Employee Engagement: Pay for internal communicators lags behind external disciplines

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March 4, 2006

Pay for internal communicators lags behind external disciplines

The 2006 salary survey published in the February 20 issue of PR Week confirmed how under valued most internal communicators are to their organizations.

Here are the median base salaries by discipline:

Financial/IR: $165,620
Crisis management: $150,000
Reputation management: $143,000
Public affairs: $98,500
Brand management: $91,430
Marketing communications: $90,690
Internal communications: $85,420
Community relations: $59,910

I was particularly dismayed to see the disparity between reputation management and internal communications, especially when employees have an increasingly large role in shaping public perception and corporate reputation.

This is not to say that internal communicators themselves are not in large part to blame for their smaller paychecks. We too often view ourselves as order takers, rather than order givers; purveyors of one-way communication, rather than enhancers of multi-direction information flow. We frequently do a poor job in quantifying the business benefit of our work and in educating senior leaders about that benefit.

I have seen tremendous progress in and increased awareness of the field of employee engagement and internal communications over the past three years; now it's time for practitioners to start building the case for why their pay should equal (if not exceed!) their externally focused peers.

Posted by Christopher at March 4, 2006 6:52 AM