employee engagement

You can’t comms your way out of a bad deal

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Employee engagement is falling. Workers are less willing to go the extra mile. Perhaps the problem isn’t their attitude. Perhaps they’ve finally read the terms and conditions.

A surrealist painting of an empty office at dusk. A giant brass scale hangs perfectly level, with a desk chair, laptop, pot plant, folders, a mug and a dangling lanyard on one pan, balanced against a single small orange envelope on the other. A man in a navy overcoat buttons it up and looks at the scale calmly, with a blue-to-violet evening sky and rows of empty desks behind him.

The Financial Times reports this week that quiet quitting is real. British workers, the lazy bastards, are increasingly reluctant to go above and beyond the requirements of their jobs.

The Resolution Foundation, the Provisional Wing of Waitrose whose research prompted the story, calls it a dissatisfaction drain. Job satisfaction has fallen to its lowest recorded level, and employees are less inclined to contribute extra effort.

Same data, different framing. One version says workers have developed a troubling attitude problem. The other raises the possibility that they might have a point.

Maybe people have worked out that work doesn’t love them back.

After years of being told to live the values, think like owners, find their purpose, adopt a growth mindset, become culture ambassadors, practise radical candour, embrace psychological safety, bring (just the right amount of) their authentic selves, celebrate colleagues on the recognition platform, describe what belonging means to them in three words on a virtual Post-it note, attend a lunchtime webinar on resilience, and think of the organisation as one big family, employees have finally done something nobody in HR saw coming.

They’ve read the terms and conditions.

And it turns out this family reserves the right to change them whenever they like.

The deal has got worse

In 2015, 81% of British workers said they were satisfied with their main job. By 2025, that had fallen to 74%, the lowest level since records began in 1989, at the height of Thatcherite reforms, when dock workers were striking over the abolition of their employment protections and nobody thought to address the problem with a Headspace subscription.

The proportion who found their jobs interesting fell from 74% to 63%. Those who saw opportunities for advancement dropped from 35% to 26%.

And contrary to the prevailing view among executives, who appear to believe their workforce is powered by mission statements, most people work for money. Grubby, unglamorous money, which they exchange for things like rent, transport, trousers, associated sundries, and food: the fuel their stupid mortal bodies insist on, three times a day, every day, forever.

They would quite like more of it. In fact, 78% now say a high income is important to them, up from 67% a decade ago. Unfortunately, only 23% say their job actually provides one.

This may come as a shock to executives whose own sense of purpose is reinforced by a seven-figure remuneration package.

There’s a similarly spectacular mismatch on flexibility. While 61% consider control over their working hours important, only 31% say their current job offers it.

So people would like interesting work, opportunities to progress, decent pay and some control over their lives. And employers are increasingly failing to provide these things.

Against this backdrop, it’s hardly a surprise that the proportion willing to work harder than required to help their employer succeed fell from 69% to 55%.

Now these are stated attitudes, not measured productivity. The comparison covers a decade that included a pandemic, an inflation shock, the inexplicable global success of Dance Monkey, a mercifully brief obsession with NFTs, the collective decision to pretend matcha tastes good, and significant changes to working patterns. We can’t attribute every movement to deteriorating employment conditions, and it would be daft to try.

But you’d need to be wilfully, heroically obtuse to miss the direction of travel. Britain’s workers have read the small print of modern employment, all of it, and thought: nah, mate.

And yet, the survey also suggests that the Great British Skiver is something of a myth. Just 4% of working-age adults say they’d prefer not to work at all.

The overwhelming majority still want to work, the weirdos. They’ve simply developed some Views about the arrangement.

Quiet quitting is just repricing

I’ve always thought “quiet quitting” was a spectacularly stupid phrase. It describes people who turn up, fulfil their responsibilities and do the work they’re employed to do, while declining to hand over an unspecified amount of extra labour for free. We’ve somehow managed to rebrand doing the job you’re paid for as a form of industrial action.

