Uses in Communities
- Amit Starikovsky
- Aug 1, 2006
- 8 min read
The academic discourse is full of studies trying to trace the motives that drive humans to use communication media. For years, the Internet, with its various applications, has been recognized as a full-fledged communication medium. As such, research on the Internet as a communication medium has also begun to flourish.
Among internet applications, virtual communities and websites have received special focus as an almost independent research field due to their growing popularity and the number of people they encompass: there are currently thousands of virtual communities and hundreds of thousands of websites covering many diverse areas: culture and leisure, politics, consumerism, computers, sports, and more.
At the same time, virtual communities and websites have also penetrated many organizations, which have used them in various ways, usually as a central platform for knowledge sharing.
This review points to the sources of empowerment of communities and websites as communication media in the eyes of communication research. It directs attention to several emphases that can be implemented within organizational life.
The central approach to studying communities and websites is the uses and gratifications approach, which deals with researching how people use communication media to satisfy their needs.
One of the fathers of this approach is Professor Elihu Katz, who, with his partners, implemented it in the early 1970s as part of comprehensive research on leisure culture in Israel.
This approach argues that communication users have communication needs, which causes them to turn to communication media to meet them. Accordingly, from the existing variety, they will turn to the communication medium that best meets the specific needs they are interested in.
This approach today constitutes a central approach to communication research and was considered revolutionary at its inception. It attributed much activity to communication consumers in their approach to communication media. Until then, an approach prevailed that saw communication consumers as passive and subject to the control of the all-powerful media. The thought that communication consumers had a role in selecting and using content was perceived as revolutionary.
Similar characteristics can be identified in organizational life: many organizations operated for years under the assumption that they knew what their employees needed and assumed a great deal of passivity from organizational users in organizational applications, under the overarching assumption that the latter would adapt themselves to the tools the organization would make available to them, whatever they may be.
However, many organizations understand that there is a great similarity between employees as communication consumers and employees as information consumers: employees have several options for obtaining the information they need: turning to a colleague, direct manager, professional authority, organizational knowledge repository–site/community or any other solution.
Even if there are still organizations operating under this assumption, today, most organizations have abandoned the prevailing approach that stated, " If you build it, they will come." They are trying to trace the motivations and needs of organization employees out of a genuine understanding that without an adequate response to these needs, the investment and effort are wasted.
For this purpose, much time is invested in identifying user needs (by conducting user workshops, questionnaires, feedback, etc.).
The connection between the uses and gratifications approach and organizational life, then, is not coincidental: this approach relies on broad psychological and social sources and, therefore, has also made its way into organizational life as we know it today, of course, with the necessary adaptations: many organizations are aware of the existing needs within them, and therefore look for the solution that will give them an optimal response.
A central insight that emerged from the uses and gratifications research is the realization that there are several types of communication needs:
Cognitive needs - needs related to acquiring information and knowledge, understanding, and knowing what is happening in the world.
Emotional/aesthetic needs - acquiring and strengthening aesthetic and emotional experiences. Needs for strengthening emotional experience, enjoyment, or aesthetic experience. The need to cry, the need to laugh, the need to be entertained.
Relaxation and healing needs/escapist needs related to escape and relaxation. Needs related to a person's relationship with themselves and their environment. Needs for escape from reality weaken the subject's connection with themselves or their surroundings.
Integrative needs/social cohesion refers to two types of social connection - acquisition and strengthening of security, stability, and social status, and social reinforcement, strengthening of trust. These needs combine both cognitive and affective components. The second is strengthening contact and connection with society, family, and the world.
This distinction between types of communication needs is not dichotomous and can exist in parallel.
In reality, the most popular communication media respond to all needs.
For example, television provides cognitive needs in news editions and current affairs broadcasts; emotional needs in various entertainment programs such as comedies and thriller series; escapist needs in the form of dramas and telenovelas; and integrative needs through heritage programs, "national" broadcasts such as Memorial Day ceremonies, Israel Prize ceremonies, sports broadcasts of the national team, etc. Similar to television, so too with radio, newspapers, and books.
Of course, according to this approach, the same communication medium can satisfy the needs of different users since beauty, in this case, is in the eye of the beholder.
The distinction between different types of needs encouraged, as mentioned, the various communication media to emphasize all needs.
The above is especially relevant in the internet era, which, due to technological capabilities, can simultaneously respond to many parallel needs.
If we take, for example, the most popular website in Israel, Ynet, at a glance, we can see that all needs exist in parallel: cognitive needs – by being a news site; emotional needs - culture and entertainment section, which also offers gossip, video clips, humor and more; escapist needs – games and many leisure activities (Sudoku, crosswords); integrative needs – communities, chats, offering a response to the need to communicate with each other and feel part of society.
