Week 6: Communities

I think the two key points of this week's readings are pretty obvious:

1) The importance of internal relations within a company.

and

2) The importance of maintaining community relations with the public.

Internal relations deals with employee goodwill, and the ability for them to communicate and interact with each other. This is important for a very large organisation that might have hundreds of combined managers, workers, and other staff. Face-to-face communication might not be possible, due to employees working at different shifts or at different locations (sometimes at overseas branches).

Therefore, many tools and modes of communication can be used to facilitate internal relations: from simple newsletters and company magazines, noticeboards and Intranet discussion boards; to more elaborate company events and workshops. Maintaining internal relations is beneficial to a company in the long run, as it greatly increases the chances of employees staying on to work for the company. This reduces the cost of having to hire and retrain newer, less experienced workers.

The readings made me realise that community and internal relations is a process that requires a lot of time and persistence. The benefits of establishing good relations doesn't occur overnight, and may often take years to develop. In other words, any good company should incorporate community and internal relations into its main objectives from Day One.