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COMMUNICATIONS
All
workers in an organization have a right to know what is happening and why.
Management of communication systems aims to keep members of the
organization in the information loop. Data, information and knowledge are,
as it were, the lifeblood of an organization - and the ways in which they
are transferred from person to person or department to department are
crucial to the organization’s well-being.
Two parallel developments have transformed the way organizations
communicate internally. First, the simultaneous trends for compressed and
fragmented organizational structures have challenged traditional top-down
communication lines. Modern workers are increasingly required to be able
to communicate effectively in all directions, and businesses to arrange
for communication between remote units.
The other significant development has been the realization of Microsoft's
vision - ‘a computer in every home and on every desk’ – accompanied
by the exponential growth in IT/ICT capacity in the average organization.
The benefits and drawbacks of the IT revolution for business are debated
every day: individual empowerment versus information overload; speed and
low cost versus enslavement to short-lived hardware and software products;
information sharing versus security concerns. Harnessing Information
Communications Technology is arguably the greatest challenge facing
businesses worldwide.
Current thinking about the ways organizations communicate internally has
been slow to respond to the IT/ICT revolution, most advances have been in
external communication. For instance, the Industrial Society’s model of
team briefing is still very popular in business. This is based on a
regular cascade of policy and procedural information via team briefings
(the standard is for communication from top to bottom to occur within 24
hours). Its traditional ‘top-down’ approach is dependent on a
discretionary ‘filter’ at each level to prioritize information.
Without this safeguard, it is very easy for those towards the bottom of
the organizational pyramid to be overloaded – with the attendant risk of
engendering a ‘so what?’ attitude. The team brief model is undoubtedly
an effective and flexible one, but it can be difficult to implement in an
organization where remote, temporary or short-term contract working are
the norms; unsurprisingly moreover, it doesn’t take advantage of the
innovations brought by intranets and groupware.
The paradox for managers planning internal communication is that the
wealth of available mechanisms (websites, team briefings, newsletters,
e-mail, groupware, social events, etc.) actually complicates
decision-making about issues such as which method to use, who should have
access, how much information to give, and whether all formal communication
has to be productive.
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