On Nov. 19th Prof. Elisa Juholin came gave a lecture about the assessment of corporate communication with ComBar. She explained how important it is to measure communication and that you cannot manage communication without a systematic assessment.
Of course it is important to measure and assess communicationas the operational environment, work and the employees have changed during the time and for that reasn Elisa made a research/project about Communication in Workplace Communities in the 21st Century. This project lasted 4 years and the targets were to define communication in present-day workplace communities and to develop practical tools for developing, leading and evaluation of communication on based on the new definition.
Elisa talked about the Delphi technique, which was completely new to me at that point. The Delphi technique is not as informal as a focus group but rather a qualitative and controlled feedback procedure. The idea of the process is simple though. First, insights on topics are gathered from the panellists. Then they are resent back to the same panellists for evaluation and comment.New rounds are completed until a common insight is found.
There are 6 factors that emerged with the help of the survey she developed with her research team (ComBaro):
1. Strategic communication
2. Collaboration with the immediate superior
3. Personal participation and responsibility
4. Workplace spirit and mutual cooperation
5. Importance of knowing
6. Vocational communications
These results show that most people are concerned with the strategic communication at their workplace. This mostly involves big companies.
Nowadays, employees want to be involved in decision making. They want to be taken serious and contribute and for this reason they feel it is important to get the chance to directly collaborate with their superior and be heard. They appreciate their own participation and responsibility and are very interested in what’s happening in their own organization. Based on these results organizations can do something to motivate their employees again and get the best out of their personnel because only happy employees are productive employees.
