Every year the communications team that I work with does a communication effectiveness study of the whole Supply Chain Organization (the function that I work in within the larger company). We carry this out not only to understand if the messages we are sending are being received and understood but also how the organization communicates best. Are they more receptive to email newsletter, face to face interaction, video, shared web spaces? We try to understand it from to sides, from what we are currently doing to communicate and how we can better communicate in the future. This study consists of focus groups first where 4 -5 groups of 10 meet with the researched and they have a more open discussion. From this focus group and input from others in the team we create a survey that is sent out to all of the members of Supply Chain. It is a accompanied by an email from the SVP requesting participation. We take the results very seriously. We have a meeting once they have all been analyzed and discuss what when wrong with past communications and how we can change our practices so that we do not see the same problem the next year. I have found it incredibly enlightening to study the communications that we send and also how the organization is communicating. It is so valuable to get that insight and understanding.
2 comments:
Wow, it's impressive that your organization puts in the time and effort to go through this process. It's also very nice that everyone takes it seriously and actually completes the process by having meetings and going through the results. Often organizations do these things just because they "should do them" without actually using the information. I think it would be interesting to also compare results from prior years to see what changed and what the reason for this change was. I would also imagine that there are some things that there are some results that are quite consistent every year. I think this is a great of analyzing the effectiveness of communication and it's even more valuable because the resulting data is actually used to make improvements.
It was very interesting to read your blog on how people working in the field of communication actually apply concepts learned in the communication classes in school. I personally work as an engineer, but we use long-distance communication on almost a daily basis, since our company is a global player and we have sites all over the world, including Europe and Asia. We have to video conference a lot, and only seldom get to meet people we work with in person. This can make matters a bit difficult because although there is great benefit in video conferencing and other modern communication technologies, there is nothing quite as clarifying as a face-to-face conversation.
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