When I first started in employee communication, oh, about 10,000 years ago, it was very much the junior partner in the corporate communication mix.
The media relations folks got all the glory, and most of the staff. Employee comms were the “folks who do the newsletter,” which was full of “babies and bowling scores.” My friend Steve Crescenzo made a series of speeches falling-down funny dissecting this tendency.
The old Journal of Employee Communication from Ragan and its Ragan Report tried to turn the discipline into something more strategic, as did Pat Jackson, Shel Holtz, Angela Sinickas, Linda Dulye, Alison Davis and others. Now there is another paroxysm of effort in that space, this time focusing on the result of effective employee communication: Employee engagement, advocacy, company culture. The October edition of PRSA’s Strategy and Tactics focuses on the latter. Quite the trick for the organization long perceived as more about external comm (especially via New York agencies.)
This focus on impact is a welcome development (yes, I know, many of us have driven for more outcome-based measurement in this space.) I’ve read lately that as the news media has continued its transformation, brands are trying new employee comm mechanisms in hopes of creating advocates who will support the organization through thick and thin (remember Raving Fans?)
In our Organizational Communication course, we talk a lot about identity. Not just personal identities, the Crystalline Identity, but also the need to help employees see their organizational employment as part of that constellation of identity. It is this growth in identification that leads to “employees acting like owners,” to discretionary effort and to advocacy and loyalty.
Without a strong sense of identifying with one’s employer, it’s not a career, it’s a job. So it’s not all about employee engagement, or even advocacy. Trying to directly influence those is complicated by multiple inputs. But building a sense of teamwork, of collaboration, of the sense of being part of something important; that’s a communication outcome that inspires and that can be measured in attitudes, beliefs and behavior.
What are your thoughts? Am I off base here? On track?
