Employee communication challenges in today’s environment - Part 2

Case 2: Progressive large organization

This is a fairly large organization with more than 10000+ people. The organization recognized early the need of a dedicated employee communication cell. The team came up with a plan of using multiple delivery mechanisms for communicating with the employees. The email messages were replaced with online campaigns with polls and feedback, the regular town hall sessions were now webcast live, online chat sessions were arranged with the CEO and Senior Managers etc.

Well all this did give a fillip and excited the younger employee more in interacting with the senior leaders but like everything else it did fade out. There were some inherent problems for e.g. with webcast it was seen as impersonal and distancing with no direct feedback mechanism. Even the chat did not gain in popularity as high level of moderation was clearly evident. So what went wrong ? Well for organized orchestrated communication meetings and events does not engage the entire organization. What still works is personal communications by line managers in smaller groups of people. 

If this can be complimented with online groups platform where team constantly engage with each other and their managers the pressure on the employee communication cell as the sole mouth piece of the organization goes down. This team can now focus on gathering data through an organization wide group network and analyze to find patterns and then insert the proper messages at the points where it makes an impact. For example if a group is posting news items and stories on it’s news board it also gets a message from the communication cell clearly marked as one of the news items. If it interests the group the team starts to comment on the item and rate it up so that to stay on top of their message heap. A very effective way to create a sticky message!