Let's imagine the following scene (I swear it never happened to me!): A willing man talks to a businessman and tells him about the benefits of applying a communication plan or action in his company.
Then, he turns on his computer and begins to show him some colorful slides (designed with great care in Power Point) in which he explains the characteristics of the project, the completion times, and so on. At the second or third film the businessman takes it from the lapels of his suit and staring at him says: "Yes, yes, everything very nice Mr. Formanchuk, but… how much money am I going to earn from this?" End of story.
Approaching communication from a business perspective (necessary, by the way) means navigating the waters of calculation. However, many of the actions carried out by any organization on a daily basis are far from being accurately quantified and are not, therefore, valuable or important. Furthermore, can human actions be analyzed in dichotomous gain / loss terms? Consider, for example, what a person who divorces their spouse loses. Half of your assets? Just that? Or let's think about what motivates us to start a job, just the check we receive at the end of the month? And if so, wouldn't we like that not to be our only incentive? "Yes, yes, all very nice what you say Mr. Formanchuk, but… how much money am I going to earn from this?"the businessman repeats without letting go of our lapels and dangerously putting his hands close to our neck.
Let's look at it this way. How much money can a company that "renounces" communication lose? Much, little, nothing? What if a human resources director forbade you from exchanging messages for a month to all employees in your office? I sense that nothing good… you?
But it is not necessary to take such a drastic measure in order to "quantify" the effects. Suppose we have, on the one hand, an employee who is not informed of what is expected of him, who is not explained what the company's plans are for the coming year, who is not listened to or whose ideas are valued and suggestions, it is not integrated into a shared culture; and, on the other hand, an employee who is provided with all of the above… who do you suppose will have a better job performance? The employee that we treat as a full and intelligent person or the one that we force to close in on himself?
But let's go back to the numbers: with the year-end balance sheet in hand, is it possible to determine what percentage of that gain (or loss) is linked to the “communication” variable? It is certainly very difficult to do so. But be careful, this difficulty is not an excuse, it is only a characteristic that we must take into account so as not to lose energy in unprofitable tasks.
Does this mean that it is impossible to measure in monetary terms the impact of communication on the company? Of course not. Invite the business manager of a fast food chain to say publicly that the meat they use for their burgers is rodent and you will see how easy it is to get accounts. But beyond the effective translation that communication can have in constant and sound money, it is about understanding the dimension of "non-linearity".
Nonlinearity
I concede that communication is intangible, which does not mean that it is not real. Communication, as an essence and beyond its physical support, is impalpable, but its results are not. The point is that these results are not always obvious, nor are they tied to a principium causalitatis or cause and effect principle. That is, it is complex to isolate the variables and establish direct relationships of the type "I edit a house organ or internal magazine, ergo productivity increases by 25%".
But why can't the relationship be like this? Let me probe this epistemological limit from the analysis of research methods. Generally speaking, when you do research, you do nothing but test a hypothesis. In our case, we propose to measure the economic benefit of an internal communication plan and we start from the hypothesis that good communication will improve employee productivity. So, as a second step, we identify the variables that intervene in our research: on the one hand, an independent variable (communication) that will be responsible for the changes of the other variable, called dependent (productivity). This simply implies establishing a causal relationship between both dimensions:if we "improve" or "worsen" communication (independent variable), it will supposedly "raise" or "lower" productivity (dependent variable).
However, the first requirement to carry out the investigation is to isolate and neutralize any foreign and foreign variable to the aforementioned. Therefore, we have to make sure that the variations in "productivity" are the exclusive result of the modifications we make to the "communication" variable. But… is it possible to control the strange variables? In our case there is a material impossibility of isolating ourselves from the environment and therefore the difficulty of demonstrating quantitatively (read: in monetary terms) the benefits of internal or external communication.
Let's see it with an example: suppose that over a period of time we carry out a series of actions tending to improve communication in a factory and that to measure its impact we analyze the indicator "presenteeism or attendance index" because we consider that if there is better communication there is better internal climate and people are more eager to come to work. There is no denying that this indicator will change its values throughout our study, but can we be sure that the presenteeism or attendance rate was higher this month because we applied the communications plan or because this month, for example Did it rain less days than the previous one? Or perhaps we find that the absenteeism rate rose 35% and that is because during the month in which we carried out the investigation, the price of the train or bus ticket increased.
In short, our field is essentially permeable to all kinds of influences, both cultural, social, economic, psychological, and even meteorological. This, which at first glance may seem like a disadvantage, is nothing more than a characteristic that demonstrates the happy complexity that still surrounds the human being and his actions.
Perhaps the “problem” of wanting to measure everything (the famous pantometry typical of modern Western culture) is not so serious if we manage to avoid the linear perspective and the temptation to want to establish a causal relationship between variables that are difficult to isolate. Perhaps, instead of seeing the following concatenation as a straight line (better communication = less conflict = better internal climate = less absenteeism = higher productivity), it would be more useful to approach it as a set of variables that mutually influence each other from a complexity systemic and dynamic.
But attention, I reiterate that I do not intend to imply that we must renounce the legitimate right to want to evaluate the results of any communication action that we carry out. It is only my intention to warn that this evaluation does not necessarily have to be quantitative and that it is not always possible or necessary to respond with numbers to the businessmen who take us by the lapels (and I swear again that something like this never happened to me!).
Bibliography
Bosco, C.; Notes on the experimental and correlational method; Mimeo; Bs.As.; 1990.
