15 ways to improve internal communications

Effective internal communication allows you to create an environment in which your employees will work together to achieve common goals. You may doubt that good communication is enough for this. But well-established internal communication processes do have a positive effect on labour productivity and company profit, as well as increase engagement and motivation, which will help to retain employees. This is why it is vital for modern business to constantly improve internal communication.

According to a survey by Gallup, only 41% of employees understand their company's mission and how it differs from its competitors. Unfortunately, many companies still do not see the value of corporate communications and do not realise their potential.

This article describes ways to get started with improving the internal communications, both simple and more complex. But the main thing to remember is that even a small improvement in this matter can significantly help both employee engagement and the company's business.

Regular communication builds employee loyalty. Make it a rule to share important news and decisions every week to prevent rumours and mistrust from spreading throughout your team. The more efficiently you deliver the news to the team, the faster they can respond to them and not lose productivity.

However, you shouldn't constantly bombard employees with messages. It's important to remember that quality is more important than quantity. Better to prioritise information and collect it into small digests.

Content strategy and plan prepared in advance allows you to focus on communication and creation of quality content, relieves pressure from the person in charge and allows employees to get used to a certain regularity of communication.

Nevertheless, it is better not to get carried away with planning too much - you never know what will happen in a few months. Maybe it is more important to describe the corporate content rules and the overall strategy.

There is no point in boring, soulless messages. If you want the information to be read, taken seriously, and even discussed with colleagues, you need to create quality and engaging content. Any content needs to be created for people and while thinking about people.

All content created by the company should reflect the values and characteristics of the company, for example, brand colours, logo, illustrations and the style in which the texts are written. To engage employees you need to remember to use call to action: taking part in a survey, remembering new information, increasing efficiency.

Choose your wording as accurately as possible, try to shorten the text as much as possible, avoid jargon and specific technic terms. The simpler and shorter your writing, the more likely it is to be read and taken into account.

Not all employees regularly check their mail, instant messengers, or pay attention to the TV panels in the office. The goal of a good communicator is to reach as many employees as possible, ideally 100%.

We recommend using universal tools that will allow you to broadcast content to the widest possible range of employees, even remote ones. Workstories is just a right solution for this goal. Read more about our platform at the end of the article.

You should be ready and even willing to receive comments from employees, for example, what type of content they like, how the quality of the materials can be improved, what the team would like to know about, etc. But the feedback should be two-way, it is not enough just to give an opportunity to speak, it is necessary to make the employee understand that they were heard and their opinion is important and will be taken into account. And, of course, you shouldn't say that without taking your feedback seriously.

We recently explained that for a large number of employees, the manager is the main representative of the corporate culture and mentor. It is important to make managers understand the value of communication, following the corporate culture and communication strategy. And also encourage them to add value to the communication process in the company, for example, discuss and clarify recent news and changes.

Do you know your company's demographics? There are many metrics, each of which affects engagement. It's important to know what your audience likes, where, when and how your content is comfortable for employees to watch, and so on.

When choosing communication channels, it must be remembered that the company is rarely a single entity, usually, there are subgroups within the team, sometimes with strikingly different interests and preferences. This is why any communication tool must be either universally simple and understandable or be flexible in targeting and personalisation.

It is better to convey information to the reader in the format of stories. The naked fact is not as interesting and engaging as a story with clear reasons, goals, and feelings. For example, if you want your presentation to be remembered, make it friendlier rather than adding lots of numbers and facts.

Many popular communication channels can hardly be called user-friendly. It can be difficult to find information in email clients, intranets and instant messengers, and the number of chats and folders only confuses you more. When sharing important information, remember that it has to be easy to access and choose the right communication channel.

According to some studies, up to half of the employees complain about a lack of communication between different departments and teams. Often information does not reach a wider circle of employees, which can harm the company. To avoid this, create opportunities for collaboration and organise general networking events.

If you don't deal with involving a new employee in the workflow immediately after hiring, there is a chance that they will not be aware of many important, but not obvious things for a long time to come.

To avoid this, create scripts for onboarding, and consider writing brochures describing the structure of the company, corporate culture, and tips for a newcomer. If you can't find resources for this, try to at least describe the onboarding plan for the immediate managers who will be conducting it.

The CEO, as the captain of the ship and the one responsible for all decisions, must regularly communicate to employees their vision of the company's plans, the latest news and future changes. It won't take the executive very long, but it will go a long way towards motivating and engaging the team.

Most companies now understand the importance of surveys, but, unfortunately, not everyone understands how to conduct them. You can read more about employee surveys in this article, but in short, there are several key things: surveys should be regular, survey results should be public and the opinion of employees should lead to real change, the importance of changes should be communicated back to employees. By following these simple rules, you can not only increase employee engagement, but actually improve the financial performance of the company, for example, by lowering employee turnover.

To get better, you need to understand what needs to be improved. That is why it is critically important to keep statistics of engagement, know the read rate of internal mailings and conduct surveys to understand the real situation. The more aspects of corporate communication you can assess, the easier it will be to track progress after changes.

Workstories is a platform for creating personalised corporate stories (as in popular social networks), combining several solutions for the development of corporate communications.

Workstories includes:

• story creator with dozens of pre-made templates for any purpose and the possibility of full branding
• player with pop-up notification for every popular platform: PC and Mac, smartphones and TV panels
• content planning manager with the ability to target departments, offices and specific employees
• a tool for conducting surveys and tests
• a tool for collecting statistics of employee engagement and get feedback
• a secure communication channel for a company of any size

Using Workstories in your company can help increase employee engagement by up to 90%, as well as save time for HR managers and employees with an easy-to-create and understandable format of Stories.