How to get leadership buy-in for your internal comms work

It’s important to understand how modern internal communications was born out of the need for change management.

During the first week of Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference, St. Francis College professor Cat Colella-Graham began with some history of internal communications function, which began in the 1800s as a top-down communications model to dictate an action or policy to employees. By the 1990s, William Kahn had pioneered the concept of ‘employee engagement’, illuminating the connection between productivity, profits and decreased turnover.

Fast forward to the early aughts, when mergers and acquisitions were on the rise and a noted decrease in productivity followed. While the mid to late 2000s brought an increase in channels such as email, 2017 brought the talent wars—and a clear and conscious effort for organizations to invest in internal comms came right along with it.

Since then, explained Graham, change management principles of planning, preparation, communication, stakeholder engagement, training, monitoring and evaluation have all become table stakes for communicators to understand.

That’s because they help internal communicators demonstrate the value of their function to leadership.