Imagine applying this standard to any other commercial relationship. You hire a plumber to fix your boiler. They arrive on time, diagnose the problem, replace the faulty part, test the system and present an invoice for the agreed amount.

You wouldn’t accuse them of quiet quitting because they failed to repaint the kitchen, walk the dog and demonstrate a passionate commitment to your family’s long-term plumbing strategy.

Yet that’s what we’ve normalised at work. The good employee doesn’t just do their job. They demonstrate passion. They show commitment. They go above and beyond, volunteer for the culture committee and become an ambassador for a corporate purpose developed by a branding agency in a windowless hotel conference room.

And if they don’t? Well, perhaps we need to have a conversation about their engagement.

Clue’s in the name, lads: Discretionary effort is discretionary. It’s not a debt employees owe their employers for the privilege of dodging the dole queue for another month.

There are good reasons for organisations to want people to contribute beyond their formal responsibilities. Collaboration, initiative and mutual support make workplaces function. Better people than I find genuine satisfaction in helping colleagues and improving things.

But those behaviours emerge from relationships, trust and reciprocity. They aren’t something you can extract indefinitely through motivational messaging and a quarterly pizza lunch.

If people are withdrawing their discretionary effort, perhaps they’ve simply looked at what they put in, looked at what they get back, and decided the exchange rate no longer works in their favour.

That’s not quiet quitting. It’s repricing.

Loyalty (terms and conditions apply)

Last week, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its global workforce. Two days later, it announced quarterly profits of $36.6 billion on revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19%. With a brass neck you could stop a train with, it described the buyouts as offering employees “greater flexibility” and “a new choice”. To be fair, these are voluntary offers, not 60,000 compulsory redundancies. And those data centres won’t pay for themselves.

If you’re nearing retirement with a decent pile of stock, you’d be mad not to take the money and run. Spend your last working years doing what you actually want: travel, opening a restaurant, an ill-advised post-divorce relationship with someone half your age, or methodically pissing your ungrateful children’s inheritance up the wall in a Las Vegas casino.

But consider the view from the desk of someone ten years into their career. The company is making obscene amounts of money. Its executives are queuing up to explain the transformational potential of AI. And a quarter of their colleagues have just been invited to consider pursuing their personal growth journey somewhere else. Nobody has said “you’re optional”, but nobody’s needed to. The people who stay have received the message loud and clear, and it wasn’t the one in the press release.

Microsoft is hardly alone in explaining the new economics of employment. Amazon’s Andy Jassy told staff last year that AI would reduce its total corporate workforce. Shopify’s Tobi Lütke told teams to prove AI couldn’t do the work before asking for another carbon-based unit.

There are legitimate business arguments for all of this. Organisations have to evolve. Technology changes how work gets done. Businesses aren’t charities, and nobody is owed a job for life. But here’s the rub: employees aren’t charities either.

For decades, employers have encouraged people to see work as something more than a transaction. A relationship. A community. A shared endeavour. A family, even. Something worth emotional investment, personal sacrifice and loyalty. Meanwhile, the employer has kept the right to treat that relationship as a line in a spreadsheet, to be deleted when the numbers say so.

Now employees have started applying the same commercial logic to their side of the arrangement, and we’re calling it a crisis.

You can’t spend years telling people they’re your greatest asset, then act surprised when they notice you’re treating them as a depreciating one. The company is entitled to make rational decisions about how much labour it needs. So are the people providing it.

We’ve spent decades trying to fix engagement

Employee engagement has been one of the great corporate obsessions of the past twenty years. We’ve measured it, benchmarked it, segmented it, action-planned it, cascaded it to line managers, bolted it onto executive scorecards and bought software to display it in reassuringly expensive shades of red, amber and green.

