This text analyzes the problems of internal and external communication and corporate image, taking as a starting point the new global economic paradigm and establishing a relationship with the new management models in the field of Human Resources.
INTRODUCTION
Communication (the famous act of sharing) plays a fundamental role in the development of any human interaction, especially when its field of action is limited to work activity, where messages must be "read" with a minimum of distortion to achieve efficient performance.
Let no one confuse what has been said with an exaltation of Shannon's Information Theory or with a behavioral conception of communication: any such reductionism would be easily discredited exposing the inevitable asymmetry that exists between encoding and decoding. Much less do I claim "clean interactions": misunderstanding is almost the quintessence of communication, to the point of having to deal as a rule (and not as an exception) with "systematically distorted communications".
Simply put, man - as the Italian semiologist Umberto Eco affirms - is a being that navigates the open waters of meaning and not a machine that transmits information. The complexity of human communication prevents us from keeping hope of developing in a world of "perfectly transparent communications".
For this reason, when I speak of efficient communications, I will do so thinking of a universe that overcomes the close analogy «communication = transmission of information», to situate myself in a framework of action that, aligning itself with the objectives of the company, does not ignore that the The impact of any communication campaign is, to a large extent, indeterminable.
But "indeterminable" does not mean "random". Emmanuel Kant maintains that the will does not define the results because it has as a limit to its realization both the world of nature and the will of the other. In an extension from phenomenology - and while design is a poetic discipline, a fruit of action - the body also limits from practice to the will. But without entering too much into a fruitful philosophical discussion, the communicational efficacy that is intended to be achieved through rational foreshadowing, can never be guaranteed before being put into practice, despite which it should not renounce «design» as an attempt to anticipate and control the meaning and its effect (s).
From the subject and the object (meaning resides in both, or rather, we assign meaning but not regardless of what the thing is) the feared polysemy (not to be confused with pluralism) does not play against planning. On the contrary, organizations need to perceive the complexity involved in the action of "communicating" so that they finally assign the value that it really has and entrust its management (in truth, the attempt to direct reading within the projected limits orienting the decoding towards a preferred meaning) to a professional. This may seem like a truism, but there is still no clear business awareness in Argentina about the importance and value of having good internal and external communications.
NEW ECONOMY
At present, every line of communication management must account for the changes that have occurred in society (baptized as the information and knowledge society) in recent years, paying special attention to the fact that the economic model transferred its way of weighing the value: from quantitative to qualitative, from tangible to intangible. A sign of these times, as the image consultant Norberto Chaves well illustrates, is that the traditional scheme of commercial communication in which people talked about the benefits of a product has expired, having to appeal to more "quiet" entities. (like the "brand") in a delicate castling between the value of the product and the value of the company.
What does this mean? I quote Martin Heidegger: «To be, today, is to be-replaceable. The very idea of reparation has become an anti-economic idea. It is essential to every consumer entity that it is already consumed and, in this way, calls for its replacement. Permanence is no longer the constancy of what is transmitted, but the ever-new of permanent change ».
Precisely, in the face of this "permanent change", the corporate image has become, despite its "invisibility", the main asset of companies, but at the cost of forcing them to expand the communication apparatus and project everything that can be support of messages and meaning, such as: graphics, clothing, furniture, labor standards, human relations, etc.
Jean Baudrillard, in his book Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, states that the key to elucidating the new environment that emerged from the Bauhaus (a society that abandons its "metallurgical" property to become "semi-surgical") is to warn that it he went from the production of "products" (with symbolic value in relation to man) to the production of "objects" (with symbolic value in relation to a system of objects), where the latter are no longer a thing or a category but a sense status.
I present these reflections on the status of the object and its relationship with society because I believe that they allow us to begin to draw the lines of a new cartography in the field of communication and design, the main vector of which starts from the concept of image.
Let's look at the Nike case. When faced with the question of what does Nike produce ?, an unsuspecting person could say that it is a manufacturer of sports clothing. At first glance the answer seems correct, but nevertheless it is not. And it is not, because an anachronistic social imaginary still exists about what it means to "produce". Nike produces nothing but "designs", outsourcing the manufacture of its garments to factories distributed in third world countries.
A similar case can be found in the Personal Computers market. Anyone who is moderately familiar with computing will know that both IBM, Compaq and Hewlett Packard PCs have Pentium Intel processors inside them. Everyone's "heart" is the same! So what sets them apart? Well, its extra services, its technical support, its guarantee, its intangible values, its "non-product".
Through these examples, we discover that the object (the message) is not worth what it is but who produces it (emits it), and that the magnitude of a company can no longer be measured by its number of factories or employees, when Just as a country's development is no longer measured by head of cattle or tons of steel produced per year.
Working in internal and external communications requires knowing this reality perfectly so as not to be locked into the productive imagery of the 1930s.
TO COMMUNICATE OR NOT TO COMMUNICATE?
In June 2000 , the Communications Commission of the Human Resources Association of Argentina (ADRHA) carried out an investigation into internal communications. During the same, the employees of different front-line organizations were asked to list what would be the benefits of having good communication:
· 25% mentioned greater efficiency in the task.
· 18% said it would allow the entire organization to be aligned.
· 17% answered that they would streamline internal processes.
· 14% who would create feelings of belonging and motivation.
· And an identical proportion stated that it would improve the working environment, perhaps as a direct consequence of the above.
In sum, the benefits of having good internal communication are concrete benefits and not an extravagance that large multinational companies (and sometimes not even them, as we will see later) allow themselves to achieve ISO certification.
