Communicators, don’t let the crap come back

Beware of the backslide.

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed internal communicators into something they’ve always wanted to be: essential.

Typically the poor country cousin to PR and marketing, internal communicators was thrust into the spotlight 18 months ago, when the world as we knew it—and certainly the world of work—changed, possibly forever. Employee communicators stepped up big.

They were in the middle of everything, helping to run their organizations’ COVID-19 command centers and putting out news, sometimes multiple times a day, feeding an employee audience hungry for information. The metrics were off the charts.

And they worked side-by-side with their executives, every day, to help them navigate the disruption and fear caused by the pandemic. They pushed aside some less meaningful communication and the clunky, time-consuming ways they had been producing it.

Almost overnight, “we’ve always done it this way” turned into “we don’t need to do this at all.”

Those leaders always knew internal communicators was there—sort of—but communication during the pandemic really opened their eyes.

“They were true partners,” more than one C-suiter has told me in recent months. “We simply couldn’t have done it without them.”

But that was yesterday.