Our source of the month for February is the minutes of a meeting to discuss terms of reference for a Communications Audit/Study held at the Midland Bank in 1983. The Midland Bank had been active in the development of internal communication (IC) since the early 1960s and was a pioneer in its development. We have records dating back to 1961 of the bank discussing IC and how it could be improved in the bank (HSBC Archives, 1961).
This is one of the first records we have found of IC being discussed as a managerial practice in a British company. The bank established an ‘Internal Communications Committee’ in January 1975, one of the earliest such committees we have found, and The Group Communications Centre in the same year (HSBC Archives, 1975).
Such activity was spurred by an attitudes and opinion survey amongst the employees of the bank in March, 1975, which revealed that lack of communication was the most pressing issue amongst all grades of staff (including management) in relation to the question, ‘How best could management/employee relations be improved?’ (HSBC Archives, 1974). In this respect, the Midland Bank reflected most companies in the UK.
The minutes of the meeting are one of the most important finds on the project. They summarise the discussion of Section 1 of the new 1982 Employment Act. This required employers of over 250 staff to not only communicate with their employees, but also to provide evidence that they were doing so. As the minutes of the meeting state (my italics):
… Section 1 of the 1982 Employment Act … requires a statement in the annual report and accounts describing arrangements aimed at furthering employee involvement.
There are 4 main elements to this process
- Giving information on areas of concern to employees.
- Consulting employees to find out their views on matters that will affect them.
- Encouraging involvement of employees in company’s performance – i.e. profit sharing.
- Raising awareness of employees of environmental factors affecting their jobs.
It was felt that a Communication Audit would only have application on 1, 2 and 4 (HSBC Archives, 1983).
The minutes went on to note:
It was thought that a need existed for an explicit communications strategy, and that a Communication Audit would assist in elucidating the best method for communicating particular items in the branch network. The outcome of such a programme would be a policy statement recommending what should be done. It was important also that the Bank should be seen to implement the recommendations of the Audit.
Why is this short and relatively innocuous source so important for the history of IC in Britain? To answer this we need to turn to W.R. Scott’s (2001) theory of the three pillars of institutions. Scott argues that organizational institutions, repetitive and ingrained practices that are taken for granted and frame organizational behaviour, rest for their support on three pillars: the regulative, the normative and the cognitive. The regulative are legal structures of expedience, such as rules, laws and sanctions, the normative are socially expected forms of behaviour, and the cognitive are taken-for-granted shared forms of understanding and sense-making.
While IC had begun to become normative in United Kingdom by the interwar period, and taken for granted by the 1960s, British companies and organizations were under no legal obligation to communicate with their employees. IC lacked regulative support as a form of institutionalized organizational behaviour. The first move in this direction was the 1971 Industrial Relations Act which legislated that organizations provide information to employees and have frameworks for negotiation, consultation and communication. Yet this was situated within the management-trade unions paradigm that had governed industrial relations in the UK for a century.
What we see in the 1982 Employment Act is an insistence by government that organizations must communicate with their employees at all levels of work and that this had to be demonstrated on a regular basis. This not only provides evidence of regulative institutionalization in relation to IC, but also explains its rapid spread across British companies in the 1980s and 1990s.
It is interesting to note that the Midland Bank not only complied with this legislation, but used it as an opportunity to develop a strategy of IC within its organization. Communication was beginning to be recognized as a resource within the bank that provided competitive advantage, rather than an operational necessity. It was a resource so important that it had to be audited, in turn establishing another historical institutional practice within IC which our project is investigating.
References
HSBC Archives UK (1961). 0161-0001, ‘Internal communications general file regarding intercom’.
HSBC Archives UK (1974). 0200-0638a, ‘Group internal communications committee’.
HSBC Archives UK (1975). 0200-0333, ‘Group internal communications committee’.
HSBC Archives UK (1983). 1617-0044, Management/staff communication review by Charles Baker Lyons, 1975, ‘minutes of meeting to discuss terms of reference for a Communications Audit/Study, January 12, 1983’.
Scott, W.R. (2001). Institutions and Organizations 2nd ed. Sage Publications: CA: Thousand Oaks and London.