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TED TALK: Sarah Magill: Opening New Organizational Communication Loops
Organizations communicate in two directions: internally to staff and externally to clients, customers, shareholders, stakeholders, the media. Faulty internal communications can lead to mistakes, discouraged and unhappy staff, employees leaving the company. Poor external communications can jeopardize image and sales. It really is that simple. Any overall management strategy needs a communications plan or the whole operation might fail.
A communications audit analyzes an organization’s practices to reveal how effective they are—throughout a whole company or in specified parts of the organization. It can pinpoint problem areas such as frequent misunderstandings, information blocks, information lacks, information duplication, misrepresentation. An audit could be part of a periodic health check but it is especially helpful at a time of change: a merger or acquisition, launch of a new product or service, entry into new markets, for example.
The exact nature of the audit will depend on the type of organization and its particular needs and problems. But it will certainly aim to identify target audiences: the external audience will have different needs from an internal one. It will need to identify the key messages that need to be communicated and the channels that exist for conveying them. It will look not only at the communications that the organization makes but also how it receives them.
But what might be going wrong, with external communications, say? Let me give an example here. My husband is a shareholder in a building company. Every year it produces a glossy Annual Report that it sends to shareholders. It clearly costs a lot to produce and distribute. This makes my husband very angry. He doesn’t want to read the full report and resents the money that is wasted on producing and sending a document that goes straight in the bin. What he would like is a leaflet summarizing the salient points about the company’s performance and changes. Does the company realize that some shareholders feel this way? It is important to bear in mind that most shareholders are not able to attend shareholder meetings and may not know how to make their views known. This company has a two-way problem. The communications it sends out are wrong for some shareholders but it has not thought about a way of creating a channel for the shareholders to give their feedback. It is thus breaking a fundamental rule of effective communications: you must have feedback.
Or take an internal issue. The HR department of a company gives out a detailed instruction manual to new employees. Yet many of the newly hired people seem completely lost during their first weeks. Why might this be? Well, in the first place, the employees are mostly involved in manual work. They are not used to reading chunks of written material. Most of the manuals lie unopened in their lockers. A buddy scheme of some kind would pro