The purpose of the thesis was to develop internal communication in the Fitness24Seven chain of gyms. The theoretical part of the thesis shows the importance of internal communication in the company. The aim of the survey was to obtain accurate information about satisfaction with the current internal communication in Fitness24Seven and how it could be improved.
Introduction
Purpose of the thesis
Research approach, questions and focus
The research did not include the management department perspective as the management communication needs were already known and are being developed separately. In addition, communication for job orientation for new employees is excluded from this thesis.
Structure of the study
Company introduction
Some of the gyms are called PLUS gyms, which means that group exercises are included for a fixed monthly price. Fitness24Seven offers a functional gym with fresh and clean space with basic equipment at any time of the day. However the focus of this thesis is to make internal communication effective at the local level in Finland and make it more efficient.
Internal communication as glue of organization
- New agenda for communication
- Total communication
- Support to core operations
- Socialization
- Informing
- Profiling
- Organizational communication strategy
- Overall communication at Fitness24Seven
- Strategic employee communication (SEC)
- Leadership vs. management communication
Good internal communication supports the motivation of the employees and thus helps them to work towards the company's goals and has a direct effect on profit making. It was discovered that an efficient internal communication has a positive influence on a general job satisfaction and motivation of the employees. The purpose of the model is to illustrate the different forms and sections of the overall communication of an organization.
According to Åberg, the support of core operations is the most important part of the company's communication. This section also includes the operative guidance form for communication, which is one of the core contents of the internal communication package to be developed in this thesis project. The history of the company has a great influence in providing answers, where the company started, and what it is, and where it is going.
An organizational communication strategy is developed to support the goals of the organization's overall strategy. The table consists of four main areas of overall communication, followed by examples of organizational communication from an operational, tactical and strategic perspective. The result of the diploma thesis is an internal information package, which is focused on the areas of support to central areas, information and, to some extent, socialization mode of communication.
Its goal is to create energy for the success of the organization.” The purpose of the dialogic aspect is to encourage employees to ask questions about what is happening in the organization and to understand it. Management cannot always consider all aspects of employees' daily work, and the best ideas may come from employees. The goal of the research was to create an information package based on the aforementioned models and knowledge.
Research approach
Research method
Management is about delegation, coordination and result- and development-driven communication management of issues and processes. There must be mutual trust between the interviewer and the interviewee in order to obtain valid information about the research topic. Later in the results of the interview, it can be seen whether the employee's motivation has influenced the perception of the investigated questions.
The longer the interview, the more the role of the interviewer changes from a passive questioner to an active conversational role with the interviewee. In a fully structured interview, all the questions are carefully planned in advance and are asked in a specific order. In a semi-structured interview, the questions are also planned in advance, but the order of questions may change according to the interview.
Rubin recommends conducting test interviews to discover and develop interview question needs.
Research process
- Selection of the interviewees
- Interviews
- Analysis of the data
Its purpose was to see if there was a need for modification of the questions asked. After the test interview, some changes were made such as the order of questions and some of them were made more specific. The actual interviews included eight semi-structured open-ended questions and one scaled quantitative question.
The interviewers were informed about the interview in advance to give the interviewees time to think about the topic. The interviewer informed the interviewees by e-mail and briefly explained the idea of the information package and the purpose of this thesis. Since the interviews were semi-structured, the role of the interviewer also participated in the thought process in the interview.
All interviews were conducted in Finnish and the results were documented in writing (Interview questions, appendix 1). In this case, the research aim was mostly confirmatory as the author of this thesis already had a fairly clear understanding of the existing situation, but also exploratory to find out possible other perspectives. The outcomes of the interviews are collected in a table that presents the outcomes of the three main question topics that supported the vision for the information package that the author of this thesis had.
Research results
Employees satisfaction on current internal communication at Fitness24Seven 20
The first interview question was a question about length of employment at Fitness24Seven. The last question was a quantitative question about overall job satisfaction on a scale of 1-10. The purpose of this was to see if there is a correlation between overall job satisfaction, satisfaction with current insider information, and length of employment.
The lowest score on a scale of 1-10 for current satisfaction with internal communication was 6, the highest was 8 and the average was 7.25. The lowest score on a scale of 1-10 on overall job satisfaction was 8, the highest was 9.5 and the average of these was 8.95. The result was that regardless of how long the employee had worked at Fitness24Seven, the general job satisfaction was very high, but there are some opportunities for improvement in internal communication.
The writer of this thesis had a clear vision of the content of the information package. The interview proved that the employees also had similar ideas in mind about what to end up in the information package. The sixth question was a direct question of the employees' desire for the content of the information package.
It appeared that employees feel poorly informed about administrative information and about work roles in the organization.
The most efficient format, platform or channel for the information package 21
The interview responses provided good insight into which areas of their work the employees felt lacked information. The process of creating the information package started with presenting the ideas of the content to the employer and going through the existing material. A manual was already made a few years ago that contains a lot of irrelevant and outdated information, but also some useful content after some changes were made to it.
The existing information, the author's own ideas and the vision of the employer created the basic framework for the information package, which was supported by the interview results. After the content page was created, there was a check with the employer to see that the content was relevant, necessary, in a logical order and easy to find. The information package will be handed to each employee either in a digital form or as a print version.
The entire document is not published as it contains precise and confidential information about the company, its staff and its practices. As can be seen on the content page, the internal information package contains information that employees need in their daily work. The idea of the internal package was also to reduce the work of the Area Manager by adding information to the internal information package, which will reduce the amount of emails sent.
After the launch of the intranet, information will be migrated to the intranet, which is a more modern and efficient platform for receiving employee information.
Conclusions and suggestions
A research can be defined as reliable if the results are the same regardless of the time or circumstances of its implementation (Krippendorff. Although all interviewees seemed to have the same idea about the situation, there are other factors that affect the reliability of In this case the interviewer was a employee and a colleague of the employees for whom the interview was held.
When the interviews are semi-structured, open discussion types, the interviewer's objectivity is always questionable, even if the interviewer tries to remain in an objective role. The purpose of this research was to improve the internal communication at Fitness24Seven by creating an information package for all employees, so that they can get information more easily and reduce the so-called confidential information inside the company. Based on the results of the interview, these above research questions were clearly answered during the interviews.
As a proposal, the information package could be rolled out in each country by adapting the content to suit local needs. This is a method that makes employees feel more like part of the bigger picture and motivates them to work. This method was tested during interviews, where employees had to be part of the research and influence the result.
All the interviewees seemed enthusiastic about being part of the development process and had good ideas for improving internal communication. To promote and develop the dialogic aspect at Fitness24Seven, I added a section at the end of the information package for suggestions, feedback and development ideas. What development ideas or other observations do you have to improve internal information?
