Communication can be one of the biggest issues a company can face. Whether you have a small team who just won’t talk to each other, or you are trying to send messages among departments scattered across continents, it can all be a headache.
A good internal communication strategy makes good business sense. If your employees have issues communicating effectively, it will be difficult to have a highly committed and well-performing workforce. Strong employee communication channels build a community and move your company culture forward.
Internal communication strategies are key to maintaining order and ensuring a consistent message is consistently sent out across your company. Good communication isn’t just crafting a nice message and hitting send; it has to hit the right tone of voice, engage employees, and have a purpose!
Do you feel like your current internal communications strategy is just falling flat? Let’s take a look at some of the steps you can take to get it revving once more, transforming it into something that employees actually want to engage with.
What is an internal communication strategy?
An internal communication strategy is a calculated approach to share information, engage employees, and create a productive environment within a workplace. An effective internal communication plan is achieved by connecting every moving piece in your organization – departments, managers, employees – together with impactful internal communications that align employees to their daily tasks and the overall company mission.
Let’s take a moment to imagine one of those dystopian-style offices filled with row upon row of gray cubicles. Workers can’t talk to each other and they have no access to internal communication tools save an occasional company newsletter they can’t reply to. This creates a disconnected workforce that has no idea what their neighbors are doing, let alone what the company’s vision might be.
An internal communication strategy ensures that the business and the employees are communicating—it really is that simple. Putting together a smart and successful internal communication strategy, on the other hand, can be the difficult part. The internal communications team might handle the vast majority of the legwork. This is a larger discipline than many might realize, requiring expert hands to manage each part of the strategy. Don’t worry if you are yet to have the resources or capacity for a full internal comms team, we are here to make things as easy as possible for you!
Internal communication strategy best practices
One-way employee communication is not how you ignite an engaged and aligned workforce because you need true dialogue to create impactful change. That’s why three-way employee communication—(1.) leaders to teams, (2.) teams to leaders, and (3.) employees to each other—needs to be the center of your internal communications strategy.
Employees who feel heard are more likely to stick with employers and contribute significantly to a team. Engaging employees with measurable goals should ensure they feel informed, engaged, and empowered throughout their careers. This guide is designed to improve the effectiveness of your internal communications plan.
If you are looking to transform how your management team and employees use internal communications software, here are 20 internal communication ideas, trends, and strategies to get you started.
1. Know where you need to start
OK, so you have a million and one ideas for what you want to do and dreams of how everything is going to come together. Great, we love that passion and energy! However, if you just go wading in and make changes without knowing what work needs to be done, you might end up putting together something that actually doesn’t meet the needs of your team.
So, how do we know where the first change has to be made? You have to ask your employees. Send surveys for them to fill out, and get managers to discuss it during 1-to-1s. Make sure that you get input from everyone, as a good internal communication plan can’t be implemented and created purely by the leadership team alone.
2. Launch an internal social network
Internal social networking encourages people to connect with each other. It also helps your company search, source, identify, and consolidate employee skill sets.
The best way to accomplish this is by adding social media tactics to your internal communications plan. An internal social network is one way to incorporate social media features into your organization. Empower users to comment, like, and interact with colleagues and work-related content. Users also receive notifications and can view an activity stream of everything relevant in the intranet.
Most engaged employees are already active on social platforms like LinkedIn, so implementing an internal social network will be easy. Ultimately, though, the power and success of social media in your strategic communication plans will depend on the enthusiastic participation of everybody in the organization—and how you can encourage them to feel excited about these features.
3. Deploy intranet software as part of your internal communications strategy
Intranets empower people with information and encourage effective communication between employees and their company. They increase productivity and enhance internal communications success with collaboration tools that help people work together and social features that create dialogue.
Executives and management can use it to share information, post company news, and connect the entire organization. At the same time, employees can communicate directly with management on the intranet and share their opinions, thoughts, and insights on published content. This type of digital workspace software enhances and encourages open employee communication, something that all organizations should strive to achieve.
4. Make internal collaboration tools fun
If you don’t take pride in your company, who else will? When you prioritize how your digital workplace looks, employees will be more engaged. Consider an open workspace, where your employees can easily communicate with each other. Add your company logo, colors, and branding to your intranet to motivate your employees, make them feel connected to your organization, and portray your company vision. These are some easy internal communication ideas to increase productivity and overall happiness for every member of your organization.
Video is the perfect solution to keep teams engaged and updated on new developments because it is way more interactive and personable than reading a long email. Not to mention that numerous studies show email is not the most effective form of employee communication.
Keep videos short and punchy, make them conversational, record interviews, and use animations. The more fun you make it, the more people are going to want to get involved.
5. Set up a wiki for sharing and building a knowledge base
Wikis are excellent knowledge management tools for documenting personal information, knowledge base articles, or anything pertaining to projects, tasks, and teams. These tools are great for information sharing, creating a knowledge base, and responding to queries from employees.
