Employee Communication Strategies Chapter Overview

K9 EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION Chapter overview Employees are a crucial stakeholder group for any organization. Organizations need to communicate with their employees to strengthen employee morale and their identification with the organization and to ensure that employees know how to accomplish their ow...

K9 EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION Chapter overview Employees are a crucial stakeholder group for any organization. Organizations need to communicate with their employees to strengthen employee morale and their identification with the organization and to ensure that employees know how to accomplish their own, specialized tasks. The chapter discusses general strategies for communicating to employees. These strategies range from communication that makes employees feel comfortable speaking up and providing feedback to managers to using communication to stimulate innovation and collaboration within digital networks and communities of practice. 9.1 INTRODUCTION Organizations require employees to cooperate with one another to achieve the company’s goals. Most organizations have divided complex activities up into more specialized tasks for individual employees. Whilst efficient, the pay-off of such specialization depends almost wholly on coordinating tasks and activities across employees. If an organization controls its members through top-down command and delegation, the individual needs of employees for autonomy, creativity and sociability may be frustrated. But, at the same time, if the organization fails to control its employees, it loses the ability to coordinate its employees’ activities and will ultimately fail. Hence, organizations must find ways to meet their employees’ individual needs and stimulate their creativity, whilst persuading them to act in ways that meet the organization’s overall objectives. Organizations do so by adopting various strategies for communicating with employees. In the next section, we first define the general scope of employee communication. The chapter then goes on to discuss how employee communication may strengthen employees’ identification with their organization. The degree to which managers communicate with employees and involve them in decision-making has a direct impact on employee morale and their commitment to the organization. The final section of the chapter outlines how social media can be used within organizations to encourage employees to network and collaborate, and to form communities of practice that stimulate knowledge sharing, learning and innovation. 9.2 DEFINING EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION Contemporary organizations realize that their performance rests on effective communication with their employees. Many of the most reputable firms and ‘most admired’ organizations spend in fact more than three times as much on employee communication than their less admired counterparts.1 Communicating routinely and effectively with employees is linked to employee commitment, productivity, job performance and satisfaction, as well as to a significantly lesser likelihood of employees leaving the organization. Given these direct benefits, it is perhaps not surprising that employee communication is a core area of corporate communication. The terms that have often been used to label this area of corporate communication are ‘employee communication’, ‘staff communication’ and ‘internal communication’. Traditionally, employee communication, which is the term used in this chapter, was defined as communication with employees internal to the organization. Such internal communication was distinguished from forms of external communication with stakeholders such as customers and investors. However, the advent of new technologies (e.g. blogs, email) has meant that messages to employees do not always remain ‘inside’ the organization. These new technologies have blurred the boundaries between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ communication. Employees can nowadays distribute their own information about an organization electronically to outside stakeholders, sometimes without any gatekeeping or control from corporate communication professionals. On a website such as Glassdoor or on a blog, for example, employees can share their views and publish their grievances as well as organize and demand action from the organization. Indeed, with access to email, blogs and social networking sites for sharing corporate information, many employees become somewhat like corporate communication professionals themselves. Rather than clamping down on such external communications by employees, many companies such as Nike, American Airlines, Unilever, GE, Airbnb, Deloitte and Accenture, have started to give their employees access through a range of social media tools (such as Smarp, LinkedIn Elevate, Sociabble and EveryoneSocial). These tools support employees to become advocates on certain company-related issues and to become, in effect, ambassadors for the company’s brand and its internal culture and workplace. Clearly, communication technologies have led to many changes in the workplace. Computer technologies have made it easier to produce, multiply, distribute and store written documents, to exchange messages over long distances and to work together and have meetings relatively independent of time and space. Employees are now often connected to each other by electronic means rather than through close physical proximity. Emails, the intranet, video conferencing and podcasting are used by managers to communicate with employees, and by employees themselves to stay informed of company news. IBM, for example, offers more than 5,000 audio and video podcast ‘episodes’ to employees, who can download these files and watch or listen to them at a convenient time. IBM feels that these podcasts are a useful way to disseminate corporate information in an efficient and engaging way. If we look at the use of communication technologies within organizations, we can first of all distinguish two central areas of employee communication: (a) management communication, and (b) corporate information and communication systems. Management communication refers to communication between a manager and their subordinate employees. Communication in this setting is often directly related to the specific tasks and activities of individual employees as well as to issues relating to their morale and wellbeing. Research on what managers do has demonstrated that managers spend most of their time communicating, and much of that time is spent in verbal, face-to-face communication.2 Besides face-to-face communication, managers also increasingly use email, video conferencing and enterprise software to communicate with their employees. Whilst the responsibility for management communication lies with managers themselves and not with the corporate communication department, communication practitioners often advise and support managers in their communication to staff. Communication practitioners in AstraZeneca, for example, have developed training materials for senior and middle managers to help them become better communicators. Corporate information and communication systems (CICS) have a broader focus than the manager–employee dyad. CICS involve technologies and communication systems that broadcast corporate decisions and developments to all employees across the organization. The emphasis is on disseminating information about the organization to employees in all ranks and functions within the organization, in order to keep them informed about corporate matters. CICS is often the preserve of the communication department, charged with releasing information to employees through the intranet, emails and so-called ‘town hall’ meetings (i.e. large employee meetings where senior managers announce and explain key corporate decisions or developments). Corporate TV, such as the digital FedEx Television Network or Nokia’s digital broadcasting systems, is also used as a communication channel for reaching employees around the world. Whereas management communication is often restricted to the specific interpersonal work setting of a manager and an employee, CICS may not differentiate content between groups of employees and typically relates to more general organizational developments rather than specific areas of work. As such, its more general contents are not tuned to the interests and circumstances of specific employees across the organization. Management communication, however, can more easily address various groups of employees, yet it misses the broader organizational picture. In other words, whilst distinct in scope, both areas of employee communication complement each other in ensuring that information flows vertically and horizontally across the organization. Without both forms of employee communication, a company’s overall communication effort may be ineffective and its employees demotivated. One key implication for corporate communicators is to assess whether CICS and management communication work effectively in that together they cover and reach the entire base of employees – from, for example, managers and workers to consultants and trainees, and from full-time staff to employees on part-time contracts. The two together should also be used strategically to reach the twin objectives that organizations often have for employee communication: to provide relevant and specific information to employees to support them in their tasks and work objectives; and to build an organizational community with strong relationships between employees, and with employees strongly identifying with the organization. The complementary nature of both forms of employee communication can also be understood through the concepts of downward and upward communication. Downward communication consists of electronic and verbal methods of informing employees about their organization, its performance and their own contribution and performance in terms they can comprehend. In other words, downward communication involves ‘information flowing from the top of the organizational management hierarchy and telling people in the organization what is important (mission) and what is valued (policies)’.3 Both management communication and CICS are central to downward communication; together, they provide employees with general information from the top of the organization (CICS) as well as with more specific information from their managers (management communication). A good example of this kind of downward communication is the corporate calendar system within Siemens. The corporate calendar (Figure 9.1) lists events throughout the year at which the corporate strategy and corporate objectives are communicated to employees from different parts of the company. The calendar was developed by corporate communication practitioners who realized that employees were not always informed about the company’s strategy in a timely and consistent manner. Communication practitioners raised the issue with the CEO and senior executives who agreed that the calendar system could be usefully incorporated into the corporate strategy as a way of implementing the strategy. The CEO and senior executives felt that the calendar would make an important contribution to the achievement of the corporate objectives as it provides a medium to report on the past year’s targets and for setting binding priorities and objectives for the new fiscal year. As displayed in Figure 9.1, the Siemens Business Services (SBS) conference marks the start of each fiscal year. This central communication event provides a platform for senior managers to report on the past year’s targets and to set priorities and objectives for the new fiscal year. The SBS event is followed by management conferences in the business divisions, regions and corporate units. By streamlining management events, the corporate calendar ensures that all managers and employees hear about the past year’s results and are given objectives for the coming period. Upward communication, on the other hand, involves information from employees that is sent up to managers within the organization. It often involves information about the employee themselves, information about co-workers, information about organizational practices and policies, and information about what needs to