No employees want to work for a company that does not share any information with them. When people work in a company, they want to know that their hard work is appreciated and whether the company is doing well or not. In the age of the internet where information is always readily available, companies that are reluctant to share internal information with their employees directly come off as suspicious.
As a result, it is crucial for companies to create a great internal communication strategy in order to improve business performance and employee engagement. Here’s everything you need to know about rallying up internal communication for your organization’s success.
What is the collective purpose of internal communication?
Internal communication keeps employees within an organization informed and connected by creating a shared understanding of company values, goals, and guidelines. It keeps employees up to date about the latest company initiatives, facilitates streamlined communication, and establishes a voice of authority. The main idea behind internal communication is to align employee engagement and participation with transparent communication.
The main key functions of internal communication in a company include:
- Keeping employees informed about what is happening within the company
- Allowing information to flow freely between management and employees
- Helping build positive morale among employees
- Encouraging employees to raise questions and concerns without any fear or judgment
The top benefits of internal communication
1- Provides a sense of purpose
80% of workers want to know more about how leaders make decisions in their organization. When employees understand the main company goals and know the plan for reaching those goals, it makes them feel more confident in working towards the goals.
Keeping employees constantly informed about the major steps being taken by the company gives them a sense of purpose and motivates them to perform better.
2- Better control over company messaging
Your employees should never ever hear about important company news from external sources as it can make them feel left out and ignored, especially when there is bad news coming their way. The best way that you can control your company narrative and keep employees engaged is by making internal company news available all the time, and not just during the time of a crisis.
Here are some ways you can do that:
- Maintain a fast editing process along with a short approval chain
- Establish shared communication channels accessible to all employees where you can directly share information with anyone
- Allow employees to share their comments or feedback about company news in order to clear out any confusions and avoid individual interpretations
3- Fulfil your brand promise
Your company’s reputation is only as good as its brand promise, which is the experience or value that customers receive from every interaction with your brand. But how can a big organization with thousands of employees ensure that they offer consistent brand promise to customers?
All of that starts with better internal communication among employees.
With clearly communicated information and goals, your employees always know what the customers expect from the brand as a whole and how to provide customers with a great experience in order to improve customer loyalty and revenue.
What are the various types of internal communications?
Every company is different in its own way and requires different types of internal communication in order to streamline information. Broadly speaking, there are five types of internal communication
- Leadership: It is not enough for senior managers and leaders to be visible to employees, they also need to be heard. Whether it’s information about a company event, a new work strategy, progress reports, or recent losses and wins, business leaders should be transparent about sharing the details with all the employees.
- Peer-to-peer sharing: Employees need to be visible and engaged with each other, asking questions, sharing interesting perspectives, collaborating together, and just generally supporting one another professionally through streamlined peer-to-peer sharing.
- Project and team collaboration: This majorly includes employees coming together to communicate details about the project or tasks at hand in order to simplify collaboration. The idea is to create organized ways to discuss work, schedule meetings, and get things done together.
- Informal/ social communication: Employees also need some form of informal or social communication in order to build a sense of team spirit and camaraderie. This can be something as easy as setting up informal communication channels where employees can talk about anything other than work, or organizing routine team-building events.
- Resource libraries: Every organization has procedures, policies, guidelines, and reference material in place that the employees may need to review, from time to time. All of this information can be centralized through internal communication and saved in a shared space where employees can quickly look for the most current versions of documents.
Finding the right tools for internal communication
When considering internal communication tools for your organization, you need to focus on the type of communication that employees usually engage in and your existing digital infrastructure as well.
After all, there are now hundreds of options available when it comes to communication tools, but if they aren’t able to work seamlessly with your existing tech stack, then they might end up introducing more problems than they can solve.
Here are the main types of internal communication tools that you should consider:
- Intranet and forums for sharing company-wide information with everyone
- Instant messaging tools for employees to have direct communication with each other
- Collaboration tools for team members to collaborate on tasks, projects, and processes
- Employee social networks for employees to find and connect with their colleagues
- Video and audio meeting tools to organize regular meetings
While all of the above tools are necessary in order to streamline internal communication in the organization, introducing so many tools, each with a distinct purpose can not only overwhelm employees but also silo communication across the different tools, making it difficult to keep track of everything.
Instead, you can use a unified digital workplace platform in your organization in order to streamline all the internal communication. With a digital workplace, you get access to intranet, forums, communication channels, project collaboration tools, instant messaging, and meeting tools all through a centralized dashboard.
In fact, a digital workplace goes beyond communication as it also allows employees to manage their processes, projects, tasks, and other work through the same platform.
Establish an internal communication strategy
Internal communication can have a great impact on employee experience, engagement, and productivity. The key to building an effective internal communication strategy is involving everyone within the organization, including senior leaders, managers, and employees. Most importantly, your strategy should encourage employees to have open conversations with their colleagues and superiors.
Dinesh Varadharajan
VP- Product Management- Kissflow
Dinesh Varadharajan is the Vice President at Kissflow. Dinesh is a hands-on executive with a wide range of experience working with bleeding-edge technologies, developing great products and mentoring highly productive teams. He has profound knowledge in design and technical implementation of BPM solutions. He was recently named one among the the Top 100 Great People Managers 2020, by Great Manager Institute & Forbes India
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dineshvaradharajan/
Business stock image by G-Stock Studio/Shutterstock