We’ve commissioned employee value propositions, culture transformations, listening strategies, recognition platforms, pulse surveys, purpose campaigns and networks of engagement champions, each with a badge. We’ve built detailed personas to help us understand why Sarah, 38, busy working mum, Operations, isn’t sufficiently thrilled about the company’s strategic priorities. We’ve given Sarah a refreshed values lanyard, invited her to a webinar called Navigating Change, and asked her, on a scale of one to ten, how likely she is to recommend the organisation as a Great Place To Work.

Sarah, meanwhile, wants a pay rise, enough colleagues to cover the afternoon shift, and for Brian to stop microwaving fish in the office kitchen. Sadly, none of these is available as an option in the engagement platform’s campaign template.

So, after twenty years of all that, how’s it going?

Gallup puts UK employee engagement at 10%, unchanged for four years. The British Social Attitudes survey shows willingness to put in extra effort falling from 69% to 55% over the past decade.

These are different measures, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Nor can anyone know what would have happened without all those initiatives. Perhaps they prevented things getting even worse.

But after decades of effort, the question deserves asking: what if we’ve spent twenty years mistaking a diagnostic for a treatment?

Engagement tells us something about people’s experience of work. That’s worth knowing, in the same way it’s worth knowing about customer satisfaction, staff turnover, or whether the roof is leaking.

But imagine discovering water pouring through the ceiling and responding by appointing a Head of Ceiling Sentiment. You survey the occupants. You develop a compelling narrative about the organisation’s commitment to hydration. You launch a recognition programme celebrating colleagues who show exceptional resilience in damp conditions. Within a year, you achieve a statistically significant improvement in attitudes towards rain.

The roof is still leaking. Someone’s desk now has a mushroom on it.

This is the trap internal communication has built for itself. We’ve let engagement become something we’re expected to deliver, as though employee sentiment were a product we could manufacture with the right mix of storytelling, leadership visibility and Canva templates.

Once engagement becomes a performance target, the incentive shifts. Instead of improving people’s experience of work, organisations can end up managing the appearance of employee satisfaction. The survey score becomes the thing to fix, while the conditions producing it remain untouched.

And because the people tasked with improving the score frequently have no authority to change those conditions, the answer is more communication. Another campaign. Another town hall. Another listening exercise. Another carefully curated set of employee stories proving this is a wonderful place to work.

All while the people we’re supposedly engaging are wondering whether they’ll still have a job next quarter.

The people in the middle have noticed too

The most interesting finding in the research is where the enthusiasm has drained fastest. It isn’t among TikTokkers who’ve supposedly decided that effort is a tragic Boomer affectation, like cheque books or eye contact. It’s managers and professionals: the experienced ones, the grown-ups, the people organisations have spent decades relying on to stop the whole thing falling over. Their willingness to go the extra mile fell further than anyone’s. And it isn’t just Britain; Gallup’s global figures show manager engagement sliding from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025.

This is a problem for internal communication, because these are the people the entire model runs on. The manager is supposed to translate strategy into local relevance, explain difficult decisions, model the culture, motivate the team, cascade the leadership messages, listen empathetically, feed insights upwards and keep a brave little smile on their face while being told to deliver 15% more with 10% fewer people. Ideally all of this happens in the fifteen minutes between their eighth Teams call of the day and a LinkedIn Learning module on psychological safety, which they’ll watch at double speed with the sound off.

And when they fail to radiate the required enthusiasm, our diagnosis is always the same: they need more communication training. Or a toolkit. A lovely toolkit, with key messages, suggested talking points and a handy FAQ explaining why the restructuring is an exciting opportunity to accelerate our journey.

Maybe, just maybe, managers understand the strategy perfectly well – well enough to hate it. They know what the cuts mean for their teams, because they’re the ones doing the cutting. They can see the gap between the corporate narrative and what is actually happening, because they live in it. They’re the ones explaining to exasperated colleagues why the business can afford a shiny new AI chat interface for the service desk but not a replacement for Sandra, who left in March and whose job is now being done, badly, by three people and a shared mailbox.

