Internal Public Relations—Principles and Practice

Everyone should know more about Public Relations, since we are all born in ‘organisations’. Family is one of those organisations, and this proved Rousseau’s theory true: ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’

To perform well in the society, we need strong interpersonal skills, while such skills should first be learnt from our daily lives with family members. The book ‘Public Relations, Principles and Practice’ by Philip J Kitchen especially emphasised the need for a ‘more consensus-oriented’ and ‘less conflicted-oriented society’.

Structure and culture are the pillars of organisational communication. Allaire and Frisirotu’s idea about ‘cultural system’ is that, it ‘embodies the organisation’s expressive and affective dimensions in a system of shared and meaningful symbols manifested in myths, ideology and values and in multiple cultural artifacts’.

To identify how an organisation should run with Public Relations strategy , we can think of the following aspects:

1.      type of business

2.      size

3.      age of the organization

4.      culture

5.      managerial style

6.      financial background

7.      staff

8.      stability/ volatility of its environment

A study sample mentioned by Philip J Kitchen is a case about a bank. For better internal communication, the bank used videos to tape what to show, and trained several high-ranked employees to teach people in lower ranks, and so forth, to tell those 18000 employees about what policy was to be changed. Apart from such ‘face-to-face communication’, internal periodicals for different ranks of employees as written communication tools also gave a great hand. Alerting computers with messages was the most simple and direct approach.

A book about management introduced a story about a newly-appointed supervisor and an experienced worker. One day, the supervisor asked a truck to go into the warehouse to unload goods inside. A worker howled not to do so, but to unload outside the warehouse, while the supervisor refused without asking why. The truck then droved in and unloaded—the problem appeared! The problem was that, the truck was able to get into the warehouse when its tires were under pressure. After unloading, pressure was released, so the height of the truck was no longer shorter than the door of the warehouse! In the end, the truck had to reload to get out and unload the goods as what had been told by the worker long before.

Do communicate with trust. Otherwise, not sensing being a part of the organisation (as a machine, as an organism, as a brain, or even as a prison—as the ideas Gareth Morgan developed), anyone would never serve for the organisation’s good, but for his or her own ‘good’, which might not be so good genuinely to anyone.

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