Say what we feel, feel what we say. Match the words with life. Seneca Information, knowledge, relationship. Human relationships in any context are based on communication. If we facilitate the mechanisms so that it occurs naturally and, in addition, we make this communication develop in the organization, in an ethical and free climate, we will have taken the first and most important step of how many activities are presented to us in the world business.
Organizations have existed and there is a practical need to influence and motivate their professionals, among other reasons, to achieve production objectives. To achieve this goal, internal communication has traditionally focused its efforts on conventional channels and broadcasters.
Added to this is a greater concern for the information that descends from management to employees (downward communication). We have been able to see its practical translation in results as notice boards, company magazines, internal notes and meetings. On the other hand, the figure of the internal communication department has not been perceived as something fundamental in many companies until recently; The roles of communication managers have been adapted from different curricular profiles until they become a discipline of their own, with a well-defined function and a map of knowledge that supports it. Now we are immersed in a new stage, where the Knowledge Society imposes its rules and makes new communication-related needs emerge: with a new communication.
From our perspective, we present this new internal communication as a fundamental strategy in the organization. Expanding the horizon of internal communication towards the dimension of shared knowledge and human relations constitutes an opening and, above all, a response to the demand and needs of new organizations and the people who build them.
The integration of internal communication elements in daily work activity, together with a firm commitment from the highest levels of management are basic premises that are complemented with adequate technological support and proportionate to our objectives, together with a preparation of the social environment where it will develop. And all the philosophy that frames this new communication has its practical result in the productivity of the company, in the satisfaction of the client, in making it more competitive, more intelligent and flexible; which ultimately contributes to its own survival as an organization. It is a new vision from a humanist paradigm that reduces the difference between what is and what we want our society and our organization to be.
Only the necessary theory.
To begin to draw the map of theoretical knowledge that gives rise to internal communication, we will briefly go back to the original source. We are situated in Athens, 5th century BC. Political decisions are made in the Assembly, which is made up of free citizens, in which they intervene and debate in a similar way to that adopted by current democratic parliaments. Also in litigation and legal cases the decision is made by a very large number of citizens who make up the jury. In both scenarios, in addition to being characterized by a practical absence of politicians and professional judges, the influence exerted on people depends to a great extent on the conviction capacity of the speakers,which makes it especially important to know and use certain communication techniques to be able to influence such important decisions in everyday public life in classical Greece.
What in a world based on oral communication made rhetoric and those who made it a form of communication within an ethical code triumph, we transferred to our current society, to which we add other forms of communication that complement the written word and are supported in physical channels unthinkable just a few decades ago. Already situated in the modern business world, we can affirm that internal communication is inseparable from the productive activity of any organization. This statement takes on specific weight in the management of companies from the incorporation of new organizational and management models.It was not until after the second half of the 20th century that organizations began to consider that this transmission of instructions (downward communication) was not enough and a new field of work began to be analyzed, among which communication was added to the repertoire of skills. directives.
The causes that in a way open a new stage in internal communication can be found in the increase in the union presence, in a framework of relations and socio-labor legislation more favorable to the worker, the increase in academic training in society, in a greater awareness on the part of organizations of what it means to invest in training their staff and, finally, in the new values and beliefs that evolve to a new management paradigm.
Communication in organizations comprises a series of guidelines, norms and style, which reflect the way of doing of the people who make up the company. Such guidelines, norms and style are reflected in models that determine them. In this way, from a positivist approach, based on technical planning originated from industrial engineering models, internal communication would be aimed at controlling and predicting actions in a planned and directed way in advance. In another dimension would be the constructivist approach, of a psychosocial nature, according to which our previous experiences, personal beliefs, motivation and expectations are of vital importance when building our own knowledge, which means that knowledge is built from within of each individual.This is especially important when we treat the teaching-learning relationship beyond concrete aspects and transfer it to attitudes.
In an organization multiple messages are generated that are repeated in the form and even in the content. These redundancies arise from certain implicit norms that synthesize, at a given moment, the weight of traditions and history, the style of command, the type of culture, daily activities, etc. It is in a way a form of mimicry learning, based on the theory of conversation. All this configures its own discourse and its own way of doing things in each company.
Therefore, the organization cannot exist without communication, so that we can also establish that communication cannot happen without the existence of messages, whether they are verbal or not. A new form of analysis of internal communication opens up, which is taking shape more and more, where the message becomes the central axis of organizational communication.
