Among important future actions in internal communication, most professionals point out training managers to act as communicators as well as spreading authentic content instead of polished messages. Separating hard facts from comments, replacing text with videos and reducing information channels will be less important. This is the conclusion reached by a study, The European Communication Monitor 2010.

This is an annual transnational research study in Europe released by professor Ralph Tench from the Leeds Business School. The project, which analyses communication management and public relations, counts the participation of communications professionals from 34 countries. However, the findings presented cannot claim representativeness.

Last year, 69 percent of respondents think that linking internal communication to corporate strategies was been the main challenge in internal communication. Communication professionals have many strategic roles, but one of the most important is to ensure that the company’s external and internal messages are working in synergy.

Too often communicators allow their executives to articulate the organization’s developments and strengths to external audiences, but these messages are not articulated as effectively to internal audiences. And this is where professional communicators can assist their executives and managers in viewing employees as strategically as they view the media, analysts, investors and customers.

Successful communication encompasses all levels of audiences. It is the role of communication professionals to encourage their organizations to put as much focus on employee understanding of strategic business directions and decisions as they do on external communication initiatives.

However, the fallout from the global economic downturn is driving internal communicators to reassess their roles and their worth in ways never seen before. Some professionals confess that they are experiencing a change in strategy as well as budget cuts. During the bad times there is often more budget allocated to internal communication.

However, more work is to be done and there are fewer people to do it who are working under far more pressure. Second, 66 percent of communication professionals also pointed out supporting organisational change and restructuring as a very important trend in internal communication.

More than every second European professional think that dealing with information overload will be an important challenge. Information overload refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that is due to the presence of too much information.

One third of respondents consider coping with the digital evolution and the social web an important task, especially for non-profit companies. Internal communications need to be authentic and engaging and to prove their worth now more than ever before because people may be more cynical or worried during a recession.

Under these circumstances, email is not an effective internal communications channel. In fact, workers claim that 34 percent of the internal email they receive is unnecessary. Overall, everyone think that using online communities for internal dialogue will also be important in the future.

Many communication professionals predict a decline in print communication spending in the next year, and a rise in intranet spending with technologies, such as SharePoint and various social media tools on the rise, such as blogs and webcasts.

Reestablishing lost credibility in management, avoiding reputation risks through online word-of-mouth (especially important to private companies) and internationalisation of internal communication are other issues pointed out by communication professionals.

The aim of internal communication is that everyone in a company knows the plans and the objectives to achieve and their degree of participation and effort in that task. If there is poor internal communication, staff will not know what ways to accomplish tasks or their expected contributions.

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About the author

Camino Ahijon

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