How communication has evolved over the past ten years in South Africa, and how channels and delivery mechanisms have changed to include a social media tools

Drivers of value creation have changed from margin, investment and asset productivity to how a business acquires, inspires and maintains human capital and innovation, thus a shift from the rational to the emotional. This rational element consists of strategy and business plans that are easy to measure due to the fact that this has enjoyed much focus in the past. The emotional element on the other hand, is concerned with softer issues such as customer experience, brand engagement and reputation management, issues that have previously not enjoyed much investigation and thus resulting in difficulty of measurement. The only manner in which to close the gap between the rational and emotional is through the use of two-way communication, starting internally and having that filter through to the external environment. With the ultimate aim of internal communication being effective stakeholder relations, employees, the best PR agents of a business, have the potential to play a cardinal role in the perception that the external environment hold of the business. Sound internal relations programmes aid the management of the micro and macro environment. Employees need to be well informed by leaders who have the necessary communication skills. The first step towards this is presenting information to employees in the manner in which they prefer to consume it. Furthermore, to ensure success, internal communication needs to report to and feed into the board and all employees need to have an understanding of stakeholder engagement principles.