How has internal communication developed in your country in recent years?

 

Turkey is a country where trends in the world are followed and consumed very quickly. Our openness to innovation is very important and good. But there is a habit of quickly passing through the next step without fully embracing the developments and recognizing the implications. In our country ıt is still complicated that internal communication is a specific area of either Marketing or Human Resources. Human Resources is a little more dominating in this area. The marketing teams usually don’t care enough about the difference between internal communication as external communication. My desire is that it be an independent field to which both departments contribute. When we look generally, internal communication in Turkey has progressed in two different ways in recent years. On the one hand, there are firms that strategically adopt intrinsic, accurate, and bi-directional communication methods that really focus on in-house welfare and employee experience. There are many factors in this progress such as the increase of organizations like Great Place To Work, the increase of the channels that will hear the employees voice, the changing of the generation, practical solutions presented in digital.

 

In general, positive trends in Turkey include:

 

• Digitalization in internal communication

• Personalization

• Storytelling

• Employee Experience

• Communication with Data

 

In addition to these, I think that authenticity will become more important in the coming years.

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When we look at the other side, there is a stream of more promotional, non-philosophical activities for the sake of appearances . For example, on mother's day, gifts are distributed to female employees, but there is no room for breastfeeding for mothers in the same company. The work done here is actually done only for the employer brand in social media. They lag behind seeing employees as a materialist mass and empathizing. At the end of the day you see the people who have drinking catered  hot chocolates  but have no real employee voice. The result: wasted budget and people who can not be happy.

 

What do you currently see as the greatest challenges for internal communication in your world?

 

I think the biggest challenge in internal communication is for the market not to get the importance of it. We do not force our imagination to understand what internal communication really is, how big a change it can make for a company, and how we can touch employee lives. A person gets his first education from his family, then the school continues to grow with his life. The area where an adult person feeds the most is business life. It acquires new habits with the corporate culture that it is included and continues to nourish the environment with these habits. When you change something positively in people’s lives, they reflect it to their surroundings. It is very important for organizations to understand that communication for the customer is very serious, and communication for employees is at least as important. Because the people who touch the customers are also employees. What you give your employees, they will give it to your costumers.

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What do you see as the biggest opportunities for internal communication to make a difference in the next year or two?

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Digital solutions really offer great opportunities. Turkey is a country of start ups that offer very creative solutions in this regard. We are able to find innovations that enrich the awarding, suggestion systems, onboarding, intranets and many internal channels.

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My vision is in the direction of moving internal communication to above-the-line communication channels. I believe that a holistic communication strategy will be adopted that will serve not only the communication that exists within the corporate but also the employer's brand.