Ways for organizations to break down internal communication barriers

Ways Companies Break Down Internal Communication Barriers

Companies with the best implementation of communication and change management perform 3.5 times better than their peers. I've compiled a list of ways companies can break down internal communication barriers, enjoy and learn from them.

Hierarchical barriers to cross-level communication is much more difficult

American scholars Sandra Blackbells, Richard Weaver in the book "Effective Communication", proposed that "communication is any process by which people share information, ideas and emotions. This process encompasses not only spoken and written language, but also body language, personal habits and ways, and the physical environment - i.e., whatever gives meaning to the message."

Effective communication in modern business is very important and necessary, but there are many obstacles in the actual communication.

Li Wei is a content editor at an Internet company. According to Li Wei, all employees are assigned a corresponding mentor when they join the company, and the mentor is usually a colleague with more business experience in the same department. They are responsible for guiding that new employee to familiarize themselves with everything from work to life within the company. The new employee can ask the mentor any questions they have at any time.

However, Li Wei added that despite this, internal communication is not comprehensive: "Usually, we mainly discuss business matters with departmental leaders, and there is almost no communication with the company's big leaders. Although the company's leaders have expressed in public that 'the door to the office is always open for employees, and they can come in and communicate with them anytime, anywhere,' our communication with the leaders is limited to 'meeting and greeting and exchanging pleasantries'. Because the workplace is the most taboo to cross the reporting work, we do not want to because of this kind of thing with our direct leadership conflict."

Yang Hui, recruiting program manager at Microsoft, told reporters that Microsoft also does not advocate, do not encourage the initiative to cross the line, and more respect for employees to try a variety of ways to solve the problem on their own, or to communicate with the direct leadership. "Microsoft has established a 'skip level one on one' (cross-level conversation) mechanism. This is specifically for the enterprise employees and leaders to communicate with the communication mechanism, employees can be on the upper level of leadership or higher leadership regular exchange of questions, once a month fixed."

"Communication reduces friction and conflict, enables leaders and employees to understand each other, increases the scientific nature of decision-making, and also shortens the decision-making to implementation . Time." Yang Hui added.

Lenovo is one of the few companies in China with a mature internal communication mechanism, which is mainly manifested in the strong advocacy of the "four steps of communication": When encountering a problem, "find the position of responsibility to go directly to the communication", " To find the position of the direct superior communication "," report their superiors to help communication "," find both sides *** with the superior to solve ".

New media to help diversify the form of internal communication

More and more companies realize that only through the construction of the internal management of the enterprise communication system, improve employee satisfaction, reduce the rate of departure, in order to achieve the economic benefits of the enterprise. In addition to the president's mailbox, in addition to the enterprise internal magazine, many enterprises have internal instant communication tools or internal forums. This has become an important part of the internal communication mechanism.

Yang Hui said that within Microsoft, the timeliness and openness of corporate communication because of the use of instant messaging tools. Become more prominent. Employees use Microsoft's self-developed Lync, to achieve online communication, employees can see the work status of Microsoft employees around the world, or "busy" or "leave", you can also see the level of the employee; you can use outlook to send mail. And with the employee's own landline number binding, to ensure the timeliness of communication; at the same time, Microsoft utilizes internal extensive use of yammer this social platform, composed of a set of voting, chat, activities, links, topics, quizzes, ideas and other applications as one of the enterprise social network.

"It is these hardware and software as a guarantee, into the company's openness of the corporate culture characteristics, Microsoft although there is no clear written internal communication mechanism, but it is always highlighting the timeliness and openness of corporate communication." Yang Hui said.

He Minglu, deputy general manager of Shenzhen Yuanxing Technology Co., Ltd. believes that if the non-off-site, originally in an open environment, you can reduce the IM (Instant Messaging) group of this mode of communication. If it is off-site collaboration, IM groups are quite necessary, especially RTX tools that support file transfer and internal IM tools that support multi-party calls.

An intranet site is an important part of an organization's internal communication system, and is a great platform for communicating about business and life. According to Li Wei, his organization's internal website basically covers every aspect of work and life, including technical communication, product experience, learning and sharing. One of the boards is called "General Office Exchange", any employee can ask questions, the relevant company executives will also be timely "bubble", to make the appropriate answer.

Focus on bottom-up to increase horizontal communication

In terms of the establishment of internal communication mechanisms, domestic enterprises have a certain gap compared to foreign enterprises, compared to traditional enterprises, emerging enterprises pay more attention to the establishment of internal communication mechanisms. Generally speaking, what kind of organizational structure and management mode an enterprise has, it will form a management communication network with corresponding characteristics. The organization of traditional enterprises is highly formalized and centralized, with a strict hierarchical system from the top management to the lowest employees. In management communication, employees can only communicate with their immediate superiors in a single upward or downward direction, and the management communication network is simple and fixed, which is not conducive to the efficient flow of information and affects the initiative and motivation of grassroots employees.

Hu Wei, a lecturer at the Institute of Organization and Human Resources, School of Public **** Management, Renmin University of China, believes that the traditional concept of increasing the number of organizational levels and departments will increase the time of communication and reduce the effectiveness of communication. However, with the increase in communication and flexibility, the main problem is not the obstacles of organizational structure, but the importance of the organization to the issue of communication, especially bottom-up and horizontal communication.

"Bottom-up lies in the full attention and respect for the grassroots staff, especially the front-line staff, from control to control services and focus. Horizontal communication to establish workflow, break the local interests of each department, break the formalism, so that everyone stands in the height of the organizational system to think and understand the problem." Hu Wei said.