Are we delivering internal spam?

An interesting snippet caught my eye in Metro yesterday, though it may well have been an April Fool joke.

The story was about a cyber experiement called "Super Spam Me" which will see 50 guinea pigs respond to all those dodgy spam emails to see whether they deliver on their promise. Apparently they've each been given a £250 budget to spend on impotence cures, revolutionary weight loss pills, needy Nigerians and other too-good-to-be-true offers. Thinking about it, I'm now pretty sure it was an April Fool.

Anyway, it got me thinking about internal spam - or rather all those pointless and irrelevant emails that get pumped out inside organisations every day of the week.

There are a lot of them and many of them originate in - or at least have had input from - the internal communication department.  We should hang our heads in shame.

During my time in-house I regularly had running battles with head office teams over the relevance (or rather lack of) of many organisation-wide e-messages. When your role is focused on a particular business unit or operating division you tend to see this phenomenon more clearly. Indeed, if you're properly plugged into your audience it's something they will no doubt signal to you loud and clear. 

Interestingly the same thing played out at the next 'level' of the organisation.  So, where I would yell "why are you sending me all this irrelevant national stuff?" at the national team, so too would the managers responsible for individual offices or branches shout at me "why are you sending me all this irrelevant regional/BU stuff?"  The national team would yell the same thing at the global team. The same thing gets played out all the way down to team or even individual level.

It's all about what I call 'circles of belonging'. Get an employee to draw a bunch of concentric circules and at the centre put "Me", then for each circle in turn ask them to put the next most important focus - e.g. my team, my office, my business unit, my business, my group, my sector, etc.. The closer communication content is to the centre, generally the more relevant it is likely to be considered. 

Problem is, most of the communication we deal with as business communicators is pretty broad-brush stuff - largely concerning the outer circles only.  That's why savvy communicators are increasingly focused on equipping and empowering line managers.

There's an interesting exercise we sometimes conduct as part of our communication audit work at Gatehouse. It involves creating a dummy employee identity  - a sort of virtual new starter - and then seeing what electronic gumph they receive. We also monitor the mailboxes of real people to see how much material they get bombarded with in a typical one or two week period - and to assess how relevant that content is. It's always extremely enlightening.

Something we have to constantly ask ourselves as communicators is are we helping create focus and clarity in the minds of employees or are we simply adding to the noise?  Are we helping answer those critical "so what does this mean to me?" and "what do I need to do?" questions for front line people, or are we merely creating communication clutter by banging out irrelevant high level stuff that no one really cares about?