Over the past 15 years, we've learned that when employees agree with the statements below, they're satisfied with corporate culture and communications at their organization. You can begin making a positive impact on your organization's communications and culture, as well as establish best practices, by paying close attention to the above statements. Follow this up by surveying and analyzing your employees' feedback.
Read on for strategy and tips to begin your journey for improvement. Our employees trust us when we communicate frequently, including enough detail for folks to understand how the content may affect them.
They need to know about changes that may affect them before those changes are implemented. Organizations with the highest levels of employee engagement have employees who have a good understanding of how the organization is doing financially. Clear communication goes both ways and employees want to feel that they can express their honest opinions without fear of negative consequences.
Employees feel that their employers give them enough recognition for a job well done. When staffing levels are adequate to provide quality products or services to customers, and both safety and quality feel like a top priority, employees feel they work for a great company. The kinds of organizations that are great at hiring people who fit within the culture tend to have employees who have fun at work and like the people they work with.
Should we talk openly to people at all levels? Should we be careful about speaking upward? Do people want certain kinds of information in emails or do they want it discussed at meetings? In addition to culture, internal belief systems about communication also affect what people choose to say and what they choose to withhold. Therefore, without examining internal beliefs, looking at culture alone would provide an incomplete explanation of what underlies the decision to communicate or withhold in the workplace.
Milliken, Morrison, and Hewlin proposed that part of the acclimation process to a workplace includes learning what is okay to discuss and what one should be quiet about. There are numerous cultural variables that affect communication, so only the most significant ones will be discussed in this CQ Dossier. Join our monthly newsletter to receive management tips, tricks and insights directly into your inbox! One of the strongest variables that affects communication is psychological safety.
Therefore, employees who feel that their environment is psychologically safe are less likely to withhold communication since the team is not perceived as likely to embarrass or reject them. Milliken et al. Organizations that are high in centralization feel bureaucratic and hierarchical, and they increase withholding by employees.
The degree to which an organization is centralized in this manner can be empirically measured by a scale developed by Hage and Aiken The behavior of leaders in an organization sets the culture and affects communication. Culture is often said to come from the top, and leaders certainly have an important role to play in the creation of a culture that is safe for communication.
Furthermore, leaders who are difficult to work with tend to stifle communication. Abusive supervision is closely related to destructive leadership and can be measured using a scale by Burris et al. Finally, job control affects communication as well. Job control varies within and between organizations, and it refers to the degree that an individual has a say in what they do at work and how their work gets done Dwyer and Ganster, If a person has higher job control, this leads to better communication, because what people have to say actually has a clear impact on their workplace versus those with less job control.
Cultural variables certainly have an effect on communication, and they have been studied for decades. Although early researchers e. A related concept appears in stereotype research, in which scholars have demonstrated how people form, use, and maintain stereotypes without conscious awareness e.
As mentioned earlier, Detert and Edmondson explored the relationship between internal beliefs referred to as implicit theories and communication in the workplace. Similar to stereotyping processes, they found that silence in organizations is governed by a set of internal beliefs that are quickly activated upon encountering a familiar situation. According to the logic of our internal belief systems, a boss is a boss. There is little variability between them, so we do not behave as differently form one boss to the next as other research might suggest.
Problems can occur when people follow beliefs that may be appropriate for one boss or organization but not another organization. For example, if your first boss told you never to bring up a problem without a proposed solution, you might carry that belief to your next job where your boss will be upset that you failed to bring up a problem sooner. In the literature, a bad experience with a boss left an individual holding the same internal beliefs about speaking up for 12 years and through three separate managers Kish-Gephart et al.
If the argumentative basis for a decision does not reach the attention of an audience, there is an increased risk that the audience will fail to understand the rationale of the decision. For instance, changes in an organization can easily be experienced as negative by those who are affected by them if the justifications for the changes are not communicated properly [ 9 ].
Such lack of understanding of underlying reasons can cause a variety of negative consequences related to motivation, conflicts and thereby efficiency [ 20 , 25 ]. Having attention is no guarantee for communication.
Consider a sender who aims to communicate something to an audience. Understood like this, having a shared language is also a necessary condition for communication. Communication breaks down if senders and audiences understand the language that is used—no matter what kind of language it is—in very different ways.
In philosophy of mind and language, there are various conceptions of what it means to share a language [ 6 , 7 , 37 , 45 , 46 ]. However, most theorists have, in one sense or another, tied this to exchange of concepts. As an illustration, consider as an everyday example a person who aims to communicate his belief that it is raining to another person.
What is commonly defined as the propositional content of this belief is made up of the three concepts it , is and raining , and communication is successful if the audience associates the speech act with the same concepts as the sender, if the audience understands that the sender means it is raining. The sender and the audience need, in other words, to have a sufficiently similar understanding of the verbal or nonverbal expressions of meaning that are used [ 6 , 46 ]. Together, having attention and having a shared language are still only necessary conditions for successful communication.
The reason is that what is directly expressed in language is only the top of the iceberg in social interaction. In typical verbal or nonverbal dialogue, communicators ascribe to each other many beliefs and thoughts that are not literally expressed in words.
