An analysis of internal communication practices in Marvell and tentative optimization suggestions.

摘要

This paper examines the internal communication practices in Marvell, one of the world's largest semiconductor corporations based in Silicon Valley, USA, and offers suggestions for optimization. To be more specific, Marvell, as the leading player in the highly competitive chip-making arena, has a very professional engineering team on board to deliver quality circuit designs to a wide range of customers including Microsoft, Dell, Google and Hewlett-Packard, just to name a few. However, being the most valuable asset in the company, the central engineering team is not taken as well care of compared with Marvell's key competitors such as Qualcomm. Internal communication, whose major functions are to keep employees well informed, motivated and happy, is still conducted in a rather hierarchical and one-way manner at Marvell. Given the information explosion in the Web 2.0 time and the high prevalence of mobile devices, effective communication is usually achieved through an interactive and two-way module. This article aims not only to diagnose existing problems in the target organization's internal communication structure through face-to-face interviews with engineers in the central designing department, but also to provide suggestions along the engaging, two-way, and social media line of thoughts, which are inspired by the extensive researches on effective internal communication practices and an interview with Dan Shaw, the west coast vice president of employee engagement and internal communications at Edelman who has thorough experiences in the field.