Without an internal communications strategy, your company’s values get lost, employees are confused about their employer, they are (and feel) less informed, less productive, and much less engaged, etc.
When there are more questions at work, lack of transparency, and limited ways for employees to get involved, there is a stigma of uncertainty, frustration, and distrust.
The list of challenges goes on, but one thing is clear: it is detrimental to your organization if your company’s communication is lacking a clear strategy.
Here are some internal communication strategy tips your organization should consider.
Explore and Analyze Your Current Strategy
If your organization has an internal comms strategy in place, you’ll want to analyze it first. Of course, if your company does not actively have one, feel free to skip on to the next tips!
If you are reading this section, you probably know your company’s communications strategy needs a boost.
First, you really need to figure out if your communications is aligning with the business objectives and business strategy.
But then you can start to dig deeper. Start asking questions about your communications, like:
- What are the business challenges our communications strategy needs to address?
- How do employees feel about the communications from our company currently?
- Are employees from different departments, buildings, and locations connected and informed equally? Or are there silos that hinder communication, and cliques between departments?
Just some samples to start figuring it all out, but really dive into your current communications process or strategy.
Get Your Messaging Consistent
Similar to how your organization works on its brand voice, your communications and messaging needs a consistency to it.
When you have different tones, various degrees of a mission, or speak differently with all forms of communications, it becomes rather confusing.
This also means, everyone should be on the same page of the business goals, vision, and objectives. Not only should the entire workplace know “what” your business does, but will have a firm understanding of the “why.”
Let Employees Share Their Voices
Communications can’t be a one way street. Meaning, your internal communications strategy should include — and encourage — employees to share their voices.
Your organization needs to develop and harness a work culture of openness, transparency, trust, and knowledge sharing.
Be open to feedback, questions, and ideas from your team, encourage them to join and spark conversations.
This will create a trust between employers and their executives. And it will create more engagement with their work when they know they are contributing to the business in ways outside their job duties.
Employee involvement can stem from department or face-to-face meetings, training sessions, internal social media, company networking events, etc.
Related: With over 20,000 employees across 30 locations and in 6 different languages, creating a unified global corporate culture, driving communications and employer brand was no easy feat for Electronic Arts. Learn how the video game company leveraged employee advocacy to fix those challenges.
Avoid Communication Overload
Since we are bombarded with information daily, communication overload can be a problem. As much as you want to keep your team informed, you want to find the right balance of communication flow.
It also can be hard to cut through all the noise, so the last thing you want to do is cause employees to ignore your messaging because of it being too frequent.
Finding a balance and breaking up your communications will be key. Yet, you also do not want to leave important information out, otherwise your strategy starts to break down.
It’s a fine line to figure out, but luckily there are simple solutions like an employee advocacy platform to help. But more on that in the next main section.
Embrace Technology to Streamline Comms
In today’s digital environment, there are plenty of technologies that make our lives easier. At the same time, implementing too much tech can also be frustrating.
Having the wrong tech in place or too many options can create communication overload and be distracting. Thus, not helping your communication strategy.
Since internal communications challenges and focus on strategy has grown, there are many great technologies to help streamline the process. By using the right ones, you ensure employees enjoy using them and continue using for the foreseeable future.
Some examples of communications tech:
- Using a cloud service like Google Drive for collaboration on documents, presentations, etc.
- Adopting an employee advocacy platform like EveryoneSocial. This acts as the central hub for content, allows feedback (comments, engagement, tagging others), mobile use, push notifications and email options, social sharing for important content, user-generated capabilities, and measurement on results.
- Also, your organization can use a chat service for internal use like Slack or Yammer to coincide with the above.
Nail Down Important KPIs
Like any process or strategy, you want to measure the results of your efforts. With internal communications, you must identify the important KPIs and continue to monitor.
These metrics can also be used to inform employees of performance of their efforts, goals, and progress.
Pending on what your organization values, some KPIs might not be as important as others. But here are a few to consider measuring.
- Corporate email opens
- Link clicks in corporate emails
- Attendance for training or town halls
- Social shares
- Traffic results from social shares
- Technology use. Like logins, comments, time in platform, etc.
Some of these KPIs you might be wondering how to measure correctly. That’s where an employee advocacy platform becomes a crucial part to your communications stack. You can dive a bit deeper into internal communications KPIs here.
Evaluate Communications Progress
Besides formulating a strategy, trying new tactics, and measuring results — you want to evaluate and refine your overall strategy as well. Most likely, if you work for a large company, your communications process will be an ongoing work in progress.
Try quarterly or monthly evaluations of your employee communications strategy. Ask business leaders and employees about the current communications. Questions like:
- Do you feel you are being communicated and informed with properly?
- Are you aware of the company mission, values, and goals?
- Is there consistent transparency and communications from company level, department level, and/or team level?
- Do you feel your voice, ideas, and knowledge are being communicated and valued?
While evaluating may seem bland, it’s instrumental in helping you pivot or improve areas of the communications process that might be lagging still.