Shaping excellent internal communication practices with middle managers in an international organisation

The British Council is the United Kingdom’s cultural relations agency operating in 109 countries with headquarters in London and Manchester. This project looks to identify key issues and unresolved questions with regard to internal communications and the
organisation’s middle managers.

The following points emerge from the research:

• internal communication (IC) is the strategic management of interactions and relationships between an organisation’s strategic managers and its internal stakeholders
• the value of IC is to help deliver business ends by enabling employees to turn strategy into action recognise how their decisions and actions impact the rest of the organisation
• knowledge of the communication needs of the stakeholder group and its preferences is important to ensure IC meets employee needs and is not seen as contributing to information overload
• managers are critical bridges and cascade briefings depend on their competence.

The research makes eight recommendations under three headings: targeting middle managers; the role of senior and supervisory managers; a communication framework.

The recommendations propose:
1. carrying out analysis to segment the middle management audience
2. reviewing the fit between the corporate and local intranets
3. forming a strong partnership with the local communicators’ network
4. commissioning of articles to allow middle managers to connect with the world outside the
organisation
5. training of managers
6. establishing agreed communication principles and standards
7. strengthening systems for feedback and in particular to establish a mechanism that allows routine monitoring by the Executive Board
8. implementing routine evaluation of internal communications.

John Gannon 2008