Imagine a boat docked in a port . Four people get on board with four oars. A fifth person, without an oar, is the one who has the map to guide them along the way. Once the boat sets sail, each person rows in the direction they want and the guide, for his part, pays no attention to the direction and direction the boat takes. The result? Possibly anything you can imagine except one, the most important one: reaching the destination .
Something similar happens when there is a lack of internal communication . Without it, it is practically impossible for all members of the organization to go in the same direction , towards the company's own objective. The strength of the team will be relegated, and the initial objectives will end up being overshadowed . That is where its importance lies. But the best thing is to know the types that exist and, from there, establish guidelines to improve internal communication in the company. Shall we begin?
Vertical communication in all its variants
I have worked for years in the publishing world, specifically in the marketing and communications department. Many companies in the sector complained precisely about this: there are days when books are presented and the employees find out about the event through the press, instead of learning about it from their own company . In fact, I know of cases where the entire marketing department was at the event and if a journalist called the company to ask for some information, the administrative person in charge of answering the phone might say something like “Presentation? What presentation? Nobody told us anything about that . ”
There is a second case: a restaurant opens its doors, and right on the opening day, the team tells their superior that they cannot stand the working conditions and much less that they should life insurance email list be moved to a new location. And with that, they decide to leave, without further ado, leaving the manager alone to face the new presentation. "But nobody told me anything, nobody told me about their situation," he laments, now that it is too late.
In both cases we are dealing with specific cases of failures in vertical internal communication . The first, descending, could be called the one that originates in the managers and ends in the workers. In general, its purpose is to inform, roughly speaking, of the company's objectives and the tasks to be carried out to achieve them.
The form of communication can be official (with rules, procedures, etc.) and unofficial, with the exchange of ideas, opinions, conversations between different work teams, etc. It does not consist of many people talking to each other, in an annual meeting. It is something more: it means structuring the communication so that anyone in the organization can get a response . That no one is left out of what is done and what is going to be done. It also consists of clarity and transparency . Returning to the subject of objectives, a "we expect more from you" will not be enough. It is necessary to mark exactly what is expected of the worker so that, when a final assessment is made, a resolution can be established as objective as possible . That is, as long as it is feasible.