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PP 397
Sense Facilitators: Important Internal Agents for Realizing Strategy Processes within the Communicative Organization
R. Andersson
1
1
Lund University, Department of Strategic Communication, Helsingborg, Sweden
In an attempt to identify how public relations and communication management can contribute value to organizations (Global Alliance, 2012), the PR and
communications confederation Glob-al Alliance initiated the report Melbourne mandate. The report is an attempt to pinpoint the communicative orga‑
nization, a concept explaining how communication practitioners working in organizations should work in order to create organizational value. However,
research that target what members actually do is rare. An exception is the new research project Communicative or-ganizations conducted by scholars at
the Department of Strategic Communication, Lund Univer-sity, in which the author is a member. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the knowledge
of what members actually do within a communicative organization, rather than what they should do which is suggested by the practi-tioner initiative Mel‑
bourne Mandate (Global Alliance, 2012). The research question of the paper is: what do communication professionals do when they work strategically with
communication? This paper will discuss one aspect of what communication professionals do within a communi-cative organization. The paper introduces
the concept sense facilitation and illustrates how communication professionals makes the strategy more explicit to organizational members by facilitating
sense in everyday social interactions. Sense facilitation is the intentional facilitation of meaning that conscious communication professionals do when fa‑
cilitating the communication processes entangled in daily work activities like meetings, projects et cetera. Strategy is not something an organization create
and then have for members to execute. It continually needs to be translated and interpreted into the daily processes at different levels in the organization,
from the individual to the institutional (Golsorkhi, Rouleau, Seidl, & Vaara, 2015), and from top management to staff at lower levels. It is in these processes
that sense facilitation is important. Within strategic management research, an area that has influenced scholars within strategic communication, there has
been a shift towards more in-depth analysis of what organizational members actually do when working strategically, and this can be linked to the general
'practice turn” within the social sciences (Golsorkhi et al., 2015). Within strategic communication, Bulgacov and Marchiori (2015; 2012) has taken a more
practice oriented approach to strategic communication to show how the perspective can be used to gain insights into the communicative practice within
organizations. The paper uses theories of strategy-as-practice (Jarzabkowski & Paul Spee, 2009; Vaara &Whittington, 2012), sensemaking and sensegiving
(Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Smircich & Morgan, 1982; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005) and CCO (Kuhn & Schoeneborn, 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2014) as
its theoretical framework, and argues that the concept of sense fa-cilitating captures the ongoing, multidirectional process of facilitation that communica‑
tion pro-fessionals engage in to improve processes in the communicative organization. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews from an ini‑
tial pre-study with ten communication professionals in two public organizations in Sweden, and approximately 20 qualitative interviews conducted with
members of ten large public and private organizations in Sweden, carried out within the research project Communicative organizations during spring 2016.
PP 398
Dealing with Communicative (Dis)Continuity via Internal Social Media. Critical Results of Online Surveys Among 500 German
Companies 2013–16
H. Sievert
1
, L. Lipp
2
, C. Scholz
2
1
Macromedia University, Head of Media School, Cologne, Germany
2
Macromedia University, Media School, Cologne, Germany
1. SHORT INTRODUCTION: In modern society and business life, discontinuity is not the exception, but the normal case. Therefore, the crisis of continuity is
very notable in internal corporate communications. This part of the organisational communication has e. g. to build up common values, corporate identity
and support economic goals. But how to do all that with a sense of continuity in a situation of discontinuity? Theoretically, one possible answer could be in‑
ternal social media. But when and how do these tools work in reality?What are chances and obstacles perceived in real life?This paper proposes theorectical
reflections and an online survey among German companies on the issue. 2. SELECTED PREVIOUS
LITERATUR:Theborder between internal and external com‑
munication is getting smaller, while the purpose of internal communication grows (cf. Huck-Sandhu, 2016: 1 et seq.). However, especially Enterprise Social
Networks foster employee engagement as they function like a ”social lubricant” (Leonardi, Huysman & Steinfield, 2013, p. 14) that allows bonding social
capital by bridging across departments (cf. p. 15). But still companies do not think of internal Social Media as a systematically relevant aspect of corporate
culture (cf. Petry & Schreckenbach, 2012, p. 41–45). 3. OVERALL METHODOLOGY: Main methodology for this paper was a quantitative semi-representative
online survey with interviewees in different management function (especially communications people and managing directors) in 563 different German
companies in 2016 in comparison also to a preceding study by one of authors with 591 interviewees in 2013. Due to space limitations, the full method‑
ological design cannot be elaborated here, but will in the full paper. 4. FIRST RESULT INSIGHTS: The importance of internal social media within companies
in Germany has nearly doubled 2013 to 2016: instead high or very high usage of this communication type in only 12 percent of German companies, today
21 percent are reached. Low hierarchies are becoming an even more important issue for the acceptance of this type of digital engagement. As a new fact,
strong change resistance is now identified as the most important problem when introducing digital employee engagement via social media. Especially
employees without management tasks are afraid of more control coming with social media. Executives should be role models for the usage of internal Social
Media. More and more people think that there are no risk in using these communication tools. Trust is seen by a very large majority as a (very) important
factor for the successful acceptance of internal social media though only in about one third of the companies this trust is really the case. 5. SHORT CONCLU‑
SION: As a result, internal social media within in companies can be seen as a possible tool to make disparities more understandable for employess – and,
on the long run, even to change a company as a whole into a more dialogical organisation. However, all this can only happen if trust is in stake as a central
cultural factor. In this situation, a creation of communicative continuity is possible even in a very discontinued environment.