Strategic Employee Communication

The study of organizational culture is recent and still has ample space for development, both in the academia and in the organizational practice. By acknowledging this, the author provides multidisciplinary references in different areas of knowledge—anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and administration—to raise intriguing questions about the fugacity of employment relations: Are we giving due attention to the management of organizations, which genuinely considers the employee profile linked to contemporary society? Or are employees, with characteristics of the so-called liquid modernity, still working in solid modernity environments?

In this chapter, the author introduces an innovative proposition: the study of the body within the business environment. Therefore, she proposes the observation of the behavioral pattern communicated by corporations to their employees, regarding the way they are supposed to act both internally and externally. There is a sequence the bodies are expected to perform, a theological sequence. Thus, this chapter’s primary goal is to propose a critical consideration which allows identifying the strength of this transformation, recognizing it as a trait of the culture of Western capitalism.

The issue of business ethics has never been more in fashion. Companies, as legitimate representatives of the society to which they belong, cannot ignore the desire expressed by society for transparency and truth. So, researching this issue becomes an important step toward understanding organizational culture, especially considering this culture is conducive to expression or to the collapse of ethical behavior on the part of employees. Therefore, communication is a vital process in shaping and maintaining a rich context for correct decisions and attitudes. This is the logic presented in this text.

In the following essay, the author explores Nutrimental’s experience using the appreciative inquiry model to guide and define its strategies, as well as cement the process of leadership communication with their teams. This experience reveals the key role played by communications in an appreciative approach, resulting in more representation and participation through dialogue in decision-making processes, and the improvement of the organizational climate through direct and open interaction, as well as promoting the value of a participative culture that promotes communication and dialogue. In this case, having well-defined organizational culture aspects played a critical part in making the appreciative approach successful.

This chapter investigates the role of WhatsApp in informal communication at Brazilian companies, highlighting the challenges faced by employee communications areas. As we are living in an increasingly connected and interdependent world, individuals and businesses adhering to new forms of communication, especially those allowing quick access, reading, and comments. The authors propose that this app mediatizes informal communication in organizations—what brings potential opportunities and challenges to improve employee communication at a time of media ubiquity, decrease in physical boundaries, and an increasing exchange of information, regardless of whether they are, in fact, establishing a process of dialogue and belonging.

In this chapter, the authors outline the results of qualitative research on Diversity Management carried out with Brazil’s 20 largest companies. The objective of the study was to map the perception of employees and managers on Diversity in the context of the organizations, confronting the corporate discourse with the perspective of professionals who identify themselves with this theme. Managers of 12 out of 20 national companies and 45 employees, representing all this group, participated for individual qualitative interviews. The results show a very an incipient ambience in Brazilian companies, with a discourse that is little aligned to the practice and almost no practical demonstration of results, perceived by employees with mistrust and a sense of exclusion.

This article explores the possibilities of employee engagement. More than discussing the media offered by the company to spread information internally, the author emphasizes the importance of creating content that makes sense to employees and uses as an example a Brazilian company that is making it possible.

This essay covers a current hot topic in communications and people management—employer branding—and seeks to conceptualize it, analyze how classical brand positioning techniques can be applied to it and how it has the potential to move from a trend to a transformative approach for workplace experiences.

The core purpose of internal communications continues to be as a force that establishes a connection between employees’ own development and performance objectives while propelling success in the business outcomes of the company. Internal communication represents a distinct advantage in a company as employees may be the most important audience for a company’s organizational communication and corporate branding efforts (Christensen and Askegaard 35(3–4): 292–315, 2001). We judge success in our internal communications when employees are able see the value for their own career and work interests by understanding, believing in, and behaving in line with the company’s business objectives.

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think, and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty? (Nietzsche). We live in the age of knowledge, new technologies, of access to almost any information at our fingertips, resulting in unprecedented connectivity, productivity, and mobility. Work is now mobile, our cell phones have become a reflection of ourselves and we do (almost) everything through their screens and apps: we study, surf the web, work, pay our bills, play games, watch movies and videos, find dates, buy and sell stuff… As such, we seem to have become increasingly more adept at multitasking, but also always seem to be out of time and vulnerable to the ill effects of an information overload and burnout—oftentimes in an authentic hyperconnectivity crash. The result is that we never unplug from work and compulsively check our notifications—every five minutes or less—to see if there are new messages in our e-mail inboxes or if someone has liked, commented, or shared our most recent post on social media.

