Questions to be answer:

After the initial discussion with your peers in the communication management team, what should you tell the CEO and the management group in order to convince them that you should go with your and your colleagues' ideas instead of those of the consultant?

CASE STUDY

Strategic Communication and Changing Expectations on the Communication Role of Employees

The days when employees were considered mere passive recipients of management information are long gone. Managers now recognize that employees have an essential role to play both in external and internal communication. Externally, employees play an important role as organizational representatives, acting as the "face" and "voice" of the organization in their interactions with customers and other external stakeholders. Simultaneously, through their everyday interactions with peers and supervisors, employees significantly contribute to internal communication and the communication climate. Therefore, employees play an important role in building intangible assets such as the reputation, brand, and image of organizations through their external relations and interactions, as well as internal communication processes and the communication climate. Thus, researchers increasingly highlight the need to make employees aware of their own communication roles and responsibilities as an important step in improving the organization's internal and external communication (e.g., Heide & Simonsson, 2011; Heide et al., 2018; Mazzei, 2014).

While responsibility can be attributedfor example, when organizations make employees accountable for their communication behaviorresponsibility should also be understood as having an intrinsic dimension. This means that for employees to take communication responsibility, they must also internalize a sense of responsibility for communication that then influences their observable communication behavior (Andersson, 2019a). It is not enough that managers attribute communication responsibility to employees. Employees themselves must sense that they have a communication responsibility.

However, internal communication activities intended to influence employees' understanding of their communication roles and their predisposition towards taking communication responsibility are still often underdeveloped (Heide & Simonsson, 2011; Heide et al., 2018). More often than not, internal communication activities are based more on management's wishful thinking about employees' communication behavior, than grounded in employees' actual work situations (Andersson, 2019b). In contemporary internal communication management, buzzwords such as "brand ambassadorship" and phrases like "living the brand" have gained widespread popularity as organizations attempt to train their employees into brand embodiments talking with one voice. While the literature on internal brand management suggests that turning employees into brand ambassadors empowers them to think for themselves and to "freely" engage with the brand (Ind, 2017), research suggests that this might have a counterproductive effect as it instead discourages employee voice (Wraas & Dahle, 2020). In their study, Wraas and Dahle found that managers influenced by the ideals of brand management and strategic communication management tend to focus on developing rules and policies that restrict what employees are allowed to say, and on disciplining those employees who break those rules and policies when, for example, they publicly criticize the organization.

Recent research instead suggests that influencing employees' predisposition towards taking communication responsibility requires organizations to go beyond mere words, and to reconsider their internal communication (e.g., Andersson, 2019a, 2019b). For example, Andersson (2019a; 2019b) argues that managers' and communication managers' efforts to influence employees' predisposition towards taking communication responsibility must take the specific work of each employee as their point of departure for employees to perceive it as relevant. More specifically, this entails that managers' efforts should focus on clarifying the specific communication roles and the associated communication responsibility related to the work of each employee, and then consider how this can be supported and cultivated.

The two extremes depicted above, the top-down perspective and the bottom-up perspective stand as stark contrasts against each other as one seemingly favors the voice of management, while the other seemingly favors the voice of employees. However, as evident in the popularity of both perspectives in strategic communication research, they both have their merits, and should therefore perhaps be understood as two sides of the same coin. Is there a way to develop internal communication practices that manages to balance these seemingly contrasting ideals of the top-down perspective and the bottom-up perspective, or does the work of revising internal communication call for more radical measures?

Internal Communication

To gain a holistic understanding of internal communication, it is necessary to consider the many factors that make up internal communication:

• the communication management team;
• communication channels;
• top management's communication;
• the immediate supervisors' communication;
• the communication climate;
• line management communication;
• informal peer interaction;
• the organizational members' perception of communication;
• formal and informal sensemaking and sense giving.

This list of factors is not exhaustive, but shows that there are numerous factors to consider when deliberately attempting to influence employees' predisposition towards taking communication responsibility through refining internal communication.

