Should employee communications report to HR?
12th March 2006 by Ron Shewchuk, ABC
I just posted a fairly long commentary on my blog asking the time-worn question, to whom should we report? I thought this forum would also be a good place to raise the issue.
I’m particularly interested in whether internal communicators should report directly to Human Resources, or if it’s better to have a “dotted line” and report through to, say, public affairs.
Has anyone done definitive research on this question?
Does anyone have a strong opinion, or a relevant experience that might shed some light on the issue?
March 13th, 2006 at 6:46 am
The Fast Company article below
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/97/open_hr.html
provides several compelling arguments why you wouldn’t want to be associated with HR:
>>HR people aren’t the sharpest tacks in the box. We’ll be blunt: If you are an ambitious young thing newly graduated from a top college or B-school with your eye on a rewarding career in business, your first instinct is not to join the human-resources dance. (At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, which arguably boasts the nation’s top faculty for organizational issues, just 1.2% of 2004 grads did so.) Says a management professor at one leading school: “The best and the brightest don’t go into HR.”>The truth? Most human-resources managers aren’t particularly interested in, or equipped for, doing business. And in a business, that’s sort of a problem. As guardians of a company’s talent, HR has to understand how people serve corporate objectives. Instead, “business acumen is the single biggest factor that HR professionals in the U.S. lack today,” says Anthony J. Rucci, executive vice president at Cardinal Health Inc., a big health-care supply distributor.
March 13th, 2006 at 8:43 am
Wow. An insightful and provocative article. Thanks for sharing it, Craig. Interesting that so many of the issues HR faces in terms of the strategic vs. tactical role apply equally well to communicators.
The implication of your post, and the article, is that employee communicators should not report to HR. But at least if you report to HR you have to deal directly with human resources, while communicators who report elsewhere often tend to develop adversarial relationships with HR that aren’t very helpful.
One of the answers is that, whoever they report to, employee communiators need someone senior in the organization to defend their interests and champion the cause. The worse situation is a junior or intermediate communicator reporting to HR but without anyone supporting him or her. That can be a Kafkaesque nightmare.
March 14th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Ideally, employee communications should report to the vice president of corporate communications, who reports to the CEO. Or, in a smaller organization, the person responsible for all communication should report to the person at the top. The IABC Research Foundation’s “Excellence Study” from years ago comes to this conclusion, I believe.
While there are some functional commonalities between communication and HR (for example, it could be argued both have a role in helping to “engage” employees in the business), when communication reports into HR, HR usually ends up subjugating communication to the more traditional HR roles and responsibilities. And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?
March 14th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Robert has the single most important clue to the answer to Ron’s question - the findings of the IABC Foundation study. Most CEOs I have talked to about these findings and the implications to the positioning of internal communication agree that employee communication is a strategic issue. If it is viewed as playing a strategic role in the management of the organization then there is only one place that the position should report in to - the leader responsible for corporate strategy.
The problem with most of the discussion about this perennial dilemma for internal communication specialists is that it occurs from the bottom looking up. The most critical discussion has to take place from the top down and focus on the function that internal communication should play and what the CEO needs delivered by the professional performing the function.
This, of course, demands an intimate familiarity with corporate strategy and the business acumen to integrate communication as a core element of corporate strategy. And that folks is where we, as professionals, often fall short. Our education contains little strategic business or leadership studies.
I like to hold up as a model FedEx and the positioning Ed Robertson achieved for his internal communication function there. He realized that communication is at the top or close to the top of most CEOs’ priorities. His responsibility was to be ready, eager and able to fill the strategic role the CEO was looking for. He did not have strategy handed down to him second hand by HR or anyone else. He reported directly to the CEO.
Seeking a place at the table is currently the phase (fad) in vogue. The problem the phrase is the perspective looks up. It describes unrealistic and unfulfilled aspirations of many communicators. Those that aspire must also be well prepared and able to fill the role that the CEO will demand if you get to the table.
Many communicators do not aspire to sit at the strategic table and are very happy filling the necessary tactical roles that are needed for delivering on strategy. That is no justification for the function to report through to HR strategists. Ron is the first to remind me and many others that it is just as important to take care of the fundamentals in our business and I agree. We will always need good writers and editors. Job satisfaction for communicators comes in many ways. Excellent communication requires both strategists and tacticians.
Not every accountant aspires to be CFO. No accounting department I know of reports through HR. Not every communicator needs to or should aspire to sit at the CEO’s right hand and I see no reason why employee communication should report through HR. This reflects a lack of understanding and insight into what employee communication is all about on the part of the strategic decision makers. Refer them to the IABC Foundation study.
