After all, people work for the one organisation, they share many interests, they talk to each other and send each other emails.
“Why,” someone in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked me when I was a general manager there, “can’t this communications organisation communicate?”
Well, it’s because the ability to communicate effectively in organisations, while seen as an innate human attribute, is in reality a complex process.
If we look at the components of organisational communications, we see a great number of factors at work, including culture, leadership, relationships and information quality.
Indeed, the complexity of communications within organisations becomes apparent when we stop for a moment to analyse what really constitutes the notion of information, as this diagram shows.
The chart reveals that, when the comment is made that “we have a communications problem around here”, it could refer to one specific factor or a complex blend of factors.
So improving organisational communication implies having your hands on a number of levers as well as understanding what constitutes the process of organisational change.
And change is usually a process rather than a ‘road to Damascus’ turnaround. If it is to embed, it needs to progress through a series of steps of “gathering perspicacity” as employees progress from awareness to participation in the corporate agenda, as this model illustrates.
Each of these five stages is a prerequisite to the other. And at no stage except the ultimate participatory stage is the organisation communicating effectively.
As the organisation moves to improve its readiness for change, different information mechanisms are called into service to assist each stage in the process.
In general, the more impersonal tools (websites, newsletters) drive the early stages (such as awareness) while the most intimate tools (personal feedback sessions, quality groups) drive the later stages (such as commitment).
And working on information flow, mechanisms and content is a prerequisite to facilitating the organisation through change.
