Communication within organizations

23 April 2020 | By Axovia | COMMUNICATION

Communication within organizations

Every human group works as a micro society. A company is a meeting place, where human interaction happens constantly. It’s a living organism that thinks, acts, generates and cultivates relationships, produces matter, energy and information. And all this happens through the word, the language. In short, through communication.

Homo homini lupus

The phrase "A man is a wolf to another man" was taken up by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes to speak of selfishness in human behavior where the law of the strongest prevails. The business world was for a long time a faithful portrait of this philosophy, where empathy and communication represent a weakness rather than a fundamental value in human relationships.

Even today, at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, there are still people who doubt the "legitimacy" of communication within organizations. They doubt their management, because they consider that there is nothing else to say beyond what they say.

This vision, typical of industrial thought, organized production processes in an assembly line that dehumanizes relationships. People came to be understood as cogs in a machinery that does not know of feelings or subjectivities. Films like Charles Chaplin's "Modern Times" or Fritz Lang's spectacular "Metropolis" masterfully illustrate this alienation.

Fortunately, this form of production organization has begun to crack, with such a rapid pace in recent decades that signs of its decline are already evident.

The new generations take up criticism of industrial organization and propose new ways of approaching organizations, closer to freedom, empathy and emotional well-being.

But what does it really mean to manage communication?

Everything communicates

A good morning, a look, a delay, everything we do and say has a meaning for the people who perceive it.
A company is constantly producing messages, acts that make their way through the network of relationships and communication resources. However, the complexity of human relationships often causes communication to become incommunicado, frustrating the parties involved in the process.

It is important to clearly understand that we are not machines, we are people. And people dream, love and hate. They can make your job either a fun place for development, or a niche of hatred and resentment. If communication is random, or worse, is coerced through authoritarian punishment, the team will probably lean towards the second option.

Managing communication is, in the first instance, recognizing its importance and showing the need to rationally manage human relationships. Not so much because of communication being the goal itself, but as a means to achieve the company’s objectives. Any productive organization starts from this base. To understand it, is to take the first step.

We save ourselves together

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian pedagogue, said: "No one is saved alone, no one saves anyone, we all save ourselves together" Today, the most important companies around the world agree with him.

The new economic system based on technology, information and knowledge, was called as the "new economy". We are in a new era where nothing is linear or punctual anymore, but interwoven, complex, interrelated. The digital world is the realm of the intangible, of signs, symbols, images and values.

This paradigm shift generated new scenarios and challenges for companies that are faced with traditional conceptions, instruments and techniques that have been proven insufficient. In this context, Joan Costa, one of the most outstanding theorists in communication, points out: "The fundamental mission within the company will be to design, organize, conceive and manage communications in their diversity of objectives and techniques"

It is not a whim or an unfounded invention, but the result of a real need experienced by companies. The integral management of communication must be based on the target audiences towards which it is directed. These can be internal, such as collaborators, culture and business identity. Or also external, such as corporate image, brand’s clients, and social responsibility.

All these aspects share two things. On the one hand, a coordination that suggests a certain order through a cycle of research, strategic planning, execution of actions and evaluation of results. On the other hand, a collaborative work team that enhances the actions faced in concrete realities. That is why "we save ourselves together."

Google is undoubtedly one of the ideal cases. It is a private company, yes, but its way of managing communication has made it one of the most important companies in the world. Google has shown that well-motivated groups work with greater commitment and efficiency than a team driven by resentment.

This is not an awakening of consciousness in the business world, nor is it about new strategic tools to control people. The world has changed and companies that do not know how to adapt to the new times will end up disappearing.

By Axovia

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