feliciagriffin's posterous

An organization’s employees are its ambassadors.  Consequently, communicating with employees is just as vital as delivering the corporate story to the outside world.  A workplace where management is respected, products are made with pride, and workers believe they are being treated fairly is a key factor in corporate success.

I’ve found a lot of wisdom on this subject from Bill Quirke, the author of Making the Connections: Using Internal Communication to Turn Strategy into Action.  He describes internal communication as “the core process that enables businesses to engage their people’s intellectual and creative assets to produce value.”  I couldn’t agree more, especially in this uncertain economy.  People want simple truths about what’s going on, and they deserve to be treated in a way that tells them they matter.

It boils down to identifying the intended business value in communicating and then designing a process to deliver that value.  Therefore, internal communication has to be a process focused on conversion rather than distribution.  Just as an industrial production line worker converts, or adds value to, a component received from up the line, the internal communications coordinator must convert information from the corporate office and from the assembly line into meaning in order to make the right decisions.

Again, Bill Quirke is right on point:

“The role of internal communication is to illuminate the connections between different pieces of information, to shine a light on the web of interdependencies, and to show the links between one area and another.  Its job is to provide the information to do the job, but to paint the bigger picture and to tell the fuller story that puts that information into context.”

I’m looking forward to delving deeper into Quirke’s text to gain a deeper understanding of the role of communication in bridging the gap between what a successful business needs from its people and the obstacles that get in the way.