And they are concrete benefits because their risks are real: poor communication harms work: tasks are delayed, duplicated or quality is lost, productivity falls, demotivation and uncertainty grow. Will it be necessary to remember that losing efficiency means losing money ?
Now, is communication a decision? In other words, can companies decide whether they "do" or "don't" internal or external communication?
To answer this question, I will repeat an axiom that appears to the point of exhaustion in any study manual: not communicating also communicates. Why do I insist with something so trite? Because every cliche always prevents the genuine development of meaning and you should not be charmed by the phrases made.
Let us agree that by action or omission things happen, and that just like having a low profile does not mean not having any profile, the worst communications policy is nonexistent since there is always - and very much to our regret - communication.
Therefore, it is totally wrong to classify organizations among those that:
· They " do " internal and / or external communication.
· They " do not " internal and / or external communication.
The correct thing is that all organizations "make" communication, differentiating between those that:
· They actively plan their communications.
· They are left to chance or to a deceptive silence.
Although it seems merely conceptual, the difference is not. The most curious thing is that although all organizations communicate - whether professed or not - very few capitalize on this already existing resource in favor of their interests, or worse, they aggravate the situation by falling into a contradiction between what they say and what they say. they really do.
It may seem strange that the following should be warned from this position, but I believe that critical consciousness must prevail because it is the only conscience that is valid: we must end the communicational utopia of thinking that all problems are communication problems per se and that once resolved everything will work properly. The truth is that when the culture of the organization does not function as a pillar, they end up fatally facing the dimensions of identity (what the company is), communication (what the company says it is) and image (what the client internal or external believes that the company is).
In addition, every message is worth for what it says and who says it, but also for everything that surrounds it, for its meta-communicative level. Nobody escapes that visual communication is a necessary and essential tool because our society increasingly develops the initial skills of an audiovisual culture, of a hommo videns.
But it should not be overlooked either that human communication works at various levels of abstraction and that it is absolutely necessary that these levels coexist without contradictions. For example, there is no point in me reading "Our company cares about the opinion of its employees: Take part in the internal climate survey", if the slogan is posted behind a hallway door, twisted and stained.
Beware: messages that contradict each other not only cancel themselves, they play against.
URBI ET ORBI
It is difficult to say why internal communications fail in globalized companies. Each organization is a particular world and it is not convenient to generalize from a particular case. However, I consider that if the experiences do not become a ready-to-wear intellectual corset they can be shared without any risk - bad despite the inductivists.
Throughout my work experience, I was able to notice something that may seem obvious, but was nevertheless systematically overlooked: communications - especially internal ones - are not effective when typed in from a foreign headquarters.
I think that this could be solved by incorporating a professional in charge of adapting the "global" messages to the "local" culture of each country. Something like a "glocalization" of communication. Unfortunately, this doesn't even apply to something as "intimate" as the intranet.
The truth is that I had to witness how management reduced internal communication to the act of receiving from the postman the cardboard tubes that came from the United States, unrolling the posters that came inside and sticking them on the billboards. The only mediation that existed was to put bedbugs or tape. I like to call this intellectual laziness "the copy and paste syndrome" and it comes hand in hand with the idea of "unique, perfect and universal communication" and the ideological fallacy that the apologists of the "Global Village" proclaim.
Therefore, in order not to fall into the trap, the first step is to understand that globalization does not mean saying the same thing to everyone, but to preserve meaning by adapting the form to the idiosyncrasies of the recipients, who are always active and consciously decode and unconsciously messages following their own cultural, ideological and psychological patterns.
I could continue to fray the causal rope, but I would find the same threads: communications - to be effective and not to become a boomerang - must be coordinated and designed by professionals.
By way of closing, I am going to tell you an anecdote that, without a doubt, is a magnificent example of how the lack of suitability can absurdly and dangerously ridicule the image of a large company in the context of global communications.
The fact, more detail, less detail, was as follows: frightened by the millionaire judgment that an employee in the US made, the company's headquarters launch a global campaign for all its subsidiaries in the world against “harassment sexual". Immediately afterwards, the famous cardboard tubes arrive at the Buenos Aires office and, as usual, the posters are unrolled and pasted behind the doors. The following month a small entourage of Americans came up to explain what situations could be considered and penalized for "sexual harassment", demonstrating, among other things, that there is nothing more hypocritical than puritan morality and that face-to-face communication is not the balm for all ills.
Can anyone think that an Argentinian takes seriously that touching a woman's shoulder is reason enough to be denounced for sexual harassment? And with this I am not fomenting a "rebellion", because of course any subsidiary of the company that is must obey the directives and labor norms of the headquarters. But it reveals not only a sovereign intellectual myopia, but also a total lack of common sense, that no one has tried to adapt (not just interpolate) that content to idiosyncrasy, I do not say Argentina, but at least "Latin".
For Americans, touching a woman's shoulder is offensive, but for a culture like ours it is not. Does that mean we are all sexual stalkers? Of course not. We only have different cultural codes because we are (fortunately) different.
But when a Human Resources department is reduced to being a mere administrative-bureaucratic office to settle salaries and control absenteeism, talking about proxemics becomes an arduous and useless task.
Going back to the issue of sexual harassment, the results are ilative: of course no one paid any attention to the campaign and everyone took the talks (even the bosses themselves!) As a waste of time and idiocy.
Just as success does not follow from merit, clumsiness does not follow from error, but from knowing beforehand that what is done is a mistake and doing nothing to avoid it. But mistakes serve to learn from them and, in this particular case, to reinforce some basic knowledge: think globally, always work locally.
Of course, fitness is the cornerstone to face the activity.
Even in something as "simple" as communication.
