Trusty channels
A really informative discussion thread took place on LinkedIn last week with internal communication practitioners sharing research on how employees like to be communicated with. Under challenge was research conducted in the 1980s by Towers Perrin that concluded supervisors are employees’ preferred source of information on all business topics.
Over thirty years on after an explosion in communication channels fed by the internet it was probably about time the research was revisited but irrespective of the number of communication channels available either in 1980 or today it seems the Towers Perrin survey questions were flawed.
This is why, according to Angela Sinickas in her 2009 discussion paper on the research (http://www.sinicom.com/Sub%20Pages/pubs/articles/article113.pdf). Employees were asked:
- Which one of these sources is currently your primary source for important company information?
- Which one of these sources is your preferred primary source for important company information?
The answer to the first question is almost always “rumours from other employees”. The answer to the second is usually “my supervisor”. Essentially employees are forced to specify one source when the reality is we all prefer different sources for different types of information.
Rodney Grey, someone involved in the original Towers Perrin research, piped in to the LinkedIn discussion, fessing up that the original research was indeed flawed and subsequent to leaving Towers Perrin he had conducted his own research into what information employees like from which source.
The break down Grey provided showed that face-to-face communication is still the preferred method of communication when certain information is to be shared. It was, as you can imagine, the big stuff. Future direction and strategies for the organisation, plus how it’s performing – the CEO. Downsizing, restructure, merger, or other major change – CEO and other senior executives. Personal job expectations, performance and feedback – immediate supervisor. Local issues such as new products and services, interaction with other teams and discussion of the competition – team meetings. Most other information could then go in to publications.
This all seems pretty logical but clearly the research on this can’t stand still. When managers today are increasingly expected to manage large dispersed teams with employees from different cultural backgrounds and can’t physically address them more than 3 or 4 times a year, some form of non-face-to-face communication has to fill the face-to-face gap.
We were left wondering, do employees tolerate recorded video as an acceptable form of communication or does its [mostly] over-polished style undermine authenticity in their minds? Is streamed video preferable or can it still feel remote? Are video conferences a working system of communication or do the technology hiccups associated with them still mean to most people they’re a cumbersome channel to use as a last resort? Does a wiki effectively replace a collaborative meeting?
Some further points were made in the discussion thread and the discussion paper by Sinickas that partly answered our questions. Firstly, younger generations are more accepting of less face-to-face communication and are very sophisticated in the way they filter through the mass of information they have available to them, so whilst face-to-face has a role it is less of an absolute requirement. Secondly, the source of information that works is the source of information that has been seen to work before. If employees have proof a source of information is trustworthy they will want to return to it again, whether that’s the intranet, a wiki, their manager or their CEO.
So is the ultimate message, whatever communication channel you use, use it well? We suspect that might not apply to firing someone by text message…