21 Steps to Improve Internal Communication in Your Company

Effective internal communication is key to creating a successful enterprise. Whether you run a small start-up or are the head of a major corporation, your teams need to communicate properly. Improving internal communications in the workplace will help your people to be more productive, better informed, and more connected. 

Keep reading to learn 21 sure-fire ways to improve internal communication in your company.

What are the Common Challenges in Internal Communication?

Focusing on how to improve internal communication in a company will provide a wealth of benefits. Effective internal communication will: 

• help to strengthen company culture;
• keep employees informed and engaged; 
• foster innovation;
• increase productivity at all levels;

Despite its importance, many businesses struggle with how to improve internal communication between departments. There are various types of internal communication, ranging from top down communication to formal communications to informal employee communications. Many of these internal communication channels can break down if there is a lack of employee engagement.

If the right communication tools are not in place, it can be difficult for employees to communicate effectively. Using outdated or inefficient online tools makes it harder to open lines of communication with remote workers. 

Company culture is also a factor in internal communication. If employees don’t feel engaged with a company, they won’t share their ideas. In some cases, employees can feel as if raising concerns or making suggestions will result in punishment rather than rewards. 

Communication issues also arise when business leaders are inconsistent or vague in their messaging. A lack of transparency from senior management is another cause of internal communication failures. 

Avoiding these types of issues can be easier than you might think. Take a look at the below examples of how to improve internal communication.

Internal Communications – Measurement to Mastery

Enhance your internal communication strategy and learn the impact of communication done right.

Step 1: Start at the Top

Major changes in an organization should always start at the top. Business leaders need to set the standards they expect from their employees. Upper management should take action to demonstrate they are focusing on their communication skills. Business leaders need to show that they are approachable, respect their employees, and are open to discussing issues. 

Example

Including a commitment to an open door policy in a mission statement is a good way to make sure employees are aware of management’s efforts to improve communication. 

Top Tip

Having management take part in active listening courses or conflict resolution training can help to show that communication is a priority. 

Step 2: Develop an Internal Communications Strategy

An internal communication strategy sets out your internal comms goals and provides ways to accomplish them. Analyze your current state of internal communications to identify any weaknesses. You can then devise a communication plan to address these issues. 

Example

A good internal communication strategy will cover exactly what information needs to be communicated, when the information needs to be communicated, and how it will be communicated. 

Top Tip

Make sure that you identify your audience correctly in order to tailor your communication strategies accordingly.

Step 3: Learn How Your Employees Communicate

Find out the methods your employees use to communicate with their colleagues. Once you’ve identified their preferences, you can tailor a set of internal communication best practices. 

Example

Find out if email is a preferred method of communication or if your employees use chat groups. Ask whether employees prefer face-to-face meetings or online meetings. Once you have the answers, you can customize your internal communication channels. 

Top Tip

Send out a digital questionnaire so employees can rank their preferred communication methods. 

Step 4: Focus on Employee Engagement

Focus on building good levels of employee engagement. Engaged employees are happier with their jobs, more productive, and more likely to communicate effectively. With good employee engagement levels, you’ll find that your team members are happy to share their ideas and suggestions. 

Example

Creating a strong company culture, providing perks, and ensuring that your staff finds meaning in their work are all good ways to boost employee engagement. 

Top Tip

Use your internal communication tools to send out bulletins, newsletters or surveys.

Step 5: Get Feedback from Your Employees

Getting feedback from your employees is crucial to establishing good internal communication. Employees that feel as though their voices matter will be more likely to share their ideas. 

Example

Sending out surveys via your company intranet is an effective way of garnering feedback from employees. 

Top Tip

Send out your employee surveys regularly. This can be weekly, monthly, or even daily. 

Step 6: Always Be Accessible

A junior employee may have a groundbreaking idea, but management may never find out if employees don’t feel comfortable in communicating with their business leaders. Implement an open door policy and be sure to have clear lines of communication between employees and management. 

Example

One way of showing that management is approachable is to conduct Gemba walks. This is a lean management technique where upper management regularly tours the working areas of front-line employees. 

Top Tip

Have senior management periodically attend and participate in team-level meetings.

Step 7: Focus on Team Building 

It’s always easier to talk to someone you know personally, like, and respect. Team building encourages your employees to form personal connections with each other. These personal bonds will facilitate internal communications. 

