Thursday, January 29, 2009

Organizational Communication

Organizational communication can be both internal and external in nature. Internal communication is largely communicated to the employee by management and vice-versa in order to achieve synergized effort towards organizational effectiveness. External communication is mainly communicating to the outside world such as media, customers, government agencies, potential investors and so forth for the purpose of increasing market share and capital while creating brand awareness.

We can see that companies pour scads of money into communication, only not employee communication. Advertising usually gets the lion's share of the budget allocated to communication. Advertising creates awareness of a company's products or services, leading targeted customers to differentiate those products from what the competition offers. It creates brand, which is generally defined as the way someone feels about a company or its offerings.

But the fact is media relations efforts or any of the other kinds of communication will not succeed if employees don't understand and agree with the messages the company is delivering, and act accordingly. There are two reasons for this:

- Employees are a company's face to all its various constituencies.
- Employees execute the business plan that is at the heart of all the communication aimed at other audiences.

Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, "Employee communication is as vital right now as shareholder communication."

To be effective, employee communication must achieve the following three results, which are critical to an organization's success:

1. Employees represent the company to external audiences in a manner consistent with the image the company's leaders want the outside world to see. They walk the talk. They are brand ambassadors. Their behavior represents the ideal that company leaders’ desire.

2. Employees produce quality work that satisfies the needs of customers. They innovate and collaborate to produce what the company needs them to produce, helping the company achieve competitiveness and profitability.

3. Employees don't quit and go to work some place better. Companies that experience high turnover particularly among higher level staff and key contributors struggle to find the talent required to execute the company's plans.

Therefore it is imperative that an organization communicates effectively internally before reaching out to their audience.

As we know, technology can be a catalyst in communication if it’s been employed in a careful manner, converting suitable traditional communication channels into modern communication tools. Therefore, I would recommend intranet as an improvement process to basically anyone as it is capable of:

Improve access and speed of delivery. Look at nearly any internal communication audit. Invariably, one of the biggest complaints is that information is hard to find and that news reaches employees late. The intranet can store unlimited volumes of information and deliver news almost instantaneously.

Inspire collaboration and interaction. E-mail has long been considered the "killer app" of the Net. Discussion groups thrived long before there was a World Wide Web, and instant messaging is infiltrating the workplace faster than any medium in history. These tools allow individuals to engage each other and work together.

Integrate information and transactions. Policy documents about, for example, company travel can be linked directly to the page where employees can book their flights, rental cars, and hotels. A page providing information that a customer service rep might need can include a link to a related element of a customer satisfaction improvement initiative.

Deliver multimedia. Audio, video, and animation are relatively easy to incorporate on an intranet (given enough bandwidth to handle it).

Improvement Methods

All-Hands Meetings

Use the intranet to promote all-hands meetings. As part of the promotion, include the opportunity for employees to submit questions in advance. This will accommodate employees who cannot be at the live meeting, including those from off-site facilities. Use a question submission form on the intranet.

If the intranet has the infrastructure to support it, webcast the meeting to off-site facilities. Archive the video as a stream for employees who cannot watch it live (due to geographical widespread or business engagements). Webcasting requires adequate bandwidth, but if you have this capability, it is not an outrageously expensive proposition.

Following the meeting, prepare a news article about the highlights for the homepage news listing. The complete article will include all Q&As, access to the streaming video, and any documents used at the meeting (for example, memos or PowerPoint presentations).

Staff Movements and Others

If ever the intranet was the perfect place for something, it is this employee communication staple for showcasing promotions, transfers, retirements, retiree obituaries, new hires, weddings, babies, company sports league results, and so on.

I am the last person to suggest that this is a waste of time. As much as many people argue that communicators need to focus 100 percent on business-related matters, I would argue that this is business related. Employees with whom you work might start out as colleagues, but later they may become friends. Making that social aspect of work a little more evident can increase job satisfaction and, by extension, commitment. Besides, people like to read this stuff. If you are already publishing it and try to take it away, you will hear complaints.

Thanks to the intranet, though, you don't have to dedicate anywhere near the kind of time to this communication it requires in print. For example, you can have a page created with hooks to the Human Resources Information System so that current anniversaries, promotions, transfers, and the like are automatically posted, set to update weekly. You could also invite employees to submit birth announcements and other such notable information through a content-publishing interface: Select the appropriate type of information (sports league score or wedding announcement, for instance), the salient information, and any dates, and it appears automatically on the page.

Create and maintain this page, and I am sure it will become one of the top visited pages on the intranet.

Q&A

Another staple of employee communications is the submit-your-question program. The employee communications department takes the questions and distributes them to appropriate subject-matter experts for an answer that appears in the company publication. With the intranet, employees don't need to wait for the publication to get an answer. Given support from senior management, you can remove employee communications from the mix. Make sure the subject-matter experts check the discussion forum every couple of days to answer any questions in their area, and you can let employees post the questions themselves.

News

One nice thing about a print publication is that everything is conveniently situated in one place. The nature of the news does not matter, news issued via press release to the media, marketplace news, or news from outside sources can all be found between the covers of the magazine.

On the intranet, news is everywhere. On some systems, you would need to follow dozens of links to find it all. Press releases are on one site, news generated by the employee communications department is on another. Competitor news is somewhere else, and who knows where to find marketplace news?

If you want employees to have access to news, ensure that they can do it from one place regardless of the nature of the news.

As for the news you want every employee to see, consider placing articles on more than one page. Using content management systems, news briefs can be tagged for inclusion on any number of pages. For example, an article about a competitor working in the financial services marketplace in Singapore could appear on the "Competitor" news brief page, the "Singapore" news brief page, and the "Financial Services" news brief page.

Once readers are on the news page, offer a couple of other conveniences, such as:

- Let employees print out a page of all of today's (or this week's) news items so they can read it on the go rather than be restrained to their computers.
- Let employees download a summary of the news to handheld devices such as a PDA. You can even make this feature available in a wireless configuration so employees away from a computer can still stay in the know.

Make It Viral

Online communications can get into the hands of employees who may not otherwise see it. The way to achieve this is through a viral approach. (The term viral, in this context, means that your employees distribute the news for you.) Include a link that invites employees to "e-mail this article to a colleague."

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