More On Accenture & Outsourcing
I have to comment on the HR survey post by Carolynne below ... at first glance it's good news for internal communication professionals, reading that a recent Accenture HR Services survey of 125 global HR executives and CEOs places employee communications at the top of the ‘we will never outsource’ list.
It's bad news, however, if Accenture is the HR consultant du jour in your organization:
David Clinton, president of Accenture HR Services, told HRG today that there was no reason why outsourcers could not deal with communications. In fact, he feels that outsourcers could do a better job and provide a ‘personal touch’: ‘Most of the problem is perception rather than substance. Outsourcers can be just as personal, if not more personal and frankly more professional and more relevant when it comes to employee communications.'That view frightens me on a number of levels, not all of which will I get into here. Fundamentally, though, it’s because this orientation considers employee communications a set of transactional processes … such as writing, editing, and managing the corporate intranet … and not a set of strategic processes, such as working with leadership to set the corporate agenda, communicating strategy, monitoring and responding to the employee pulse, and most important, acting as counsel to leadership. To serve as a strategic function, though, internal communication has to be at the table as a trusted advisor to leadership, an advisor that fully understands the organization culture and context—something that’s very difficult to do if it’s not a living, breathing, and internal part of the organization. (As a consultant, and hence, "outsourcer," I feel I know of what I type: the greatest challenge to providing good counsel is intimacy with the organization in question, and it's one of the reasons our firm insists on deep work with fewer clients, rather than shallow work with many clients.) The outsource crowd has one thing going for it, though: Our experience is that where internal communication doesn’t add strategic value, leadership ultimately doesn’t see an ROI and indeed takes action--they either hire consultants whom they consider strategists (a short term solution and one from which we benefit on occasion), or they make a more dramatic choice … not to outsource, but to cut.