This ebook will help communicators understand the how, what and why of internal communications and what it means for their own work.

For far too long, we communicators haven’t done enough to communicate what we do and why we do it. We haven’t put the day job to use when talking about our own value.

With the help of groups such as IC Kollectif, this is changing. The IC Kollectif’s founder Lise Michaud launched an initiative to bring together communications from across the globe, to talk about different aspects of internal communications to help others understand what we do, how we do it, and why.

The result of Lise’s efforts in persuading thirty communicators is an ebook. Named Disrupting the function of IC – A Global Perspective, the ebook is free and covers a wide range of topics, including Changes and Challenges in Internal Communication, the Skills and Knowledge of Internal Communication Professionals, the Impact of Technology on The Profession, the Leadership Role of IC Professionals, Employee Advocacy, the Convergence and Integration of Communication Disciplines, Collaboration Between Internal Communication and Other Disciplines  and the Future of the Profession.

I want to draw on the inspirational foreword to the book. Written by Anne Gregory, who has devoted her professional life to promoting the communications profession, the foreword sums up why internal communications matters, now more than ever.

Not only is [organizational life] getting less predictable and the issues that have to be grappled with more slippery, but organisational form is changing too. Companies like Uber and AirBnB are totally different from traditional companies and their disruptive influence means that more traditional, established companies are having to respond in radical ways. Governments, too have to re-engineer the way they are interacting with citizens and this requires huge internal change programmes in the public sector. People want a level of constancy when all around is changing. This is driving a huge focus on organisations reexamining their purpose and values in ways that provide meaning for people who are not only coping with huge organisational change, but who are experiencing all the lack of certainty and turbulence that is present in the world. Organisations are a point of stability for many and at the heart of this is IC. For all these reasons internal communications has come of age, and not before time.

That this volume is available free is testament to the commitment of these authors of IC Kollectif to share their work and thinking widely for the benefit of the global internal communication community. For this, our professional community is deeply grateful.

I’d like to reiterate Anne’s thanks for the work which has gone into this seminal piece of literature. If you’d like to know more about IC Kollectif and download the book, please visit the website (you can click here), sign up and get reading.