The first research questions asked who leads internal communication and is there evidence of encroachment or a blurring of boundaries in this domain? In most of the companies and organizations that participated in the study (n=13), internal communication was led by a communications or public relations department. In other settings, it was led by marketing (n=4) or human resources (n=3), and in one organization, the internal communication was part of the executive office as their responsibilities involved preparing speeches and messages for leadership. The other six companies were external consultants in public relations (n=3), human resources (n=2) or marketing (n=1). A few of the organizations (3) had recently undergone a restructuring that involved moving internal communication from human resources to public relations or marketing. As a regional director in public relations said,
I think that was for a couple of reasons. One, we still have people in HR that are doing employee services, employee engagement. But in terms of the communications pieces, obviously the communications departments are better equipped for the communications aspect of the writing, designing, brand standards...So it's not just pushing out HR messages, but it's also pushing out… marketing messages.
A couple of the participants said the ideal structure is a close partnership between public relations and human resources on internal communication initiatives. As a managing director at a public relations agency said,
In the healthiest companies, you have HR and internal communications working side by side, hip to hip, really integrated and moving in the same direction. In companies that maybe aren't so healthy, you sometimes do see turf battles between HR and communications and sometimes communications reports up into HR, which actually I don't really think is the right way to go…internal communications is an important enough function that it should not be underneath HR, but …they should be equals working together in a corporation.
While oversight of internal communication can vary, so can the organizational structure. Some participants (n=3) reported having a centralized internal communication department, while others (n=7) assigned specific internal communicators to individual departments or business units. The reasons provided in support of the decentralized approach included a desire to have someone dedicated fully to an individual department's needs. As a manager of employee programs for human resources said,
It's possible that part of the decision was HR wanted to have more control over the survey responsibilities and the engagement focus. And then also wanting more of a dedicated person to work on HR communications…I believe from what I've been told that there was a desire to…have a dedicated person rather than having to have the service come out of communications. And I have seen that in my previous company too where some business units have just hired their own communications person to be completely dedicated to their needs. And they do get a deeper level of service than they might receive from a centralized communications office.
However, the problems that participants reported with the decentralized structure were a duplication of services, lack of collaboration, and different priorities.