Reputation and trust are terms being bandied about by just about everyone at the moment. So I wasn’t particularly surprised when I opened the March edition of NZ Marketing Magazine to find an article about the need to protect a company’s reputation in these tumultuous times.

I read it with interest and agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment that, in the current economic environment, communication professionals must “band together against short-term thinking” and that our focus must be on “maintaining the trust of our stakeholders, shareholders, and customers”.

However, I was surprised that there was no mention of employees and the important role internal communications plays in maintaining trust and helping to manage reputation.

Reputation management begins from the inside out. How can an organisation expect to reassure its customers and external stakeholders if it doesn’t spend the time, or simply can’t convince, its most important audience (and advocates), its staff?

Strong and authentic employee communication is even more important during times of uncertainty. In an information vacuum, staff respond in a similar way to the public and other stakeholders – they become suspicious and rely on other sources (including the grapevine and the news media) for information.

Furthermore, research is clear that an engaged workforce is more productive and loyal, and customer satisfaction is greatly improved. So not only is good internal communication vital for ensuring that our staff are more likely to be ‘on message’ during these tough times, it’s also good business sense.

Late last year Ideas Shop conducted research into the state of internal communications in New Zealand. Unfortunately the discipline is the poor cousin to external communications; practitioners tend to be under-resourced, reactive rather than strategic, and brought in at the end of the loop when many of the key decisions have already been made.

Strong internal communications goes hand in hand with external communications. It’s time we all started thinking more about this important discipline and better equipped our practitioners to do this very vital job.

Amanda is now writing an article for Management Magazine about the importance of internal communication, particularly during a recession. amanda [at] ideasshop [dot] co [dot] nz (Email Amanda) to ensure you see a copy of her article once it goes to print.