The Injoos Blog

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!

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.