DMR: Although many companies give plenty of lip service to the importance of employee communication, employee surveys regularly present a negative picture of this subject. The result is apparently that employees lose interest in corporate information completely. Why? What is generally the crux of employee communication?

A. von Butler: I have observed that there is often little or no relationship between the employees’ experience of their companies and the picture drawn by the management and presented in in-company media. The lack of credibility of the internal communication, and the resulting disappointment felt by the employees lead to them privately distancing themselves from it, yet at the same time feeling poorly informed. This, I believe, is due to the way in which many companies deal with employee communication. On the one hand, they use traditional marketing communication mechanisms; on the other, they assume that “inward public relations” is what is needed. This leads to the internal media concentrating on success stories and glossy messages. Managers only make critical or negative statements when they can be directly related to a solution or a call for action.   

DMR: The term “information overload” is heard repeatedly in connection with new media. What relevance does this term have in the context of this discussion – both for the employees and from the management’s point of view?   

A. von Butler: What is interesting is that the same employees and managers state in employee surveys that they are poorly informed, then turn around and complain about the flood of information. If both statements are taken seriously, the logical conclusion is that the problem of lack of information would not even be solved if all the e-mails and the piles of paper in the in-trays were consistently being dealt with. This is simply because the information required by the employees and management is not to be found in these piles. Two main questions arise here: what is information, and what is communication? I often see these two terms being used synonymously in organizations. Here the assumption is that the receiver decides whether something is information – i.e., if it adds something to what is already known. In contrast, communication is the only way in which we humans can interact, whereby – according to Heinz von Förster – the misunderstanding in communication is the rule rather than the exception. The term communication is ­derived from the Latin word “communicare”. It means “to share, inform, involve, do together, unite“. From this we can extrapolate what communication should really be about in organizations: the establishment of a valid, common basis for beneficial co­operation throughout all hierarchical levels. Here the individuals are like human cells – each of them has its own individual and widely differing function, and a nervous system links them together so that they can jointly achieve the implementation of a common and unified idea.