Informal Communication in Organizations: Form, Function, and Technology

The intricate choreography necessary to do work in organizations requires effective coordination. This paper uses a variety of data from R & D organizations to describe informal communication and its functions in organizations. It argues that informal communication, generally mediated by physical proximity, is crucial for coordination to occur. Informal communication is frequent in R&D organizations, it aids organizational members in learning about each other and their work, it supports both production work and the social relations that underlie it, and it provides a critical facility that collaborators rely on to start joint work, maintain it, and drive it to conclusion. Without informal communication, many collaborations would undoubtedly not occur and others would break up before becoming successful. In this light we present two telecommunication systems designed to support informal communication through artificial proximity. The VideoWindow system is a wide-screen video teleconferencing system continuously linking public places, and Cruiser is a switched, desk-top video communications system that implements a metaphor of a virtual hallway. Both systems have the potential to support informal communication, but experience with the VideoWindow and analysis of Cruiser suggest that careful attention to implementation detail will determine if they are successful. Informal communicattion 2/20/2002 3 Informal Communication in Organizations: Form, Function, and Technology Most of the work that people do in organizations requires some degree of active cooperation and communication with others. This is true of routine clerical work, it is equally true of creative work, like scientific research or engineering development. Indeed, in some scientific fields over 65% of publications are jointly authored (Over, 1982), and most research projects, regardless of authorship, require support staffs of clerks, research assistants, or technicians. Individual members of groups need to communicate with each other to accomplish their production and social functions, and within organizations, groups need to communicate with other groups. The communication they use is both formal and informal. Our goal as authors of this chapter is to understand the communication processes underlying group work in order to improve the communication technologies that groups have available to them. Our assumption is that by understanding how groups and organizations work and by comparing their communication needs to current communication technologies, we will be able to identify gaps in the array of communication tools that people in organizations have available to them. We are especially interested in communication tools to support distributed groups. For instance, what would it take to have a nation-wide task force meet and write a report as easily as if they were housed in a single building? When we look around our places of work, we notice that informal communication seems to be a dominant activity. People read at their desks but are interrupted by phone calls. They leave to attend a department meeting but stop on the way to discuss a matter with a colleague. To answer questions about office procedure, they call to the person at the next desk rather than consult the appropriate manual. The conversations seem fluid and undesigned and yet, clearly, work is being accomplished. In looking at the contrast between formal and informal communication, it occurred to us that the more spontaneous and informal communications was, the less well it was supported by communication technology. We realized that we had well established procedures for scheduling meetings and writing reports but little technology to support bumping into a colleague in the hall. Hence, our interest was drawn toward understanding more about the nature and value of informal and spontaneous communicative activity and toward seeing whether technology could be fruitfully employed to aid it. While our attempts to understand informal communication have taken a number of empirical approaches, our interest in enabling technologies has been focused on the uses of audio-video combinations as communication media. The history of video as a communication technology has been a mixed one, showing great successes as a method of broadcasting entertainment, a mixed record as a method of disseminating education, and a dismal record as a mechanism for interpersonal communication. The lack of market success for such items as video telephones and video conferencing Informal communicattion 2/20/2002 4 systems seems to contradict our intuitions about the value of visual contact in interpersonal communication. However, because these technologies had been primarily geared toward relatively formal communication occasions, we began to explore whether video's employment in systems for informal communication might be more successful. In particular, we thought that because video simultaneously reminds a person of a need to talk to someone and provides a communication channel through which to carry on the conversation, it might become the technology to support spontaneous, informal communication. The remainder of this chapter elaborates our thesis that informal communication is an important mechanism to help achieve both the production goals and the social goals of groups. The chapter starts by more fully describing what we mean by informal communication, conceptually and through example. Next it details some features common to informal communication episodes. Then it examines some of the ways that informal communication supplements more formal communication processes to aid both the production and social components of group work. While the examples and data in this chapter come from studies of informal communication in research and development environments, we do not think the insights gained are limited to these environments. Finally, the chapter describes two experimental telecommunication systems aimed at supporting informal communication at a distance. The Nature of Informal Communication Theorists have long recognized that organizations make use of communication methods varying in formality, that they deploy these different methods for tasks varying in uncertainty, and that matching the informality of the methods with the uncertainty of the task leads to better organizational outcomes. At both the organizational and the small group level, the coordination of activity is the production-oriented task that has been examined in most detail. Coordination is the activity of directing individuals' efforts towards achieving common and explicitly recognized goals (Blau & Scott, 1962). As Van de Ven, Delbecq, and Koenig (1976) describe it, "coordination means integrating or linking together different parts of an organization to accomplish a collective set of tasks" (p. 322). Explicit coordination is necessary in part because individuals within an organization have only partially overlapping goals. Thus, one of the aims of coordination is to insure that the disparate individuals come to share the same goals. But even if this aim were achieved, and their goals were identical, the input-output dependencies among individuals require that their efforts be sequenced and interrelated efficiently. The coordination mechanisms used by organizations differ in their degree of formality -that is, in their degree of pre-specification, conventionality, and ruleboundedness. At the formal end of the dimension, coordination is accomplished by adherence to common rules, regulations, and standard operating procedures, through pre-established plans, schedules, and forecasts, and through memos, management information reports, and other standardized communications. These formal coordination mechanisms have in common communication that is specified in advance, is unidirectional, and is relatively impoverished. Informal communicattion 2/20/2002 5 Informal communication is a loosely defined concept and is often treated as the residual category in organizational theory. According to this perspective, informal communication is that which remains when rules and hierarchies, as ways of coordinating activities, are eliminated. More positively, informal communication is communication that is spontaneous, interactive and rich. Coordination by feedback (March & Simon, 1958), through organismic communication networks (Tushman & Nadler, 1978), or by clan mechanisms (Ouchi, 1980) are alternate ways of describing coordination by informal communication. The essence of these informal communication systems is their lack of pre-specification. Information is not prepackaged and then shipped intact to a recipient; courses of action are not precomputed and then executed without modification. Rather, information is often exchanged interactively, through meetings and conversations, and courses of action are worked out in the context of the circumstances into which the actions must fit. Figure 1 illustrates several of the variables that we think distinguish formal from informal communication. At the heart of what we term informal communication is its ad lib nature. Conversations take place at the time, with the participants, and about the topics at hand. None of these characteristics timing, participants, or agenda is scheduled in advance. Moreover, during its course the communication changes to take into account the participants' current interests and understandings. In this sense, informal communication is truly interactive, with all participants in the communication being able to respond to what they perceive to be the current state of affairs, including the communication up until that point and their perception of the other participants' reactions to it. Through this feedback mechanism, informal communication can be more effective than formal channels, as participants in the conversations elaborate or modify what they have to say in order to deal with someone else'