Internal communications glossary

Internal communication

The information that moves around inside a company between management, line managers and the workforce. It covers the obligatory, the operational and the things that hold the atmosphere together. It is not the same as corporate communications, which faces outwards.

Internal communications plan

The document that says who you have to reach, with what, through which channel and who does it each week. Without named owners and a calendar, it is a statement of intent.

Top-down communication

What travels from management to the workforce: announcements, policies, results. It is the part almost every company has half solved.

Bottom-up communication

What travels from the workforce upwards: surveys, suggestion boxes, shift meetings. It is the part almost nobody has solved, and the one most often promised in plans.

Lateral communication

What happens between colleagues and between departments without going through the hierarchy. In a company with several sites it is usually non-existent, and it is where half of the coordination errors come from.

Cascade

The method by which a message travels down the management line: directors to managers, managers to teams. Reliable for anything nuanced, unreliable for anything urgent, and not reliable at all past the third rung.

Editorial calendar

The table setting out what gets published, when, who writes it and who it goes to. It is the piece that turns a plan into weekly work.

Segmentation

Sending each thing only to the people it affects: one site, one department, one shift. Without segmentation, people learn to ignore the channel.

Internal marketing

Applying marketing technique to your own workforce, treating them as an internal audience. A legitimate idea, but be suspicious when it is used to call something a campaign when it is really just informing people properly.

Champions or correspondents

People on each site who contribute content and help the channel get used. In a plant it is usually the supervisor, because they are the one with the news and the photos.

Crisis communication

The set of decisions about what gets said, in what order and when, once the news is bad. It gets prepared beforehand, not on the day of the announcement.

Official channel

The one the company commits to publishing important things in. There has to be exactly one per type of message, or it stops being official.

Informal channel

The messaging group, the changing room, the tea break. You cannot get rid of it and you should not want to: what has to come out of it is anything affecting working time, safety or pay.

Intranet

The company's internal website. Historically built for people with a computer, which is why in companies with a shop floor it ends up as an office-only tool.

Digital noticeboard

The equivalent of the cork noticeboard, but on a phone and segmented. The important difference is not the format: it is that you can tell how many people have seen it.

Feed

The list of posts in date order that you see when you go in. A format inherited from social media, which is exactly what means nobody has to have it explained to them.

Community or space

A sub-channel per site, department or project, with its own members and permissions. It is what stops the Manchester workforce getting Glasgow's notices.

Pinned post

One that stays at the top of the feed until it stops being relevant. Useful for anything that has to stay visible for weeks: the rota, a procedure, a set of dates.

Internal newsletter

A periodic summary, usually by email. Works in offices and does not work with a workforce that has no email, which is exactly the problem that sends people looking for alternatives.

Enterprise social network

An internal tool with profiles, posts and comments. The category Meta's Workplace belonged to, whose closure has pushed a lot of companies into looking for a replacement.

Kiosk or shop-floor screen

A touchscreen installed in a changing room or common area for people who cannot use a phone at their workstation. Some suppliers sell them and some do not; worth asking, because it changes the budget.

Suggestion box

A channel for ideas from the workforce. It only works if somebody answers in public: a suggestion box with no answers stops receiving suggestions within two months.

Reach

How many distinct people have seen a piece of content. Not to be confused with impressions, which counts the times it was displayed.

Coverage

Reach expressed as a percentage of the group it was aimed at. It is the measure that actually answers 'did people find out?'.

Impressions

The number of times a piece of content appeared on a screen. One person going in forty times generates forty impressions and one person reached.

Engagement rate

The proportion of people who do something: comment, react, answer a survey. Useful as a thermometer, bad as a target: you can raise it with prize draws without anything actually improving.

Aggregated data

Data about a group: '61 % of the Derby plant'. It is the right grain for running internal communication.

Named data

Data that identifies one particular person. Only justified where the proof is needed, such as the read receipt on a safety procedure.

eNPS

A measure that summarises, on a scale, how many people would recommend their employer as a place to work. Useful for comparing a company against itself over time; comparing yours against another company's says very little.

Pulse survey

A very short, frequent survey of three to five questions, to track how something is moving. It is the practical alternative to the annual sixty-question survey nobody finishes.

Engagement survey

The one that measures how it feels to work at the company. Only worth running if the anonymity is real, and real anonymity costs you the breakdown for small groups.

Real anonymity

That not even an administrator with database access can reconstruct who answered what. You check it by asking whether responses carry a timestamp and whether that timestamp can be cross-referenced with the session logs.

The terms that turn up in the meeting with the employee representatives or with the legal team. They are explained by what the rules say rather than by what would suit us: how any of it applies to your case is for your employment solicitor and your data protection officer to say.