These insights regarding communication needs should guide us when implementing general knowledge management solutions, particularly solutions related to the Internet and communities.
Indeed, in organizational life, employees do not always have the choice available to them in their "civilian" lives. They cannot choose from hundreds and thousands of sites existing on the external internet. Still, to provide an optimal response and ensure maximum use, we must consider all these needs and try to respond to them.
In truth, this is not a complex challenge: The cognitive needs in the organizational reality refer to all the data, information, and knowledge the employee needs to perform their work. These are the relevant documents, professional updates, work plans, briefings, and training, which, in any case, find their way to the organizational community/website, being the main trigger for their establishment.
However, not only is this need met, even if we are not aware of it.
One of the secondary goals, and in some cases one of the main ones, is strengthening the employee's connection to the organization and creating social cohesion, in other words, integrative needs.
These needs are met by the possibility of direct communication from the employee to management through improvement suggestions, feedback, etc., but also by holding a forum of questions and answers, discussions open to all on topics on the organizational agenda, and free discussions on current affairs, direct interaction between employees through a give and take board, congratulations windows, etc., that is, using aids made possible by the technology itself to create a cohesive social entity.
And what about emotional and escapist needs? These are usually marginalized and not expressed, but they can be addressed more easily.
"Soft" content can be offered on the site/community. This can include pictures of community members, pictures from various trips and social events, sharing experiences related to the world of personal leisure (suggestions for trips, recommendations on movies, books, performances, travel abroad, etc.), and crosswords and quizzes with prizes related to the business content world (and also those that are not).
It is also possible to deepen the connection between employees by communicating activities done in the community that are not necessarily related to immediate business activity, by hosting an expert (in salary matters, for example) or a managerial figure (HR manager, CEO, etc.) to answer employee questions and more.
An interesting point to emphasize is that satisfaction of needs is user-dependent. As mentioned earlier, different users can find the same application that responds to different needs.
For example, a news flash window, familiar to us from various websites (Ynet, Galatz, NRG, Haaretz, and more) can fulfill cognitive needs of knowledge acquisition for some; for others, it is entertainment for its own sake, just as watching a news broadcast is a kind of "show"; other users will see in this window response to their integrative needs since the connection to news strengthens their connection with the environment and "civilian" society; for other users, the very turning to news updates answers an escapist need of breaking the work routine and engaging in something else – a kind of time-out within the busy and pressured organizational routine.
The flip side is that the same application/content product can be presented in several ways to answer different needs.
In this case, the above depends on the form of presentation: for example, the news broadcast presented on Channel 1 by Haim Yavin is serious and respectable, emphasizing the cognitive need and, in parallel, the integrative need for social cohesion primarily. In contrast, the news broadcast of Channel 10, despite the great similarity in content, is "lighter" and, in addition to cognitive needs, also aims to meet affective needs, among other things, through especially active involvement of the presenters, conducting small talks with their guests, emphasizing peripheral stories with a more entertaining and less news-like character.
In short, after forming the insight that these needs are also important to satisfy on the site/community, the variety of solutions is subject to the degree of creativity and mandate received by the site/community managers.
However, it is important to note that in some cases, management is reluctant to respond to these needs for fear that employees will invest their time in activities that are not directly related to performing their roles, thereby wasting organizational resources, especially time.
Another important point in this context is that the main challenge facing us in setting up a site/community is getting the user to return to it. How do we make the site/community the employee's main work tool, which they return to, even several times daily?
No doubt connecting these two points will lead us to the conclusion that as social creatures with communication needs, employees will turn to alternative means to satisfy these needs: employees with access to the internet will turn to news sites to update themselves on what is happening, employees who are blocked from the internet will turn to the radio near their seat; the internet and radio will also supply the emotional and escapist need, which in the organizational reality takes on a different aspect: the need to break the routine a bit, to take a very short time-out to refresh.
Under this basic assumption, the question arises – why not on the organizational site/community?
Combining the response to all needs will help employees return to it, even when they want to satisfy other needs. Thus, "everything stays in the family," and immediately after the employee finishes updating themselves on the news (a need that gains extra validity in these very days of the civic reality in the State of Israel), they will move on to update themselves on professional materials and what is happening in the organization.
In summary, as social beings, we have communication needs that accompany us in our private lives outside the organization and while performing our work within its walls.
It is important to try to respond to all the needs that academic research has illuminated to enable optimal work performance and optimal utilization of the existing tools within the organization.
When we know how to do this, we will increase the chances of success of any technological application we establish in the organization, assuming that we must adapt it to changing needs. At the same time, we are careful to update, innovate, and renew accordingly.
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