March 16th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Since employee communications addresses the needs of all the employees in a company, it should report to the sole department responsible for all these people — HR.
Corporate Communications is primarily interested in luring or reassuring customers and investors. Marketing is only interested in sales. IT (who owns the tools that run the intranet) is very insular. And the CEO is too often too focussed on the Board of Directors to even know who the employees are. No department other than HR is involved in some way with every aspect of every employee’s job — not even Payroll or the CEO.
HR may not be the business experts, and nor are the communicators. HR are HR experts. Communicators are communications experts. The business experts are the business experts. These business experts, therefore, need to work with the communications experts to get the news to the audience in a manner that the audience understands and appreciates. They don’t need to own the process. They just need to work with it.
As a journalist working in employee communications (a branch of the training department, which is itself a branch of HR) in the financial services industry I can demonstrate the effectiveness of this role for HR.
We get an insider’s perspective on what employees need, what they complain about, why they join, and why they leave. We take that knowledge and seek out the business expert who can best address these needs. We then take their business jargon and heartless dismissal of anyone below the rank of senior executive, and translate these into news items that are relevant to employees; news that recognises the accomplishments of those even at the lower levels.
We sell the business on the importance of speaking to all employees (as opposed to only customers, investors, regulators, sales teams and/or senior executives). We get their input on news. We have them verify business facts. And then we speak to employees.
Without much business skill, I can write a business article as well as HR can hire a business expert. And before the business experts complain that HR doesn’t know the business they should consider that HR knew enough to favour their business skills over other similarly suitable applicants. The business expert is responsible for the business. HH is responsible for staffing. And Employee Communications is responsible for communicating to employees. Neither can do everything alone as well as they all can when they work together.
Business experts build the business and then we connect the needs of the business with the needs of employees. We help boost morale, loyalty, affection and engagement, they help drive sales and product improvements. We address bad news before it drives people away and we celebrate good news to attract or rejuvenate employees, they are the subject of that news — good or bad.
Employee communications, done well, gives HR a strategic reason to justify its seat at the table. By getting HR to the table we get employees to the table. Business decisions with HR at the table are just as business oriented as those without, but they are now made with the human impact in mind.
Employees aren’t cash, or gizmos, or ad space. Employees are humans, people. Leave the human relations — in person, in print or online — to the department that specializes in it.
Employee Communications belongs with HR and nowhere else.
March 16th, 2006 at 8:49 am
Brett, I couldn’t disagree with your position more. I respect the argument that you make for the employee communications function to reside in the HR department, but I thoroughly disagree with it.
Just as you cite your experience of having seen it work, I have witnessed just the opposite. HR is so focused on the administration of hiring, retention, policy enforcement, benefits, etc., that in practicality the administration of an enterprise-wide strategic communication effort just falls to the bottom of the list — or falls completely off the list.
The communication function must partner with HR. In fact, building relationships with people and groups across the business — not just with HR — is a critical part of the communicator’s job. But partnering with HR does not require communication to be part of the HR department.
Again, I point to the IABC Excellence Study. The research behind the recommendation that communication should report directly to the CEO is exhaustive and, I believe, convincing.
March 16th, 2006 at 10:13 am
I will look at the IABC Excellence Study but I can also say that I’ve seen the disastrous results when Employee Communications rests with Corporate Communications or other primarily externally focussed departments.
Even at my company where we have a viable communication structure our publications department answers to Marketing. They produce all the ads and flyers. We need to work with our publications department to produce the newsletter but we’re last on their list of priorities because employees aren’t seen as customers. As a result, some departments get calls from customers before they’ve received the whole story from us.
Case number two, also from us, relates to our part in a larger amalgamated organization. The parent company’s employee communications are produced from their Corporate Communications department (that is tied to Marketing and closely paired with the CEO). Their employee news is either sacharine drivel or so convoluted that I bet even they don’t understand it. Sometimes, the employees merely get excerpts from the officers’ presentations but with all the honest meaty bits removed (since they feel employees can’t be trusted with this stuff). And we, along with most operations departments and some branch offices, never get included.
Too often a CEO can’t appreciate how a change to a processing screen can affect someone’s job, and a Corporate Communications team can’t see past the bottom line. The publications they produce may be rock solid but they don’t help the employees. These same employees then turn to the grapevine or ill-informed supervisors for answers. Worse, they tell HR in their exit interviews, that one reason they’re leaving is that they never felt included in the corporation.
