We are striding into 2024 with a strategic mindset and are following on from our successful post from last year on the best books to help you form an internal comms strategy. This Part Two edition focuses on the best reads for this year from improving employee engagement for your remote or hybrid workforce, to inclusion, diversity, cultivating positive mindsets, and how AI can support you.
Best Internal Comms Books for your Internal Comms Strategy
At Oak, we know the importance of a solid internal communications plan and how this can transform employee engagement and culture within businesses. We’ve helped big brands such as Aldi, Five Guys and NatWest Group achieve great things in their organisations and want to help you do the same.
📖 Better Internal Communication - by Lesley Allman
Topic: Internal Communication / Career Advice
Key takeaways: Practical guidance on how to build internal comms knowledge and skill sets whilst being more strategic.
Author Bio: Lesley Allman MBA has over twenty years of internal communication and employee engagement experience. As a consultant she has worked with over fifty leading organisations, successfully helping them to deliver major transformation and culture change programmes.
This internal comms book recognises that it takes in-depth knowledge to be an internal communications expert and so provides practical advice on how to build on this, whilst also helping professionals to expand their skill sets and develop their careers. This book helps professionals take ownership of their roles and create an internal comms plan, and career, with value.
📖 Successful Employee Communications: A Practitioner’s Guide to Tools, Models and Best Practices for Internal Communication - by Sue Dewhurst and Liam FitzPatrick
Topic: Internal Communication
Key takeaways: Communicating change in the workplace, bringing stability and navigating difficult situations with examples from big brands.
Author Bio: Sue Dewhurst spent 20 years working as a senior internal communicator and for the past decade focused on learning and development, serving as an internal communications trainer and coach. Her models and frameworks are used in organisations worldwide.
Liam FitzPatrick is experienced in change management, PR and internal communications in-house and for major consultancies. He lectures on developing teams, research, and planning, and has served as an external examiner at UK universities.
Written by leading PR and internal communications experts, this book shares stories from experience across a range of industries. It provides an important and varied insight into what success looks like through communicating a company’s goals, strategy and tactics, to influencing a change process that has a positive impact on employees.
📖 The People Business: How Ten Leaders Drive Engagement Through Internal Communications - by Annabel Dunstan and Imogen Osborne
Topic: Internal Communications Strategy / Business Performance
Key takeaways: Exclusive insights into the internal communications strategies behind leading businesses like WPP, Heathrow Airport, PizzaExpress and more.
Author Bio: Annabel Dunstan has worked in marketing and comms in senior positions at top firms and in-house. She co-founded the engagement consultancy Question & Retain whose clients include Suzuki, PizzaExpress and Ferrero.
Imogen Osborne has spent over 20 years in senior communications leadership roles at Skype, Cisco and Edelman. In 2018, she set up the Pulse Business, building on eight years of experience working with real-time insight and helping companies understand how to take advantage of it.
Understanding how other companies, particularly big brands, have approached internal communications and engaged their people is fundamental knowledge for taking key wisdoms and applying those that may be relevant to new strategies within your organisation. This book is built around interviews with senior executives, providing an honest perspective on the practices, and challenges, communications professionals can face.
📖 Feel & Think Like a Pineapple - by Mr.Pineapple
Topic: Business Culture / Mindset / Positive Persuasion
Key takeaways: A book on cultivating and harvesting positivity, looking at patterns of the past to influence dynamics and actions of the future.
Author Bio: Mr. Pineapple is the author/owner of The Pineapple Theory books. From Canada, Mr.Pineapple considers themselves a “guinea pig” of their own theory, detecting patterns and being positively curious, looking at life and society to find ways to change mindsets to be more positive.
Using positive persuasion, affirmation and self-awareness, the author focuses on people and their behaviours to positively influence change.
An internal communications strategy is centred around people and so considering the mindset or your organisation, executives and employees is important to promote positive change in the workplace and get people onboard with your approaches and internal comms strategy.
📖 Core Values: … And How They Underpin Strategy & Organisational Culture - by Mike Baxter
Topic: Culture / Strategy / Communications
Key takeaways: Using or establishing core values to support internal communications plans and organisational decisions to empower leadership, employee engagement and purposeful work.
Author Bio: Mike Baxter has been awarded a PhD in Science, a personal Professorship and Chartered Designer status. He has enjoyed a variety of careers: product designer, higher education college dean, web entrepreneur, independent researcher, author, keynote speaker, business thought-leader, company director, and, early in his working life, trawlerman and animal welfare scientist.
He has been a business consultant since 2001 for some of the world's biggest brands (e.g. Cisco, Google, HSBC, Lilly, Skype, Sony PlayStation) and an advisor to some of London's fastest growing tech start-ups and to leading UK universities.
An internal comms strategy is more than just tactics to get more employees to engage. It stems from the roots of the business - its core values, which then extendeds to everyone within an organisation and is the structure that influences a strong business culture. Considering the importance of core values will help build internal communications that are inclusive and representative of the entirety of a brand.
An internal comms strategy is important for business success
We’ve written more about internal communications and why it is important to businesses. For more reading on this, outside of the books recommended here, read about our 5 reasons for why internal communication is important in the workplace.
📖 Monetising The Employee Experience: How to Prove the ROI for Investing in Your People and Unlock Lost Productivity - by Mike Sharples and Nicholas Wardle
Topic: Internal Communications / Business Strategy / Employee Experience
Key takeaways: A guide on how to build the case for investment in your employee experience. Covering, senior leadership buy-in and the tools needed to create a winning culture.
