1 [Strategic Employee Communication – What does it really mean?] Towards responsible dialogue: Searching for the missing piece of strategic employee communication 1 Elisa JUHOLIN Leif ÅBERG Pekka AULA University of Helsinki Introduction “Any organization’s most valuable resource is its staff” (Human Relations school, e.g. Lewin 1943; Barnard 1938/1968; Mayo 1933/2003). “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it” (Drucker, 1955/1984). “Every employee is a reputation ambassador or someone who can destroy the reputation of the company” (Aula & Mantere, 2008). “Every employee is a communicator” (Juholin, 2007a; Juholin, 2007b; Heide & Simonsson, 2011). This article deals with strategic communication in the context of work organizations, from the point of view of employees. We name it strategic employee communication (SEC). Earlier models, we argue, have emphasized the role of top management and communications managers and undermined the role of the others. This probably stems from the origin of the strategy concept: Greek στρατηγία, generalship, or the art of troop leader. This managerialistic approach sees communication as consisting of building an effective communication system, defining strategic core messages, and communicating them to a grass root level in such a manner that strategic goals are met (e.g. Davis, 1962; Likert, 1967; Roberts & O´Reilly, 1972; Wiio & Helsilä, 1974; Downs & Hazen, 1977; Goldhaber & Rogers, 1979; Greenbaum et al. 1988; Grunig, 1992). Communication is strategic management of interactions and relationships between stakeholders at all levels within organizations (Welch &Jackson, 2007) aligning and inspiring employees to support the organization (Gregory, 2011). This calls for measurement of output, outcome and outtakes/outgrowth (e.g. Zerfass, 2008). The two first one-lines describe this. Strategic communication has been defined as a paradigm for analyzing communication as consisting of purposeful activities of organizations having a mission and targets (Hallahan, Holzhausen, van Ruler, Verčič & Sriramesh, 2007). The overall purpose is to maintain favorable reputations with all stakeholders in 1 Paper presented at EUPRERA Conference ”Communication Ethics in a Connected World”, Brussels, September 2014