be done and how it can be done. Allowing employees to communicate upwards is important because employees’ ideas, responses to their working environment or critiques of the plans and ideas announced by managers may be used to find ways to improve an organization’s overall performance and profitability. Upward communication is typically facilitated within the interpersonal setting of management communication. Managers can stimulate employees to voice concerns and to provide them with feedback on practices, procedures and new organizational changes. At the same time, CICS may include communication systems such as message boards on an intranet and ‘town hall’ meetings, allowing employees to ask questions of senior managers and to ask for further information on corporate decisions or organizational developments. Description Figure 9.1 The corporate calendar system at Siemens Note: Calendar dating from 2003; reprinted with permission 9.3 EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTIFICATION Generally speaking, when employees strongly identify with the organization they work for, they are more satisfied in their work, they will be more cooperative and they will also demonstrate behaviour that is helpful to the organization.4 Organizational identification, in other words, plays a significant role in many organizations. It can be defined as: ‘the perception of oneness with or belongingness to an organization, where the individual defines him or herself in terms of the organization(s) of which he or she is a member’.5 Academic research has shown that organizational identification increases as a result of the perceived external prestige of the organization6 and as a result of the degree of overlap between the personal identity of the employees and the identity of the organization. When employees perceive their organization to be associated with a strong reputation and prestige in the eyes of outsiders, they often feel proud to belong to that organization and may feel inclined to bask in its reflected glory. Employees identify with an organization partly to enhance their own self-esteem: the more prestigious an individual employee perceives their organization to be, the greater the potential boost to self-esteem through identification. Employees also identify more strongly with their organization to the degree that the corporate values and attributes of the organization (organizational identity) correspond with their own personal values. In other words, the higher the perceived fit between the values of an individual employee and the corresponding organization, the stronger the degree to which that employee identifies with their organization. Employee communication in particular has a significant impact on organizational identification. Recent studies demonstrate that downward communication enhances organizational identification when the information transmitted is perceived as adequate and reliable.7 Adequate information involves receiving useful and sufficient information about what is expected of employees in their work and regarding their contributions. The more adequate or specific the information to the employee involved, the higher the level of identification with that organization. Reliable information involves the perception that managers release information that is trustworthy and instrumental to the accomplishment of tasks. When information coming from management is perceived as reliable, employees are more likely to identify with their organization.8 A further factor that has a significant impact on organizational identification involves the degree to which employees feel that they are listened to and are involved by managers when decisions are made. When employees feel that they participate in decision-making and are able to exert some control over their working life, they identify more strongly with their organization and are also generally more committed. Good employee communication, therefore, combines upward and downward communication in such a way that employees are well informed about the future directions of the organization (in particular, the organization’s strategies and policies) and are allowed to interact with management about their policies, and where this interaction has an impact on managerial decisions. In other words, employee communication is most productive, in the sense of eliciting employee commitment and organizational identification, if it is a two-way process of communication, rather than a one-way flow of feedback and instructions. The role of corporate communication practitioners and managers is therefore to use management communication and CICS in such a way that employee communication provides each employee with adequate information and opportunities to speak out, be listened to and get actively involved in the organization. Again, the balance between downward and upward communication is key to fostering strong levels of employee identification. If employee communication in an organization is largely top-down, it may be experienced by employees as limiting and indeed as somewhat oppressive. The one-directional flow of information in the form of directives and commands may then in turn negatively shape employees’ feelings and emotions as they try to perform the roles that are expected of them. Yet, without any opportunities to provide feedback or to speak up, they would feel that their professional roles and emotional wellbeing are suppressed or even controlled, with a direct effect on their commitment, morale and identification with the organization. On the other hand, if employees are provided with the means to express their opinions through upward communication and are able to exercise some influence over their workplace, their level of involvement, as well as the degree to which they identify with the organization, is bound to go up. Case example 9.1 gives a good illustration of these communication principles. Case Example 9.1 Vodafone: Using Employee Communication to Empower Employees Vodafone, a global telecommunications company, has been experimenting with internal communication tools to involve staff and to drive higher levels of employee engagement. The internal communication team at Vodafone observed that employees were not effectively using the traditional tools of communication that the company had been using, such as newsletters, the intranet and the annual company survey. The uptake of these channels with employees had been minimal. They also observed that other channels, such as meetings and emails, were becoming far less effective. Employees felt overwhelmed by meetings and emails, and messages that were conveyed via those channels were often not sufficiently targeted to their work-related circumstances. One major objective for the internal communication team, therefore, was to reduce the overall volume of internal emails, and the heavy reliance on this tool across levels of managers and employees. The team reasoned that a creative use of other tools should offset the heavy email traffic in the company. They also wanted those tools to be more interactive and not just information channels cascading down from the top of the organization to front-line staff. The team developed from scratch a suite of new interactive communication tools such as corporate screensaver messages, desktop alerts, staff quiz tools, a survey channel, and user-generated newsletters. They redesigned screensavers to use images and animation to convey important information and drive engagement. Where previously the default screensaver setting consisted of the user’s name and telephone number, screensavers now featured as live billboards to project brand messages, business goals and motivational messages, as well as to promote events, drive intranet usage and inspire staff to submit business feedback and ideas. Desktop alerts similarly bring important business messages to any device used by employees. In addition, instead of a traditional employee survey with standardized questions that is sent to all staff, Vodafone uses quiz and gaming elements as part of its new survey to identify levels of employee involvement and engagement, and their overall awareness of business topics. Perhaps the most innovative tool that was launched by the team is a user-generated newsletter, where all staff members are able to submit content and thus express their voice on important matters in different locations and at different levels of the organization. Besides this overhaul of its internal communication tools, Vodafone has also been trying to bring the brand alive internally by having launch events mirroring external advertising campaigns and sponsoring. The team recognized here that the external brand could be leveraged a lot more to build employee morale and greater personal connection to the brand. For example, when Vodafone sponsors specific music festivals, it invites some of the artists that promote the brand externally to come and give a gig internally. In this way, Vodafone is able to get more currency out of its external communications and build the brand internally – fostering higher levels of employee engagement and stimulating employees to act as stewards and ambassadors of the brand in their own work. Question for reflection Reflect on the changes in internal communication tools within Vodafone. How do they foster upward and downward communication? And how do you think these new tools add to the levels of employee identification within the organization? Source: This case study is based on an interview with George Aitken, Head of Communications at Vodafone UK; see www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXHCJfd2K9Q (accessed 2 October 2019). 9.4 VOICE, SILENCE AND STIMULATING EMPLOYEE PARTICIPATION Voice, silence and employee participation are terms used to refer to the degree to which employees speak up, are listened to and participate in organizational decision-making. Employee participation involves organizational structures and processes designed to empower and enable employees to identify with organizational goals and to exert power over decision-making. Unionization of the workforce, for example, is one way in which the interests of workers are represented and communicated to senior managers. In some organizations, participation is anchored in the very identity and corporate governance of the organization. Cooperative organizations, for example, are jointly owned and democratically controlled by all those who work for the organization. John Lewis, a successful cooperative chain of department stores in the UK, attributes much of its success to employee co-ownership, which the company feels has led to ‘sky-high’ levels of employee engagement.9 Whilst most organizations are not based on a form of employee co-ownership like John Lewis, employee participation has been an issue of concern for as long as organizations have existed. Employees want a say in shaping their work lives, and organizations equally often feel that participation is desirable for a number of reasons, from genuine concern for the welfare of employees to a desire for the productivity benefits that can follow from employees engaging with their organization. However, even though participation is desirable, enabling employee participation is by no means straightforward. The management scholars Morrison and Milliken have argued that there are often powerful forces in many organizations that prevent employees from participation and that force them to withhold information about potential problems or issues.10 They refer to such withholding of information as organizational silence. When employees share a perception that speaking up is unwise or without any consequence, they remain silent. Such silence in turn may mean that vital upward information is not passed on to managers. Morrison and Milliken pointed to two factors that often systematically cause employees to feel that their opinions are not valued and that thereby discourage them from speaking up. The first factor relates to managers’ fear of receiving negative feedback from employees. There is evidence to suggest that senior and middle managers often feel threatened by negative feedback, whether this information is about them personally or about a decision or course of action with which they identify. Managers often feel a strong need to avoid embarrassment, threat and feelings of vulnerability