Example

Hold regular team-building activities. Both employees and management should be able to participate. It’s a good idea to constantly vary your activities. Don’t be hesitant to take team-building activities off-site! 

Top Tip

A regular trivia competition is a great way to include remote workers in team-building exercises. 

Step 8: Keep Your Employees Informed

Employees who are kept well informed about what is going on in their company are more connected, engaged, but also more likely to be communicative. If your employees aren’t informed of current developments, rumors can spread. It can harm morale and impact productivity levels. 

Example

Make sure your employees know how well the company is doing or if any major changes are going to be implemented to working procedures. Is there an upcoming merger? Will a new IT system be implemented? Send out a company-wide bulletin to let people know. 

You can also implement an employee intranet to improve internal communication like the LumApps, which lets you pin important announcements to the top of employee dashboards and has internal campaign features that allows you to send broadcasts to employees via email or push notification. 

Top Tip

A weekly round-up bulletin from the CEO is a great way to keep employees up to date on what’s going on in the company. 

Step 9: Hold Regular Catch-up Meetings

Meetings don’t always have to be formal occasions. Holding a regular informal catch-up meeting is a good way to encourage internal communication. If people feel comfortable, then they are much more likely to engage in brainstorming and come up with innovative ideas. 

Example

Schedule a casual team catch-up once a month. Make sure it is in a relaxed setting where employees can feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas. 

Top Tip

A monthly team breakfast or lunch is a great way to informally catch up with colleagues.

Step 10: Be Consistent in Your Communications

Consistency is vital to good internal communications. Consistent messaging builds trust but also credibility. If your internal communications are consistent and clear, rumors or misunderstandings will be avoided. 

Example

Companies must make sure that their messaging is always on-brand and direct. Use the same style of language every time you communicate with your employees. You can also use LumApps broadcast campaigns to create consistency by sending messages at the same time each week and send it via the employee’s preferred method of communication. 

Top Tip

Set the tone for your communications early. Don’t adopt a formal prose style and then suddenly switch to an informal style. 

Step 11: Ensure that Your Communications are Engaging

If your internal communications are flat, dull, and full of irrelevant information then your employees aren’t going to read them. Always communicate information with real value for your employees. Edit out any filler material or irrelevant information from your internal communications. 

Example

Always consider your audience when planning internal communications. Tailor internal communications to provide department-specific information. 

Top Tip

Before sending out an internal communication, think about who the audience is, why they need the information, and if they can use it. 

Step 12: Have a Clear Company Mission Statement

Creating a strong company culture starts with your mission statement. The mission statement will inform your employees of the company’s goals and purpose. A good mission statement can inspire, give your employees a sense of pride and purpose. It is also good for branding and marketing. 

Example

Your statement should be brief, catchy, but mostly, informative. It’s not an easy task, so spend time developing the ideal mission statement. Think about the core goals and the main purpose of your enterprise. Try to express that in one or two sentences. 

Top Tip

Conduct brainstorming meetings with senior stakeholders to develop your mission statement. 

Step 13: Encourage Employees to Share Information 

Smart ideas can come from anywhere. Business leaders should make sure to encourage employees to share information between different departments. To improve internal communications, facilitate employees sharing what they know about their roles. Information sharing leads to enhanced collaboration and promotes innovation. 

Example

You can encourage information sharing between departments by holding team meetings with guest speakers from other areas of the business. Arrange for employees to sit with a staff member from a different team with a different role for a day. 

Top Tip

Highlight success stories of inter-departmental collaboration to encourage information sharing. 

Step 14: Respect the Diversity of Your Workforce

Employees come from a diverse range of backgrounds. The modern workforce is comprised of people with different cultures, beliefs and requirements. All employees should feel that they are valued, that their opinions and ideas are valid. 

Employees may have different religious or political beliefs or sexual orientations. If not handled correctly, issues can arise and impede the way a team functions. Certain staff members may refuse to work with each other or get involved in heated arguments. Encouraging respect for diversity will avoid these problems. It allows staff to communicate effectively even if they hold opposing views. 

Example

Setting up cross-cultural meetings where employees can share their stories can help to improve understanding between colleagues and facilitate internal communication. Employee resource groups show staff that the company respects diversity. 

Top Tip

Diversity training can help staff to learn how to be more accepting of each other. This will enhance communication between people with different backgrounds and beliefs. 