The manager cascade only works if the people doing the cascading can make the organisation’s intent sound credible. So what happens when the translators no longer believe the translation?

The deal is the message

So where does this leave internal communication? In a pickle, that’s where.

We’ve spent years arguing that communication is essential to engagement. And it is, up to a point. Good communication reduces uncertainty, helps people do their jobs, makes organisations easier to navigate and gives employees a voice in decisions that affect them.

But it cannot manufacture trust in an organisation behaving in untrustworthy ways. It cannot create security while people watch their colleagues disappear one by one, like a slasher film directed by McKinsey. And it cannot persuade employees they’re valued when every decision suggests they’re a cost to be minimised.

This is where the familiar know/do/feel model drives headlong into a wall marked reality.

We can help people understand what’s happening, what they need to do and why decisions have been made. But you can’t communicate people out of a reasonable response to what they see with their own eyes.

Which raises an uncomfortable question about our own profession.

Every time we accept a brief to ‘improve engagement’ without asking why people are disengaged, we risk becoming part of the machinery that disguises the problem. We take an organisational failure and rebrand it as a communication challenge. We treat the workforce’s entirely reasonable response to its circumstances as something to be corrected with messaging. We’re the crime-scene cleaner, mopping up so efficiently that nobody asks about the body.

And then we wonder why nobody invites us into the room as strategic advisers.

The alternative is harder. It means telling leaders that employees aren’t confused about the strategy – they understand it perfectly well, and they don’t like what it means for them. It means challenging decisions before they’re announced, not just finding a more appealing way to announce them.

Sometimes it means telling the CEO that the fastest way to improve the next engagement survey is to stop commissioning sodding engagement initiatives and start fixing the things people have been complaining about for years. That’s a considerably more useful contribution than another campaign about purpose.

We’ve spent years obsessing over whether employees are prepared to go the extra mile.

Perhaps it’s time to ask whether employers are prepared to meet them halfway.

The deal is the message. And if the deal is shit, no amount of communication is going to make it smell of roses.

Networking for #intranet managers

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

In my latest post over at Intranetizen, I’ve pulled together my recommendations for intranet pros on networking with others in the industry.

Always one to eat my own dogfood, this week we’re holding the fourth Internal Communications Teacamp. The theme this time around is internal comms and employee engagement.

As ever, IC Teacamp is open to all internal communciations practitioners, in any industry or discipline. No need to book or RSVP – just come along to Cafe Zest, on the second floor of House of Fraser in Victoria Street SW1, from 4pm tomorrow (18th January).

If you can’t make it, follow the action on the #iceteacamp hashtag.

UKGC10 Session two: Socialising Internal Communications

/ Sharon O'Dea / 8 Comments

The second session of the day was the one I was looking forward to the most, having discussed it ahead of the event with Kim Willis and Mark Watson.

Kim took the lead on facilitating, but as it turns out the discussion managed to veer though the full swathe of internal comms issues without the need for much facilitating at all. It seemed like we covered an awful lot in under an hour, and could have talked for at least another hour.

Almost everyone agreed  social media could play a much bigger role in internal communications, but within the public sector at least there hasn’t been widespread adoption yet.

Someone described social networking as “what intranets are supposed to be” – enabling you to connect and collaborate with colleagues, share information and improve communication.

A social intranet enables the recording and sharing of organisational knowledge. But while knowledge management looks at how we manage our intellectual capital, we need also to look at how we record, share and pass on social capital too – that is, sharing that knowledge of people and processes that we all build up over time.

Shane Dillion said we rely too much on traditional, top-down methods of communication that no longer suit the way we work. To become more effective, everything we learn outside the organisation should be bought back in and shared.

By enabling colleagues to connect with one another, and by making working lives a little bit easier, good social intranets have a positive impact on employee engagement too.