If it were Marketing or Finance superstars that were saying this, the CEO would listen to HR when they report it and address the matter in the internal media. But when it’s processers or call-centre reps, the CEO just figures they can find more.
When HR houses the media, it reports on every department, every branch. And it does so in a manner that employees can relate to.
There may be good cases where CEOs and Corporate Communications teams have succeeded. Mine is a case where they have not and HR has done so in their place. Our corporate newsletter, for example, when the role was given to HR, combined five separate publications (including a supposedly corporate one produced by Marketing) and finally got all the news to all the employees. Our intranet does the same.
I’m not in HR per se, in that I don’t handle the administration of hiring, firing, pensions and benefits. That work is handled by the HR experts (who I wouldn’t trust to write anything). I, and everyone else on the Employee Communications team, handle communications. I report to and work with HR but act autonomously. It’s like a dotted-line relationship.
My mandate is to relate to the people who work here via the media we produce. I partner with Marketing, IT, Operations and the executive team to deliver the news the company needs delivered and to deliver the news employees need to hear. My sole customer is the employee (whether the CEO or the CSR). Those employees then use the news to improve their relationships with their customers (i.e. the ones who buy our products or shares).
Maybe I’m just lucky or maybe there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. But I believe that, without the power of control over the employee media, HR would be too easily dismissed by the business drivers regardless of how effective they are capable of being — and employees would lose out in the end.
March 16th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
I do believe you’re lucky, Brett! And good for you. It does sound like your HR department is not typical in that it allows the employee communication to function autonomously. In that case, I suppose it doesn’t really matter where the function rests organizationally — as long as the person at the top truly understands communication’s strategic role and champions it with the CEO. That is not always the case when communications resides in HR.
Neither should the employee communications function reside in Marketing, in my opinion, for all the reasons you list.
March 21st, 2006 at 3:19 am
Ron, this topic has sparked some lively debate. Do you find in your business practice that the issue of an employee communications function’s reporting relationship is consistently a sensitive issue? Do you find that certain cultures are concerned about this topic more and other cultures are less concerned?
March 21st, 2006 at 3:30 am
One other item: There is an interesting posting - less about the reporting relationship although it does touch on that topic - via a Hill & Knowlton blog: http://blogs.hillandknowlton.com/blogs/davidferrabee/archive/2005/12/23/1003.aspx
jj
March 21st, 2006 at 8:54 am
Good question, Judy, and thanks for the link. Interesting rule of thumb - one employee communicator per thousand employees. Ah, if it were that simple. I know one organization with 8,000 people and no employee communicator!
Communications’ relationship with HR is one of the most sensitive and talked about issues in our profession. In many organizations HR is viewed quite derisively. I remember one company, which had gone through many downsizings over a number of years, where HR was short for Human Remains.
One of the reasons for the tension is that HR people are naturally cautious when it comes to communication because they are always working with confidential information. The more officious and bureaucratic HR types view open, two-way communication as not much more than an excuse for employees to complain about policies that would then have to be changed, which would just create more work.
I think the key to whether communicators have a good or a bad relationship with HR depends a lot on who is in charge of the HR function. If the HR director or VP “gets it” and has a positive relationship with the senior communicators, things will work out fine. But more often than not, HR has the coveted seat at the “strategic table” and communications does not, and the only relationship that exists is that of an internal client to a tactical service group.
A lot also has to do with the specific culture of an organization. If it is a closed, hierarchical, comand-and-control culture with policies and practices that subjugate employees and limit open communication, the communicators are not going to get along with HR, or the rest of the senior leadership for that matter.
But if the organization values people, encourages lively debate, and has leaders who have some humanity, the HR function will be an ally and a partner.
One last thought. Whatever the reporting structure, it’s incumbent on the communicator to build positive relationships with all internal stakeholders, including human resources. Too often we make snap judgements about the people we work with, or make demands of them without having invested in the relationship. Trust and respect need to be earned — the first lesson for everyone in the corporate world.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:20 am
[...] Ron on HR versus Comms in the corporate struggle: a great conversation happening [...]
March 23rd, 2006 at 3:31 am
Thanks to Ron for alerting me to this conversation - I’d been musing around this completely separately on my own blog at:http://leapfrogcomms.blogspot.com/.
Thinking further, it’s not so much where you reside as how much autonomy you have - and the level of access you have to the corporate decision makers.
