Strategic Communication and Organisational Performance: an Analysis of Staff Intranet Use in Select Publicly Quoted Companies in Kenya

Abstract

Intranets have been identified as useful tools for enhancing organisational performance. This study examined how staff intranets have been used by the most successful international corporations to boost staff productivity, enhance organisational performance and manage change. This study also examined the role strategic communication via staff intranet plays in enhancing organisational performance, how the value of a staff intranet as a channel for strategic communication can be measured, the success factors for corporate staff intranets and how staff members in Kenyan companies with NSE listings perceive their organisation's staff intranets. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTUAT) model serves as the bedrock of this study. A descriptive research design was utilised. An online questionnaire survey that was distributed through sponsored posts on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp was used to collect the study’s data. Following data collection, a representative sample of 100 responses from the Nairobi stock exchanges' various categories was selected (NSE). The data that was gathered was analysed using descriptive statistics. According to the analysis, 95.8% of NSE-listed firms have invested in staff intranets and most employees of NSE-listed companies believe that the information on their staff intranets supports them to execute their tasks fast and accurately. The findings also showed that there is room for improvement in how most NSE-listed companies use their staff intranets to share knowledge. Most employees in NSE-listed companies reported that their staff intranets lacked essential information like project updates, project frameworks, best practices and staff directories that list subject matter experts, their skill set, experience, location and contacts. This study recommends that organisations review their intranet strategies with a view of enhancing organisational performance by ensuring that their staff intranets are enriched with enough knowledge to support their staff to complete their tasks fast and accurately, to make their staff intranets as easy to use and functional as possible, to encourage intranet use and to provide a feedback mechanism on their staff intranets for continuous improvement. This study hopes to provide helpful data that organisations can use to develop an intranet strategy that takes into account; success factors necessary for a staff intranet to lead to good organisational performance, ways by which organisations can quantify the benefits of their staff intranets and perceptions of intranet users in Kenyan organisations.