It didn't happen in my day ...

Someone asked me yesterday how much internal comms has changed since I've been working in it. I answered, as I always do, that it hasn't changed that much, really - same issues, same problems, same basic planning process. "But surely the channels must have changed?" this person prompted.

And blimey, when I thought about it, how they have. So please indulge me, while I take a trip down memory lane.

Not to make myself sound too ancient or anything, but there were no mobile phones, no Intranets and no email when I started out. I actually used to look after a small team of people whose job it was to stuff letters in envelopes when we wanted to communicate with employees. That was just for an 'all manager' run though, because we only had 1300 of those. For an 'all staff' run (21,000) we used to go to a mailing house, making sure we booked in with HR for a print out of the right labels we needed to go on the envelopes - and avoiding Mondays and Tuesdays when the HR system was out of bounds.

(So you thought you had a hard time being seen as 'unstrategic'?  Think yourself lucky you're not fighting the tag of 'licker and sticker', and people no longer think all IC people do is stuff envelopes all day!)

We had a face to face briefing system - but no PowerPoint. So we used to get 1300 lots of flipcharts printed up, and once a month, the envelope stuffing office became full from floor to ceiling with cardboard tubes.

I remember the point when we first really started using email. In fact I'm proud to report that I was the person apparently single-handedly responsible for getting email 'in' in our division. Because the company was Royal Mail, we were in the middle of a national strike, and I couldn't get any information out to anyone because the only way to communicate was by mail ... and there wasn't any. So I told the managers I was switching to the new email system and they'd better use it because I was stopping the paper stuff.

Very exciting times. Furious exchanges in some quarters. My answerphone used to get so full every day it ran out of space. One senior leader left a furious message telling me his computer password was 'Luddite' and he'd use email over his dead body. So inexperienced were we with the perils of email, that I managed to spread a virus throughout the entire division in 2 minutes flat with one of my all manager mails. Whoops.

Can you imagine, though, how difficult it was to get out the simplest of messages? And we were the Royal Mail, so we didn't have to worry about postage charges. And yet ... and yet ... at least we had to think.  There was no chance of throwing out loads of irrelevant messages - it was too time-consuming and difficult.  Line managers were the route for most of our communication, simply because they were the easiest people for us to reach from the centre.  When we had a big issue, we put all our effort into face to face communication, roadshows and events. All time-consuming, much more expensive than communication is now, but on reflection I'd say probably a more considered use of people's time.

And not forgetting, of course, that for plenty of employees, paper and face to face is still the order of the day. No access to email, no access to Intranet, no work-connected mobile phones. But if you're in a comms department in headquarters, getting all excited about the latest social media case studies it's pretty easy to forget there's a whole other world out there where actually, really, things still haven't changed too much ...

Sue

Comments

[Emma Ridgeon]

Sue, I enjoyed your trip down communications memory lane. My personal favourite 'olden days' activity: standing by the fax machine all day long when the financial results were announced, faxing the press release to every single worldwide office one at a time so they could photocopy it and stick it on the noticeboard for employees. Timely? Targeted? Relevant? Engaging? Oh yes!

[Sue]

Oh yes - the fax! One organisation I worked in had an 'aaargh, how did we miss that?!' moment when the group team faxed a re-org announcement (actually a pretty major job-loss announcement, but I promise everyone affected was briefed face to face, by very carefully briefed and trained managers - this was just the 'for information' communication to everyone else) to all our offices at 7am when the stock market announcement was made. Then got very confused when managers started calling to ask why on earth there had been no communication. At which point we discovered the offices all unplugged their fax machines and locked them away overnight, for security reasons, where they sat happily until 9am. And they didn't have memories...

[Liam]

Funnily enough...I was getting whistful the other day when dealing with a proof of a manual which came in a pdf. In the old days I would faxed a marked up copy...

Liam

[Jeroen]

(Not really IC-related but hey)
I happened to be in college at the right time, when this Internet thing first was introduced here, back in '93. We only had access to it in one Uni computer room, located about 1,5 KM from where I lived. Even then I knew that some day this would be a story to tell the (hypothetical) grandchildren: "Did you know that gramps in his younger days had to walk aaaaalll the way across town, just to fetch his e-mail?"

"Yes grampa, you already told us. Shut up."