or incompetence. Therefore, they are likely to avoid any negative information and negative feedback coming from subordinates. The second factor that may influence organizational silence involves a set of managerial beliefs which suggest that managers know best about organizational matters. The basic assumption underlying such beliefs of managers is that, because of information asymmetries, employees will not have a broad enough understanding of the organization. The information that employees therefore provide about organizational matters is seen as not relevant or up to date compared to the knowledge that managers already have. This particular belief is quite strong in managers who view their role as one of directing and controlling, with employees assuming the role of unquestioning followers (see Figure 9.2). If the dominant belief of managers in an organization is that employees are not sufficiently knowledgeable about what is best for the organization, then it is reasonable for managers not to involve them in decision-making processes. In turn, participative forms of decision-making that involve employees will be seen by managers as not worth the time and effort they require. Excluding employees from decision-making is also a way to avoid dissent and negative feedback and, thus, will also stem from fear of negative feedback. In many organizations, although there may be the appearance of some forms of participative decision-making (e.g. taskforces, committees), managers still often attempt to hold on to their decision-making authority. And when managers fear negative feedback from employees, they are unlikely to engage in seeking much informal feedback from subordinates. Instead, managers may be more inclined to seek feedback from those who are likely to share their perspective and who are, thus, unlikely to provide negative feedback. Description Figure 9.2 The conditions and processes leading to organizational silence Source: Adapted from Morrison, E.W. and Milliken, F.J. (2000) ‘Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world’, Academy of Management Review, 25: 706–25, figure on p. 709. The fear of negative feedback and the belief that upward information is often of little value will also be associated with few or no mechanisms for soliciting employee feedback after decisions are made. Using procedures such as employee surveys or 360-degree feedback will be unlikely, because there will be a tendency to believe that little of value will be learned from them and because negative upward feedback will be seen as a challenge to management’s control. It is important to realize that these various managerial beliefs and practices contributing to silence may operate at multiple levels of an organization. For example, middle managers and work supervisors may hold these beliefs and exhibit day-to-day practices that impede upward communication, whilst corporate communication practitioners and senior executives may feel that employee feedback and involvement are a key performance indicator. Organizational silence can damage the organization in that it blocks negative feedback and, hence, an organization’s ability to detect and correct errors. Without negative feedback, errors within an organization may persist and may even intensify, because corrective actions are not taken when needed. The quality of decision-making may also be affected by organizational silence. Potentially useful viewpoints and alternatives from the perspective of employees are not considered. The effectiveness of organizational decision-making will be compromised because of the restricted information available to managers. The tendency of managers to discourage employee opinion and feedback is also likely to elicit negative reactions from employees. Employees may come to feel that they are not valued and that they lack control over their work. When employees feel that they are not valued, they will also be less likely to identify with the organization. The concept of organizational silence is closely related to the concept of communication climate. Communication climate is defined as the internal environment of information exchange between managers and employees through an organization’s formal and informal networks.11 A communication climate is characterized as ‘open’ when information flows freely between individuals, groups and departments, and it is characterized as ‘closed’ when information is blocked. Organizational silence corresponds to a ‘closed’ communication climate because it involves a shared and widespread feeling amongst employees that speaking up is of little use, leading them to withhold potentially valuable information. In an ‘open’ communication climate, in contrast, employees feel free to express opinions, voice complaints and offer suggestions to their superiors. In such a climate, information also passes without distortion upward, downward and horizontally throughout the organization. Employees feel that they have enough support from their managers so that they can give information to them without hesitation, confident that superiors will readily accept it, whether good or bad, favourable or unfavourable. In an ‘open’ communication climate, employees also know that their information will be seen as valuable, and hence sending communication upward may have an effect. 9.5 SOCIAL MEDIA, NETWORKS AND COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE Downward and upward communication largely reflect the hierarchy of the organization, with managers communicating to employees on an individual basis or in work teams, and with employees speaking up and potentially participating in decision-making at higher levels in the organization. Hierarchy often stems from the vertical structure as depicted in the organizational chart of an organization (see Chapter 2). The vertical structure refers to the way in which tasks and activities are allocated to employees and located in the hierarchy of authority within an organization. The solid vertical lines that connect the boxes on an organization chart depict this vertical structure and the authority relationships involved, with senior and middle managers being located higher up in the hierarchy than employees. Communication that strictly follows such hierarchical lines, either downwards or upwards, is often by its very nature about control and command, and about supporting the coordination of specialized tasks across employees and departments. Besides such vertical communication, many organizations have started to use social media tools and other digital means of communication to support employees in working effectively together within teams and departments, as well as horizontally across the organizations. Companies such as Cisco, Dell and General Motors have set up their own digital platforms and have introduced social networking tools such as Yammer, Slack and Google Hangouts for dialogue and conversation between managers and employees. Social media tools in particular are now widely used for communication within teams, organizational units and departments, as well as to support collaboration across professionals groups and hierarchical layers. Collectively, these tools have come to be referred to as ‘enterprise social media’ (ESM) tools, in order to distinguish their function and use from ‘public’ social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) and ‘professional’ social media platforms, such as LinkedIn. ESM specifically facilitates communication in organizations, and in ways that complement the traditional corporate information and communication systems (CICS) such as email, videoconferencing and the intranet. According to digital communication expert Paul Leonardi and his colleagues, ESM refers to ‘web-based platforms that allow workers to (1) communicate messages with specific co-workers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2) explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal particular co-workers as communication partners; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and (4) view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing’.12 In other words, a key advantage of these tools is that they support individuals and groups in having real-time communication between each other within the organization and chart the progress they are making in their collaborative work. ESM tools generally involve online databases and records, so that users can create and edit content in a dynamic, collaborative fashion, as well as online message boards so the users can manage the interaction between them. The communication networks that employees subsequently form through ESM can be quite varied and may extend beyond the team or department in which they are located. Communication networks may for example involve communication within a group of young professionals who are at the same stage in their career, a community of employees with a shared interest in a particular technology, or networks based on social interests. Academic research into communication networks makes a distinction between production networks, which are primarily formed around the accomplishment of work tasks; innovation networks, which emerge around the creation, development and diffusion of new ideas; and maintenance networks, which serve to develop and maintain social relationships at work.13 Obviously, these types may overlap, such as when a group of co-workers start to develop strong social bonds between them and form a maintenance network. For corporate communicators, it is often useful to have a good sense of the communication patterns and networks that are formed within an organization, so that they know what networked groups exist and can figure out how best to communicate with such groups. An interesting aspect of network dynamics in the context of innovation is the notion of the ‘strength of weak ties’.14 The sociologist Mark Granovetter, who developed the idea, suggests that we often value so-called strong ties in social and organizational settings that are based on strong durable relationships with others and on frequent communication. However, such strong ties may also lead to an in-group mentality where you mirror each other’s ideas and points of view, making it harder to generate new ideas. Instead, weak ties between individuals – such as between occasional acquaintances, relative outsiders or different subject experts – are more likely to lead to a challenging of taken-for-granted assumptions and to a combining of different ideas that may potentially lead to significant innovations. One interesting form of network in the workplace today is what has been labelled as a ‘community of practice’. These are networks of communication that bind employees together with a common focus on a particular project or because of shared professional interests. Communities of practice are based on the idea of self-organization through coordinated activity. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who popularized the idea, defined a community of practice as a group of people informally bound together by common interests.15 Such communities are not only self-managing, similar to self-managing work teams, but also self-designing in pursuit of social connections and a common social identity as well as mutual learning and knowledge development. An organization can consist of many different communities of practice that, once formed, can cross departmental and divisional boundaries, or any other dimension of formal hierarchical structure. Structure exists in emerging networks of social connections between individuals and groups. The community model suggests that although the group itself may not literally be in one and the same place, members are connected as a group and bound together through their common interests. In this respect, Wenger suggests that ‘members of a community are informally bound by what they do together – from engaging in lunchtime discussions to solving difficult problems – and by what they have learned through their mutual engagement in these activities’. He also argues that ‘communities of practice are not a new kind of organizational unit’, but that they are ‘a different cut on the organization’s structure – one that emphasizes the learning that people have done together rather than the unit they report to, the project they are working on, or the people they know’.16 In other words, communities of practice ‘set their own boundaries’ around themselves and largely through collaborating together. Examples of communities of practice are found in many organizations and have been called by different names at various times, including ‘learning communities’ at Hewlett-Packard Company, ‘family groups’ at the Xerox Corporation, ‘thematic groups’ at the World Bank, ‘peer groups’ at British Petroleum (BP) and ‘knowledge networks’ at IBM Global Services (see Case study 9.1). According to Wenger, it is important that boundaries of communities of practice remain fairly flexible so that the expertise within them is not sheltered from other communities and so that a community avoids becoming insular. With flexible boundaries, communities of practice learn through the knowledge that they develop within them as well as through any further knowledge from other communities that they may bring in and assimilate. As mentioned, a growing list of digital platforms and ESM tools has given employees the ability to freely communicate with one another and to build communities around shared interests. Much like using Facebook and LinkedIn outside of the organization, these platforms and tools allow users to create personal profiles, post messages and correspond with other community users. These networks can also be password-protected and can grow organically, based on the interests that are shared between employees. The IBM case study (9.1) provides a good example of how a digital platform can be used to support the development of communities of practice. CASE STUDY 9.1 Transforming IBM International Business Machines (IBM) is one of the largest information technology and services companies in the world, with almost 400,000 employees and operations in more than 170 countries. Through the development of the personal computer in the 1980s, the company had become an industry leader. In the 1990s, however, IBM moved from being the most profitable company in the world and an industry leader to one with negative earnings and sliding revenues. This had a major impact on the workforce of more than 400,000 at the time, who had grown accustomed to a tradition of lifelong employment at the best place to work in the world. However, the total workforce had to be cut over the course of several years. After these crisis years, culminating with an $8.1 billion net loss in 1993, IBM began a steady climb towards profitability with a net income of $7.7 billion in 2001. In 2002, IBM found itself in a solid position again, given its wide range of products and its unparalleled research excellence (IBM had received more patents than any other company for each year in the previous decade). Sam Palmisano, who became CEO in 2002, recognized, however, that these capabilities would not be enough. He felt that he also needed to unite IBM’s vast resources to create customized solutions on behalf of its customers, and to do that he needed to develop a deep level of social integration within IBM. In 2002, this was a huge challenge given the changes and turmoil that the company had gone through in the previous decade. As he assumed control in 2002, Palmisano recognized that the task would be one of uniting IBM’s global workforce behind a common set of values and through stimulating collaborative work. When employees could share strong connections with one another, and be united in purpose, horizontal interaction and innovation at the behest of customers would be a lot easier. Changing the internal culture However, because of the turmoil of the 1990s, whatever values the employees had previously shared between them had been lost. By 2002, many of IBM’s more than 325,000 employees had no idea that there were any common IBM values other than driving up profits. Longer-term employees had also become disenfranchised with the company, their trust in the company shaken by lost job security and reduced benefits. Palmisano and his top executives recognized that something had to be done. From the start, they reasoned that a top-down approach would not work with a highly educated and cynical workforce. IBM employees generally have strong feelings about their work and would probably not appreciate a prescriptive approach that circumscribes the company’s values for them. Palmisano’s team therefore decided to set up an online discussion forum, using a technology that was pioneered by IBM in 2001. The forum was open to all IBM employees and facilitated the free and open expression of ideas. The team felt that this forum would be the right venue for focusing IBM’s global workforce on a recommitment to corporate values. It fitted with the mobility of IBM’s workforce and its flexible work arrangements. The team initially produced a set of three proposed value phrases (commitment to the customer, excellence through innovation, integrity that earns trust) that were put online in 2003 to start the online discussion. On 21 July 2003, Palmisano announced the exercise on the IBM intranet, inviting IBMers across geographies, divisions, levels and functions to participate in the discussion. Over the next three days, an estimated 50,000 IBMers monitored the discussion and 10,000 comments were posted. Many of these comments revolved around how to realize and live particular values, not around the wording or the substance of the values themselves. Besides many cynical comments, employees also pointed to the formulation of common values that could bring the company together. As Palmisano recalls: IBMers by the tens of thousands weighed in. They were thoughtful and passionate about the company they want to be a part of. They were also brutally honest. Some of what they wrote was painful to read, because they pointed out all the bureaucratic and dysfunctional things that get in the way of serving clients, working as a team or implementing new ideas. But we were resolute in keeping the dialog free-flowing and candid. And I don’t think what resulted – broad, enthusiastic, grass-roots consensus – could have been obtained in any other way. At the end of the online session, the executives collated and analysed the comments, which led to an announcement in November 2003 of the new company values. These were ‘dedication to every client’s success’, ‘innovation that matters – for our company and the world’ – and ‘trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships’. When these values were posted on the intranet as ‘our values at work’, more than 200,000 IBMers viewed them within a few weeks and employee responses indicated that there was strong support for the three chosen values. In October 2004, IBM held a second values-related online discussion, this time on the practical issues involved in the implementation of the values. Many ideas for how this could be done were posted by employees. After this session, Palmisano announced with his trademark clarity a range of initiatives, both internal and external, that would help in realizing the hard work of living these values. These initiatives included efforts to overhaul corporate programmes, align performance management and compensation with values, invigorate training and support individuals in forming innovation-driven communities of practice. Once the key values had been identified, Palmisano and his communication executives also re-crafted the IBM story in the image of these values. The IBM story details how IBM and its predecessor companies have always been infused by human values, focused on developing innovations that matter to the world and that support progress, and defined by the best customer service. Whilst these values may have been more or less prominent at various stages in the company’s history, the IBM story suggests that they have always been there at a deeper level. As such, they can also act as a guide to the future direction of the company. Communities of practice Besides this value-driven initiative, Palmisano also recognized the importance of communities of practice within IBM. These communities consist of informally connected groups of employees who discuss, often in an online setting, different areas of expertise. Although they are formed informally, the company supports them through software tools that facilitate interaction between employees across the globe. Communities of practice within the organization were initially started in 1995 with informal networks of professionals managing domains of knowledge around IBM’s technological competencies (such as enterprise systems management, application development, testing methods and practices, product platform), marketing competencies (such as e-business, package integration, mergers and acquisitions) and industry-sector competencies (such as automotive, chemicals and petroleum, distribution, finance and insurance, and healthcare). In 2000, there were over 60 unique communities of practice and about 76,000 professionals who participated through web-based software (ICM asset web) which connects individuals to different communities. These professionals were also supported through an information portal that allowed them direct access to different IBM data sources. Within these communities, professionals handle knowledge in the above domains as well as intellectual capital; they gather, evaluate, structure and disseminate knowledge that is shared amongst community peers and across customer projects and they also manage related intellectual capital consisting of methods, processes, tools, assets, reported experiences and any other documentation associated with delivering services and considered of value by the business or community. All of these communities evolve with some assistance from the corporate organization. Whilst they are self-managing, they tend to seek support from the organization, usually to obtain some level of organizational recognition, support and access to the common technology infrastructure. Many of these communities, particularly those that are fully formed, are characterized by a lot of development and learning within their boundaries, with professionals working together to build and sustain the community as well as to solve business problems and exploit business opportunities. Indeed, professionals in such fully formed communities often see it as their joint responsibility to pool knowledge and work together to address the business issues presented to them and to create new products (new solutions, new offerings, new methods) in the process. Recognizing the importance of these communities of practice, the company introduced the On Demand Workplace in 2003, an online technology which centralized the support for communities of practice and allowed employees across the globe to share and transfer knowledge. This online workplace helps employees to search for the profile of other IBMers, and also provides products and technologies that connect people and business processes. These communities of practice, together with the value-based initiative, help bring IBMers together, creating stronger social connections between them and providing a platform for collaboration and innovation. They are thus a central part of the company’s market-driven strategy. Palmisano explains: ‘If three fifths of your business is manufacturing, management is basically supervisory … but that no longer works when your business is primarily based on knowledge.’ Instead, he argues, ‘if you are going to build a business based on continual innovation and new intellectual capital, you are signing up for total dependence on the creativity and adaptive skills of your workforce’. Hence, common values and communities of practice that cut across divisions, departments and levels, are key to developing innovative solutions for clients. Again, in the words of Palmisano: ‘how else can we get our people in far-flung business units with different financial targets and incentives working together in teams that can offer at a single price a comprehensive and customized solution – one that doesn’t show the organizational seams?’ Questions for reflection Reflect on employee communication within IBM from the perspective of employees. How can communication with staff be characterized in terms of upward and downward communication and in terms of employee participation and voice? IBM has supported the development of communities of practice within its organization. Would you expect such communities to be equally useful in other organizations and industry sectors that are, to a lesser extent, focused on constant innovation? Source: This case study is based on Weeks, J. and Barsoux, J. (2010) ‘IBM: The value of values’, IMD case study; and on Kanter, R. and Bird, M. (2009) ‘IBM in the 21st century: The coming of the globally integrated enterprise’, Harvard Business School case study. 