Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2015

Good Inside, Showed on the Outside? When Internal Communication Tools Turn Collaborators Into Lifelong Ambassadors

Résumé

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the following economic crisis, the relationship between internal public and management has become more complex. The tension is palpable in companies facing repeating redundancy plans and new management scheme with the objective to increase productivity and reduce costs. These complex internal situations has been leading to dramas and crisis: suicides waves for the French telephone company Orange or the Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, or massive strikes like the recent fast-food workers strike in USA or even the French Air France’s and German Lufthansa’s pilots strikes. In some case, these crisis stroke companies or categories of workers who do not have a tradition to strike, perhaps wrongfully seen as docile or as privileged employees. Nonetheless, the current economic situation has changed the perception of the employment market for a lot of collaborators. While facing unemployment or more rigid management structures, collaborators’ expectations, proneness to organize and to protest have also changed. For instance, social networks and blogs are more and more used to organize resistance to change management or even to denounce unfair internal process. But, internal public can also show to be a force when facing crisis. Employees can defend the company on social network in case of a “bad buzz”, they are often the front line of customer satisfaction and in some cases can even play a role in more complex communication strategies. Recently, the French government decided to revoke the right to open Sundays for hardware store. Following these new regulations, “spontaneous” workers movements – “Sunday Handymen”, or “Yes Week-end” – decided to protest to defend hardware store employees’ right to work on Sundays. The movement led the French government to re-evaluate its position on the issue. Later, numerous newspaper showed that the movement was in fact a successful influence campaign uniting hardware stores and their employees with the help of a Parisian PR company - Les Ateliers Corporate. Internal public can therefore be seen as dual. Their ability to be both a threat and an ally in the communication and influence strategies of companies, exceed their traditional position and thus recall new and innovative communication tools, or at least to rejuvenate traditional tool which can then contribute to successful and effective communication strategies. In this paper we aim to analyze different communication tools – internal magazines, internal social networks – and their different uses in constitutive organization communication practices, from sharing information to turning employees into ambassadors. We focused our research on two large corporations facing similar major changes in their organization structures, EDF and GDF Suez. Both originally French public owned companies have been forced by European market regulators to open their capital to private investors. In addition, these two energy providers and producers who once used to have a closed market, are now facing a rapidly growing competition in their sectors. This changes led them to modify their internal management structures as well as the traditional “work culture” within the company, from public service uses to private sectors practices. In this context, new editorial policies of internal magazines as well as new internal social networks were developed not only to facilitate the change management process but also to promote organization’s reputation as an employer and as service providers. Our methodology involved critical discourse analysis and semiotic analysis of internal magazines, as well as interviews with actors in charge of internal social networks implementation processes. First we analyzed more than fourteen issues of Vivre EDF, EDF’s internal magazine and twelve issues of Horizon, GDF Suez’s internal magazine. Interestingly, Vivre EDF is also available as a mobile application but also for the general audience through EDF corporate websites. These new forms of accessibility and diffusion of magazine question the role of such an “internal” magazines when accessible to the public. We conducted several interviews with actors responsible of the implementation of internal social networks as well as internal communication experts involved. First conclusions of this research in progress allowed us to understand the growing challenge of turning employees into ambassadors, especially when companies are confronted to complex market contexts and major internal changes. Internal magazines therefore seems a good but still limited storytelling medium to instill corporate messages as well as to promote and diffuse the company’s narratives. Nevertheless, if many actors perceive the potential benefits of internal social networks, a lot of interviewed foresee potential risks and tension, inherited of previous situations or current changes. The fear that Union could also “hijack” such tools and turn them to their advantage has also been mentioned. Thus, we see the interest of accompanying managers in the long term to turn them into active users and actors of a more collaborative structures, in which the social network can be play a decisive role. Nonetheless, the existence of a community manager serving internal communication strategies has also to be taken into account. We hope that this research can contribute to both researchers exploring internal communication evolutions and similarly to practitioners and experts in change management and constitutive communication.

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  • HAL Id : hal-02094691 , version 1

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François Allard-Huver. Good Inside, Showed on the Outside? When Internal Communication Tools Turn Collaborators Into Lifelong Ambassadors. International Communication Association’s 65th Annual Conference – Puerto Rico 2015,, May 2015, Porto Rico, Puerto Rico. ⟨hal-02094691⟩
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