What is a company without an effective internal communication strategy and action plan?
Effective internal communication is key to growing a successful business. Poor internal communication can badly affect your business, and it’s one of the most common challenges companies face!
Studies show that only 40% of employees feel that they understand their company’s goals and vision. And according to Gallup, only 15% of employees feel engaged in their jobs.
Wondering how to improve internal communication in your organization?
In this article, we cover everything you need to know to improve communication at work:
- Why internal communications are more important than ever
- Internal communication best practices
- Internal Communication FAQs
Let’s get started:
The importance of internal communication
Poor internal communication has a negative impact, such as employees’ frustration, lower motivation and productivity, employee disengagement, lack of collaboration across the company, lower employee retention, and high turnover.
According to Udemy Research, bored employees are two times more likely to leave a company than those who are not bored.
This study points out a common challenge most organizations face: Lack of engagement and a sense of belonging.
In short, boredom leads to low retention, which affects the cost and business performance.
The Queens University of Charlotte conducted a survey and found that 39% of employees believe that there isn’t enough collaboration between people in their organization.
Check out these quick stats:
- When employees are engaged profitability increases by 21%.
- High performing companies are TWICE as likely to keep communications jargon-free and straightforward.
Understood the importance of Internal communication? It’s time to discuss some strategies to improve communication in the workplace.
7 Internal Communication Tips to Build a Better Company Culture
Internal communication and company culture go hand in hand. Here are some of the best practices for developing an internal communication strategy that makes sense for your organization.
1. Reflect on your company culture and mission
Every company has a mission and vision because they want everyone to work towards achieving it. However, as employees get busy with their day-to-day activities, they may forget the company’s underlying mission statement.
As a leader, it becomes your responsibility to keep reflecting on these values as you communicate internally in your organization. Make sure to remind your older employees about the company culture from time to time.
Similarly, new employees should be introduced to your company values with training sessions, one-on-one conversations, and more.
2. Review your company goals (and set some new ones)
One of the qualities of good company culture is that it allows everyone to align their thinking towards the company’s progress.
For this to happen, you must review your goals from time to time and even set new ones as the situation demands.
This will bring transparency in your organization and help people to work together more efficiently. When you define clear goals, employees get to reflect on their roles more profoundly.
In other words, they would understand the part they have to play, helping achieve the company goals.
3. Appoint a point person
If your employees work in a remote environment, you might not find your HR department very helpful.
Even though the human resource department’s job is to make sure of your employees’ well being, you might not find them very resourceful.
Therefore you must appoint a point person that is trusted by the people in your organization. This will help your employees reach out to them in need and initiate an open door conversation.
4. Invest in an instant messaging tool
An instant messaging tool can help you build a healthy company culture. When you have an instant messaging tool in place for your organization, your employees feel free to get in touch with each other.
While emails and calls are a part of communication, an instant messaging tool makes information sharing much more comfortable. It leads to quick resolutions without wasting time in writing long emails.
This is mostly when your employees work in a remote environment and need constant engagement. Instant messaging tools also impart a feeling of staying connected with the business.
5. Create an informative and compelling company email newsletter
Regardless of whether you’re a SaaS business or one that sells physical products, you must have been reaching to your customers via email newsletters. The question is, why not do it for your employees?
Newsletters can help everyone stay on the same with the progress and developments happening in the organization. It imparts a sense of being connected with the business, primarily if your employees work remotely.
Email newsletters also help build a positive company culture because it is planned, structured, and consistent. This helps employees stay involved and retain the information in a far more effective way than an impromptu chat.
6. Let employees share their voice
One of the best things you can do for your employees is to provide them with a platform to share their voice. As a leader, if it’s only you who has been doing all the talking, it’s time you changed the narrative.
Remember, with a healthy conversation helps build a culture of transparency in the organization. It will make your employees feel valued and believe they have a say in the company.
Letting employees share their voice also helps you understand the problems they are facing in the day-to-day business proceedings.
7. Evaluate communications progress
60% of internal communicators don’t measure the effectiveness of their strategy.
While communication methods must be established in your organization, you must also go back and review them. This is because until you know what the shortcomings of your existing methods are, there is no chance that you can improve them.
For example, just like every other company, yours too might have an email communication platform in place.
However, emails are more of a standard communication tool, which might not suit all your requirements. In such situations, introducing an instant messaging tool can help get faster resolutions.
Bonus: 10 Sample Questions for Your Internal Communication Survey
This could really save your team. I’m giving you 10 helpful survey questions on communication. Just copy the questions.
Look for blindspots.
1. How much does our organization’s culture drive your active engagement at work?
2. Do you think that our organization does a good job of promoting recognition in the workplace?
3. How effectively does our organization take action on the feedback you provide?
4. Have you seen any positive change since we started collecting employee feedback?
5. How can we improve communication at our organization?
6. How well are you recognized when you do great work?
7. Do you feel that you have a clear idea on how our company is performing?
8. People in the organization regularly share views on issues of importance. (On a scale of 1-10)
9. How satisfied are you with the level of communication you are receiving from the company?
10. The organization’s internal use of social media gives me a sense of belonging to the organization. (On a scale of 1-10)
At Springworks, we use EngageWith Pulse which tracks metrics closely in sync with organizational climate to reflect a true score.
What does EngageWith measure in Organizational Climate?
1. Respect: A primal need, it reflects how well workers feel individually respected in the workplace.
2. Communication: It is the foundational stone to any successful enterprise between two or more human beings. This metric focuses on communication between co-workers, managers. Communication for goal/task clarity and rationale.
3. Organizational perception: The most authentic reflection of organizational climate, this metric tracks the belief employees have in their organization and capabilities. The best part about this metric is the importance it places on the inherent emotions of employees.
4. Leadership: In this pulse, leadership is measured at a superficial level. Ease of appointment, encouragement, willingness, and leadership contribution in shaping the work environment are measured.
5. Reward system: It measures what and how fairly (Distributive & Procedural justice) the organization’s reward system.
6. Ad-hoc: Ad hoc questions can be as simple as (referring to seniors as Sir/ Ma’am) or confidence in the company’s mission, vision, and plan. (Research shows only 4 in 10 people know what their company stands for and less than 50% feel connected to their organization’s mission). Although seemingly trivial, these pulse questions can be a building block to creating a more significant change. An impactful change.
Smart companies listen to what they’re being told about their organizational climate and take action accordingly. Actions with 10x returns.
Thus, Organizational Climate can help make or break your organization. No matter how well designed, an organization is only as good as the people who live and breathe in it. To win in the marketplace, you must win at the workplace. So, are you ready to win?
Internal Communication FAQs
Internal communication is important for any organization to function. In this article, we’ve mentioned 7 ideas that you can implement to improve internal communication.
Employee engagement surveys and interviews are considered qualitative data and offer valuable insights into your employees’ preferences and motivations.
Increasing employee engagement can be tricky. As an employer, you need to make sure that your employees are passionate about their work. Here, we shared some amazing ideas to increase employee engagement.
When the right information finds the right employees at the right time, they naturally become informed and engaged and feel heard and valued.
Originally published on October 21, 2020 10:36 AM, updated March 22 2021