The “internal public” has never been so external. Previously, what was discussed only within a company’s four walls is now heard everywhere. The employee has been transformed into a communicator with great power of reach and is considered one of the most trustworthy spokespersons when talking about the company. For the organization, the trust of its employees and other publics is its most valuable asset. It is what regulates any relationship and what demonstrates the company’s ability to generate future value. The basis for building trust is not just the operating result or profits that the company delivers to shareholders, but rather the way it behaves regarding integrity, ethics, and transparency—and company’s employees are the main spokespeople to talk about specific topics such as engagement and integrity. They are the main agents of a brand’s culture. Therefore, the need to build trust from the inside out is more obvious than ever, with communication to and by employees serving as one of the main bases of business.

Breaking this pattern helps improve the quality of communications. For instance, employees do not behave solely as members of one specific group. Oftentimes, they create interfaces with many other groups they identify with. It is clear that understanding them from such a holistic perspective raises complicated, as questions abound even when answers are in short supply. We no longer need to focus communications for a marketing employee based exclusively on the fact that he/she works in the marketing department. These employees may also be part of the group that enjoys photography, the group that is interested in innovation, they may be members of the team managing a new productivity project, or part of the group that brings friends together to cook on weekends. In other words, employees have multiple interests. There is no magical formula to determine the ideal way to communicate based on an individual’s specific needs. Such an approach would require great effort from leadership and communications areas and would ultimately not meet all those needs, which are, after all, individual ones.

This essay intends to bring to the debate the importance of systemic thinking in organizations. Among many ways to do it, we explore the concept of Social Team Building as a successful way to exercise our social skills, interaction, and the strengthening of the teams. The German philosopher Friedrich Hegel said that the one who exaggerates the argument affects the cause. The quotation clearly translates the great panacea into which certain concepts such as social responsibility, sustainability, and engagement have become. Sustainability is an ethical issue. We can assume different behaviors according to our values, beliefs, culture, as individuals and society. The complexity of social and environmental problems signals the importance of potentializing opportunities together as a team. Citizens, civil society, organizations, and government need to think in a collaborative way of solutions that may contribute and give more effectiveness to the search for sustainable social development.

Inspired by the results of the author’s master’s degree work, this essay addresses the changes we see in society and people’s relationships at work. Having this starting point, this work approaches how public relations can contribute in the search of means of valuing the employees and humanizing the company. An in-depth look at the BIOFAST Group’s communication helps as a benchmark on the subject, which is presented below. Organizations have been changing their concepts and modifying their managerial practices considering the speed of the economic, political, social, and cultural transformations that are taking place in the world. Companies realized that it is important to value the employee since it is their most important asset, and also because people in their work activities should be seen as partners and not as economic resources.

The words that compose the title of this essay should never be treated separately when it comes to the management of employee communications. Each of those elements plays a key role in employee communications, but their effectiveness rests largely on the maturity level displayed by the department managing them. In the last few years, a significant shift regarding concepts such as planning, communication channels, and campaigns has been observed, mostly due to the increasing importance of employee communications management has achieved. As a matter of fact, the increase in the maturity level of the practice is indirectly correlated with an increase in the seniority of professionals managing this function.

Many were the reasons behind the development of a maturity matrix to evaluate employee communications within organizations. Supported by practical experience and inspired by the application of this methodology in other industries, the maturity matrix for employee communications presented here was created to better understand what guides the development, evolution, and growth of the communication function within companies over time. The matrix was conceived based on empirical experience, but is also grounded in theories that are briefly explored here. It arises within a current market context where communication areas are being challenged to rethink their roles within organizations. As such, the matrix may also help diagnose whether the employee communication function within a given company is actually prepared to take the next step toward a relational communication paradigm in tune with current challenges.

In this essay, the authors propose a reflection about the strategic work of employee communications from an adequate planning elaboration. By resorting to market research data and bibliographical reviews, which allows a better understanding and exemplification, the essay is divided into three parts: the research (diagnosis), the planning itself, and the evaluation and measurement of results. With special attention to this last topic, however, the authors offer a series of tips that may contribute to the creation of an adequate methodology to each organizational reality. In July 2014, the Brazil national football team was defeated by the German team in the semifinals of the world cup, hosted in Brazil. Unfortunately, it was not a simple defeat. Brazil lost by 7-1.

