Organizational communication speaking volumes
In a communicative organization there is a shared understanding that good communication is a prerequisite for the existence of that organization, essential for it to reach its goals and find success. But how communicative is your organization? To find out, we developed a Comvey, a method that discovers and details the communicative baseline of an organization, providing a situational analysis that can serve as a starting point for positive change. The results provided by Comvey can then inform the decision-making process and how to prioritize resources as the organization moves through different areas of development.
Case description
About the method
To increase our knowledge about the importance of communication for an organization to achieve its goals and find success, researchers at Lund University studied eleven Swedish companies and public sector organizations. A secondary goal of the study was to define future demands and challenges facing corporate communication. The research team included Mats Heide, Rickard Andersson, Jesper Falkheimer, and Charlotte Simonsson, at the Department of Strategic Communication in Lund.
As a research project, “Methods for Communicative Organizations” is completely unique. The study, which ran for five years, included a quantitative survey with over 8,000 respondents, as well as interviews with around 170 people. The insights from the project then became the foundation for the development of Communicative Organizations – The Survey, or Comvey for short, together with Gullers Grupp.
Comvey is based on a standardized format, making sure that any comparisons, over time or between organizations, are easy to set up. Comvey measures the employees’ experiences and level of satisfaction across the following areas:
• Channels, tools, and voices, in the corporate communication system
• Conditions of the communication
• The communication climate
• The strategic and operative communicative work
• The communicative leadership
• The communicative employeeship
Comvey provides a new dimension, tying together the external and internal corporate communication. The external perspective enables a deeper analysis of the communicative platform and conveniently connects to other studies and metrics that might apply to the organization.
Comvey also gathers and analyzes any thoughts and ideas that the employees may have about future communication in the organization, diving deeper into their experiences, lifting up potential issues that have yet to surface. Open-ended questions are examined via thematic analysis, in order to detail any trends that might dominate the responses. We also perform a narrative analysis of the material with the help of artificial intelligence. The AI analysis not only identifies the trends that dominate the responses, but also provides statistics to support those insights.
All to give you the answers you need to take your organization to the next level.
