Those of us who work in communication often say that well-managed internal communication enables the spirit of belonging of the staff to be enhanced. This is so, there are many cases that demonstrate it.
However, it is also true that happily launching this statement can be somewhat reckless when considering the prevailing labor mobility, where "making a career" is an anachronism, something that belongs to a past lost on a horizon that is no longer seen. "Feeling part of an organization" is an emotion that is struck in its two pillars: companies set rapid rates of entry-exit and people do not take root, either because they do not give them time to do so or because they no longer directly interested in doing it.
As we often point out, the strongest communication is that which takes place through action. For example, providing training to staff is a way of saying: I want to give you seeds so that they bear fruit. But when the vision is short-term, companies do not invest in "giving knowledge" to people who may be here today and tomorrow on the opposite side. There is simply no time to wait for the fruits.
Where does this culture of vertigo come from? Do people enter a company with the idea of leaving as soon as they can or do companies take them with the idea of quickly renewing them? The answer for now perhaps borders more on the analysis of consequences than of causes. There is a set of vicious communicating glasses: I do not give you because I think you are going to leave and you want to leave because you think that I do not give you because I want you to leave. In any case, and in order to separate the waters, I believe that the company has tools so that this circle does not become a balloon and explode. One of them is internal communication, which does not ask staff to "have a sense of belonging", but rather gives good reasons for this feeling to arise.
Now, belonging is built when you adhere to an identity, when you choose to be part of an “us”. But what identity does work build today? In principle, an identity questioned in its essence: we are all modifiable and it is a condition of survival to constantly remake one's perceptions of oneself. Today you work “on something”, but tomorrow you must have a “waist” and the ability to adapt to work on something else. Work challenges us, both when practicing it and when trying to think it. Man is not a worker in society but is, as many gurus on the subject describe it, a "sole proprietorship", a "I SA".
Of course, this new reality has both baptism and burial. We can speak of a flexible man, but also of one who does not have time to meet the other, socialize, form a memory, learn and share common codes, integrate, communicate. A man whose action is strained by the speed and deterritorialization of his symbolic worlds, a tension that rips him from the social fabric and turns him into someone who does not walk but circulates, who does not communicate but connects. The madness of speed, as José Pablo Feinmann points out, annihilates temporality and that is why the phrase most often heard is "I don't have time".
The territory is lost because circulation is mandatory. This is new? I quote a speech that Martin Heidegger gave in 1955: “the loss of the roots of the man of today is not simply caused by external circumstances and destiny, nor does it reside only in the negligence and superficiality of the way of life. The loss of roots comes from the spirit of the time in which we all had to be born. ”
In this spirit of the time the key is not to stand still, change, move, hello and bye. Everything must be continuous: training, innovation and communication (as we will see later). The water and sun that allowed the seed to grow and take root, are replaced in this new electronic nursery by energy drinks that cause effects considered positive and desirable for this culture: excitement, nervousness, tachycardia, insomnia and tension.
Dizzying communication
What about internal communication in an environment marked by constant doing, undoing and redoing, where sociability dances to the rhythm of uprooting and mobility? First, it mutates. It mutates towards shapes and tools that have the same rhythm and dynamics. If life is dizzying, communication is dizzying, and the electronic media provide the agility necessary to send information flows and maintain the connection beyond time and border, but at the same time they erase the human and experiential dimension of communication and They open distances, like when two colleagues with desks a meter away choose to "talk" to each other all day by e-mail.
Can we still think about internal communication from a human dimension or are we limited to working with fragments of mobile, diverse, sporadic subjects? How to recover a global perspective of communication in the company when what is at stake is a new sensitivity? It is enough to have an attentive ear to write down which words gain ground (flows, connections, networks) and which lose value (encounter, understanding, listening).
As we pointed out paragraphs ago, today the form is in continuous movement. Communication must also be continuous and this causes that there is no "sharing" but a flood of information. In many communication audits, it is discovered that the staff considers the information they receive to be “not very relevant” but highlights the constant flow. Words abound, but they have less and less value, and, as revealed by the last investigation we carried out in the Organizational Communication Commission of the Human Resources Association of Argentina, people ask for more personal “means” (meetings, meetings, talks) and less electronic.
It is difficult to structure a communication plan when the identity is no longer clear and the roots are not strong. When the scenarios for the future are enigmatic (this is the pulse of this time: the enigma.), When there is a structural expansion of anonymity and people are released from the obligation of having to exchange a word, or, as Jesús Martín would say Barber, when there is a substitution of communicative interaction for informational textuality. It is difficult to share when an "I SA" and not a "We SA" is proclaimed.
What to do in front of this panorama? Taking hold of nostalgia does not seem constructive (and in my case it is impractical because I am less than 30 years old and this is the only world I know). An idea of "past time-better time" leads to a pessimism that prevents understanding why the clock is running faster now than before, why speed killed time. What we can do is take note of the spirit of the time to know what are the new ways of living and narrating what is experienced within a company, the ways of being and feeling together, of socializing and therefore of communicating and express ourselves.