9.6 CHAPTER SUMMARY The chapter started by defining the role of employee communication in terms of its impact on employee commitment, morale and organizational identification. One significant message in the chapter has been the importance of combining downward and upward communication between management and employees in such a way that employees feel valued, that they are listened to and that they can speak up about organizational decisions, practices and relationships with their colleagues. Besides upward and downward communication, organizations may also support employees with digital communication platforms for setting up communities of practice to encourage learning and innovation. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Describe in your own words how, in an ideal scenario, communication flows between managers and employees in an organization. Can you give examples from your own experience in organizations to support your account? Social media and new work-based technologies are changing employee communication. How, in your view, can these media and technologies be used to improve learning and innovation, as well as cohesion amongst employees? Which organizations, in your view, are doing this particularly well? KEY TERMS Communication climate Communities of practice Corporate information and communication systems Downward communication Emotions Employee participation Employee voice Enterprise social media Management communication Networks Organizational identification Organizational silence Upward communication Weak ties FURTHER READING Gratton, L. (2022), Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone. London: Penguin. Leonardi, P., and Neeley, T. (2022) The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI. Boston: HBR Press. Want to know more about this chapter? Visit www.sagepub.co.uk/cornelissen7e to access videos, web links, a glossary and selected journal articles to further enhance your study. NOTES 1 Seitel, F.P. (2006) The Practice of Public Relations, 10th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 2 See, for example, Hales, C.P. (1986) ‘What do managers do? A critical examination of the evidence’, Journal of Management Studies, 23: 88–115; Tengblad, S. (2006) ‘Is there a “new managerial work”? A comparison with Henry Mintzberg’s classic study 30 years later’, Journal of Management Studies, 43: 1437–61; Birkinshaw, J. (2012) Reinventing Management: Smarter Choices for Getting Work Done. London: Wiley. 3 Andrews, P.H. and Herschel, R.T. (1996) Organizational Communication: Empowerment in a Technological Society. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. 4 See, for example, Dutton, J.E., Dukerich, J.M. and Harquail, C.V. (1994) ‘Organizational images and member identification’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 39: 239–63. 5 Mael, F.A. and Ashforth, B.E. (1992) ‘Alumni and their alma mater: A partial test of the reformulated model of organizational identification’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 13: 103–23, quote on p. 104. 6 Dutton et al. (1994); Smidts, A., Pruyn, A.T.H. and Van Riel, C.B.M. (2001) ‘The impact of employee communication and perceived external prestige on organizational identification’, Academy of Management Journal, 44: 1051–62. 7 Smidts et al. (2001); Bartels, J., Pruyn, A.T.H, De Jong, M.D.T. and Joustra, I. (2007) ‘Multiple organizational identification levels and the impact of perceived external prestige and communication climate’, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28: 173–90; Bartels, J., Peters, O., de Jong, M.D.T., Pruyn, A.Th.H. and Van der Molen, M. (2010) ‘Horizontal and vertical communication as determinants of professional and organizational identification’, Personnel Review, 39 (2): 210–26; Wu, C., Zhang, Y., Huang, S. and Yuan, Q. (2021) ‘Does enterprise social media usage make the employee more productive? A meta-analysis’, Telematics and Informatics, 60, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2021.101578. 8 Christensen, L.T., Cornelissen, J.P. and Morsing, M. (2007) ‘Corporate communications and its reception: A comment on Llewellyn and Harrison’, Human Relations, 60: 653–61. 9 De Vita, E. (2007) ‘John Lewis: Partners on board’, Management Team, August, pp. 44–7. 10 Morrison, E.W. and Milliken, F.J. (2000) ‘Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world’, Academy of Management Review, 25: 706–25. 11 See, for example, Conrad, C. and Scott Poole, M. (2012) Strategic Organizational Communication in a Global Economy, 7th edition. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt. 12 Leonardi, P.M., Huysman, M., and Steinfield, C. (2013) ‘Enterprise social media: Definition, history, and prospects for the study of social technologies in organizations’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19: 1–19, op.cit. p. 3. 13 Monge, P.R. and Contractor, N.S. (2003) Theories of Communication Networks. New York: Oxford University Press. 14 Granovetter, M.S. (1973) ‘The strength of weak ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 81: 1287–1303. 15 Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 16 Wenger, E. (1998) ‘Communities of practice: Learning as a social system’ (https://thesystemsthinker.com/communities-of-practice-learning-as-a-social-system/) (accessed 5 December 2019) [first published in Systems Thinker]. Descriptions of Images and Figures Back to Figure The figure consists of two blocks on the left labelled ‘Implicit managerial beliefs Management knows best Unity is good and dissent is bad’ on the top and ‘Managers’ fear of negative feedback’ at the bottom. Next to these blocks are two blocks labelled ‘Organizational structures and policies Centralization of decision-making Lack of formal upward feedback mechanisms Managers’ on the top and ‘Managerial practices Tendency to reject or respond negatively to dissent or negative feedback Lack of informal solicitation of negative feedback’ at the bottom. Between them are two forward arrows, connecting top two blocks and bottom two blocks, and a slanting downward arrow connecting top left and bottom right block and a slanting upward arrow connecting the bottom left block with the top right block. Next to this is a block labelled ‘Climate of silence’ connected from the previous two blocks using an arrow. There is another block next to this on the right labelled ‘Organizational silence’ connected using an arrow with the previous block. Back to Figure The figure consists of 14 columns and the first column has 11 rows labelled as follows: Events and corporate calendar; Seimens business conference (incl.top* award); Communication of key topics for the new fiscal year; Target achievement, target agreements, staff dialogues, management dialogues; Structuring and integration of initiative in the group/region planning process; Approval of regional business plans; Review of group plans by the corporate executive committee; Quarterly reviews (Q2 with expanded circle attendees); Regular reviews of initiatives in the corporate executive committee; Best practice sharing/best practice day; Training to support initiatives. Columns 2 to 14 are labelled Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct. Above columns 5 to 13 are two rows; the fifth and sixth column of first row is labelled AM and other columns of first row is labelled PM. The second row is labelled 8.00; 10.00; 12.00; 2.00; 4.00; 6.00; 8.00; 10.00; 12.00 from column 5 to 13. The third column of row three has a thick line at the centre and labelled ‘Groups, Regions, Corporate Units’. Columns 2 and 3 of fourth row, 3 to 12 of fifth row, 12 of sixth row, 13 of seventh row, columns 3, 4, 5 and 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, 11 and 12, 12 and 13, 14 of ninth row, columns 3 to 14 of 10th row and columns 3 to 14 of 11th row have thick horizontal lines. Columns 3, 5, 8 and 11 of eighth row are labelled Q4, Q1, Q1 and Q3, respectively. 9 EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION Chapter overview Employees are a crucial stakeholder group for any organization. Organizations need to communicate with their employees to strengthen employee morale and their identification with the organization and to ensure that employees know how to accomplish their own, specialized tasks. The chapter discusses general strategies for communicating to employees. These strategies range from communication that makes employees feel comfortable speaking up and providing feedback to managers to using communication to stimulate innovation and collaboration within digital networks and communities of practice. 9.1 INTRODUCTION Organizations require employees to cooperate with one another to achieve the company’s goals. Most organizations have divided complex activities up into more specialized tasks for individual employees. Whilst efficient, the pay-off of such specialization depends almost wholly on coordinating tasks and activities across employees. If an organization controls its members through top-down command and delegation, the individual needs of employees for autonomy, creativity and sociability may be frustrated. But, at the same time, if the organization fails to control its employees, it loses the ability to coordinate its employees’ activities and will ultimately fail. Hence, organizations must find ways to meet their employees’ individual needs and stimulate their creativity, whilst persuading them to act in ways that meet the organization’s overall objectives. Organizations do so by adopting various strategies for communicating with employees. In the next section, we first define the general scope of employee communication. The chapter then goes on to discuss how employee communication may strengthen employees’ identification with their organization. The degree to which managers communicate with employees and involve them in decision-making has a direct impact on employee morale and their commitment to the organization. The final section of the chapter outlines how social media can be used within organizations to encourage employees to network and collaborate, and to form communities of practice that stimulate knowledge sharing, learning and innovation. 