How do you reach colleagues with strategic content if they work in private groups outside the central internal platform? How to find out which ones are there? Where do you share important organizational news in a fragmented platform landscape?in short: how do you deal with closed communities as an (internal) communicationconsultant?
The dream image of the internal communication consultant
The dream image of the average internal communication consultant is one central (social) intranet where all employees, across departments, retrieve, share and collaborate. The assumption here is that the employees visit the platform with great pleasure, because the connection with the daily work is great.
this means that the range of the central communication messages is high, which greatly increases the chance of alignment with course and strategy toeneemt.
There can of course be questions surrounding the argument that visit equals reach and range equals alignment. But still apart from that… the idea that by facilitating one central platform employees actually only use one platform is, as mentioned, a dream image. Within organizations, more and more private platforms are used by specific groups of employees, separate from the central (social) intranet.
This was reflected in our national survey on the use of internal social media: organizations use an average of three platforms at the same time, a third of the participating organizations even have more than four platforms in use. And those are only the platforms that the communication department is aware of.
With our clients, we regularly encounter situations where there is a social intranet for all employees, while the IT department works with Slack, the marketing and communications staff have organized themselves on Teams, and healthcare employees communicate with each other via WhatsApp or private Facebook groups.
Everyone can purchase a new platform themselves
These closed groups on the platform of their own preference – so-called gated communities – they are not new, but they have increased significantly in recent years. We see a number of causes for this:
- the COVID pandemic (2020-2022)
we prefer not to talk about the pandemic in 2024. Still, we can’t ignore the impact the pandemic has had on how we work. With the beginning of 2020 the first lockdown, and with it the start of working from home. The pandemic is fortunately behind us, but hybrid working has become the norm for many organizations. And (partly) working from home means that you seek contact with colleagues in other (read: digital) ways. Preferably as accessible as possible. -
Common practice
It is increasingly normal to be in contact with each other through social technology. Just about all social networks have messaging functionality and the Teams / Slack app is – especially since the aforementioned pandemic-just on your phone. You are used to tuning in privately via a DM, so it makes sense to alsotype things out with colleagues via this type of platform. - High availability
Third, there is the high availability of internal social platforms. Where ICT and intranet used to belong to the IT department, today Community software such as Slack or workplace from Meta has been downloaded and almost everyone has WhatsApp installed on their phone. And for most cloud platforms, if the free variant does not offer enough possibilities, the license costs for the premium version of a few euros per user are often no problem for a small group. - Self-determination
count the trend of agile work on it. Agile working is very much about self-management and often means greater autonomy for (small) teams. This not only results in less line management, but also in deciding for yourself which software you are most comfortable working with. Surprisingly, this is often not the centrally imposed intranet that should apply to all employees. - (sense of) security
despite the desire of some evangelists to work out Loud (WOL) research shows that not all employees are comfortable communicating, sharing knowledge and working together when all your colleagues can watch, Judge and sometimes even condemn. Although you can also question the principle that everything should be public, it is also highly dependent on the corporate culture whether employees feel safe enough to interact openly with each other. This phenomenon is called self-censorship or corporate silence and works in private communities with small groups of employees. - Relevance
The smaller the community, the more relevant the content is likely to be to you. As more employees become active on a central platform, the noise for individual employees increases and the relevance for the individual decreases (signal-to-noise ratio). So it is ironic that the success of the one central internal social platform leads to fragmentation and more digital platformen.
Is that bad?
We know that organizations are increasingly using multiple platforms at the same time by different groups of employees. And also what causes underlie this development. The central question is whether this tendency is bad and if so, what can be done about it.
Whether it is bad depends on the perspective.
From the perspective of efficiency, efficiency and effectiveness, it can certainly be said that teams work with platforms that best match their working methods and needs. From the perspective of alignment, cross-team knowledge sharing, collaboration, bonding and knowing what is going on, this is of course less desirable. In the field of privacy and security, asking the question about the desirability of free platforms-where the user is the product – is almost rhetorical.
for internal communication (advisor)
As an internal communications consultant, how do you deal with the fragmentation, which is also largely invisible? In any case, it means that you have to start thinking differently about the role of the social intranet in the internal communication strategy and in your resource mix. You will have to come up with inventive solutions to reach the employees.
In our opinion, effectiveness goes beyond idealism. Why invest a lot of energy in enticing employees to visit the central platform, when it is much more effective to bring content directly to the closed groups and bring the relevant content from these communities together on the central platform?
Sounds good? It is not a simple task.
On one hand, this requires current platform suppliers and software developers to better facilitate that their systems can easily exchange data with other types of platforms. A social intranet will have to act more as a distribution channel and aggregator of content from different communities (regardless of the platform on which they are located) than as the central place where all activity takes place.
Line communication and decentralized community management are becoming more important
On the other hand, it also means that the communication role of key figures, (line)management or team leads becomes more important. They are responsible for internal communication and distribution of strategic content to the platforms on which their colleagues operate. At the same time, they pass on signals from their teams to the internal communication advisor. In this way, the internal communication consultant can also better fulfill his/her role.
In addition, the importance of decentralized community managers is increasing. Although our research showed that internal community management is less often formally invested , this is extremely important for gaining insight into and overview of what is happening in the communities. These insights, in turn, are essential for the effective dissemination and retrieval of information in the organization.
Does the return of the role of management, coordinators, team leads and key figures mean that the promise of internal social media as a breaker of hierarchical organizational structures is dead? Not in our view. You may wonder if the connecting role of these employees has ever really gone. Above all, it means that we are forced to think even better about how complex processes such as alignment, involvement, binding, knowledge sharing and collaboration within organizations can make a success.
Want to start mapping the different platforms within your organization? Once again, evaluate the role of your social intranet in the internal communication strategy and resource mix or set up internal community management properly? Or just curious about this topic? Contact Peter Haan at peter@evolve.eu or call 06-13 98 14 27.