Wikis are one of the internal communication trends for organizations or departments that focus on creativity and shared ownership. They are the perfect type of content to establish platforms where everyone, including senior management, can search and locate contributions from the team. What’s more, with helpful AI tools like Axero’s Copilot, you can make it easier than ever for your employees to find the exact knowledge they need.
6. Establish and drive metrics
Which scenario do you think is more likely to have a positive impact on your business strategy?
- A report that includes quarterly results, data, graphs, and growth numbers to encourage focus on a certain area.
- An email that tells employees which direction they should be focusing on to reach the company goals.
The answer is clear.
By using metrics in reports, you are more likely to encourage growth since you actually know what is and isn’t working. Adding visual representations that show internal growth trends enables teams to see where they can focus without even having to tell them to do it. Analytics tools with metrics speak louder than words and make your internal communications strategy more impactful.
7. Create an employee-centric organization
If you want to build a business that lasts, you need to take care of your employees. When turnover is high and it feels like there is a constant stream of new faces in meetings, it can be challenging to establish momentum on tasks and business development. Focusing on the care and well-being of your employees, creating a business that they are proud to work for, supporting them and treating them as people, these may all seem like obvious ideas but they are crucial in increasing employee engagement and productivity. Create that employee-centric mindset and you will actually get responses when you ask them for their opinions!
Employee-centrism has to be ingrained in your company culture, and you must ditch the carrot-and-stick mentality. Dangling rewards or punishments will narrow concentration and damage the creativity and conceptual thinking required for many jobs of today. Instead, employees need autonomy and purpose to thrive, and you can do this with a low budget. The core of your internal communications planning should be valuing your employees and how you express that to everyone within the company.
8. Start an open-door policy
Empowering your employees to have and share their opinions is one of the most effective ways to improve communication in the workplace. Encourage productive dialogue between managers and team members—make sure employees share their ideas and discuss issues when they arise.
Don’t forget to emphasize that no one will be targeted for sharing their personal opinions, and ensure that everyone has a safe space to offer their thoughts in a way that suits them. A super-introverted team member may not feel comfortable speaking up in a meeting, but an online comments box might be the perfect place to share their thoughts.
You can implement this open-door policy in numerous ways. Use a forum in your intranet for employees to share suggestions and concerns. Make sure managers reach out to their teams. This internal communication strategy example reduces office politics and gives employees a say in the organization. They’re also a great way to promote autonomy in your organization.
9. Build lines of communication throughout the organization
In most organizations, internal communication typically happens from the top down. Management teams often feel largely responsible for communicating necessary information and deliberating amongst themselves with little to no input from the employees.
To implement effective change and make balanced decisions, consider a bottom-up business communication plan where employees can contribute their ideas and opinions and have these discussed openly by other employees and management. By involving the non-managerial team in decision-making, leaders can enhance collaboration and build appreciation for what management is doing.
How do you do this?
Open up the lines of internal communication. When management communicates news, announcements, or updates, allow employees to respond, i.e., enable comments and likes in your intranet software so employees can ask questions or leave comments on company posts! Also, start forums or create surveys to involve your employees in corporate conversations. Remember, the goal is to keep it all employee-centric.
10. Be transparent with company goals and objectives
When goals are transparent, performance thrives. By telling everybody in the organization your goals, you are also helping them commit to pursuing those goals in their own way.
Goals and objectives that are publicly available to your employees also help put meaning into metrics. Updating employees on your progress in achieving goals and objectives, with metrics, gives it a whole new meaning and helps everybody see how their efforts are contributing to the goals. This is a powerful means of improving internal communications to help meet expectations.
11. Check on staff regularly
Want to retain valued employees? Stay interviews are one of the most effective internal communication ideas for keeping the people you want on your staff. Employees meet one-on-one with managers, HR personnel, or even your CEO to discuss what they like about their jobs and what needs improvement.
If you want to prioritize your people as part of a successful internal communication plan, you need to talk to your people. And you need to listen. Pay attention to what their concerns and grievances are, and make sure they are addressed.
12. Connect your organization through employee profiles
If your intranet supports employee profiles, use them! You’d be surprised how employee profiles can upgrade your internal communication plan. The beauty of this tool is that it boosts productivity and connectivity for every user.
Half of the solution to time-wasting and information searching is a strong knowledge management system, but the other half is facilitating an easy way for staff to find the expertise they need quickly. Employee profiles are an extensive staff directory that details each person—what they do, who they report to, professional projects, personal interests, etc. Members can find what they need and who they need with a couple of clicks.
13. Publish regular company newsletters
Publishing regular newsletters allows you to reach your employees and increase awareness about your company, products, and services. This is especially important for new employees who need to get acquainted with your company’s processes and procedures. A newsletter can also be an effective internal communication plan for updating employees about recent developments and metrics. When every department has its own KPIs and success metrics, a unifying force like a newsletter helps everyone align with overall company goals.
Let’s say your newsletter is monthly; it is likely that it will not be pushed aside as noise (spam) and will be an important internal communications tool. You could go through the trouble of having a paper newsletter designed, formatted, printed, and dispersed. Or you could dedicate a blog on your company intranet to be the newsletter. Want to make sure that people are reading it? A mandatory reading tag can help ensure that you get those clicks and that your news is getting in front of the people who need to see it.