9.2 DEFINING EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION Contemporary organizations realize that their performance rests on effective communication with their employees. Many of the most reputable firms and ‘most admired’ organizations spend in fact more than three times as much on employee communication than their less admired counterparts.1 Communicating routinely and effectively with employees is linked to employee commitment, productivity, job performance and satisfaction, as well as to a significantly lesser likelihood of employees leaving the organization. Given these direct benefits, it is perhaps not surprising that employee communication is a core area of corporate communication. The terms that have often been used to label this area of corporate communication are ‘employee communication’, ‘staff communication’ and ‘internal communication’. Traditionally, employee communication, which is the term used in this chapter, was defined as communication with employees internal to the organization. Such internal communication was distinguished from forms of external communication with stakeholders such as customers and investors. However, the advent of new technologies (e.g. blogs, email) has meant that messages to employees do not always remain ‘inside’ the organization. These new technologies have blurred the boundaries between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ communication. Employees can nowadays distribute their own information about an organization electronically to outside stakeholders, sometimes without any gatekeeping or control from corporate communication professionals. On a website such as Glassdoor or on a blog, for example, employees can share their views and publish their grievances as well as organize and demand action from the organization. Indeed, with access to email, blogs and social networking sites for sharing corporate information, many employees become somewhat like corporate communication professionals themselves. Rather than clamping down on such external communications by employees, many companies such as Nike, American Airlines, Unilever, GE, Airbnb, Deloitte and Accenture, have started to give their employees access through a range of social media tools (such as Smarp, LinkedIn Elevate, Sociabble and EveryoneSocial). These tools support employees to become advocates on certain company-related issues and to become, in effect, ambassadors for the company’s brand and its internal culture and workplace. Clearly, communication technologies have led to many changes in the workplace. Computer technologies have made it easier to produce, multiply, distribute and store written documents, to exchange messages over long distances and to work together and have meetings relatively independent of time and space. Employees are now often connected to each other by electronic means rather than through close physical proximity. Emails, the intranet, video conferencing and podcasting are used by managers to communicate with employees, and by employees themselves to stay informed of company news. IBM, for example, offers more than 5,000 audio and video podcast ‘episodes’ to employees, who can download these files and watch or listen to them at a convenient time. IBM feels that these podcasts are a useful way to disseminate corporate information in an efficient and engaging way. If we look at the use of communication technologies within organizations, we can first of all distinguish two central areas of employee communication: (a) management communication, and (b) corporate information and communication systems. Management communication refers to communication between a manager and their subordinate employees. Communication in this setting is often directly related to the specific tasks and activities of individual employees as well as to issues relating to their morale and wellbeing. Research on what managers do has demonstrated that managers spend most of their time communicating, and much of that time is spent in verbal, face-to-face communication.2 Besides face-to-face communication, managers also increasingly use email, video conferencing and enterprise software to communicate with their employees. Whilst the responsibility for management communication lies with managers themselves and not with the corporate communication department, communication practitioners often advise and support managers in their communication to staff. Communication practitioners in AstraZeneca, for example, have developed training materials for senior and middle managers to help them become better communicators. Corporate information and communication systems (CICS) have a broader focus than the manager–employee dyad. CICS involve technologies and communication systems that broadcast corporate decisions and developments to all employees across the organization. The emphasis is on disseminating information about the organization to employees in all ranks and functions within the organization, in order to keep them informed about corporate matters. CICS is often the preserve of the communication department, charged with releasing information to employees through the intranet, emails and so-called ‘town hall’ meetings (i.e. large employee meetings where senior managers announce and explain key corporate decisions or developments). Corporate TV, such as the digital FedEx Television Network or Nokia’s digital broadcasting systems, is also used as a communication channel for reaching employees around the world. Whereas management communication is often restricted to the specific interpersonal work setting of a manager and an employee, CICS may not differentiate content between groups of employees and typically relates to more general organizational developments rather than specific areas of work. As such, its more general contents are not tuned to the interests and circumstances of specific employees across the organization. Management communication, however, can more easily address various groups of employees, yet it misses the broader organizational picture. In other words, whilst distinct in scope, both areas of employee communication complement each other in ensuring that information flows vertically and horizontally across the organization. Without both forms of employee communication, a company’s overall communication effort may be ineffective and its employees demotivated. One key implication for corporate communicators is to assess whether CICS and management communication work effectively in that together they cover and reach the entire base of employees – from, for example, managers and workers to consultants and trainees, and from full-time staff to employees on part-time contracts. The two together should also be used strategically to reach the twin objectives that organizations often have for employee communication: to provide relevant and specific information to employees to support them in their tasks and work objectives; and to build an organizational community with strong relationships between employees, and with employees strongly identifying with the organization. The complementary nature of both forms of employee communication can also be understood through the concepts of downward and upward communication. Downward communication consists of electronic and verbal methods of informing employees about their organization, its performance and their own contribution and performance in terms they can comprehend. In other words, downward communication involves ‘information flowing from the top of the organizational management hierarchy and telling people in the organization what is important (mission) and what is valued (policies)’.3 Both management communication and CICS are central to downward communication; together, they provide employees with general information from the top of the organization (CICS) as well as with more specific information from their managers (management communication). A good example of this kind of downward communication is the corporate calendar system within Siemens. The corporate calendar (Figure 9.1) lists events throughout the year at which the corporate strategy and corporate objectives are communicated to employees from different parts of the company. The calendar was developed by corporate communication practitioners who realized that employees were not always informed about the company’s strategy in a timely and consistent manner. Communication practitioners raised the issue with the CEO and senior executives who agreed that the calendar system could be usefully incorporated into the corporate strategy as a way of implementing the strategy. The CEO and senior executives felt that the calendar would make an important contribution to the achievement of the corporate objectives as it provides a medium to report on the past year’s targets and for setting binding priorities and objectives for the new fiscal year. As displayed in Figure 9.1, the Siemens Business Services (SBS) conference marks the start of each fiscal year. This central communication event provides a platform for senior managers to report on the past year’s targets and to set priorities and objectives for the new fiscal year. The SBS event is followed by management conferences in the business divisions, regions and corporate units. By streamlining management events, the corporate calendar ensures that all managers and employees hear about the past year’s results and are given objectives for the coming period. Upward communication, on the other hand, involves information from employees that is sent up to managers within the organization. It often involves information about the employee themselves, information about co-workers, information about organizational practices and policies, and information about what needs to be done and how it can be done. Allowing employees to communicate upwards is important because employees’ ideas, responses to their working environment or critiques of the plans and ideas announced by managers may be used to find ways to improve an organization’s overall performance and profitability. Upward communication is typically facilitated within the interpersonal setting of management communication. Managers can stimulate employees to voice concerns and to provide them with feedback on practices, procedures and new organizational changes. At the same time, CICS may include communication systems such as message boards on an intranet and ‘town hall’ meetings, allowing employees to ask questions of senior managers and to ask for further information on corporate decisions or organizational developments. Description Figure 9.1 The corporate calendar system at Siemens Note: Calendar dating from 2003; reprinted with permission 9.3 EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTIFICATION Generally speaking, when employees strongly identify with the organization they work for, they are more satisfied in their work, they will be more cooperative and they will also demonstrate behaviour that is helpful to the organization.4 Organizational identification, in other words, plays a significant role in many organizations. It can be defined as: ‘the perception of oneness with or belongingness to an organization, where the individual defines him or herself in terms of the organization(s) of which he or she is a member’.5 Academic research has shown that organizational identification increases as a result of the perceived external prestige of the organization6 and as a result of the degree of overlap between the personal identity of the employees and the identity of the organization. When employees perceive their organization to be associated with a strong reputation and prestige in the eyes of outsiders, they often feel proud to belong to that organization and may feel inclined to bask in its reflected glory. Employees identify with an organization partly to enhance their own self-esteem: the more prestigious an individual employee perceives their organization to be, the greater the potential boost to self-esteem through identification. Employees also identify more strongly with their organization to the degree that the corporate values and attributes of the organization (organizational identity) correspond with their own personal values. In other words, the higher the perceived fit between the values of an individual employee and the corresponding organization, the stronger the degree to which that employee identifies with their organization. Employee communication in particular has a significant impact on organizational identification. Recent studies demonstrate that downward communication enhances organizational identification when the information transmitted is perceived as adequate and reliable.7 Adequate information involves receiving useful and sufficient information about what is expected of employees in their work and regarding their contributions. The more adequate or specific the information to the employee involved, the higher the level of identification with that organization. Reliable information involves the perception that managers release information that is trustworthy and instrumental to the accomplishment of tasks. When information coming from management is perceived as reliable, employees are more likely to identify with their organization.8 A further factor that has a significant impact on organizational identification involves the degree to which employees feel that they are listened to and are involved by managers when decisions are made. When employees feel that they participate in decision-making and are able to exert some control over their working life, they identify more strongly with their organization and are also generally more committed. Good employee communication, therefore, combines upward and downward communication in such a way that employees are well informed about the future directions of the organization (in particular, the organization’s strategies and policies) and are allowed to interact with management about their policies, and where this interaction has an impact on managerial decisions. In other words, employee communication is most productive, in the sense of eliciting employee commitment and organizational identification, if it is a two-way process of communication, rather than a one-way