The communication field studies the ways to influence and manage the perception one has about people, companies, and concepts. In organizations, the consumers’ as well as other stakeholders’ perception can directly impact results and profit. Employees’ perception also plays an important role as they become engaged and more productive due to attributing meaning to institutions, routines, work, and so on. That said, it is essential for enterprise success to invest in communicating clearly and understandably its strategy—in other words, in a way that creates meaning for the company and its workforce. A study, carried by the Harvard Business Review in 2010 with 1075 executives, asked about how strategy was developed in their companies and which challenges were depriving its execution, among other aspects. According to respondents, the biggest challenge to execution is to make strategy meaningful to employees in the front office of the company. The challenge is reasonable, as many people cannot even tell what the company strategy is. To 72% of respondents, communicating the strategy clearly is a priority to execution.

Organizations are made of people, and their objectives can only be achieved through its people’s effective participation. Based on this premise, it is possible to conclude that employee communications has indisputably become a strategic organizational process, as it is critical for sharing objectives, engaging teams, and awarding recognition to individuals throughout organizational niches. However, it is still patently clear that there is no consensus regarding the objectives, means to reach them and the results inherent to this process. After all, if, on the one hand it is key to keep the information flowing and connect people to the organization’s objectives (which in itself represents a considerable amount of work), on the other, society, organizations, employees, and the work itself have all changed considerably to face the challenges of modern times.

Priority management is a valuable skill in any field and professionals who master it can perform their tasks with a high level of excellence. In a corporate context, a simple assessment of your organizational environment can reveal the risks of not having your company priorities set right. Teams often face intense work routines and are driven by solutions focused on “doing things the way they have always been done”, leading them to overlook the need of ensuring alignment between a communications area’s goals and the company’s priorities. In such a case, although communicators may excel at managing their own priorities and focusing on what is relevant for their area, they may not be working on the things that will generate results for the company as a whole.

“I think, therefore I plan”. If you identify with this basic principle of our field, it is very likely that you, dear reader, are a professional just like me, devoting yourself each day to one of the most challenging functions within organizational communications. Yes, it is a fact! Deadlines are tighter, budgets usually do not adequately cover the needed efforts for achieving expected objectives, and the reality is that the majority of plans created are unfortunately doomed to never reach implementation, as countless and unpredictable market and organizational changes affect the relevance of what had been so far planned and approved. While I am not an incorrigible optimist, I do have a healthy amount of faith that the field of employee communications will develop fully within the next few years, enabling the professional growth of all those brave enough to take on this challenge and—with great skill—build a solid business case acting as advisors, rather than adopting a merely reactive stance.

Communicating with employees has always been a challenge for organizations. A primary obstacle was institutionalizing the communications area, so that it played a strategic role and went beyond producing communication channels that acted solely as tools for disseminating information. Based on my experience in this field, significant strides have already been made, which resulted in communications becoming increasingly more relevant to companies—a reflection of the work of communicators over the years. As a result, the current main point of contention is whether communications can play a merely an “internal” role, or go beyond the organization, especially in this digital age where everyone is connected and employees have begun to use social networks to share their work–life experiences.

The transformations imposed by contemporaneity on companies are of an objective order, such as the need to adopt new work practices or the implementation of new technologies, as well as of a subjective nature, including the expectations of the younger generations of employees on the meaning of work and the ways of working, creating value by means of processes and professional relationships. In this environment, the use of mobile tools in employee communications turns out to be a viable alternative, especially given the social reality in which we live at the end of 2010 decade, to contribute to an intense dynamic of exchanges, information flows, and decision-making in the context of the accelerated pace of the business world. Despite the universal presence of cell phones and other electronic communication devices in people’s everyday lives, the use of these tools is only part of a story that began many years ago.

In September 2010, the top leadership of a pharmaceutical company based in Mexico has put in motion an internal restructuring process that included the layoff of some employees, the creation of new processes, and the launch of a new business strategy focused on restoring growth. The company had stopped growing for reasons that included a lack of results, orientation, and clear business objectives. The new strategy called for investments in an employee communications campaign to generate empathy, commitment, and integration among employees, in addition to restoring confidence in the decisions taken by the leadership team.

With the evolution of employee’s communication, the campaigns to the corporate audience start to have a more relevant role in the organizations: to provide passage rituals capable of tracing lines between the past and the future—lines that can be demarcated with the use of teasers, powerful resources in the involvement of the middle leadership. The author describes in this essay three cases lived by him during his work as a general manager in Invitro agency, in which the use of teasers in the campaigns, associated to the involvement of the leaderships, was crucial for achieving, or even exceed, the expected results. The three following cases were experimented by the author during the 20 years of his career, being the last decade in charge of Invitro agency, specialized in employee communications. These stories illustrate how internal campaigns that associate teasers (or pre-launch communication strategies) with the work of middle management leaders can change radically the perception of the social groups that had an impression by them.