Many cited middle management as a barrier to adoption of social media. In some ways this is understandable, as social internal comms reduces the middle managers role as a gatekeeper of information.

Our current organisational structures are built for command and control, not collaboration. So the success of internal social media  depends on moving management towards a culture of co-creation.

The question of culture is a very important one. Technology cannot itself create a collaborative culture; if people aren’t talking to each other already, introducing social tools isn’t going to make them.

Other common barriers include silo culture and concerns around security, particularly in relation to things like Government Connect. Platforms like Yammer are incredibly simple to use, and have some great functionality, but sitting outside the firewall are considered too risky by many.

(As an aside, while I like Yammer, I find its default email setting – which emails for every notification – begins to grate remarkably quickly and is itself a barrier to adoption).

But as I blogged about recently, the business case for internal social media is strong and growing. Carl Haggerty gave an update on the Devon County Council social networking pilot he talked about at LocalGovCamp. They branded this ‘business networking’ to counter accusations of frivolity and timewasting. This succeeded in winning hearts and minds, and in evaluation recently he found it produced considerable (but non-cashable) savings.

So what do we do to hasten the adoption of social media inside the firewall?

  • JFDI. The old adage that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission is true to some extent, but it isn’t that simple when it’s your job on the line. But start with a small, agile pilot that can be scaled up if successful. If it works, the organisation will buy into it. If it doesn’t, you won’t have lost much.
  • If you want to promote new ways of working, switch the old ones off. Carl Haggerty said his team made a commitment to use their Business Networking tool for discussion rather than sending group emails. People like their tried and tested methods, so you need to provide incentives to change.
  • Dave Briggs said change needs to be dramatic to work – new tools have to do the same thing at least nine times better to win people over.
  • Get buy in from leadership, and encourage them to use social media internally to communicate, listen and lead.
  • Don’t focus on the negatives. Yes, some people will misuse social tools, but most will not. Posts have real names on, so are self-policed.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel. Adapt your code of context to say how it applies in an online context rather than write a new code from scratch – that way you avoid protracted negotiations.
  • Hug your CIO. Work with ICT to reach solutions to problems like security rather than focus on barriers.
  • Demonstrate value. Budgets will be tight for many years to come, so we need to set out the business case for social tools, though improving flexibility, sharing knowledge, and improving productivity.

Internal social media sits at the intersection of culture change, innovation and knowledge management. It has the potential to deliver innovation and collaboration, but to do that we need to adapt to the cultural and technological barriers in our own organisations.

This was a vibrant and varied discussion, and we could all have talked for ages. Phil McAllister suggested an internal comms barcamp, which a few of us have begun to discuss in more detail. Watch this space.

Intranets are key to recovery in 2010, say surveys

/ Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

Each January, Jakob Neilsen’s annual intranet design annual is released. This showcases the top ten intranets of the year, and is a good indicator of trends in intranet design and usability.

This year’s Neilsen report found intranets are becoming a higher priority for organisations, intranet teams are growing in size, and increasing numbers feature mobile accessibility and social networking.

On the face of it, the improved functionality comes as no surprise. Mobile internet and social media has grown exponentially over the past few years. Our experience of using the web creates expectations of the kind of content and functionality we want at work too; as we rely on our iPhones to do everything for us when we’re out and about, we expect to be able to use our intranet on it too.

That intranet budgets and teams have continued to grow despite the long recession reflects a growing realisation that intranets can deliver real return on investment for organisations.

Significant and measurable returns can be made by making information easier to find – quite simply, less time spent searching for things is more time people can spend doing something worthwhile. Functionality like self-service HR can see sizable reductions in administration costs.

Less easy to measure, though, is the value of the intranet in improving engagement. Last year’s MacLeod Review on Employee Engagement (from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills) found that more widespread adoption of employee engagement approaches could impact positively on UK competitiveness and performance, and meet the challenges of increased global competition.

