What is Internal Communications?

Internal communications definition: Internal communications at its most basic is the messaging shared among the members of an organization.

Traditionally, its primary function was to allow corporate leaders to distribute information to their employees. In recent years, however, internal communications has taken center stage as the lifeblood of an organization’s culture and day-to-day operations. As the world of work continues to transform, a robust internal communications strategy is essential to the success of an organization and each of its individual members.

What is Included in Internal Communications?

Internal communications has evolved to include not only top-down messaging, but also two-way conversation, cross-departmental collaboration, and more. Internal communications can include messaging that is shared throughout the entire organization, between departments, or among individual team members. The functions of internal communications include keeping employees informed, building company culture, promoting transparent leadership, enabling the exchange of information and ideas, and giving employees a voice within their organization.

What are the Types of Internal Communications?

Internal communications take many different forms, from verbal conversations to electronic written and video messages, to print materials. Everything from team chat to the company-wide crisis response falls under the umbrella of internal comms. Common types of internal communications include:

• Crisis communications
• Onboarding communications
• Resource materials
• Change announcements
• Team conversations
• Top-down messages
• Employee-management messages
• Culture conversations
• Question and answer sessions

→ Learn more about different types of internal communications, and the different methods of communication you can incorporate into your strategy.

Internal Communications Examples

There’s no shortage of ways to leverage internal communications at your organization. Here are a few examples:

Onboarding Materials – Good internal communication begins on day one (or even before that during pre-boarding). Onboarding is an important and highly influential part of the employee journey. The onboarding experience sets the foundation for an employee’s relationship with an organization

From digitized onboarding paperwork to user-friendly internal platforms, there are numerous types of communications that set new employees up for success from day one. For example, produce training videos that not only inform but illustrate your company culture. Or, connect new hires with their colleagues by making introductions via an employee experience platform.

Company Newsletters - A company newsletter is a great way to share information about your organization in one concise package. Use a newsletter as an opportunity to:

• Share company updates and encourage social media sharing when appropriate
• Spotlight teams or individuals
• Celebrate employee milestones or accomplishments
• Highlight connections to the community or other social impact activities
• Convey your values

Use providing value to your readers as the driving force of any newsletter. This might include helpful tips on time management or wellness, access to company resources, reminders about employee benefits programs, or other useful information. Feature FAQs, or a question and answer with a different department each time you publish. With that said, the company newsletter should not be a one-way lane of communication. Allow employees to nominate their peers for a shoutout, submit photos or updates, ask questions, and more.

Using a communication platform to publish newsletters makes them easily accessible without clogging up inboxes. Newsletters should be published on a regular, consistent schedule. Whether you publish weekly, monthly, or quarterly, sticking to dates helps with newsletter effectiveness.

An Internal Source of Truth - When employees spend significant time searching for information or tracking down the right person to ask for help, morale can plummet. Keeping useful information like an employee directory, training materials, and other documents in an organized, centralized location can improve efficiency and keep employees engaged. This requires a powerful search function and integrations with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and other widely used tools.

Town Hall and All-Hands Meetings - Virtual or in-person town hall events help create an environment where employees feel empowered to raise questions or concerns with each other and with management. When arranging a town hall meeting, set a clear agenda so everyone knows what to expect, and leave plenty of time for questions and answers to encourage an open dialogue.  

What is the Difference Between Internal and External Communications?

While some principles of external communications can be applied to internal communications, the primary difference between internal and external communications is the audience. External communications (often consisting of marketing and public relations) are directed toward potential customers, industry peers, the media, and/or the general public, with the aim of selling products/services and promoting a company’s brand.

Internal communications are intended for the members within an organization. Internal communication is designed to empower workers with necessary information, nurture organizational culture, and promote conversation and engagement among teams.

Why is Internal Communications Important?

The Great Resignation has placed renewed emphasis on company culture, employee experience, and internal communications. As more and more companies embrace remote and hybrid work, internal communications plays a more important role than ever before to keep workforces unified and informed.

Keep Employees Informed and Empowered

Internal communications can keep employees informed and empower them to do their jobs more effectively. Support your employees’ success by keeping them up to date on the latest developments, changes, and news so they never have to feel blindsided or left in the dark. Informed employees are more likely to be engaged and deliver high performance.

Improve Engagement

When employees are more engaged at their jobs they perform better, are more productive, and are more likely to remain with their organizations. Internal communications is a key driver of employee engagement, well-organized teams communicate well and are more productive.  Multi-directional communication that encourages employees to have a voice within their organization keeps employees engaged. Likewise, if internal comms convey a shared set of values and highlight the impact of individual employees, their motivation is likely to increase.

