Love Letters And Internal Communications

// September 18th, 2009 // Internal Communications

I was having a discussion yesterday with Adam Shay about internal communications and employer reputation management. Specifically, we were talking about companies where the employer brand is principally an external impression, a recruitment tool. This is actually pretty common – there’s no shortage of companies who use the brand to find talent, get them into the business, and then the brand is never seen again.

I compare the process to love letters. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve received love letters, you know there’s a tremendous personality that’s part of them. Hand-written, full of protestations of affection, written to make you feel valuable and loved. You can put fifty of them from the same author side by side, and see a pattern.

Now imagine your true lover started typing them on a computer, printing them on plain white paper and started writing from the head, not the heart. You’d be worried. You’d feel it was a formality, something carried on simply because it had been done before. You’d be put off by the change of pattern, and I suspect part of you would start questioning the relationship. You’d almost be waiting for the Dear John letter, wouldn’t you?

That psychological change comes because the original love letters made you feel special. They felt and sounded like the person you were in love with. They were a reaffirmation of your emotional contract, and they made you reinvest in the relationship.When the communication style changes, becomes more impersonal, and more functional, your emotional contract begins to weaken. You’re seeing no evidence of the person you’re in love with. You’re just being given messages with no emotion, no transference of care.

This is exactly the same for internal communications. Communication has become about the delivery of data, which lacks emotional input, and denies us the ability to connect author and reader. The word we use for the delivery of emotion is story-telling, and even that’s evasive. Every message, no matter how small or dry, can be imbued with some personality, some sense of single-voice authorship. It can be imbued, for want of a better term, with love.

A good employer brand lives on the continual transfer of emotion, the ongoing renewal of that psychological contract. If your communications with employees feel more like impersonal manuals and less like messages from one person to another, you’re alienating employees from the brand they identify with. And there’s no faster way to make people fall out of love with an idea than assuming that you only have to fall in love with it once. The best employer brand does something to make people renew their emotional commitment at every encounter, no matter how small.