14. Avoid email when you can
According to research from Microsoft, the hardiest email-aholics spend 8.8 hours a week on email. You think that’s bad; the average worker spends 57% of their time communicating with others, whether that is via email or through another platform like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Everyone has their own tales about their experience with unnecessary emails. Company announcements, customer emails, colleague emails, automated messages, Google Alerts, and many others clog our inboxes on a daily, even hourly, basis. Sometimes we’re included in long threads that we don’t need to be a part of. All current internal communication trends—with the exception of newsletters—point away from email and your internal comms strategy should do the same.
Encourage managers to use collaboration tools to track and discuss projects. Colleagues can use direct messenger to send files. Department heads can use their space to send updates to their entire team. Leave inboxes as clean as possible so messages from customers or partners are never missed.
15. Always communicate—even when times are hard
We are sure you’ve heard the saying, “Treat others how you’d like to be treated.” This is a valuable principle for a strong internal communications strategy. When determining how business leaders share company-wide news, or how teams work together, this golden rule considers every person in the situation. Particularly when your organization goes through inevitable changes—good or bad—you need to ask yourself, “If I was the receiver of this news, how would I like to be told? Who would I want to hear it from? What questions would I have?”
The same questions apply to every aspect of your internal communication plan. When you put time, thought, and care into how you deliver information to your staff, you create a supportive and trusting environment. Turnover decreases, engagement increases, and morale is at its highest.
16. Use mobile tools
It’s no secret that mobile devices have transformed how companies operate. Today, employees in the field, teams spread across different locations, or remote workers on the go can communicate with work efficiently.
Therefore, smartphones and tablets can also greatly improve your internal communication strategy. There are many apps available, like a mobile intranet with push notifications, that allow employees to respond directly from their own devices. This is not only convenient for them, but also keeps employee communication channels open at all times for both the management and employees.
You need to have a way to keep your frontline employees engaged and up-to-date. They aren’t going to be kept in the loop in the same way that your senior office staff will be, so make sure you are the ones providing the tools and the methods to keep them aligned.
17. Keep your teams organized
If your company lacks internal organization, you’re going to run into issues inside and outside the office. Your departments, divisions, and/or teams need their own place to organize documents, people, and information—whether it’s shared within that group or the entire company.
With a Spaces feature in your intranet, you can designate a known spot for everyone to access. Need to find an HR document about benefits? No problem! Looking for a contract from your legal department to hand off to a customer? Go to the Legal space. Internal communication only works if everyone is communicating with each other.
18. Create company traditions
A positive side effect of a strong internal communication strategy is a connected workforce. Not just with each other, but with your company values. One of the best ways to increase employee engagement levels and build a culture is by investing in it. Start company traditions—annual holiday parties, pizza lunches for birthdays, or celebrate your company’s birthday. The motto “work hard, play hard” works if you put energy into celebrating your successes and people.
Create an employee reward system that actually celebrates your employees and gives them recognition. An “Employee of the Month” award can seem a little cheesy, but when it meets the needs of employees, it can really make them feel appreciated.
19. Provide everyone at your company with what they need
It may go without saying, but it’s important to provide your staff with what they need to do their jobs well. Old computers, outdated software, and difficult programs make their lives harder, which ultimately hurts your business as a whole. If you’re taking the time to improve your internal communication strategy, you want devices that drive these conversations.
Take inventory of the tools your company uses, the platform(s) used to communicate and the software employees use to do their jobs.
Do they work well?
Are they slow or difficult to use?
Can anyone in your organization use them with little problem?
Is it actually a piece of problematic hardware, or will a training session be enough to get everyone up to speed?
Every device and software in your organization should be quick and easy to manage for anyone. And keeping tabs on internal communication trends will help you determine what you need.
20. Always show deserved gratitude
Showing appreciation to employees requires very little effort and can generate the most morale. That said, your internal communications strategy should promote employee recognition when they do great work. When a team member excels on a project, send a thoughtful message, create a newsletter about employee successes, or send a badge via your intranet. Make sure you nominate employees for that reward scheme you set up.
You want your employees to know that you see their hard work while reinforcing the purpose their contributions have for the company and the people they serve. Give them support for their work, and then use your internal communications strategy to shine a spotlight on all that they do for you.
Start building an effective internal communication strategy today
The people inside your organization are the engines that move your company forward. Unless there is effective communication planning in your company, your teams will have difficulties reaching their fullest potential. When you prioritize your internal communication strategy, you will reap the benefits of a booming, well-performing workforce.
To improve internal communication, you need to give employees tools that they truly want to engage with. A smart internal communications strategy creates content that engages and resonates with your workforce, but you also need one place to bring it all together. We did suggest this above, but we’ll take the opportunity to do so again: Use an intranet as the primary place to push out all communications you may have.
Axero is designed to be your one-stop shop for all things social and knowledge management. Book a demo with us today and find out how we can help you create an online hub that is truly the heart of your business.
