In an ideal world, your business would run like a well-oiled machine 100% of the time. In reality, however, we’re all fallible. We all make mistakes and anyone can be vulnerable to disengagement. The solution is to enable better collaboration and support at work. This is why it’s essential to develop a solid internal communication strategy.
It may seem obvious, but communication is the bedrock of teamwork. You can’t expect your people to do their best work if they’re isolated and out of the loop.
Internal communications someone in your business talks to someone else in said business. That might be an immediate colleague, or someone in a distant department. Sometimes, this might mean a face-to-face conversation. So, an internal communication strategy refers to your channels, policies and goals for enabling these interactions.
Effective communication is essential for business functionality. Say you’re running a call centre, for example. Even the best inbound call centre solutions won’t help if things are a mess behind the scenes.
Communication is a skill like any other. Having a formal framework and established channels gives your people a point of reference. It’s also a key performance management tool for motivating employees and informing the work they do.
In other words, it helps to engage and align your employees with company objectives. Yet, it isn’t uncommon for businesses to lack a formal internal communication strategy.
The importance of engagement and alignment
Increased employee engagement and alignment are two key benefits of investing in an effective communication strategy. Of course, the question remains, why are they so important?
Employee engagement
Engagement is a measure of an employee’s commitment and attachment to their role, the organization, its objectives and their colleagues. It plays a key role in motivation and focus at work.
Unfortunately, global levels of engagement are pitifully low. Even though they’ve risen slightly, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report put worldwide engagement at just 23%. Low employee engagement is typically associated with:
Attrition
Mistakes
Minimal effort
Absenteeism
Poor mental health
Employee alignment
Alignment is distinct from engagement, although high levels of the latter can help boost the former. Alignment basically means that everyone is on the same page, which is vital for meaningful collaboration. Signs of an aligned workplace include:
Shared professional values
Mutual understanding of business goals
Keeping people informed
How communication helps
Disengagement and lack of alignment happen for all sorts of reasons, but effective communication can address quite a few of them. Many businesses have some form of HR-led communication strategy, however, you need to look beyond HR if you want to create a communication-focused workplace culture.
Prioritizing effective communication at all levels gives employees a voice and keeps them in the loop. It’s hard to stay engaged when you’re left in the dark, let alone contribute meaningfully, after all.
Communication strategies are also essential to prevent different elements of your business from working against each other. For example, if your company is a big name in environmental protection and green energy, you probably shouldn’t sponsor product placement on the sides of Formula 1 cars.
Finally, communication also covers a lot of the behind-the-scenes-work to make sure customer-facing elements run smoothly. Take customer support tickets, for instance. They must be registered with a ticket number, forwarded to the relevant department, with a specific timeframe for delivering a response.
Any breakdown in this process can cause increased customer wait times, overall dissatisfaction and poor impressions of your brand.
7 steps to crafting the perfect internal communication strategy
If you’ve never set up an internal communication strategy before, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Fortunately, the overall aims are the same, whether you’re running a fashion company like Tommy Hilfiger or a web register like Only Domains. The steps in our guide should offer a basic outline of what you’ll need to consider.
Remember, you’ll be reviewing your strategies at the end. Creating the perfect workplace communication policies is an iterative process. The idea is to do a little better each time.
1: Set goals and objectives
The simplest place to start is by figuring out what you want to achieve. You might aim to increase the rate of collaboration between departments in your business, or to create ongoing feedback processes between performance reviews for employees.
With goal-setting, specificity helps. Going back to our customer support example, your goal might be to decrease ticket turnaround time by 10%. Once you know what you’re aiming for, the comms elements you’ll need to focus on will become much clearer.
2: Survey employees and other stakeholders
The problem with purely top-down decision-making is the degree of separation between C-Suite executives and the lived realities of ground-level employees. Internal communication strategy affects everyone in your business, so it needs to serve the needs of everyone.
Your employees might reveal, for instance, that current project reporting methods eat into their time too much. One solution could be to implement asynchronous digital updates. Managers could even have a conversational AI platform to deliver progress stats in real-time, so they don’t have to hound their direct reports.
3: Develop a plan and assign metrics
Once you’ve established a consensus on what needs to change, it’s time for a plan of action. Whether it’s a new comms tool or a change to workplace policy, you need to be able to measure its impact. These might include:
Internal comms response times
Employee survey sentiment analysis
Rates of employee recognition
Engagement analysis metrics
4: Move away from top-down communication
Top-down communication certainly has its place. Business leaders and managers need to be able to organize their people and convey information effectively. But, relying solely on a top-down approach tends to lead to issues with micromanagement, which is counterintuitive to an efficient internal communication strategy.
An omnidirectional communication strategy enables anyone to reach out. This means employees can raise issues, and knowledge specialists can inform workplace discourse. This supports innovation at work by allowing it to come from anywhere.
Of course, we’re not talking about firing off an email to your boss with a list of ideas. We mean dedicating whole internal channels to different topics and projects, where people can make suggestions and get immediate feedback.
5: Give your people the tools to succeed
Speaking of dedicated comms channels, you need to make sure your people have the best tools and resources for their jobs, communication tools especially. These include:
Direct messaging apps
A virtual employee hub
Video calling tools
Asynchronous check-in and progress updates
File-sharing
Shared virtual workspaces for direct collaboration
On top of that, you need to give people the training to use them. We don’t just mean jargon-free how-to guides, although they’re certainly important. We also mean things like professional conduct to prevent distraction, as well as how to securely handle and share sensitive data.
6: Identify your communication ambassadors
You can’t do everything yourself, which is why you should identify key figures through your business. Naturally, this should include department heads and major team leaders. However, it’s also worth appointing some employees across different levels too.
A communication ambassador helps others familiarize themselves with your comms policies and any tools they need to learn. They may take an active role in onboarding to ensure new employees learn the ropes quickly. They can also help collect data on your internal communication strategy during the review stage.
Being a communication ambassador can be a great thing to include on an employee’s career development plan. It shows they can handle responsibility, and even gives them the opportunity to practice their skills as a mentor to new hires.
7: Review your internal communication strategy
Once you’ve put your internal communication strategy into action, it’s time to start collecting data using the metrics you’ve established. It’s easy enough to plan something in theory, but now you’ll see if it translates to reality.
If you’ve achieved some statistical improvement, you’re on the right track. Mind you, that’s not all. You also need to investigate any unintended side-effects of your policy changes. Like other business objectives slowing down because of the demands of communication requirements.
Again, we urge you to survey your people and get as much first-hand experience of your system in action as possible.
You probably won’t hit on the perfect balance the first time around, but that’s the point of this stage. If you keep improving workplace communications bit by bit, you’ll get there eventually.
The best internal communication strategies are multi-faceted
The time when every person had a single overburdened inbox is over. It’s best to take advantage of a range of comms solutions to ensure flexibility for your business.
In the age of hybrid and remote work, these tools help people work together seamlessly, regardless of distance. For this to work, however, employers need to take a digital-first approach, which means experimenting to find the best range of tools for your industry.
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