Convey Organizational Culture and Values

Internal communications set the tone for organizational culture. Capitalize on this by building unity around a shared set of values and long-term goals. Internal comms can influence how culture develops and allow team members and departments to easily collaborate with one another.

Transparent leadership

Are employees encouraged to speak up, do they have a platform to do so? To what extent all voices feel heard and valued. These things impact retention rates, company reputation and management performance.

Support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

From the language used in internal platforms and emails to the decisions we make about who gets what information when a company's internal comms strategy is a core component of any efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion at the organization.

Foster a Sense of Belonging

Employees who feel they belong in their organization are more motivated, engaged, and productive. Belonging stems from company culture, and communication is one of the most  powerful culture-building tools at your disposal. Nurture a culture of belonging in the workplace by giving employees the opportunity to make their voices heard. Use communication channels to recognize individual employee achievements and contributions, and help keep members of the organization in the loop.

Connection and Collaboration in a Fragmented Work Environment

While technology and the gravitation toward remote and hybrid work have given employees greater autonomy and agency, colleagues are more widely dispersed than ever before. With employees scattered across multiple cities and even across the globe, it’s easy for people to become more disconnected than in the past. The internal comms strategy should help employees stay connected no matter where they are.

Identify Shared Goals and Purpose

Use internal communications to unite team members around a shared goal and sense of purpose. By clearly communicating with your employees about the company’s goals and values, you help people see how their work contributes to the bigger picture.

Respond to and Avoid Crises

The damage of an unexpected crisis can be mitigated through thoughtful internal communications. The COVID-19 pandemic is the most obvious example of how an effective comms strategy is crucial for keeping people informed and connected during difficult times. A human-centered approach to communications during times of crisis can help maintain morale while keeping employees informed as policies and protocols change in response to uncertain times. You may even head off potential problems by issuing instantaneous alerts about travel restrictions, cancellations, and more.

→ Learn more about the importance of internal communication for business goals

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How to build an internal communication strategy?

Use the following steps as a guide to build an internal communications template for your company.

Assess Current Strategy

The first step to building an effective internal communication strategy is to take stock of your current strategy. Begin by listing the various communication channels and internal communications methodology you employ. Then, delve into their effectiveness by gathering data and seeking feedback directly from your employees. You can accomplish the latter by sending out anonymous surveys, or conducting focus groups.

Analyze the resulting data to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

• Do people have easy access to the information they need?
• Do they feel included in company-wide conversations?
• Is there a pattern of confusion or misinformation?
• Do your people feel overwhelmed by a constant bombardment of emails?

Make note of what methods of communication in the workplace are working well and could be replicated for additional purposes.

→ Check out our complete guide for a complete Internal Communication Strategy

Set Goals

Use the data and feedback you gather to establish a set of goals for your comms strategy. One popular method is “SMART” goal-setting. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-based. A variation to this acronym adds “R” to the end for “Reward.” Other alternatives include the classic 5 W’s and How. There’s no shortage of other acronym options to explore.

Tip: Make your own goal-setting acronym using a word or phrase that reflects your organization.

Define a Plan to Reach Your Goals

Build an employee communications plan once goals are established. Consider which organizational stakeholders should be involved with communication strategy. Some organizations will include human resources, department managers, IT specialists, or others. Establish a timeline for implementation and a schedule for how often different types of communications will be shared. Review your budget for internal communications and what training, if any, will be required for new tools or platforms.

Determine Which Tools You’ll Use

There is no shortage of internal communication technology available today. The right internal comms tools for your organization will depend on the unique needs of your people and the composition of your workforce. Consult with your IT and HR departments to determine which communications tools would be a good fit for your company.

Identify Key Metrics

Any internal communications strategy must include a plan for tracking performance. You need to know which channels and content types are most effective, where changes are needed, and where to allocate your resources. Define the KPIs you will use to measure the success. You may want to track granular metrics like clicks, opens, and engagement with content, or qualitative data from employee feedback to gauge sentiment and overall experience. To determine the true success of your strategy, work toward big-picture outcomes like employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

Define Audiences

Audience is everything when it comes to an internal communications plan. Not all employees will require the same information, so it may be helpful to segment your audience into a number of different subgroups or personas. Be strategic about targeting your audience and deliver information that is relevant and personal. Having a clear understanding of your audience and their needs will help inform what kinds of information should be shared with whom and how often.