Author Bio: Mike Sharples has over 14 years of experience in strategic consulting, branding and business transformation. As the founder and chief experience officer of Brand Experiences, Mike works with clients to develop and implement innovative solutions for employee engagement, retention and advocacy.
Nicholas Wardle is an Employee Experience Director and fellow of the Institute of Internal Communications (IoIC). An internal communications award-winner and global keynote speaker, Nicholas designs effective employee experiences, IC strategies and tactics.
We understand the importance of leadership buy-in when it comes to internal communication strategies. This made our list of best internal comms books because great ideas, strategies and new employee experiences typically require a presentation of how this will positively impact the business, particularly financially. This book will help you to prove ROI and get the backing you need to execute your strategy.
📖 Remote Not Distant: Design A Company Culture That Will Help You Thrive in a Hybrid Workplace - by Gustavo Razzetti
Topic: Remote/Hybrid Working / Business Success
Key takeaways: Rethinking office culture, hybrid working and remote teams to succeed in today’s new normal.
Author Bio: Gustavo Razzetti is the CEO and founder of Fearless Culture, a culture design consultancy that helps teams do the best work of their lives. For more than 20 years, Razzetti has helped leaders from Fortune 500s, startups, nonprofits, and everything in between on every continent but Antartica. Gustavo is also the creator of the Culture Design Canvas, a framework used by thousands of teams and organisations across the world to map, assess, and design their culture.
Although a fairly new genre, it’s one that cannot be ignored. Books like this are exceptionally relevant due to the way working culture and office/home working has transformed since the pandemic. Considering these new realities is essential to any internal comms professionals in navigating new ways to engage employees and maintain a solid sense of inclusion throughout your workforce, at home or on site.
📖 Powering HR with AI: An In-Depth Guide to Chat GPT for Human Resources Professionals - by Matt Dunn
Topic: Technology / AI / Communications / Human Resources
Key takeaways: A dive into the world of ChatGPT, specifically focussing on how this is changing how HR teams work, designed to enhance productivity.
Author Bio: Matt Dunn has trained over 2,000 users in prompt engineering and brings real world experience to human resource teams.
AI is an unmissable technological advancement that is now more tangible and real within workplaces than ever. What began as future ideas is now something businesses and teams are using and can use further to improve operations and support company culture. For venturing into the realm of AI, this book is a good place to start and is considered a “must read” for HR professionals who want to step into the future.
At Oak, we have Aria, our AI assistant that helps you create compelling content within our modern intranet software so you can save time and boost productivity with streamlined internal communications. Find out more about Aria, here.
📖 The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human - by Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman
Topic: Psychology / Workplace Culture / Human Resources
Key takeaways: Creating more psychological safety in the workplace.
Author Bio: Minette Norman is an author, speaker, and leadership consultant who spent decades leading global technical teams in the software industry. Minette has extensive experience leading internationally distributed teams and believes that when groups embrace diversity in all its forms, breakthroughs emerge, and innovation accelerates.
Karolin Helbig is a leadership consultant focusing on mindset and emotional intelligence. Her background is in science with a PhD in human genetics. She firmly believes in the transformative power of bringing your whole self to work and making the workplace psychologically safe for all of us. She integrates neuroscience findings that revolutionise the way we understand how human brains function and translates them into applicable and powerful leadership practices.
Behind every business action, strategy, technology and intention, is a human. While workplaces have changed following the pandemic and technology supports or powers even the most people orientated departments, it’s important to remember that human beings are the core and operators of all of these things. Ensuring that psychological welfare is highly considered within organisations is essential for any internal comms or business personnel.
📖 Building a Culture of Inclusivity: Effective Internal Communication For Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - by Priya Bates & Advita Patel
Topic: Public Relations / Business Communication Skills
Key takeaways: Preparing communication professionals for the importance of inclusivity in the workplace to help support internal communication strategies.
Author Bio: Priya Bates is an award-winning professional communicator, and President and owner of Inner Strength Communication. Priya is also co-host of the Leader Like Me Podcast and her clients include organisations and leaders across the technology, retail, financial, government and education sectors. She is an accredited Business Communicator (ABC) and was one of the first Certified Strategic Communication Management Professionals (SCMP) globally.
Advita Patel is the director of CommsRebel and co-host of an award-winning podcast, CalmEdgedRebels and A Leader Like Me. An experienced speaker, she has worked in internal communications for 17 years and has gained experience in various industries. Based in Manchester, UK, She is a Chartered PR practitioner and a Fellow of CIPR. In 2020 she was named one of the top 100 Asian British entrepreneurs and on the top 101 global employee engagement list with inspiring workplaces.
This book acknowledges that diversity, equality and inclusion have never been so important in organisations and so all professionals need to be prepared. The authors combine their expert knowledge to help engage employees in driving culture change within organisations, providing a tangible roadmap to help internal comms professionals throughout the year, also highlighting techniques to avoid.
Oak Engage has been named as an Intranet Choice Winner 2024 by Clearbox. This is the go-to report for internal communications, business professionals and those working with intranets and digital workplace solutions.
We are recognised as a leading product in the report and can help take your internal communications to new heights. We provide a free demo service, click below to book yours today.
