Minute Read Internal Comms
It’s clear that effective internal communications is an essential part of any organisation. Therefore, a great internal communication plan should be a critical aspect of your everyday operations.
Most organisations have carefully constructed strategies for communicating with clients, stakeholders, new hires and employees. When you apply the same level of care to your employee communication plan, you're destined to see a definite uplift in employee engagement.
In this blog we’ll cover:
Internal communication plans can be daunting for some organisations. Shockingly, 60% of companies don’t have a long-term strategy for their internal communications.
However, we’re here to show you how to create a successful strategy and avoid the typical roadblocks that come with enhancing your plan. An effective internal communication plan includes transmitting important company information and includes key elements such as:
Email is still the main form of communication for many organisations, however, it does come with many limitations.
Research from The McKinsey Global Institute reports that the average employee spends 13 hours a week reading and responding to email, making it the most time-consuming work activity, taking up 28% of our working life.
Although email has served a purpose by enabling us to connect with others, there are aspects of communication that email lacks. For starters, it’s difficult to inject personality into an email, which can lead to emails being perceived in the wrong way.
It’s also difficult to contain a lot of information in an email. If you have to reach a large audience, you can’t create much of an impact by just using email.
The limitations of using email as your main form of communication can have a damaging effect on your employees. Here are just a few:
When it comes to developing your communications plan, it’s natural to reach for email first. Companies have been using it for years, and although it serves some purposes in relation to communication, it’s clear that email is relatively 'old school' in the world of internal communication. There are now far better ways to communicate with your workforce, intranet software being the most successful and beneficial way to connect.
Having a strong internal communication plan has multiple benefits that help lead to the overall success of your business. These include:
Recommended Reading 📖: 15 Scary Internal Communication Stats For 2021 & Beyond
If you’re reading this, you’re likely to already have an internal communication plan in place, so it’s always best to start accessing your current strategy and doing some internal research. If this is your first plan, simply head to our next steps on how to create an internal communication strategy.
For those accessing your current plan, here are some questions you need to address when revamping your internal communication strategy:
Planning to answer all of these questions is such an important part of re-evaluating our strategy. You want to deliver the right message to your employees, so you should spend some time thinking about these issues.
Below are 5 easy steps to creating a successful internal communication plan that will boost your employee engagement and communication.
Whoever is responsible for creating your plan within your company should start by identifying each department and project to be included. It can be helpful to use an internal communication plan template, (please find our free template at the end of this blog) both to oversee the project and for each department to work with. This makes it easier for the coordinator to pull all the ideas together. But if you are looking for a challenge and you want to start from scratch, don’t forget the following 5 main steps:
You should start by analysing your current communication goals so that you can build a better internal communication plan and define the right objectives for your company.
One of the most effective and easy ways to do this is by using the SMART approach:
SPECIFIC - What are your company goals? Is the business achieving your goals? Who works towards achieving them? How can the company reach its objectives?
MEASURE - Why do the goals exist? Can they be measured?
ACHIEVE - Are the goals attainable? Are they realistic and based on your business development capacity?
RELEVANT - Will the goals affect the overall business of the company?
TIME - What are the timescales to reach each goal?
Another important factor to consider is whether your employees are integrating with your company's goals. You need to find out if they understand them and communicate what their part is in achieving them.
To determine the goals you should ask a series of questions:
Once the goals are established and their success (or failure) has been determined it’s time to plan how to achieve the goals, in conjunction with the support of all members of your organisation.
It’s particularly important when producing an internal communication action plan to understand who the target audience is.
Your final plan should be available to everyone in the company. This will include the key stakeholders, management, administration and frontline workers. Each of these departments should be considered when developing your internal communications plan.
Understanding your audiences can ensure that you distribute relevant content to those who need to see it - reducing information overload and irrelevant information being sent to the rest of the organisation.
One of the most common tools for internal communication is an intranet. Your company intranet can be tailored to your organisation, perfect for communicating information to each of your employees.
Below are a lost of common internal communication examples for your strategy to include, all of which can be communicated on an intranet:
Recommended Reading 📖: 11 Internal Communications Tools for 2021 & Beyond
When you have your internal communication plan in place and in motion, it’s time to measure the results. It’s essential to know how effective your internal communications have been by gathering quantitative and qualitative data.
Analytics tools will help you to gather quantitative information - how many people have viewed an intranet page for example. Other internal communication channels such as email won't be able to give you this data.
There are other ways to measure the effectiveness of internal communication as well. For example:
Having these measurements requires action. If your strategy is not effective, you need to evaluate where it went wrong and what you can do to improve internal communication.
You should always look at the bigger picture when implementing your internal communication plan. Identify which strategy serves your goals and objectives. The best way to do this is by testing, testing and more testing.
When you have the specific data from measuring your plan, you can narrow down your objectives to the ones that will be most effective for your company. Review your strategy plan on a regular basis. High performing companies regularly meet to review and update their plans. It’s a great way to evaluate which part of your internal communications plan is working and what needs some improvement.
One-way communication is certainly a thing of the past. Employees who feel as though they’re being listened to are more likely to stay at their company and contribute to the business’ success.
However, 39% of employees believe that people in their own organisation don't collaborate enough, and technology is a way of addressing the problem.
Below are our best practices that will help you continually improve your strategy and make sure you’re using your internal communication channels effectively.
Whether you need to design a communication strategy that shares your content with remote and mobile workers, or you simply need to break down the walls between generations. The future of communication will be all about overcoming engagement issues through shared goals. As a company, you should be communicating your company culture and goals regularly to your employees.
Recommended Reading 📖: Company Culture: A Guide for 2021 & Beyond
There's no one-size-fits-all approach to an internal communication strategy. Naturally, some of your employees will prefer to use email and some will prefer a more social approach.
The key is to be clear about which tools are meant to accomplish which tasks. It's then key to identify one centralized location for employees to go to for information that can then point them to the next relevant place.
Your goal is to empower your employees to become brand advocates. Already, 98% of your employees are using a social media site in their free time, and 50% of that group already use these platforms to connect with your brand.
By transforming your employees into content marketers, you introduce a peer-to-peer dynamic into your internal communications strategy. This improves both your employer's brand and increases your chances of better leads, more qualified hires and stronger business results.
With a strong employee advocacy solution, businesses can strengthen company culture and engage their most valuable employees, while also amplifying their share of market voice. After all:
Great internal communications planning will make sure your employees are engaged in their workplace. At its core, communication is an instrument of strategy because it helps you share your mission, vision and values with employees.
It will help you achieve specific goals. It creates a sense of community and trust with employees, creating a line of sight for them and engaging them to make the business successful.
Are you ready to take the next step? Download our internal communications plan template. Simple and easy to follow, the template will get your planning off to the best possible start.
An effective internal communication plan includes important company information and includes key elements such as:
You should follow the 5 main steps:
For a company to achieve successful growth, it needs to communicate with its employees regularly. Communications should be engaging and make employees feel part of the bigger picture.
Molly is a Content & Design Executive at Oak Engage. Coming from a background in Design, she can tailor her marketing approach to specialise in both visual and written content within her role.
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