"There is a state of emergency here"
Philip Meier, a strategist at Guye & Partner, on internal communication
Philip Meier, strategist at Guye & Partner, on internal communicationIn a dissertation, Philip Meier has examined theoretical and empirical aspects of the organization and language of internal communication in large companies. His book, which is being devoured by communication and corporate managers, obviously hits a neuralgic point.How long have you been working scientifically on internal communication?
Philip Meier: I have been doing research in the field of internal communication for seven years.
cation. I had already examined the internal communication structures and processes of a company for my licentiate thesis. With the dissertation, I now tested the picture in Switzerland on a representative level.
What is wrong with internal communications in this country?
Meier: Most companies are mistaken if they think their internal communications are in order. There is an awareness of this important area of communication, but one does not structure the communication. One communicates internally merely because, as a communication axiom by Paul Watzlawick states, one cannot get around communication. Moreover, people believe they are capable of internal communication without consulting specialists such as business economists or linguists. This view is favored by the intimacy of the subject: communication consulting presupposes the openness of top management, which must be willing to grant the consultant access to the company's innermost circle. Furthermore, the will for internal communicative change cannot be delegated, but must always be present at the top level in fact and not merely as lip service.
What are the subjects of your investigation?
Meier: In the first part of the investigation, I was interested in what the structures and organization look like, who is responsible for internal communications, what the tasks of someone in charge are, what media they use and what specialists they rely on. I found that most large companies in Switzerland do not have the tools that comprehensive internal communication requires. For example, only about one-third conduct regular employee surveys. In other words, just one-third of the companies are aware of the attitudes and needs of their employees. All the rest are in the dark. About the same percentage has a specialized department that takes care of these processes and procedures. Collaboration with specialists, as in external communications, is practically non-existent. In a second step, I wanted to test whether this tendency is also reflected in the language of the companies.
What linguistic abuses have you discovered?
Meier: In view of the ever-increasing amount of text material, I have concentrated on the study of one type of text: the editorials of the staff newspapers. They contain the most information about the course of business and future developments. In these editorials, two quite different communication strategies basically prevail. On the one hand, there is the obfuscatory strategy, which omits and withholds information without a relevant reason.
without providing transparent information about the current and future situation of the company, motivate employees to perform at their best. The second strategy is to report openly and honestly about a specific problem situation. In these transparent editorials, mistakes are also admitted. To a large extent, the texts are characterized by an alarming degree of clumsy word choice and a lack of presentation of the overall context.
What role does internal communication play in repairing and maintaining the hierarchy?
Meier: Information also means power. You use it to maintain your edge. There are two camps. One sees strength in openness, the other wants to secure its position by channeling and blocking information. Change processes will have to be managed with a great deal of effort, especially in the second case, because communicative subcultures will form over time, communication associations that sometimes span different departments and hierarchical levels, whose voices can carry more weight than the voice of official internal communications.
What opportunities for improvement do you see?
Meier: Internal communications consulting makes sense when it takes the culture of a company as the basis for its analysis. Organizational improvement measures should be implemented first. Priority should certainly be given to conducting regular employee surveys and setting up an internal media infrastructure in which each medium is assigned a function. After that, language-cultivating measures should be introduced, such as improving the verbal expressiveness of key people or installing dialog training for employees with customer contact.
How can a linguistic expression change if the basic attitude of the speaker or writer remains the same?
Meier: It is very important to define communication guidelines. An internal communication climate based on communication guidelines defines the tolerance framework for dealing with each other. Bullying, for example, consists largely of linguistic aberrations that are steadily increasing in radicalness and are not related to any communication maxims.
How do you explain the neglect of internal communication?
Meier: It's very likely that the reason for the internal communications emergency is short-term thinking: people have the feeling that external communications will sell more products and contribute to brand building. But people forget that the superficial investment in internal communications also has a long-term effect on the entire brand of a company and thus contributes to value creation.
Interview: Ernst Weber
Philip Meier:
Philip Meier: I have been doing research in the field of internal communication for seven years.
cation. I had already examined the internal communication structures and processes of a company for my licentiate thesis. With the dissertation, I now tested the picture in Switzerland on a representative level.
What is wrong with internal communications in this country?
Meier: Most companies are mistaken if they think their internal communications are in order. There is an awareness of this important area of communication, but one does not structure the communication. One communicates internally merely because, as a communication axiom by Paul Watzlawick states, one cannot get around communication. Moreover, people believe they are capable of internal communication without consulting specialists such as business economists or linguists. This view is favored by the intimacy of the subject: communication consulting presupposes the openness of top management, which must be willing to grant the consultant access to the company's innermost circle. Furthermore, the will for internal communicative change cannot be delegated, but must always be present at the top level in fact and not merely as lip service.
What are the subjects of your investigation?
Meier: In the first part of the investigation, I was interested in what the structures and organization look like, who is responsible for internal communications, what the tasks of someone in charge are, what media they use and what specialists they rely on. I found that most large companies in Switzerland do not have the tools that comprehensive internal communication requires. For example, only about one-third conduct regular employee surveys. In other words, just one-third of the companies are aware of the attitudes and needs of their employees. All the rest are in the dark. About the same percentage has a specialized department that takes care of these processes and procedures. Collaboration with specialists, as in external communications, is practically non-existent. In a second step, I wanted to test whether this tendency is also reflected in the language of the companies.
What linguistic abuses have you discovered?
Meier: In view of the ever-increasing amount of text material, I have concentrated on the study of one type of text: the editorials of the staff newspapers. They contain the most information about the course of business and future developments. In these editorials, two quite different communication strategies basically prevail. On the one hand, there is the obfuscatory strategy, which omits and withholds information without a relevant reason.
without providing transparent information about the current and future situation of the company, motivate employees to perform at their best. The second strategy is to report openly and honestly about a specific problem situation. In these transparent editorials, mistakes are also admitted. To a large extent, the texts are characterized by an alarming degree of clumsy word choice and a lack of presentation of the overall context.
What role does internal communication play in repairing and maintaining the hierarchy?
Meier: Information also means power. You use it to maintain your edge. There are two camps. One sees strength in openness, the other wants to secure its position by channeling and blocking information. Change processes will have to be managed with a great deal of effort, especially in the second case, because communicative subcultures will form over time, communication associations that sometimes span different departments and hierarchical levels, whose voices can carry more weight than the voice of official internal communications.
What opportunities for improvement do you see?
Meier: Internal communications consulting makes sense when it takes the culture of a company as the basis for its analysis. Organizational improvement measures should be implemented first. Priority should certainly be given to conducting regular employee surveys and setting up an internal media infrastructure in which each medium is assigned a function. After that, language-cultivating measures should be introduced, such as improving the verbal expressiveness of key people or installing dialog training for employees with customer contact.
How can a linguistic expression change if the basic attitude of the speaker or writer remains the same?
Meier: It is very important to define communication guidelines. An internal communication climate based on communication guidelines defines the tolerance framework for dealing with each other. Bullying, for example, consists largely of linguistic aberrations that are steadily increasing in radicalness and are not related to any communication maxims.
How do you explain the neglect of internal communication?
Meier: It's very likely that the reason for the internal communications emergency is short-term thinking: people have the feeling that external communications will sell more products and contribute to brand building. But people forget that the superficial investment in internal communications also has a long-term effect on the entire brand of a company and thus contributes to value creation.
Interview: Ernst Weber
Philip Meier:
"Corporate Internal Communication. Theoretical and Empirical Aspects of the Organization and Language of Internal Communication in Large Companies in Switzerland" is available at: www.in ternekommunikation.ch.
