Sonsoles Lumbreras
Following on my series of guest writers for Diary of an internal communicator, comms student Sonsoles Lumbreras has written an article as she is appealing for help.
Sonsoles is currently researching her dissertation and has worked for a number of years in PR, she studied Journalism at the European School of Economics in Rome and is now at Kingston University in London studying Corporate Communication. She has written in the form of a letter. If you are able to help her, please do get in touch. Her contact info is below.
Over to you Sonsoles…
Hello Internal Communications practitioners, my name is Sonsoles Lumbreras and I am a Corporate Communications student at Kingston University, currently working on my MA dissertation. I am researching the use of new media in the workplace, especially when communicating change to employees.
It is becoming more common for companies to incorporate the use of media such as Twitter, Facebook, Skype or blogs in the workplace. Some of the benefits of using these media to communicate with employees can be the increase of collaboration between employees, the enhancement of the company’s image, employee engagement and feedback created through these channels. Telefonica, O2, IBM, Virgin Media and HP are just some examples of companies who have used these media with success in their communication with employees.
On the other hand, the communication of organisational changes to employees is a fundamental issue for companies, to the extent that the success of many organisational changes lies in how they are communicated. Thus, it is fundamental to choose the right media and methods to communicate in every stage of the change process, in order to avoid the employees’ resitsance to the change. It seems that making employees part of the change process can help them to accept it. And here is where new media can play an important role, due to easy feedback generation and involvement features.
In order to acquire a solid understanding of how companies are using new media to communicate with employees and to what extent these media are used to communicate in any of the stages of an organisational change, I would like to interview several Internal Communications practitioners in the UK. It would only take 30 minutes of your time and it could be on the phone or face-to-face, any date in June or July. This is to help me research my dissertation – can you help?
I hope some of you are able to give me some of your valuable time please to share your knowledge and experiences about this issue with me.
Many thanks to Rachel for allowing me to publish this post on her blog and thank you all for taking the time to read it, Sonsoles.
Thanks Sonsoles. Are you a comms professional who would be willing to have a chat to help with her research? The invitation is to both in-house and agency-side professionals. If so, please do get in touch: Sonlumbreras@yahoo.com or you can find her on LinkedIn.
Post author: Sonsoles.