Review for Improvement

Continue to track your progress toward your goals and measure the effectiveness of your internal comms strategy. Your strategy will likely need to evolve over time as conditions change and the needs of your people shift. There will always be new tools to enhance your communications and ways in which you can improve.

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Improve Your Internal Communications with These Internal Communications Best Practices and Ideas

Conversation, Not Proclamation

Your internal communications strategy should encourage conversation at all levels. While traditional internal communications focus on one-way messaging from management to employees, modern communications strategies require an open dialogue. Your communications strategy should provide opportunities for employees to engage with one another across departments, and with management. In order to build an inclusive workplace culture and boost employee engagement, all employees must have the opportunity to make their voices heard. Not only will this make for a better employee experience, but it can also yield important insights, innovations, and breakthroughs that might otherwise have gone unheard.

→ Check out our complete guide to creating an internal communication plan.

Know Your Audience

By segmenting your audience and targeting your communications accordingly, you can ensure that employees receive information that is relevant to their role and their location. Simultaneously, targeted messaging helps reduce the amount of irrelevant and superfluous information employees receive (and ignore).

Consider such questions as,

• What type of information does your audience need to be successful and supported in their jobs?
• What method of communication is preferred?
• Is your audience working in an office, from their home, or away from a desk?
• How does this information add value to your employee’s day?

Ensure Timely Messaging

In order for internal communications to be effective, they must be timely and consistent.
If communication is sporadic, unreliable, or late, it will be rendered ineffective. In the modern workplace, a prompt response time is crucial whether you’re addressing a crisis or announcing an exciting new program.

→ Check out our complete guide for internal communications best practices

Be Transparent

Transparency builds trust. Be forthcoming with your employees about company goals, successes, and challenges. To be sure, transparency does not require that all members of an organization receive all information all of the time. On the contrary, this can lead to information overload wherein relevant details get lost or ignored. Rather, transparency is about creating a culture of honesty and accountability. Leadership can model the accountability they wish to see from employees by discussing pain points and what is being done to fix them, and by soliciting input from all levels of the organization.

Highlight Individual Achievements and Contributions

Your internal communications strategy should include opportunities to highlight the achievements and contributions of your employees. When employees feel their efforts are noticed, appreciated, and rewarded, they continue to perform to the best of their ability. Keep in mind that recognition does not have to come exclusively from management. Peer-to-peer recognition programs can be hugely beneficial in building a culture of belonging and forging connections among colleagues.

Seek Feedback From Your Workforce

To improve your internal communications, you will need input from your workforce. Pulse surveys, focus groups, or informal conversations can yield important insights about your employees’ experience. Surveys are a great way to capture insights about your comms strategy and the needs of your audience. Questions using a five-point Likert scale (i.e. answer questions with strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, and strongly agree. allow you to gauge employee sentiment with consistency. Include some open-ended questions such as,

• “What setbacks or barriers do you face in accessing the information you need, or connecting with fellow employees?”
• “How could we improve communications at this company?”

Use Data to Drive Decision Making

Given the importance of internal communications, decisions regarding your comms strategy should be informed by reliable data. Tracking the effectiveness of your communications and measuring the KPIs that matter most to your organization can help you make the most of your internal communications efforts. Use data to determine which channels and content types are most effective, where communication breakdowns occur, and where to focus your energy and your budget.

→ Check out more internal communication examples and ideas you can implement at your organization.

How to Measure Internal Communications?

Measuring the effectiveness of internal communications provides an opportunity to make improvements and to meet the needs of your audience. Here’s an example of quantitative and qualitative data to measure success.

Engagement Rates

Engagement rates include metrics such as reach, clicks, email opens, social interactions such as comments, and other indicators. Gathering data on engagement can help your team set benchmarks for future performance and glean insights about what types of content resonates with your audience.

Employee Feedback

Direct feedback from the people in your organization is a valuable source of information about the success of your communications strategy. You can gather feedback through internal communication surveys, polls, focus groups, and anecdotal conversations.  Employee feedback may illuminate hidden problems, gaps, and biases in your company communications and even spark new ideas.

Learn more about how and why you can measure the success of your internal comms strategy with this communication KPI and metrics blog post.

Internal Communication Tools

Communications must be engaging, relevant, and easily accessible - especially remotely. The internal communications digital transformation has changed the way we give and receive information.  To make internal communications more efficient and effective, take advantage of some of the numerous tools available.

Some internal communication tools include:

• Intranet
• Mobile intranet applications
• Internal newsletters
• Collaboration tools
• Instant messaging tools

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