Step 15: Be Transparent in Your Communications

Transparency builds trust. If your employees know that business leaders are being upfront with them, they will be more likely to communicate freely. Senior management must take steps to maintain the highest standards of transparency within the organization. 

If your employees think important news is being kept from them, they will become distrustful of management, less likely to speak their minds. They will also be more likely to spread rumors and misinformation. All of which can be incredibly damaging to a company’s productivity levels, and its reputation. 

Example

Inform your employees about all relevant company news, whether it’s good or bad. Your internal communications should address all major issues the company is facing. 

Top Tip

Holding leadership Q&A sessions with your employees can help to reinforce transparency and encourage communication. 

Step 16: Don’t Shy Away from Repetition

Repetition is a major factor in maintaining consistent internal communications. Although many business leaders don’t like to repeat themselves, repetition in internal communications can be a useful way of getting a message across. 

Example

Repeating certain goals, values, or objectives over several meetings and within numerous written internal communications will stress their importance. Want to break last month’s sales record? Make sure you mention it more than once! 

Top Tip

If your company is working toward a short-term goal, you can include it as a sign-off in your email communications. 

Step 17: Make Use of Social Media

Social media is a great way to get employees connected and encourage communication. You can use both internal and external social media to enhance communication levels among your staff members. 

Example

The company intranet can be more than simply a way to disperse company information. Give your employees a space where they can share interests and chat about non-work-related subjects. Setting up a dedicated wall on the company’s internal website where employees can share personal stories or photos is a good way of encouraging communication via social media. 

Top Tip

Encourage your employees to engage with the company’s external social media accounts. 

Step 18: Track Your KPIs 

There’s no sense in implementing ways to improve internal communication without keeping track of your progress. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to assess internal communication. You can use data analytics tools to monitor whether or not KPIs related to internal communication are being achieved.

Example

Common KPIs that can help you to measure the success of your internal communication strategy include:

• email open rates; 
• website link click-through rates;
• read times; 
• open-by-location statistics;
• open-by-device statistics. 

These metrics will give you a better picture of how often your employees are engaging with your messaging and how they are engaging with it.

Top Tip

Using digital tools is a great way to stay on top of your KPIs. LumApps employee intranet included advanced analytics that you can use to track performance of your content by read rate or engagement rate. 

Step 19: Send Out a Company Newsletter

Sending out a company-wide newsletter on a weekly or monthly basis is a highly effective way of ensuring good internal communication. Your newsletter can cover important company news, mark when milestones are reached, and share personal news about employees’ lives.

Example

A newsletter is a great vehicle to build company culture. It will encourage better internal communication practices. Use your newsletter to acknowledge employees who go above and beyond and highlight instances of successful cross-departmental collaboration. 

Top Tip

Consider assigning sections of your newsletter to various employee interest groups. 

Step 20: Set Up an Anonymous Suggestion Box

It’s often difficult for employees to share ideas if they feel they may be controversial or unpopular. An anonymous suggestion box allows employees to voice their concerns and ideas without fear of recrimination or stigma. 

Example

A suggestion box can be a simple cardboard box with a top and a slit for envelopes. Alternatively, you can set up a digital suggestion box on the company intranet. Be sure to stress that all submissions will be completely anonymous. 

Top Tip

Set up your physical suggestion box so that employees won’t be watched when they submit something. 

Step 21: Use the Right Digital Tools

Online tools are fantastic for fostering effective internal communication. You can use digital tools to:

• monitor projects;
• keep track of KPIs;
• ensure that employees stay connected to one another. 

Example

Digital tools can be made available to both on-site employees and remote workers. They can be accessed by a variety of devices. You can set up your digital tools to cater to numerous languages. A modern employee intranet is a top digital tool that businesses can use to improve internal communication, knowledge sharing, and transparency. 

Top Tip

Digital tools such as the LumApps employee intranet can help you to build employee engagement and improve internal communication.

Conclusion

Taking steps to improve internal communication in a company will enhance productivity, boost morale and job satisfaction, and encourage innovation. 

No matter where your employees are or what language they speak, the digital tools from LumApps can help you develop an effective internal communication strategy. LumApps ensures that you always provide your employees with relevant, up-to-date information via their preferred channels.

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Internal Communications – Measurement to Mastery

Enhance your internal communication strategy and learn the impact of communication done right.