flow of feedback and instructions. The role of corporate communication practitioners and managers is therefore to use management communication and CICS in such a way that employee communication provides each employee with adequate information and opportunities to speak out, be listened to and get actively involved in the organization. Again, the balance between downward and upward communication is key to fostering strong levels of employee identification. If employee communication in an organization is largely top-down, it may be experienced by employees as limiting and indeed as somewhat oppressive. The one-directional flow of information in the form of directives and commands may then in turn negatively shape employees’ feelings and emotions as they try to perform the roles that are expected of them. Yet, without any opportunities to provide feedback or to speak up, they would feel that their professional roles and emotional wellbeing are suppressed or even controlled, with a direct effect on their commitment, morale and identification with the organization. On the other hand, if employees are provided with the means to express their opinions through upward communication and are able to exercise some influence over their workplace, their level of involvement, as well as the degree to which they identify with the organization, is bound to go up. Case example 9.1 gives a good illustration of these communication principles. Case Example 9.1 Vodafone: Using Employee Communication to Empower Employees Vodafone, a global telecommunications company, has been experimenting with internal communication tools to involve staff and to drive higher levels of employee engagement. The internal communication team at Vodafone observed that employees were not effectively using the traditional tools of communication that the company had been using, such as newsletters, the intranet and the annual company survey. The uptake of these channels with employees had been minimal. They also observed that other channels, such as meetings and emails, were becoming far less effective. Employees felt overwhelmed by meetings and emails, and messages that were conveyed via those channels were often not sufficiently targeted to their work-related circumstances. One major objective for the internal communication team, therefore, was to reduce the overall volume of internal emails, and the heavy reliance on this tool across levels of managers and employees. The team reasoned that a creative use of other tools should offset the heavy email traffic in the company. They also wanted those tools to be more interactive and not just information channels cascading down from the top of the organization to front-line staff. The team developed from scratch a suite of new interactive communication tools such as corporate screensaver messages, desktop alerts, staff quiz tools, a survey channel, and user-generated newsletters. They redesigned screensavers to use images and animation to convey important information and drive engagement. Where previously the default screensaver setting consisted of the user’s name and telephone number, screensavers now featured as live billboards to project brand messages, business goals and motivational messages, as well as to promote events, drive intranet usage and inspire staff to submit business feedback and ideas. Desktop alerts similarly bring important business messages to any device used by employees. In addition, instead of a traditional employee survey with standardized questions that is sent to all staff, Vodafone uses quiz and gaming elements as part of its new survey to identify levels of employee involvement and engagement, and their overall awareness of business topics. Perhaps the most innovative tool that was launched by the team is a user-generated newsletter, where all staff members are able to submit content and thus express their voice on important matters in different locations and at different levels of the organization. Besides this overhaul of its internal communication tools, Vodafone has also been trying to bring the brand alive internally by having launch events mirroring external advertising campaigns and sponsoring. The team recognized here that the external brand could be leveraged a lot more to build employee morale and greater personal connection to the brand. For example, when Vodafone sponsors specific music festivals, it invites some of the artists that promote the brand externally to come and give a gig internally. In this way, Vodafone is able to get more currency out of its external communications and build the brand internally – fostering higher levels of employee engagement and stimulating employees to act as stewards and ambassadors of the brand in their own work. Question for reflection Reflect on the changes in internal communication tools within Vodafone. How do they foster upward and downward communication? And how do you think these new tools add to the levels of employee identification within the organization? Source: This case study is based on an interview with George Aitken, Head of Communications at Vodafone UK; see www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXHCJfd2K9Q (accessed 2 October 2019). 9.4 VOICE, SILENCE AND STIMULATING EMPLOYEE PARTICIPATION Voice, silence and employee participation are terms used to refer to the degree to which employees speak up, are listened to and participate in organizational decision-making. Employee participation involves organizational structures and processes designed to empower and enable employees to identify with organizational goals and to exert power over decision-making. Unionization of the workforce, for example, is one way in which the interests of workers are represented and communicated to senior managers. In some organizations, participation is anchored in the very identity and corporate governance of the organization. Cooperative organizations, for example, are jointly owned and democratically controlled by all those who work for the organization. John Lewis, a successful cooperative chain of department stores in the UK, attributes much of its success to employee co-ownership, which the company feels has led to ‘sky-high’ levels of employee engagement.9 Whilst most organizations are not based on a form of employee co-ownership like John Lewis, employee participation has been an issue of concern for as long as organizations have existed. Employees want a say in shaping their work lives, and organizations equally often feel that participation is desirable for a number of reasons, from genuine concern for the welfare of employees to a desire for the productivity benefits that can follow from employees engaging with their organization. However, even though participation is desirable, enabling employee participation is by no means straightforward. The management scholars Morrison and Milliken have argued that there are often powerful forces in many organizations that prevent employees from participation and that force them to withhold information about potential problems or issues.10 They refer to such withholding of information as organizational silence. When employees share a perception that speaking up is unwise or without any consequence, they remain silent. Such silence in turn may mean that vital upward information is not passed on to managers. Morrison and Milliken pointed to two factors that often systematically cause employees to feel that their opinions are not valued and that thereby discourage them from speaking up. The first factor relates to managers’ fear of receiving negative feedback from employees. There is evidence to suggest that senior and middle managers often feel threatened by negative feedback, whether this information is about them personally or about a decision or course of action with which they identify. Managers often feel a strong need to avoid embarrassment, threat and feelings of vulnerability or incompetence. Therefore, they are likely to avoid any negative information and negative feedback coming from subordinates. The second factor that may influence organizational silence involves a set of managerial beliefs which suggest that managers know best about organizational matters. The basic assumption underlying such beliefs of managers is that, because of information asymmetries, employees will not have a broad enough understanding of the organization. The information that employees therefore provide about organizational matters is seen as not relevant or up to date compared to the knowledge that managers already have. This particular belief is quite strong in managers who view their role as one of directing and controlling, with employees assuming the role of unquestioning followers (see Figure 9.2). If the dominant belief of managers in an organization is that employees are not sufficiently knowledgeable about what is best for the organization, then it is reasonable for managers not to involve them in decision-making processes. In turn, participative forms of decision-making that involve employees will be seen by managers as not worth the time and effort they require. Excluding employees from decision-making is also a way to avoid dissent and negative feedback and, thus, will also stem from fear of negative feedback. In many organizations, although there may be the appearance of some forms of participative decision-making (e.g. taskforces, committees), managers still often attempt to hold on to their decision-making authority. And when managers fear negative feedback from employees, they are unlikely to engage in seeking much informal feedback from subordinates. Instead, managers may be more inclined to seek feedback from those who are likely to share their perspective and who are, thus, unlikely to provide negative feedback. Description Figure 9.2 The conditions and processes leading to organizational silence Source: Adapted from Morrison, E.W. and Milliken, F.J. (2000) ‘Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world’, Academy of Management Review, 25: 706–25, figure on p. 709. The fear of negative feedback and the belief that upward information is often of little value will also be associated with few or no mechanisms for soliciting employee feedback after decisions are made. Using procedures such as employee surveys or 360-degree feedback will be unlikely, because there will be a tendency to believe that little of value will be learned from them and because negative upward feedback will be seen as a challenge to management’s control. It is important to realize that these various managerial beliefs and practices contributing to silence may operate at multiple levels of an organization. For example, middle managers and work supervisors may hold these beliefs and exhibit day-to-day practices that impede upward communication, whilst corporate communication practitioners and senior executives may feel that employee feedback and involvement are a key performance indicator. Organizational silence can damage the organization in that it blocks negative feedback and, hence, an organization’s ability to detect and correct errors. Without negative feedback, errors within an organization may persist and may even intensify, because corrective actions are not taken when needed. The quality of decision-making may also be affected by organizational silence. Potentially useful viewpoints and alternatives from the perspective of employees are not considered. The effectiveness of organizational decision-making will be compromised because of the restricted information available to managers. The tendency of managers to discourage employee opinion and feedback is also likely to elicit negative reactions from employees. Employees may come to feel that they are not valued and that they lack control over their work. When employees feel that they are not valued, they will also be less likely to identify with the organization. The concept of organizational silence is closely related to the concept of communication climate. Communication climate is defined as the internal environment of information exchange between managers and employees through an organization’s formal and informal networks.11 A communication climate is characterized as ‘open’ when information flows freely between individuals, groups and departments, and it is characterized as ‘closed’ when information is blocked. Organizational silence corresponds to a ‘closed’ communication climate because it involves a shared and widespread feeling amongst employees that speaking up is of little use, leading them to withhold potentially valuable information. In an ‘open’ communication climate, in contrast, employees feel free to express opinions, voice complaints and offer suggestions to their superiors. In such a climate, information also passes without distortion upward, downward and horizontally throughout the organization. Employees feel that they have enough support from their managers so that they can give information to them without hesitation, confident that superiors will readily accept it, whether good or bad, favourable or unfavourable. In an ‘open’ communication climate, employees also know that their information will be seen as valuable, and hence sending communication upward may have an effect. 