3, 2, 1, sändning. Välkomna! : En fallstudie om hur Aller medias interna nyhetsprogram A-nyheterna stärker deras organisationsidentitet under coronapandemin

Sammanfattning: COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have limited employees’ physical presence in the workplace, and entailed rapid digital transformations within Swedish companies due to the transition to remote work. Recent studies found that remote work will prevail post-pandemic, and future transitions to remote work and digitalization will consequently require companies to adapt employee communication. A research gap, however, has been identified concerning remote employee communication and its’ implications on organizational identity. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate how employee communication constitutes organizational identity during the COVID-19 pandemic; specifically by examining employees’ sensemaking process around an internal communicative event which had arisen due to the pandemic.  The theoretical framework comprised a social constructionist perspective of organizational identity, the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) and Karl Weick's (1995) theory of sensemaking. A case study was conducted at the Swedish branch of a media company, Aller media. Six semi-structured online interviews with Aller medias’ employees were carried out. Additionally, the employee interviews were limited to questions regarding Aller media’s internal news program (‘A-news’), which was selected as the internal communicative event for the purpose of the study.  Our findings suggest that employees created meaning around the A-news mainly by extracting cues from previous experiences and contrasting them to their present experiences. Furthermore, the A-news reflects employees’ perception of Aller media, which indicates a correlation to the organizational identity. Therefore, organizational identity can be sustained or reinforced through communicative events.