VITarSS is an acronym I created to help focus the efforts of business communication during change processes, initial organizational design, and facilitating communication in the truest sense of the word. Too often, small and mid-sized businesses are functioning in communication like a large corporation. Confused communication plans, entrenched managers, inflexible processes and procedures, but worst of all, sending communication and employing statistics to measure adherence. It is time and past time to stop using statistics to replace actual voices for customers, especially internal customers, in business processes. This post is the introduction to VITarSS; coming shortly will be examples of how poor communication creates problems and how employing VITarSS would have helped the situation.
When considering organizational communication, several elements need to come together to create communication with power. These elements include: value, imagination, targeted audience, specific purpose, and significance for the audience and business as a whole, (VITarSS). Value: This refers to the receiver answering the concern, “Will the communication be valuable to me personally?” If not, value in the communication is lost and the sender fails to communicate. Knowing the audience remains key to building value; asking the audience what they want, the channel or mode they prefer, and what leaders can do to improve communication, helps to customize the communication experience. A desire to build value through knowing the audience and communicating in the same language style is critical to building value. Yet, communicating in the audience’s language often is perceived as condescending or paternalistic if verbs and tenses are not similar. Translating into the audience’s language occurs when leaders are engaged in listening and asking clarifying questions. Value builds when standards in sending and receiving same channel, two-directional messages improve.
Imagination: Communication should never settle for something that has previously worked well or worked well for another organization or department. This is the “lazy man’s” method to organizational communication. Imagination does not refer to marketing gimmicks and sales techniques or silly games to garner interest. Imagination refers to relying upon human-to-human knowledge transfer processes. Girdauskienė and Savanevičienė (2007) offer useful advice on the processes of knowledge transference by insisting upon the principles VITarSS is based upon. For example, when a problem is realized, listen to potential solutions, imagine them at work, maybe beta-test a couple, but keep imagining the future and communicate the future to solve the problem.
Targeted: Targeted communication, especially when moving mass amounts of data, requires a personal touch. Specificity and knowledge combine to send and receive knowledge on a topic. In many ways, targeted communication remains similar to the United States Postal Service (USPS), massive amounts of data transferred to targeted destinations in small little packets to and from senders and receivers to meet communication standards; regardless of whether the message is a poster, an email, a face-to-face, etc., target the communication specifically to that audience. Even when a person receives 100 packets of information, the communication is targeted, specific, and honed to a single issue. Anonymous (1994 and 2006) both make similar appeals where communicating is concerned, and they represent a small minority of people begging business organizations to onboard the VITarSS principles of communication.
Specific: While similar in many ways to targeted communication, specificity is individually important to communication. Each audience member will receive the same message, but each audience member will perceive the message differently according to individualized value matrices, ability to employ the message, and questions about applicability. When specificity is lost, the message is lost, and Dandira’s (2012) counsel on organizational cancer is not far behind. Poor organizational communication remains a force multiplier: a problem develops, poor communication lacking VITarSS releases to employees, and instead of solving the problem, there are now 10-problems. Like biological cancer, these 10-problems metastasize into a much larger problem. “Work arounds” and “Band-Aid solutions” as “temporary measures” become a permanent way of avoiding the problem, and the cancer grows. Soon, another problem develops in a different area. The resources being sucked into the first problem makes handling the second problem more severe; VITarSS works as a tool in solving communication concerns. Without VITarSS, poor communication multiplies problems exponentially, and VITarSS must be applied with strong leadership, not additional “Band-Aid work arounds.”
Significant: Valuable communication focuses on application to the individual, but significant communication focuses upon long-term relationships between the message, the sender, and the receiver, along with the ability to move communication in a back and forth manner between the sender and receiver. In many ways, Brown (2011) along with Cable, Gino, and Staats (2013) intimate VITarSS is embedded in organizational design, focuses the efforts of many organizational leaders as senders and lower hierarchy employees as the audience onto the problems of communicating, and into actions as a single cohesive unit.
Alvesson and Willmott (2002) add additional caution and insight into the process of melding individuals into an organizational culture, which makes organizational communication a control mechanism. Alvesson and Willmott (2002) provide a unique counterpoint to the focal point of communication, the give and receive nature inherent in communication, e.g., two-directional on a single channel, when considering organizational identity each individual gives and receives from the organization. Thus, the question becomes why the reliance upon one-way communication strategies employing statistics to substitute actual voices of internal customers? Mintzberg (1980) discusses many of the key aspects required in designing organizations. The fundamental principles discussed regarding organizational design provide the needed backdrop to visualize how communication changes and becomes embedded upon every relationship in the organization.
The field of communication is not so much lacking as it is re-using principles and paradigms that do not work. The knowledge is there, and many examples exist displaying the principles of VITarSS in action, but the general usage of these principles is lacking due to various reasoning. The reasoning runs the gamut from internal risk control measures and organizational design, to cost effectiveness and lack of training, and into individual bias towards not interacting with other people or desiring to not interact with people as reports and meetings take precedence and are easier to shoe-horn into one’s professional day.
Without strong organizational communication plans, strong leadership, and less management, the hierarchy of the organization becomes less knowledgeable, which creates internal friction, reduces internal communication opportunities, and fulfills Dandira’s (2012) organizational cancer prophecy. VITarSS holds the elemental knowledge to construct the communication policy, design the organization, and create the needed hybrid solutions required for the current organization while planting the seeds for the future organization to grow. Researchers and business consultants continue to write on the direct line of congruence between managers controlling communication and lack of knowledge in the manager’s subordinates. This link is how genetic knowledge in an organization becomes lost, placing the business into perilous waters as employees retire and churn. Losing employees and deteriorating communication speeds employee churn and exasperates the communication problem. If your organization wants to save money on employee churn, improve communication, open doors and dialogue, listen, and follow VITarSS.
References
Alvesson M, & Willmott H. (2002, July) Identity regulation as organizational control: Producing the appropriate individual. Journal of Management Studies 39(5): 619-644. Available from: Business Source Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed July 27, 2014.
Anonymous. (1994). What is communication? The International Journal of Bank Marketing, 12(1), 19. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/231351871?accountid=458
Anonymous. (2006). Strategic communication. The Business Communicator, 6(7), 2. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/221153662?accountid=45
Brown, D. R. (2011) An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Cable, D. M., Gino, F., & Staats, B. R. (2013). Breaking them in or eliciting their best? Reframing socialization around newcomers’ authentic self-expression. Administrative Science Quarterly, 58(1), 1-36. doi: 10.1177/0001839213477098
Dandira, M. (2012). Dysfunctional leadership: Organizational cancer. Business Strategy Series, 13(4), 187-192. doi: 10.1108/17515631211246267
Girdauskienė, L., & Savanevičienė, A. (2007). Influence of knowledge culture on effective knowledge transfer. Engineering Economics, 4(54), 36-43.
Mintzberg, H. (1980). Structure in 5’s: A synthesis of the research on organization design. Management Science (Pre-1986), 26(3), 322. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/205849936?accountid=458
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