Organizational Vital Signs: The How and Why of Communication Audits offers tools managers can use to assess and improve communication with employees. The work of managers and non-managerial staff differs by necessity, both in complexity and detail. However well-intentioned managers may be, these differences may lead to communication disconnections that can negatively affect morale, turnover, and productivity. How can such disconnections be discovered? What can be done to avert them? How do managers discover employees’ perceptions and opinions about company practices and direction? A communication audit will show how communication flows, or fails to flow, through the company’s established channels. Readers will learn how a company can benefit from a communication assessment and how a team conducts one. The eBook follows two hypothetical companies – client and consultant – through the steps while exploring both predominant theories and practices from group dynamics to report writing. Also included are details of the measurement techniques employed by consultants. Sample survey formats for data collection and final reporting are provided for illustrative purposes.Additional key concepts covered in the eBook include:
- How to determine if a company needs a communication audit
- How to Identify, analyze and draw conclusions about information systems within a company
- Determine best practices for conducting an audit, whether by a consultancy or internal staffing
About the Author
Lori Harvill Moore has been writing professionally since her university days. She served as an information specialist for GTE Microcircuits before and after graduating from Arizona State University with a bachelor's degree in communication, emphasizing organizational communication. At GTE, she designed and wrote employee and marketing newsletters, press releases for the trade press, and penned the text for marketing brochures. After her stint with GTE, she became a freelance writer with articles published in American Baby Magazine, Tucson Business Journal, and Tucson Business Digest among her credits. She also served clients in the fields of real estate and accounting who needed help communicating with their customers.Her corporate experience includes working as an operations analyst for a mortgage company, a financial analyst for a grocer's administrative office, a data analyst for a health care company, and a business systems analyst for a health insurer. In each position she used her writing skills and became an observer of how communication strategies employed in each setting worked, needed improvement, or failed. Her experiences, coupled with her education, became the inspiration for two eBooks.Her work responsibilities were also far ranging, encompassing a variety of projects. Lori developed and initiated internal and external communication plans; created training material and conducted employee training sessions; wrote technical documents; wrote SQL scripts; designed management reports; and performed data analyses.Throughout her career, she sought positions and projects that allowed her to express both her analytical and creative abilities. Non-fiction writing, whether on the job or for her own business, serves this purpose better than any other professional responsibility she accepted.Lori lives in Sacramento, California. She is the author of Business Communication: Achieving Results, available at Bookboon.com, and Fragments of Seasons – Poetry, available on Amazon.com. She currently owns and operates Moore Books, where she focuses on writing and publishing fiction, poetry, and non-fiction
