Introduction
Public relations professionals and senior management have traditionally
controlled internal communication tools, such as newsletters and Web casts, leaving
employees to merely receive and react to the messages. The intranet, an internal Web
site geared for an organization’s employees, offers the potential to transform the internal
communication process by enabling two-way communication. An intranet empowers
employees to participate on message boards and wikis in order to share information
and to provide feedback via polls. However, although an intranet has the potential to
encourage dialogue among management and employees, the majority of companies still
utilize a highly controlled intranet whereby management pushes communication
messages to employees (Holtz, 2008). The purpose of this case study research was
twofold: (1) to qualitatively examine how one organization used employee feedback to
construct an intranet designed to increase work productivity and to enable employee
communication, and (2) to analyze whether employee usage of an intranet designed to
foster two-way communication yielded enhanced hospital communication effectiveness
and increased employee satisfaction and employee voice into the decisions of the
organization.