Listening to Survival

The article presents a research projectaimed at how companies communicated to employees the crisis and what roles top managers, line managers and internal communication managers held in the internal crisis communication process. Questions investigated the companies’ crisis communication strategies, their internal communication objectives, contents and instruments, the organizational roles involved in employee communication, the kind of language used to describe the crisis, the difficulties and evolution of internal communication. Data collection took place between January and July 2009 and was based on interviews to 14 communication managers and to 13 employees of other departments, a web survey on a sample of Italian companies and two focus groups involving communication managers. The survey included a sample of 135 companies drawn from a directory listing the most important Italian companies, with a valid response rate of 45%. Survey respondents were Corporate Communication Directors, Internal Communication Managers, Human Resource and Internal Communication Managers, Marketing or Training Managers with an internal communication responsibility.