Employee representatives

The people who represent the workforce collectively, whether elected under an information and consultation agreement, elected for a specific consultation such as redundancy or a TUPE transfer, or appointed by a recognised trade union. There is no single standing body equivalent to a continental works council unless you have set one up.

Union recognition

The arrangement, voluntary or statutory, under which an employer recognises a trade union for collective bargaining. It determines who you consult with and about what.

Safety representative

A representative with specific health and safety functions, appointed by a recognised union under the Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations 1977, or elected under the Health and Safety (Consultation with Employees) Regulations 1996 where there is no union.

Collective agreement

The agreement between an employer and a recognised union covering terms and conditions. It is where your questions about hours, shifts, premiums and out-of-hours contact get answered before any guide does.

Collective consultation

The formal consultation certain processes require: redundancies of 20 or more employees under section 188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, and TUPE transfers under regulations 13 and 14 of the 2006 Regulations.

Collective redundancy

A proposal to dismiss as redundant 20 or more employees at one establishment within 90 days, which triggers the consultation duty and the requirement to notify the Secretary of State on form HR1.

Lay-off and short-time working

Sending employees home without pay, or cutting their hours, where the contract allows it. It is the nearest standing UK equivalent to the temporary suspension schemes some other countries have; the furlough scheme of 2020 was an emergency measure, not a permanent one.

Dismissal and re-engagement

Changing contractual terms by dismissing and re-hiring on the new terms, commonly called fire and rehire. Covered by the statutory Code of Practice, with tribunal awards liable to an uplift of up to 25 % for unreasonable non-compliance.

TUPE

The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006: employees transfer on their existing terms when a business or a service contract changes hands, and both sides must inform and consult representatives.

Right to disconnect

The idea that people should not be expected to deal with work messages outside their hours. There is no statutory right to disconnect in UK law: what governs is the contract, the daily and weekly rest in the Working Time Regulations 1998, and whatever policy you write.

Read receipt

The record that a document was made available to a particular person and that the person confirmed it, with date and time. It evidences delivery; it does not evidence reading or understanding.

Controller

The party that decides why and how personal data is processed. With an internal communications tool, that is the customer company.

Processor

The party that processes the data on the controller's behalf and on its instructions, under the contract required by Article 28 of the UK GDPR. In this market, the software supplier.

Data protection officer

The role, required in some circumstances under the UK GDPR, responsible for informing, advising and monitoring compliance with data protection inside an organisation.

Data protection impact assessment

The prior analysis required by Article 35 of the UK GDPR when processing is likely to result in a high risk to people's rights and freedoms. The ICO expects one before most systematic monitoring of workers.

Data minimisation

The principle in Article 5 of the UK GDPR: data must be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary for the purpose. It is the argument that supports measuring in aggregate rather than by name.

Whistleblowing channel

The internal route for reporting wrongdoing. In the UK, protection for workers who make a protected disclosure comes from the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, which amended the Employment Rights Act 1996. Most private employers are not required by statute to run a formal internal channel, though financial services firms are under FCA and PRA rules. Either way it is not the same thing as a suggestion box.

Deskless workforce

The people who work without a desk and a computer: shop floor, shop, warehouse, construction site, hospital, care home, cleaning. They are the group classic internal communication does not reach.

Invitation code

A code a person types in to sign themselves up, which can carry their site, department and role inside it. It is the practical alternative when there is no corporate directory to pull from.

SSO (single sign-on)

Getting into the tool with corporate credentials, through protocols such as SAML or OpenID Connect. Very useful for the office side, irrelevant for anybody with no company account.

SCIM

The standard for automatic user provisioning: joiners and leavers in the corporate directory show up in the tool by themselves.

Self-hosted

The supplier runs the service from its own servers rather than on somebody else's infrastructure. It matters mostly for where the data ends up and who can reach it.

On-premises

Installing the software on the customer's own servers. It is a different thing from self-hosted, and fairly rare in this market.

Progressive web app

A website that behaves like an app and opens from a phone's browser without going through an app store. It takes a lot of friction out of signing up a shop-floor workforce.

Push notification

The alert that appears on a phone's screen even when the app is closed. It increases immediacy, and it is exactly what to look at closely when the conversation turns to working time and rest.

Moderation and review queue

The route by which a post from somebody without direct publishing rights goes through approval before it appears. It is what lets you open publishing up to the sites without losing control.

Audit log

The history of sensitive actions, sign-ups, deactivations, role changes, approvals, deletions, with date and author. It is the first thing an IT department asks for in a security questionnaire.