What Is Internal Communication?

By Lon W. Schiffbauer, BA, MBA, PhD, SPHR

What Is Internal Communication?

So, internal communication. If my goal were to put you to sleep before we even began, I’d be hard pressed to find a term more soporific than “internal communication”. And if I’m being completely honest, a great deal of what we associate with internal communication is no less snooze-inducing. We’re talking things like:

  • Documented HR and company policies
  • Reports
  • Meetings
  • Company announcements
  • Project updates
  • Corporate training
  • Day-to-day collaboration with coworkers
  • Direction from management and leadership

When it comes to the day-to-day job of getting work done, internal communication is ubiquitous.

But is that all internal communication is? Not by a long shot. All these things I listed—meetings, reports, training, collaboration—these are just outward manifestations of internal communications, or internal comms as its sometimes called. But if internal comms is more than meetings and reports, what is it then?

So glad you asked.

To answer this question, I want to tell you three stories.

The first one is a Judeo-Christian origin myth which offers a fascinating explanation as to why there are so many languages spoken in the world.

In the beginning, mankind spoke a single language, the perfect language; God’s language. And because they spoke this perfect language, there was perfect communication; perfect understanding. There were no misunderstandings; no miscommunications. Every thought, idea, and direction could be communicated perfectly.

Well these folks thought pretty highly of themselves—equal with God, in fact. So, they decided to build a great tower, so tall that it could reach all the way up to heaven. What better way to make yourself equal with the Creator that to move into the neighborhood? And since they all spoke the perfect language, they were actually pulling it off.

Well as you might imagine, God wasn’t cool with this, so he decided to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

Now obviously, being God, he had quite an arsenal of curses to choose from when it came to making the lives of his children miserable: we’re talking plagues, locusts, earthquakes, floods, committee assignments. In this case though, he didn’t choose any of these. Instead, one night he confounded their language, so when everyone woke up the next morning, each of them was speaking a different language.

Construction of the tower came to a halt and things fell apart. Unable to communicate in any meaningful way, everyone just sort of wandered off, and before you know it, the world is full of a plethora of hopelessly imperfect languages.

Like most myths, the Tower of Babel is more interested in delivery a cautionary tale of man’s hubris than it is with the technical aspects of language development, but you have to admit, as far as the Deus Ex Machina is concerned, confounding languages has a certain cheeky flair about it. Still, it’s just a myth, right?

Jump ahead a few thousand years, to September 23, 1999, to be exact. On that day dozens of NASA engineers watched in horror as the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter, after its 286-day journey, veered off course and burned up in the thin Martian atmosphere.

So, what went wrong? As it turned out, Lockheed Martin, which had performed the thruster calculations, sent the figures to NASA in standard English units. However, the NASA engineers read and entered the figures into the rocket’s guidance system in metric.

Once again mankind was reaching for the heavens, and as before, a misunderstanding between two languages brought their tower tumbling down.

So, a myth becomes an interesting object lesson. But now let’s look deeper. And to do that, I’m afraid we’re going to take another look at NASA.

In a report published on May 17, 2017, reporter Geoff Brumfiel interviewed Wayne Hale, who earlier in his career was responsible for overseeing space shuttle launches. On February 1, 2003, he was out at the landing site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with hundreds of others, waiting for the return of the space shuttle Columbia. Unfortunately, the Columbia would never return. Upon hitting the atmosphere, the shuttle broke apart, killing all seven crew members.

As it turns out, some of the foam insulation covering the main fuel tank had come off during the launch and struck the shuttle. This was no surprise, and no big deal, the team had thought. Foam had been striking shuttles every now and then since the program began. Sure, it would scuff things up and require some maintenance once the craft was back down on earth, but for the most part it was standard operating procedure. This time though, things were different. This time the foam punched a small hole in the left wing. And when the shuttle hit the atmosphere upon reentry, the hole allowed hot gasses to melt the wing’s aluminum frame. The wing buckled, and the shuttle broke apart.

This may have been the reason the shuttle broke apart, but to Wayne Hale, the root cause of the problem was internal communication. As he put it:

“All real problems are people problems. It’s not, you know, did the foam come off the tank. It’s why did people let the foam come off the tank? Why did we think it was okay for foam to come off the tank?”

As it turned out, an investigation found that there were in fact many engineers lower down in the shuttle organization who had raised concerns, but their concerns weren’t clearly understood by leadership.

According to Wayne Hale, “We’ve got an awful lot of smart people in the space program, but many of them are not very good communicators. … If somebody brought a concern to you and it was not, you know, it just didn’t sound logical, you were very dismissive and basically told them to get a life.”

The Columbia disaster showed Wayne Hale that, ultimately, poor internal communication was a major contributor to this tragedy, and so he set out to fix it. To do this, he said they had to set the arrogance aside and learn to become listeners. As he put it:

“I really had to take a step back and start treating people with, okay, you’ve got this concern, I don’t understand it. Back in the old days I would have yelled at you, but you don’t say that. And now I have to really think about how I get you to give me some more information.”

It was by improving internal communication behind the curtain that NASA was able to resolve the problem and bring about a more effective work environment.

This event, tragic as it may be, is a great case study in how internal communication can mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to meeting organizational objectives. Ultimately, the purpose of internal communication is to inform, influence, and affect the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors of those in the organization to meet business objectives.

As Stanley Fish said in his book How to write a sentence and how to read one, “People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.” In the case of internal communication, the effect we are seeking after is greater organizational alignment and performance as it works to reach its strategic and tactical objectives.

A key component of Wayne Hale and NASA’s mission was to bring the crew home safely. Poor internal communication prevented this; improved internal communication helped to ensured that it would never happen again.

Throughout this series we’re going to talk about the many aspects of internal comms and they help us work together and make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

References

Brumfiel, G. (2017, May 17). Total Failure: When The Space Shuttle Didn’t Come Home. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2017/05/17/527052122/total-failure-when-the-space-shuttle-didnt-come-home.

Fish, S. (2012). How to write a sentence and how to read one. Harper.

Lon is an Associate Professor of Business Management at Salt Lake Community College and holds an MBA, a PhD, and is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR). In addition to his academic background, Lon spent close to 30 years working and consulting for such companies as FedEx, Intel, eBay, and PayPal, as well as a variety of small to mid-sized companies around the world.