Employee communication challenges in today’s environment - Part 1

Jagdish

Tuesday, 4th of November 2008 at 10:00:25 AM

Here is Part - 1 of series of blogs I plan to post on this subject.

Current scenario:

People in general are better informed now than before.
Speed of viral messaging.
Faster speed of communication through SMS, Twitter,
Everyone has an opinion. Blogs!
Management still stuck with old paradigms and old notions.
Nothing beats a personal touch even today in the digital age.
How do we handle scale, multi geo communication?

Some of the best practices used in leading companies:

Case 1: Small sized IT firm

The organization in it’s infancy has 200+ IT professionals and has been growing. The internal Information systems team had setup couple of online Bulletin boards. Basically this was implemented using Microsoft outlook shared folders visible to all. The employee and management bot could post messages, the Bulletin board was divided into various section line Official, Buy and Sell, Sports & Interests, General etc. There were also email IDs published for various functions such as Canteen, facilities etc. The employees could send emails to these concerned person or team using these mails ids. There was bulletin board usage guidelines published. Anyone violating the norms was communicated by the HR team.

Since the general culture of the organization was open people tended to discuss issues of concern on the bulletin board for e.g. quality of food deteriorating in the canteen and the response of the food manager. Th HR person kept regular tab on these messages and immediately caught any issues early before it blew into a major fiasco. The HR Manager also quickly brought relevant issues to the notice of senior managers to take actions and communicate back to the concerned parties.

The advantage of the electronic medium from this example is obvious that the manage could detect issues early and come up with solutions. But the fact is that it takes a daring employee to go and raise issue in the bulletin board. What if there was mechanism where casual discussions or chats happening between employees could be looked at to see if there are common patterns and identify issues. Something like having casual canteen discussions and see what the hot topic is.

These things are now possible in the online world with web2.0 tools used widely in social networks and social media sites. For example rating news posted bubbles up the hit news to the top or looking at a tag cloud shows what are the hot topics being discussed. If mechanism like these are adopted inside organizations for example having a platform to support organization wide groups and teams will help HR and senior management unravel many of these issues way in advance, get feedback on policies implemented etc, Thus overall improving the communication with the employes.