Imagine walking into your local bank to find out their servers were down. Does the bank still exist? The bank tellers cannot process anything until the enigmatic and all-knowing “system” comes back online, so technically, in the absence of technology, the bank ceases to be a bank. Instead, the bank becomes nothing more than a building with people inside of it – employees who race to get the system back online, and the disgruntled customers for whom other bank employees must communicate with.
Technology has come a long way to become the backbone of modern business. If we think of the origins of the first digital computer, the computer itself was quite literally an object placed in the world. Users had to be specially trained for the computer’s input/output manual process. Fast forward seventy years and the digital computer has been redefined to the extent that no two people in the world use technology the same way. We can also now wear technology on our skin (wearables), underneath our skin (NFC implants), or house a computer in our back pocket (a mobile phone). The evolution of technology is also the evolution of it becoming more and more integrated into our lives.
Organisations are no different in terms of technology being intertwined with employee behaviour, and technology occurring in the background of employee awareness. When an employee sends an email, for example, they do not think of themselves as using a piece of hardware or a piece of software which elicits a transfer protocol across servers. They instead think of themselves as sending a message to another human being. The same analogy can be applied elsewhere, such as making dinner. You read the instructions, do something with the ingredients, and at the end of the process you end up with a cooked meal. The technology involved in the cooking and eating process becomes abstract. The knife you used to cut the meat and veggies is a type of technology, and so is the stove you cooked the meat on. Even if you sit with a fork in your hand and you get a phone call interrupting your meal, you wouldn’t say “I’m holding a fork”, you would say “I’m eating dinner”.
Yet it is a curious thing that a majority of organisational managers continue to view IT and its relationship with employees from two perspectives: firstly, seeing technology as something that can be selected, which automatically translates into certain employee usage, and secondly, seeing technology as something which dictates social employee behaviour – much like the first digital computer which produced specific results. These somewhat outdated views of technology have been widely contested in information systems research, with researchers in this field arguing that modern technology in business does not define employee behaviour – it is employee behaviour which ends up defining the technology.
Interestingly, internal communication (IC) professionals often hold the same view of technology as the organisational managers – seeing technology as a bridging solution for communication between leaders and employees, or seeing technology as something that can be controlled or managed. It is this view of technology which poses the greatest threat to the future of the internal comms profession. There are currently two technical examples which are illustrating the information systems view of technology which, when combined, are enabling the goals of many internal comms practices without the mediation or involvement of a communication team. The two technical things are Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) and cloud computing. More specifically, it is employee uses of ESN in remote work practices (enabled through cloud computing) which poses the threat. Given the internal communication view of technology, it is not surprising that research regarding the IT threats to the profession have fallen under the radar in both IC and PR literature.
ESN and Off-site Work
Prior to the introduction of ESN software (such as Yammer, Communote, Jive and Tibbr), internal communication teams had either control, or a vested interest, in the earlier social media technologies (such as emails, blogs, wikis, and social media intranets). On these social channels, the team could publish and push content to employees, as well as garnish employee feedback or foster an environment where employee voice could take place. On something like ESN, the push-pull, top-down and bottom-up approach to messaging is replaced by a flat structure. Studies have shown that ESN usage makes communication and leadership hierarchy redundant, which in turn increases the likelihood of employee voice to occur in an enterprise-wide dialectical fashion.
The flat structure is enabled through the malleability aspects of ESN software. This means that ESN only becomes meaningful when there’s a network of social users who constantly populate and re-imagine its content. The malleability aspect puts communication and social networking in the hands of the employee, which allows them to create an individualistic and customisable view of their workplace. When partnered with remote or telework practices, which are enabled through cloud computing where information can be shared across people, devices and servers independent of physical employee location, ESN has been shown to become ever-more powerful.
A main reason for this is that ESN can function as the “gateway channel” for employees to stay connected to enterprise systems, organisational content, and to other employees. This usage of ESN is driven by behaviour and not by technical functionality, as there is a psychological need for off-site employees to stay relevant in the digital workplace. Co-workers cannot physically see off-site employees working, so employees in this context work hard to avoid the out-of-sight-out-of-mind stigma. As a method to stay relevant, they use ESN to seek out relevant information, people, and need-to-know business messages. This in turn results in employees being more social and willing to share information across the enterprise network.
Furthermore, ESN in the context of flexible work helps promote employee engagement. By enabling a better work-life balance for employees (in which employees can choose where and when they work), there is incentive for employees to lend their voice to organisational objectives and increase their involvement on the ESN gateway channel.
If employee behaviour surrounding ESN has been shown to:
- empower employee-to-employee communication
- promote networking across different business groups
- increase employee voice and knowledge sharing; and
- increase employee engagement through flexible work practices
How can internal communication professionals compete to stay relevant when technology is enabling the successful result of many IC practices? The self-perpetuating ESN employee activities require no involvement from an internal communication team.
Staying Relevant
To put it bluntly, no one knows exactly how internal communication professionals can stay relevant in the digitally changing world of business. That is to say, the research is not there yet. This could in fact be a good thing as it not only gives professionals the freedom to redefine themselves, but also allows you to learn that the digital evolution of work is not all that peachy. Firstly, the proliferation of content over multiple systems and multiple servers creates an information nightmare; not to mention the security risks associated with such dispersion, as well as a lack of employee awareness for what information is located where and why. Secondly, the digital workplace has a sinister dark side to its practice. If workplaces become increasingly digital, this means employees themselves become digital versions of real people. Does this make an employee seem less than human?
If anything, internal communication professionals can fight to keep the human element in the digital workplace, but this requires professionals to perform a complete overhaul of how they perceive technology. Instead of only reading articles that are coming from the IC or PR space, look instead at the articles coming from the IT and information systems space. A large proportion of these studies talk about how employees use technology and what this means for business and, in turn, employee satisfaction (including engagement).
Furthermore, instead of imposing communication on employees – let it flourish, and focus instead on two key practices: Firstly through leadership education so that leaders can effectively communicate with their employees without the mediation of an IC team; and secondly, by being the experts in knowing how and when employees use technology so that you can see where barriers to work, communication, and engagement may exist. As a short and dirty example, think of a global workforce in today’s digital economy. Each country will have different legislation in relation to cloud computing and data storage laws.
This example deals with issues of knowledge sharing across technologies, as well as communication barriers across languages and cultures – not to mention the communication that would need to take place between IT, HR and Legal to combat these issues. It seems more relevant to put the communication expertise in this space and have internal comms become the voice of the employee. After all, why else has employee engagement become the main driver of IC practices in recent years if not to put the employee at the forefront of business practice?
Whether internal communication professionals like it or not, technology is where the future of work is headed. Employees are going to become more remote in their work, and face-to-face communication is going to decrease. It even seems strange that many non-client facing employees are still required to physically go into an office each and every day when all they do is sit down in front of a computer and spend their day “online”. Many organisations are investigating this very notion. It costs a lot of money to pay rent for office space, and if remote work and ESN can produce better employee results – why wouldn’t organisations want to embrace the future of work?
For internal communication professionals, the digital future of work means performing a complete overhaul of how technology is viewed in relation to where business is headed. This way, IC professionals may be able to redefine their role and stay relevant before the ever-evolving digital workplace views internal communication as a redundant function.