My take is three-fold:
1. Communication doesn’t split neatly into internal/external any more. Every organisation has a business strategy to deliver its goals. Effective communication is an enabler to deliver those objectives and that communication will be broken into a series of activities focused on single, or more often, groups of audiences.
For communication to be successful as an ‘enabler, communicators need to work together mining this core of information to deliver the right outcome. If we don’t work together, there’s fragmentation and we’re on the slippery mixed message slope.
2. We’re too focused on output rather than outcome. A huge amount of business communication is transactional, and our skills are called on as great writers and editors, designers and packagers, to deal with information once key decisions have been made. There will always be a need for these skills, but they should be a start-point in our relationship with the other business functions, not the end-point.
There is also a need for a strategic role, engaging the organisation’s leaders as expert counsel; having the adult-adult conversations and taking the space that’s too often given over by the in-house team to external consultants.
It tends not to be a role filled by internal communicators in particular as we’re too ready to stay in the comfort zone taking orders and delivering great media rather than putting our head on the line and sometimes just saying ‘no’ when that request comes in for another finance newsletter or CEO e-mail.
3. By nature we react - we’re ‘yellow’ people, creative, great starters but often not interested or engaged by process.
Yellow people are great at saying ‘why’ - but how often do we say it to our leaders? And how often do we even make the leap from saying ‘why’when a request comes in, to insisting we’re part of the conversation that leads to a request in the first place.
We need to be louder and more challenging. But we’ll achieve that only if we demonstrate results.
It’s not about a functional ‘bun fight’ - that’s the wrong battle.
In the end, it’s about gaining the trust of business leaders to operate above the transactional level; defining desired outcomes; planning the right way to achieve these outcomes; delivering on them; learning from the process and working round that virtuous circle again.
To be honest, if you can get the right access and have your expertise recognised as being beneficial to the business, it really doesn’t matter what your reporting line is.
April 2nd, 2006 at 8:44 am
My view is employee communication should report to human Resource for a simple reason HR would be having a larger persepective of the organisational goals and hence what communication should go down to employees..
April 4th, 2006 at 12:06 am
This is indeed an debatable topic - one that causes a lot of heatburn at organizations.
In my experience, I have come across very few organizations who allow direct reporting to HR - instead the trend in India is to have a seperate reporting line to the CEO and a dotted line to HR for people related issues.
There is a fair bit of scepticism about the ‘respect’ and ‘trust’ HR has within the company - therefore to consider a reporting structure for employee communications to HR may not work best for our own credibility. Especially when internally employees are looking for honest, reliable partners.
April 4th, 2006 at 1:03 am
Unfortunately, in North America, HR has built a negative reputation in many organizations. This is partly because they were so involved in the huge downsizings of the last two decades, which disrupted many people’s lives.
I like dotted lines in an organization. They are an abstraction, but a useful one that denotes collaboration and encourages teamwork where none might otherwise exist.
If the trend in India is for communications to report to the CEO, your country’s profession is going in the right direction.
April 7th, 2006 at 6:40 am
[...] Over at the IABC Employee Communications Commons, Ron Shewchuk stirred a hornets nest of conversation up when he asked whether Internal Comms should report to HR or a Corporate Comms flavinoid comprising PR and Marketing folks. [...]
April 24th, 2006 at 5:46 pm
Whenever this the topic is discussed about whether employee communication should report to HR, I feel like turning to my friend Tudor Williams and saying, “Tudor, you’re on!”
If I might add my bit, however, the short answer to the question is simply No. The longer answer, from my perspective is, employee communication is part of corporate communication and a component of employee relations. And, of course, employee relations is the responsibility of HR.
HR has a direct role in the planning of internal communicaiton that affects employee relations, namely employee benefits and related topics, such as safety, training, recruitment, industrial relations, compensation, succession planning and the like.
It does not have a role in communicating other corporate messages to employees, such as operations, finance, strategic planning and IT.
The question is not whether one should report to the other but how could they collaborate strategically in the areas they share in common.
April 25th, 2006 at 6:27 am
I fully agree with Moses’ comment. Communications should be seen as strategical as HR. In fact, both have to cross objectives so both areas can contribute to the achievement of the companie’s goals. Communications should be as close as it can be to the General Management and get the information on strategy at the same time as HR. Sometimes it happens that HR does not communicate the key information to Communications and confusing messages could be sent out to employees. Communications should transmit the strategical information to employees, but it also has the obligation of coming back to HR and General Management with feedback on how this information is being perceived and/or proposals to change the strategy if the results are not the expected.