9.5 SOCIAL MEDIA, NETWORKS AND COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE Downward and upward communication largely reflect the hierarchy of the organization, with managers communicating to employees on an individual basis or in work teams, and with employees speaking up and potentially participating in decision-making at higher levels in the organization. Hierarchy often stems from the vertical structure as depicted in the organizational chart of an organization (see Chapter 2). The vertical structure refers to the way in which tasks and activities are allocated to employees and located in the hierarchy of authority within an organization. The solid vertical lines that connect the boxes on an organization chart depict this vertical structure and the authority relationships involved, with senior and middle managers being located higher up in the hierarchy than employees. Communication that strictly follows such hierarchical lines, either downwards or upwards, is often by its very nature about control and command, and about supporting the coordination of specialized tasks across employees and departments. Besides such vertical communication, many organizations have started to use social media tools and other digital means of communication to support employees in working effectively together within teams and departments, as well as horizontally across the organizations. Companies such as Cisco, Dell and General Motors have set up their own digital platforms and have introduced social networking tools such as Yammer, Slack and Google Hangouts for dialogue and conversation between managers and employees. Social media tools in particular are now widely used for communication within teams, organizational units and departments, as well as to support collaboration across professionals groups and hierarchical layers. Collectively, these tools have come to be referred to as ‘enterprise social media’ (ESM) tools, in order to distinguish their function and use from ‘public’ social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) and ‘professional’ social media platforms, such as LinkedIn. ESM specifically facilitates communication in organizations, and in ways that complement the traditional corporate information and communication systems (CICS) such as email, videoconferencing and the intranet. According to digital communication expert Paul Leonardi and his colleagues, ESM refers to ‘web-based platforms that allow workers to (1) communicate messages with specific co-workers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2) explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal particular co-workers as communication partners; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and (4) view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing’.12 In other words, a key advantage of these tools is that they support individuals and groups in having real-time communication between each other within the organization and chart the progress they are making in their collaborative work. ESM tools generally involve online databases and records, so that users can create and edit content in a dynamic, collaborative fashion, as well as online message boards so the users can manage the interaction between them. The communication networks that employees subsequently form through ESM can be quite varied and may extend beyond the team or department in which they are located. Communication networks may for example involve communication within a group of young professionals who are at the same stage in their career, a community of employees with a shared interest in a particular technology, or networks based on social interests. Academic research into communication networks makes a distinction between production networks, which are primarily formed around the accomplishment of work tasks; innovation networks, which emerge around the creation, development and diffusion of new ideas; and maintenance networks, which serve to develop and maintain social relationships at work.13 Obviously, these types may overlap, such as when a group of co-workers start to develop strong social bonds between them and form a maintenance network. For corporate communicators, it is often useful to have a good sense of the communication patterns and networks that are formed within an organization, so that they know what networked groups exist and can figure out how best to communicate with such groups. An interesting aspect of network dynamics in the context of innovation is the notion of the ‘strength of weak ties’.14 The sociologist Mark Granovetter, who developed the idea, suggests that we often value so-called strong ties in social and organizational settings that are based on strong durable relationships with others and on frequent communication. However, such strong ties may also lead to an in-group mentality where you mirror each other’s ideas and points of view, making it harder to generate new ideas. Instead, weak ties between individuals – such as between occasional acquaintances, relative outsiders or different subject experts – are more likely to lead to a challenging of taken-for-granted assumptions and to a combining of different ideas that may potentially lead to significant innovations. One interesting form of network in the workplace today is what has been labelled as a ‘community of practice’. These are networks of communication that bind employees together with a common focus on a particular project or because of shared professional interests. Communities of practice are based on the idea of self-organization through coordinated activity. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who popularized the idea, defined a community of practice as a group of people informally bound together by common interests.15 Such communities are not only self-managing, similar to self-managing work teams, but also self-designing in pursuit of social connections and a common social identity as well as mutual learning and knowledge development. An organization can consist of many different communities of practice that, once formed, can cross departmental and divisional boundaries, or any other dimension of formal hierarchical structure. Structure exists in emerging networks of social connections between individuals and groups. The community model suggests that although the group itself may not literally be in one and the same place, members are connected as a group and bound together through their common interests. In this respect, Wenger suggests that ‘members of a community are informally bound by what they do together – from engaging in lunchtime discussions to solving difficult problems – and by what they have learned through their mutual engagement in these activities’. He also argues that ‘communities of practice are not a new kind of organizational unit’, but that they are ‘a different cut on the organization’s structure – one that emphasizes the learning that people have done together rather than the unit they report to, the project they are working on, or the people they know’.16 In other words, communities of practice ‘set their own boundaries’ around themselves and largely through collaborating together. Examples of communities of practice are found in many organizations and have been called by different names at various times, including ‘learning communities’ at Hewlett-Packard Company, ‘family groups’ at the Xerox Corporation, ‘thematic groups’ at the World Bank, ‘peer groups’ at British Petroleum (BP) and ‘knowledge networks’ at IBM Global Services (see Case study 9.1). According to Wenger, it is important that boundaries of communities of practice remain fairly flexible so that the expertise within them is not sheltered from other communities and so that a community avoids becoming insular. With flexible boundaries, communities of practice learn through the knowledge that they develop within them as well as through any further knowledge from other communities that they may bring in and assimilate. As mentioned, a growing list of digital platforms and ESM tools has given employees the ability to freely communicate with one another and to build communities around shared interests. Much like using Facebook and LinkedIn outside of the organization, these platforms and tools allow users to create personal profiles, post messages and correspond with other community users. These networks can also be password-protected and can grow organically, based on the interests that are shared between employees. The IBM case study (9.1) provides a good example of how a digital platform can be used to support the development of communities of practice. CASE STUDY 9.1 Transforming IBM International Business Machines (IBM) is one of the largest information technology and services companies in the world, with almost 400,000 employees and operations in more than 170 countries. Through the development of the personal computer in the 1980s, the company had become an industry leader. In the 1990s, however, IBM moved from being the most profitable company in the world and an industry leader to one with negative earnings and sliding revenues. This had a major impact on the workforce of more than 400,000 at the time, who had grown accustomed to a tradition of lifelong employment at the best place to work in the world. However, the total workforce had to be cut over the course of several years. After these crisis years, culminating with an $8.1 billion net loss in 1993, IBM began a steady climb towards profitability with a net income of $7.7 billion in 2001. In 2002, IBM found itself in a solid position again, given its wide range of products and its unparalleled research excellence (IBM had received more patents than any other company for each year in the previous decade). Sam Palmisano, who became CEO in 2002, recognized, however, that these capabilities would not be enough. He felt that he also needed to unite IBM’s vast resources to create customized solutions on behalf of its customers, and to do that he needed to develop a deep level of social integration within IBM. In 2002, this was a huge challenge given the changes and turmoil that the company had gone through in the previous decade. As he assumed control in 2002, Palmisano recognized that the task would be one of uniting IBM’s global workforce behind a common set of values and through stimulating collaborative work. When employees could share strong connections with one another, and be united in purpose, horizontal interaction and innovation at the behest of customers would be a lot easier. Changing the internal culture However, because of the turmoil of the 1990s, whatever values the employees had previously shared between them had been lost. By 2002, many of IBM’s more than 325,000 employees had no idea that there were any common IBM values other than driving up profits. Longer-term employees had also become disenfranchised with the company, their trust in the company shaken by lost job security and reduced benefits. Palmisano and his top executives recognized that something had to be done. From the start, they reasoned that a top-down approach would not work with a highly educated and cynical workforce. IBM employees generally have strong feelings about their work and would probably not appreciate a prescriptive approach that circumscribes the company’s values for them. Palmisano’s team therefore decided to set up an online discussion forum, using a technology that was pioneered by IBM in 2001. The forum was open to all IBM employees and facilitated the free and open expression of