Internal or Employee Communication: The Results

03 Feb , 2014 1 Comment

Internal Communication vs. Employee Communication

Is it Internal Communication or Employee Communication? While there may be no right or wrong answer, there is a clear preference among communication professionals. The results of my recent poll were 78-28 in favor of Internal Communication. In addition, I posed the question on several LinkedIn group discussions and received a lot of feedback. I also took a look at the comments on Chuck Gose’s Intelligent Visual Solutions blog when he asked the same question on Twitter back in July. The following is a distillation of all of the opinions I read.

Employee Communication Internal Communication
Advantages
  • Sounds less formal and more human.
  • More easily understood by those outside the profession.
  • More inclusive of other internal groups.
  • More descriptive of the function.
Disadvantages
  • Sounds too top-down one-directional.
  • Confused with internal telecommunications by those not familiar with the profession.
Other Comments
  • Not used as much outside the U.S.
  • Some feel employee communication is a subset of internal communication.
  • Overwhelmingly preferred by professional communicators.

While I have always preferred the sound of “Employee Communication,” I clearly see the rationale for “Internal Communication.” I don’t buy the argument that Employee Communication doesn’t include management or union employees because to me those audiences are employee subsets. However, I do buy the one-directional argument and that is the point that moves me off dead center. Of course, the only thing that really matters is that we’re all doing a great job communicating.

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful comments!

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1 Comment

Mary Vein

about 7 years ago

Hello Paul! Love the work you are doing. ☺ Wanted to share a great free tool that you may be interested in using from time to time. It helps non-designers types create great looking infographics. The free version is limited in templates and puts the logo/link at the bottom, but hey, it does look nice and super easy to use…I just dropped a few factoids in from your poll to show you how quickly it is to create visual information. Have fun and keep up the great work. M Infogr.am [cid:image001.png@01CF20D5.1D43CFE0]

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