Are your employees just an audience—or co-communicators?

Regardless of your community’s size, the rules of engagement should hold true.

Regardless of your community’s size, the rules of engagement should hold true

A few years ago, The Journal of Employee Communication Management published an article titled “Employees Are Not an Audience.” It was written by Glynn Young, who now heads up internal communications at Monsanto Co.

His basic premise is simple yet significant—the job of organizational communicators should NOT be mainly to create and deliver messages to the employee audience, but rather to facilitate conversations within the employee community.

That distinction is more than an exercise in semantics. It goes to the heart of why organizations struggle—and often fail—to generate meaningful employee engagement. It also explains why organizations get caught in the wrongheaded notion that they need better “two-way” communication. Seriously, is there any other kind? Bottom line, if it isn’t two-way, it isn’t communication. It’s message distribution.

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