From sending to moving: Belgian internal communicators meet in Brussels

How do you get colleagues moving when sending yet another message no longer works? That question brought 165 internal communication professionals to the Flemish Parliament in Brussels on Friday 16 October, for the annual congress of vonk, the network for internal communication in Dutch-speaking Belgium.

Under the theme “From sending to moving”, the programme combined two keynotes, six breakout sessions, the launch of a benchmark report and a manifesto with seven statements for senior management.

Vonk chair Inge Vandewiele opened the day with one question for everyone to carry along: what will I do differently on Monday?

First the group, then the message

Communication anthropologist Rieneke Moonen-Van de Laar set the tone. People follow people far more often than they follow information. A message only gains meaning in the group that receives it, and many communication problems turn out not to be communication problems at all. Her advice: before producing anything, look at what holds a group together, who sets it in motion and what happens when something changes.

Psychologist Christel Smedts turned the focus to the professional, under the title “You are the medium”. Under pressure, our nervous system filters what we hear and what we pass on. Sometimes the problem is not an unclear message but an unclear promise. “What you notice is information. What you do with it is craftsmanship,” she concluded.

From a brewery to a town hall

The breakout sessions brought the practice. Ellen Aarts showed how Duvel Moortgat, a Belgian brewing group with twelve breweries, several languages and colleagues with and without a computer, chose consistency over a big launch, with one primary channel: the Cheers app. She kept it down to earth: an intranet is no golden plaster, and having a beer with colleagues is internal communication too.

Laura Maluin of the consultancy De Meedenkers described how a care home group in Limburg moved care staff without a PC or fixed workplace from WhatsApp groups to a single platform of their own. The key: 22 content creators spread across the sites, and a launch each site celebrated in its own way.

AI came up twice. Eulaly Vanroelen (Thomas More University of Applied Sciences) warned that AI makes more messages possible while employees’ attention does not grow with it. “The easier sending becomes, the more important not sending becomes.” Astrid Vrolix showed how the communication team of the municipality of Mol is moving from using AI to organising it, in a shared working environment with fixed sources and agreements, where people make the decisions. Between sessions she also captured the day live as a graphic recorder.

Work psychologist Tom Dijckmans explored why employees believe their team leader more than their CEO. People do not resist change, he argued, they resist loss. And whoever passes a message on carries more weight than whoever wrote it. “Your newsletter is the source. The team leader is the one who shares it.”

Many channels, little measurement

The sixth breakout session presented the IC benchmark report, by researcher Sander Dorst and vonk director Erwin Van Overloop. For the report, 617 communication professionals from Flanders and the Netherlands described how they measure the reach of their internal communication. The results show a striking gap: 88 per cent of organisations email all employees, yet only 16 per cent measure how many colleagues that email actually reaches. Seven in ten compare their figures with nothing and no one.

“Without shared reference points, the answer often comes down to gut feeling,” says Erwin Van Overloop. “And that makes it hard to prove the value of our profession to senior management.”

Sander Dorst sees the gain in what is already running. “The biggest opportunity for the profession is not yet another channel, but better measurement of what we already do. Anyone who sets a baseline today and agrees on a target is immediately ahead of the field.”

> The report and an interactive dashboard are freely available (in Dutch) at vonknetwerk.be/ic-benchmarkrapport.