off!

Anyway, I’m now responsible for managing a group of business partners in a channels centre of excellence team providing channels expertise to the communications community in BT.

The major downside to this is that I’m having to hand over all my lovely social media toys to Mark Morrell, the BT Intranet Manager I’m sure he’ll love and nurture them as if they were his own … and if not, I’ll be waiting for him in a dark alley one night when he least expects it!

Although I no longer have the luxury of majoring on social media in BT, I am still very involved … we’re actually doing some really interesting pilots engaging with our customers in on-line forums … and Twitter is also on the radar screen which is really exciting.

In recent weeks, there has been a huge amount of interest in engaging with customers and stakeholders externally in social channels from different bits of the company … we’re taking it slowly and not biting off more then we can chew. The great thing about this enthusiasm is that it’s coming from unexpected quarters and from people who seem to get it. I’m optimistic that we are doing, or plan to do, the right things … time will tell.

Anyway, one of my final parting shots as social-media-guy was to re-write our social media guidelines. If you’re interested, take a look (downloads a PDF file; some of the links in it pointing to BT Intranet pages obviously won’t work).

I plan to keep blogging … if you can call my poor performance over recent weeks blogging! Must do better …

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the IntraTeam event in Copenhagen which was an excellent event in every way … a gave a short video interview after my presentation and did an interview for the funniest man on the event circuit, Steve Crescenzo.

I’m taking a break now from conference speaking until I have some fresh material to share.

]]> http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/intrateam-conference/feed/ 0 richarddennison http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/usability-warning/ http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/usability-warning/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:53:06 +0000 richarddennison http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/?p=305 ]]>

I just had the following conversation with my son:

Felix: I found this really cool racing game on the computer.

Me: What do you have to do?

Felix: You use the forward and sideways arrows to control the car – but I’m not sure yet whether you’re supposed to ram the other cars or race past them.

Me: Why don’t you read the instructions?

Felix: I never read instructions, I just figure it out for myself.

(Felix is 8 yrs old!)

TAKE NOTE intranet system designers!

I’ve seen lots of articles recently asking whether social media is the death of knowledge management (KM) … I’ve even written about myself, albeit nearly a year ago now.

In this context I was struck by an answer in Computer World from John Seely Brown to a question about what he learnt at Xerox (thanks  to @jobsworth for the heads-up):

“First, wisdom is often the biggest obstacle to innovation. In a rapidly changing world, the assumptions that underlie our past learning may now be invalid. So, an idea that didn’t work five years ago may work fantastically now.

Second, we tend to hold on to assumptions longer than we should. Often, by letting go of old assumptions, whole new vistas are created.”

I’ve always felt that traditional KM practices are too slow moving and try to impose an overly simplistic and controlling model onto what is essentially a chaotic, vibrant, real-time reality. Sometimes, it feels like KM is trying to take a series of still-shots of this real-time reality to present back to users who have already moved on – and when you put the still shots together, you get a jerky and incomplete picture.

I think John Seely Brown makes a great point – the world is changing so fast that keeping stuff for future use is becoming less and less valuable and can blinker our future potential. It challenges many of the precepts upon which KM is built.

As the world has become more and more real-time, so the balance has shifted away from re-use of existing information to the notion of relationships. The need for knowledge now is what has driven social media practices which, not only acknowledge the chaos of humanity, but embrace it to deliver distilled, real-time value. It’s not formally organised, it’s often not pretty, but it seems to work.

The million dollar question is how do you strike the right balance between learning from history and living in the past?

I was on the expert(?) panel at the CIPR Inside event last night at the very nice Soho offices of Hill & Knowlton. The event was about leadership communications and an interesting debate ensued. I won’t attempt to post notes here covering the whole event, as Scott McKenzie of H&K took copious notes and will probably publish them somewhere at some point …

I thought I’d share some of my own deliberations on the subject as I can just about remember them!

The original question the panel was asked was: What do leaders want from their internal communications people?

My immediate response was: relationship counselling (they might not know they want it, but they definitely need it!)

Here’s why … if you accept that internal comms is about building and managing the relationship between the management and employees of an organisation, then the discipline itself is really macro relationship counselling.

I think leaders want their people to trust them, respect them, be loyal to them, and be inspired and enthused into action by them. This will only happen if leaders have a healthy relationship with the people concerned. Leaders who don’t have this kind of relationship will find that, while they might have power, they’ll have no influence … the worst kind of leadership imaginable.

To help create and maintain relationships you need to REALLY understand human nature … the best way to understand what makes people tick, is to find out what makes you tick first. One way to do this, is to have some therapy!

So, my top tip for the best training available for internal comms people is six month’s psychotherapy!

As an aside, given what I’ve said above, I personally think employee relations better describes the discipline than employee communications.

[I've talked a bit about leadership before on this blog: here and here. There's also an article on the future of leadership communications]

Sorry for the long silence! I was quite busy before Christmas and then had flu for three weeks … I’m a stone in weight lighter and look 10 years older!

Anyway, I’m coming out the other side! Thought I’d just let you know of a couple of conferences I’m speaking at over the next three months:

• Internal communications: A vital business function in difficult economic times on 11-12 Feb in London
• IntraTeam 2009 in Copenhagen on 3-5 Mar (there’s a 15% early bird discount if you book by 10 Jan – sorry not long left to do this – if you quote ‘Dennison15′) - added 8 Jan – thanks for the clarification Kurt – see Kurt’s comment below

After these two conferences, I’ve decided to take a break from speaking as, quite frankly, I’m getting bored of the sound of my own voice and I’m repeating myself too much! When, and if, I have something new to say I’ll start speaking again.

We’re really going through a bedding-down period with our social media tools – trying to increase adoption levels and ensuring they comply with our governance and information management standards. While this is extremely important for us, it isn’t that exciting to talk about!

Anyway, I’ll endeavour to keep posting to this blog so keep stopping by every now and then!

Happy New Year to everyone!