Inside the Palace

I have a confession. I’ve become mildly preoccupied by thoughts about the British monarchy.

No, not about Kate and William and baby George. I’ve developed an interest in the Royal Household as an organization, a business.

I don’t know how it started but I recently found myself thinking about how there must be an interesting mix of occupations required to keep the Queen’s household running to high standards and under a fair amount of visibility. Take for example, the forecourt of Buckingham Palace where the changing of the guard happens. It’s kept unbelievably clean despite the volume of tourists and other passersby. That doesn’t happen by itself. It stands to reason that there’s a person or two with the job of keeping that area in a show-ready state at all times.

That got me thinking about the daily experience of that person as an employee. Do they have a lot of autonomy or is their time highly managed? How do they receive information about special events happening at the Palace? Is it the same way that the chefs and kitchen staff hear about them? What about the equestrian staff? The guards?

I decided to stop wondering and try to validate my assumptions about the range of roles in the Royal Household. Turns out, I was on the right track.

Royalty is big business

According to the recruitment page on the Royal Household website, they employ 1,200 people. That makes them a large business by most definitions. They go on to say their staff have “a wide range of professions with varied skills including those relating to: catering and hospitality, gardening, finance, secretarial, media relations, marketing, human resources, IT, property surveying and maintenance, equine management, visitor management and retail, furniture restoration, curatorship and strategic planning and research.”

From the internal communications perspective, those are quite diverse internal audiences. Audience segmentation is critical to having your message or information be absorbed. I’ll bet that the furniture restoration staff and hospitality staff have different perspectives, ways of processing information and “what does it mean to me?” questions when they go through orientation or hear news about budget issues, events, changes in management, systems and processes. Oh yes, the Royal Household is a business like any other.

So, what about their internal communication? Are they being progressive? Do they present information in the traditional top-down manner or the more engaging approach of addressing the employees’ needs first? Is their code of conduct guide written in bureaucracy-ese with a dash of royal-ness or in more approachable and easy to understand everyday language and images? (I don’t know for certain that such a document exists. However, I think it’s a reasonable assumption to think there are documented guidelines for the expected behaviour when working for the Royal Household!) Are they embracing new technologies for sending information to and getting feedback from employees?

That made me curious about the demographics of the Royal Household staff. Who is working inside the palace? Are they hiring young people who most certainly want to be communicated to in a way that’s different from traditional internal communication?

A new recruitment campaign

In March 2014, Prince Andrew starred in a Buckingham Palace recruitment video on YouTube. Better yet, it included plenty of real employees telling their story and offered a glimpse of the employee experience at Buckingham Palace. If this doesn’t show that they understand 1) the need to bring in fresh talent to help them remain effective and relevant and 2) that younger generations want to be offered experiences not told information, I don’t know what does. Their HR practices appear to be changing with the times. Excellent!

It gives me hope that their internal communication practices are equally relevant to the times. I’ve done some initial research to find out for sure but have come up dry. At the best of times it’s difficult to know how a business communicates with its employees unless you’re inside or there’s a case study. Trying to find out the Royal Households internal communication practices is even more challenging!

However, my research did answer my questions about the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. According to the official website of The British Monarchy, “One regular ritual which most tourists do not see is the daily ‘dragging’ of the gravel on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. It is cleaned and combed using mechanical equipment first thing daily – even on Christmas Day. Later in the day two more inspections take place just in case there is any rubbish to clear away. This helps to ensure that the forecourt always looks spick and span.”

Okay, maybe the Royal Household isn’t exactly like any other business.