April 26th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Let’s move from the theoretical to the real world, folks. I agree that — in theory — the best place for internal communications is not HR and not marketing, but instead, reporting in to the CEO or some department that has the neutrality of the Swiss.
However, we also have to deal with the human side of the equation. The head of HR could be a tremendous ally through personal or position power in the organization. The CEO could be so busy that a communications direct report is completely ignored. The marketing EVP could be an organizational psychopath who is intent on grabbing credit and spreading blame.
So temper the enthusiasm for a particular reporting relationship with the reality of the people to whom you might report. On a coast-to-coast airplane trip I sat next to a woman who was reading a book called “How to work for a jerk.” Let’s hope that you never face that situation, no matter where you report in the organization.
April 30th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
At the business process outsourcing company where I work, internal commn has two goals: policy communication, and employee motivation.
Policy communication is concerned with making employees aware of the company guidelines on compensation and benefits, conduct, security, taxes, quality, and so on.
Motivational communication promotes the company as a good place to work in by making employees feel that they are valuable participations and stakeholders in the company’s success.
The problem of course is that, communication specialists would much rather work on the latter and not on the former. We have been singularly unsuccessful in attracting and retaining communication specialists for policy communication. Policy communication is seen as worthy but lacks the excitement of media, customer, or analyst relations.
So we are splitting internal comm into two parts. One part will be a team headed by an HR person reporting to the HR head and staffed with communication specialists to handle policy communication. To make it interesting for the communication specialists, we are also folding recruitment advertising and employee newsletters into that department. The HR person will provide the connect with the rest of the HR folks and this will be invaluable in policy communication. The communication specialists will design the content and the delivery and cascade the policy through relevant communication contacts in various departments
We are retaining the ‘corporate communications’ part of internal communications dealing with executive messaging with the corporate marketing function. The corporate marketing team reports to the CEO and is aware of the big picture on company strategy and direction that HR lacks And of course, marketing is adept at working with professional agencies if and when special campaigns are needed to support the internal comm. team.
July 31st, 2006 at 3:27 am
It doesn’t matter where Internal Communication is housed, what matters is how they are perceived by the Team under which it’s housed.
The problem with HR, more often or not, is that they are too pre-occupied with their HR agendas and hence undermine the value which Comm. professionals could bring to the table. This leads to a never ending acquisition game, with HR referring the Internal Comm. professionals as spin doctors and Internal Comm. retaliating with acquisitions on HR of slave driving the Top Management fancies, both, thereby missing the employee value proposition.
Irrespective of which team it’s with, Internal Comm. has to partner with both the internal facing (HR Organization) and the external facing (Marketing, Media Relations, Corp Comm.) functions to align the messaging and provide a single brand message internally and externally, and whichever team can provide this flexibility, should own the Internal Communications function.
August 1st, 2006 at 12:56 am
Absolutely not! HR sometimes lives the fallacy that by the sheer fact that it manages most of the employee related pieces, it is also naturally competent to handle “employee communications”. Communcations is a more complex realm and needs to be vested with a legitimate communications organization that in most cases would be tied-in with the corporate as an independent function or with the marketing function (both of which are logical from a competency perspective). This also creates greater message and brand synchrony.
Making employee communications report into HR is as daft as having finance or facilties report into HR. If these can be respected as niche functions with their own turf, so should communications. The only problem is that to the “limited vision” communications seems so easy that it doesn’t need a specialist. Attribute this to ignorance than intelligence.
August 4th, 2006 at 7:18 am
I’m somewhat late to this conversation, but I have to react to one of Ron’s early points, that “communicators who report elsewhere often tend to develop adversarial relationships with HR.” Well, that certainly doesn’t have to be the case. I’ve just finished 17+ years with Hallmark Cards, where the internal communication function is housed (appropriately, I believe) with external communication in a division that reports to the CEO. I’ve seen lots of different structures and have come to believe, as many of you also do, that having communication report to the CEO is what makes the most sense.
That said, to be successful, I think internal communicators have to develop excellent working relationships with HR, and that’s what we tried to do at Hallmark. We were partners on a wide range of initiatives and implemented reguar ways to keep each other informed about what was going on.
And, as Brad so accurately points out, it might not matter WHERE internal communication reports, because it’s really all about the people and what they’re like.
August 4th, 2006 at 8:03 am
It’s true — everything, in the end, comes down to the ability of people to get along and work together in a positive way, whatever the reporting structure. But I wonder how things might have gone at Hallmark if you had reported directly to HR. Would you have lasted 17 years? I would think not.