Increasingly, however, the traditional boundaries erected between internal and external communication are beginning to blur and social media has accelerated this trend. Employees now interact with each other and external stakeholders on social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Contemporary communication managers now cannot separate internal communication activities from external communication activities in the same way as before. Some researchers even claim that an increasing awareness of communicative dimensions such as organizational reputation and brand, have fundamentally changed how organizations are managed (e.g., Kornberger, 2010; Mller, 2017; Mumby, 2016). Nowadays, it is increasingly the outside that dictates how the organization is managed on the inside.

Additionally, internal communications have traditionally been accorded lower status than external communications. External communication activities such as media relations, marketing communications, and sales communications have had greater success in developing concrete and credible ways to measure and explain the value these activities contribute. The difficulty is to demonstrate the positive effects of internal communication activities. This lower status results in smaller budgets for internal communication managers than other managers and functions. Therefore, communication departments call for substantiated arguments with which to convince their organization to increase the budget for internal communication management, as well as for ways to measure the effects and/or impact of internal communication activities.

The ScandiNova ¹ Case: Fresh Ideas and a Window of Opportunity

During ScandiNova management group's "strategy day", an invited consultant gave a presentation titled "Utilize the potential of your employees: build a strong brand by turning your employees into brand ambassadors," which captivated the management group, and the CEO especially. Following this, your communication management team has been assigned the task of "turning employees into ambassadors," as the CEO described it to you in one of your weekly planning meetings. As you head back to your peers in the communication management team, you realize that you need to sit down and discuss how to commence this ambitious project. The CEO wants you to report back to him and the management board, and present a plan for realizing the vision of the management team.

However, you sense that you might need to return to the management board with some recommendations on a somewhat alternative path than what the management team and the CEO envision. While the management group was convinced by the consultant that turning employees into ambassadors demands, as the consultant phrased it, "leadership that inspires employees to internalize the brand and deliver it to customers," your experience tells you that this task demands more than management buzzwords about the organization's vision presented to employees by inspired supervisors in Power Point presentations. Instead, you are convinced that realizing the vision necessitates that you fundamentally revise and develop the organization's internal communication.

Instead of the buzzword "ambassadorship," you would like to direct attention to the idea of communication responsibility. You yourself recently attended a webinar in which you were presented with eight communicator roles which employees enact (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019), and you believe that the work that the CEO wants you to oversee is the perfect opportunity to raise the awareness of both managers and employees regarding their important communication roles and communication responsibility, and to commence the well needed revision of the organization's internal communication.

Sensemaking and Sense giving

Internal communication has for years rested on the traditional notion of line management communication in which the managers fulfill the role of information distributors, and where employees generally consider the sensemaking and sensegiving of information to be the task of managers and supervisors. However, you consider the traditional notion of line management communication and the information distributing role of managers to be rather outdated and in need of a major revision, taking in new ideas from contemporary research, as communication cannot only be the responsibility of managers.

The work flows and processes in modern post-bureaucratic organizations are increasingly agile, collaborative, and communication-intensive in nature following the influence of management ideas such as agile management, and the growing use of digital platforms and social media which facilitate collaboration and networking spanning traditional organizational boundaries. As a consequence, it is increasingly important that employees understand their communication responsibility in relation to their work, and the important communication roles they enact on a daily basis. These roles range from more externally oriented roles, such as "the embodier" and "the defender", to more internally oriented roles, such as "the sensemaker" and "the innovator" (Madsen & Verhoeven, 2019). In particular, the increasing speed and complexity of intra-organizational processes and the vast amount of information that managers and employees are expected to read, make sense of, and act upon in their daily work, necessitate that employees are more aware of their important intra-organizational roles as sensemakers and sensegivers in their work team and/or group of colleagues. Sensemaking, or "the making of sense" (Weick, 1995, p. 4), can be defined as the process by which people continuously attempt to make the world they experience meaningful, and by doing so, simultaneously produce the world that they attempt to understand. Weick emphasizes that the notion that "people generate what they interpret" (p. 13) is key for understanding what differentiates sensemaking from other similar concepts, such as interpretation. Sensegiving, in short, can instead be defined as "the process of attempting to influence the sensemaking and meaning construction of others toward a preferred redefinition of organizational reality" (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991, p. 442).