Good intranets not only make life a little easier for colleagues, they improve communication, facilitate collaboration, enable people to connect and have their say, and help workers feel part of their organisation. This, in turn, encourages employees to say, stay, and strive.

Another study out this month, from communication research specialists Melcrum, would suggest organisations have heeded Macleod’s call for greater focus on engagement.

In the survey of 2,212 senior communicators, 40% said the business case for social media within internal communication was clear and that there is visible return on investment, while 53% of those who responded said they were planning to increase investment in their organisation’s intranet in 2010.

The results of this study show that not only are organisations investing in good intranet design, but also in functionality and content. When asked about channels used for internal communication, the intranet ranked as the most effective channel by 73% of senior communicators worldwide, with a clear majority believing webcasts and video would grow in importance in 2010.

Respondents highlighted a wide range of business benefits from investment in internal social media. These included improved levels of employee engagement (21%), better communication with remote workers (16%), knowledge management and collaboration (25%), improving employee feedback (20%) and making business leaders more visible and accessible (14%).

Both the Neilsen and Melcrum studies show intranets are maturing. Increasingly they’re moving away from being a simple repository of information and becoming instead a platform for communication, collaboration and engagement.

Victoria Mellor, CEO of Melcrum said: “There is a fundamental shift happening with how information flows inside an organization. Peer-to-peer online networks are enabling real-time feedback from employees to inform decision-making, not to mention facilitating collaboration between remote workers.”

With budgets tight, the pressure is on for organisations to demonstrate value for money. But with growing evidence of the business benefits of investment in intranets and internal social media, it’s clear they’ll play an even more important role in 2010.

Thoughts on Portsmouth’s Facebook ban

/ Sharon O'Dea / 9 Comments

Portsmouth Council announced this week they’ve decided to ban access to Facebook from its computers after it was revealed staff spent an average of 400 hours a month on the site.

Council bans on Facebook are hardly new; many have restrictions on access thanks to the requirements of Government Connect. But this story focussed on “waste”, noting 400 hours a month equates to between five and six minutes per month spent on the site by each of the 4,500 PC-based staff.

Firstly, the statistic isn’t a sound one; Portsmouth Council admit they can’t differentiate between business and personal use, nor between dwelling and active browsing, which means they don’t know how much of that 400 hours is clocked up by windows left open while the user does something else.

Second, the headline doesn’t reflect the real issue behind this story. Organisations have had this debate many times already, over the potential for employees to waste time if given a telephone, email, or access to the internet. In all of these cases, it’s a manager’s job to tackle any perceived timewasting, and so too it should be for Facebook. But instead of looking at the quality of performance management, Portsmouth Council are trying to solve the problem from the centre.

This strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. People are already talking about us on social networks. We can either choose to ignore those conversations, or we can listen to and learn from them.

As Carl Heggarty notes, would we consider a member of staff visiting a village hall and listening to community issues and communicating with them about councils services a waste of time, or would that be considered community engagement?

Employees listening out for the organisation on social networks gives us an extended network of “eyes and ears” able to highlight problems and bring them to our attention before they spiral out of control and become significant reputational risks.

By banning access, we prevent employees from listening on our behalf, identifying problems so they can be given attention by more conventional means. But heavy-handed bans also prevent employees from speaking for us. Employees can be powerful advocates for what we do, and are likely to speak highly of us in their social networks, both on and offline. By banning access we limit employees ability to advocate for us online.

By limiting the extent to which informed and engaged employees can advocate on its behalf, Portsmouth Council is failing to get the full value from its internal communications.

Finally, centrally-imposed bans on access could also be said to have a negative impact on employee engagement. Hertzberg argues that dissatisfaction with employment is primarily motivated by company policy, supervision, salary, interpersonal relations and working conditions (what he termed ‘Hygiene Factors’). Portsmouth’s policy of blocking social networking sites could be seen to create dissatisfaction among employees, as it could be seen to be heavy-handed centralised supervision, and limits their ability to manage their work-life balance and build working relationships.