Theoretically, the main reason is that in normal dialogue, communicators intend to be as economical as possible when they convey meaning. As Sperber and Wilson [ 47 ] observe:. When communicating humans automatically aim at maximal relevance, i. This is the single general factor which determines the course of human information processing.
The point is that in ordinary communication we only say what we think we need in order to convey all that we want to communicate. We include the part of the communicative iceberg that is beneath the visible surface and hope, due to more or less contextual or conventional norms for interpretation, that the audience also gets the part of the message that is beneath the directly visible surface in the way we intend it to be understood [ 48 ].
An everyday example from an organization might be a situation involving a manager and an employee who talk about a job task. What he means is that he wants the employee to take responsibility for the task. The lack of clarity about this might cause a misunderstanding and have negative consequences. He thinks that the criticism is unfair in the light of what the manager actually asked him—he thinks that his interpretation of the question was valid.
In this kind of situation, it is always a good question if someone is to blame for the misunderstanding. Initially, one might think of this in the light of the idea of a social norm: If there is a common social norm for how an utterance should be interpreted, and if only one of the parties interpret a message in accordance with this norm, then the other party is, at least prima facie , to blame for the misunderstanding.
Here, the idea of a social norm can be understood broadly, as a norm in the whole language community. But it can also be understood more narrowly within a context or social group, as a way of interpreting what have been established as part of a culture [ 8 , 43 ].
If there are many different contextual or group-related interpretative frameworks within an organization, then this can have a huge negative impact on organizational communication and, thereby, on organizational performance.
However, in some cases it is far from clear that there are any definite norms that should govern interpretation. In such cases it is often not justified to blame one or both communicators for the misunderstanding. The abovementioned communication conditions focus on thoughts and beliefs—information that is expressed and interpreted. The final condition focuses on a remaining aspect of communication, what one might call the relational aspect of social interaction: In addition to beliefs and thoughts, senders attempt to convey attitudes, preferences and values, and communication is only successful if audiences interpret these mental states as they are expressed by senders.
The idea of similar interpretation is the same: A sender who intends to convey a mental state like an emotion, experience or attitude must be experienced in the intended way by the audience. The immediate consequence of this is that it is not how a person defines himself as someone who expresses a specific mental state that defines successful communication of this kind, but how he is experienced by his audience.
An example might be the attitude of empathy. Consider an employee in an organization who thinks of himself as empathetic in dialogue with a colleague. Or consider a manager who defines himself as a friendly person. Then, for communicative purposes, he does not appear friendly to his audience.
It is how the audience perceives him that determines how successful the communication is. The same goes for a range of other non-conceptual mental states like values, interests and preferences. The way a sender intends to be understood must correspond to how the audience experiences him. Incongruent communication—communication in which there is an inconsistency between verbal and nonverbal language—causes uncertainty about intentions and negative interpretations [ 5 ].
Fundamentally, the significance of avoiding this kind of communication is connected to the need to clearly express positive attitudes in order to create a positive culture [ 49 ]. Together, the four communication conditions I have outlined can be understood as principles for communication that it is especially important what communicators think of. Communication as a process involves many aspects, and the process can be understood as a cycle: The audience needs to close the communicative loop, and in order to get a confirmation that a message has been received, senders need to get feedback from the audience [ 4 , 5 ].
The four conditions above are core pitfalls that communicators easily can fall into when trying to secure two-way dialogue. Turned around, the conditions can also be understood as conceptual resources. To each condition, there is a crucial question that any communicator can use as a mental checklist for evaluating the quality of social interaction: 1 Do I have the attention of my audience?
These questions can be understood as methodological tools that can be implemented individually or collectively to sharpen communication practices. The need to meet basic communication conditions is general and therefore also of crucial importance in organizations. Such conditions have not, however, been linked to organizational culture: In the academic literature, the question of how it is possible to change organizational culture by implementing communication principles has not received much attention.
The significance of this question is striking on personal levels. After all, and as Eisenberg and Riley [ 43 ], p. However, the need to focus on communication as part of culture is recognized to be important on system levels as well. This has, in particular, been connected to the importance of creating communicative networks and especially to analyses of how such networks arise.
This is the main reason why analyses of communicative cultures are so relevant. Such analyses can explore how formal and informal communication networks actually work. This dependency between communication and the dynamics of cultures has been addressed in many ways. The important point for the present purposes is that both on individual and general levels, the four communication conditions above have striking implications for how it is possible to strengthen communicative organizational cultures.
Create a culture that better serves its employees by adapting your communication to your team and operations. When you keep in touch with your employees on their terms, you can identify and meet their needs more effectively.
If some of your team members miss out on your messaging, look for channels that meet them where they are. By offering its weekly touchpoint in three different formats, Warby Parker ensures that employees get updates in ways they understand.
In this way, workplace culture and communication become well aligned. Compare the performance of different newsletter formats to see what delivery method your employees prefer. ContactMonkey surveys let you ask your team about their schedule and communication styles. That way, you can design information around their needs. For more ideas, read our blog post on company culture questions to ask in your next employee survey. Internal communication becomes an even more important part of when changing your company culture.
Successful companies across a variety of industries rely on effective communication to overcome times of change or crises and maintain a culture of trust:. ContactMonkey makes it easy to provide frequent and consistent updates with intuitive newsletter creation and email scheduling.
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