The Work Foundation found access to new technology affects how people view their organisational culture: “People who have access to newer technologies are more likely to characterise their organisation as one that is loyal with mutual trust, that is committed to innovation and development or is focussed on achievement and not rule bound”.

The holy grail of employee engagement is discretionary effort. Engage your staff and they repay you by investing more time and effort into their work; fail to engage – or actively disengage – and employees are not motivated to contribute more than the bare minimum.

A more nuanced look at Portsmouth’s Facebook ban might reveal it has a negative impact both on employee engagement and on community engagement, resulting in far more “waste” than the five to six minutes a month currently spent on Facebook.

Podcasting for internal communication

/ Sharon O'Dea / 2 Comments

Tools like YouTube and AudioBoo mean we can produce and distribute audio and video more easily than ever. Abi Signorelli, Head of Internal Communications at Virgin Media, has been experimenting with AudioBoo for a few months. She’s been using it to record her thoughts, and for impromptu interviews with people she bumps into.

It’s certainly an interesting idea. Using real voices from real employees can really bring messages to life, and arguably help to break down organisational silos.

Video, too, is cheaper and easier to produce than ever. Where I work we’ve been using the cheap and ridiculously simple Flip Video to record and share interviews and footage from events. The proliferation of mobile phone cameras means people no longer expect well-produced, slick corporate video. The homemade quality of videos from Flip or mobile phones lends a shaky, grainy authenticity that viewers are now used to seeing on You Tube.

YouTube is now the second most popular search engine in the world – which just goes to show people are actively looking for multimedia content.

But are people looking for it at work? Recent research at a large telecoms company found less than 4% of employees are interested in watching online video from their employer, while actual hit rates on their corporate videos are even lower. Similarly, Abi’s Audioboo advertures have stimulated some interesting debate, but the recordings themselves attract comparatively tiny internal audiences within Virgin Media.

All of which suggests that hype surrounding pod- and vodcasting is overblown. But in my view that would be too simplistic.

History shows our media consumption habits at home create expectations of the media we consume at work. So as more of us access online video or podcasts regularly, it follows we’ll expect the same media rich content in our employee communications.

Short videos from our recent community festival had surprisingly high numbers of views, and some great feedback from colleagues who said they appreciated seeing some of the events going on across the borough.

But that’s not to say in a few years time we’ll all be scrapping our staff magazines in favour of audiovisual content.

First, audiences have to jump through quite a few hoops to access podcasts. Even simple steps like having to download the file to listen, or even plug in headphones, are reasons not to bother. In organisations like mine – with a high proportion of non-wired audiences – the barriers to access can be huge.

Even for desk-based audiences, video and audio is more difficult to access than traditional print and online communications. A recording, even if really well made, takes considerably longer to consume than the same amount of information in text form. So while they’re cheap to make, they cost more in staff time to consume.

Those who are likely to take the extra steps and extra time to consume video or podcasts are those who are already highly engaged. Those who aren’t will need some strong motivation to actively access information in video and postcasts.

So how do we do that? Simply: make it worthwhile for the end user.

We need to think why would someone take time out of their day to view/listen to this? Would you take ten minutes out of a busy day to listen to corporate news in audio form? Probably not.

But would you take some time out to watch a video of colleagues at a sports day? Or a preview of a new product? Possibly.

Its certainly not suitable for every kind of message; the disincentives to access mean it certainly can’t be relied on for business critical information.

But nor should we write off podcasting for internal comms just yet. Video and audio can bring colour and tone to communications that traditional channels can’t. With home consumption of online audio and video expected to continue to grow, as well as increasing numbers of people working remotely, audio and video look set to play an increasingly important role in the internal comms mix.

In the meantime, it’s good to experiment. You can listen to Abi’s AudioBoos here. Why not add your own?