How Businesses Can Improve the Way They Communicate Internally

Internal communication is one of those areas that can always benefit from improvement. The result of poor internal communication can be grave: information gets missed, employees feel disconnected, and time is wasted choosing things that should be clearly communicated.

How do you as a business turn around its internal communication and address any gaps that exist for a seamless experience and a structured approach?

Identify Where Communication is Breaking Down

You cannot start to improve internal communication until you address where it's going wrong. You need a clear, honest picture that looks at the obvious and not-so-obvious failure points that exist in your operations and where patterns are forming.

Common failure points include relying too heavily on email for time-sensitive information, announcements being made in team meetings that not everyone attends, decisions being documented inconsistently or not at all and frontline employees being several steps removed from the information that affects how they work.

Start by surveying staff directly; ask what they feel isn't working and what can be improved from their perspective. It gives you a good place to start from, and you identify exactly where in the chain of communication things are breaking down.

Create a Single Source of Truth

A significant contributor to poor internal communication is information being scattered across too many places. It’s having details in one folder, updates in other folders, important announcements buried in an email thread from three months ago. The result is employees not being able to reliably bring what they need, and they waste time searching or making decisions based on incorrect, incomplete or outdated information.

Centralising company information in one accessible location removes that friction when you adopt an internal communications platform. You give your employees a single place to find whatever they need, be it company news, HR documents, project updates or contact information. They don't need to access different systems or ask others for access; they can find it all one place either. The result is improved efficiency and consistency for everyone, thanks to them all working with the same information at the same time.

Make Leadership More Visible and Accessible

If you have employees who feel disconnected from leadership, they'll be less engaged and less informed about the direction of the business. And this means they're less likely to align their work with the organisation's priorities.

You need to ensure that all leadership engages correctly with regular direct communication beyond the formal quarterly or all-hands meetings. This makes a significant difference to how connected people feel to the people and the business they work for.

Now, this does not mean constant communication. Far from it. It means making leadership presence a deliberate part of internal communication rather than an afterthought. Delivering regular updates on company performance and direction, offering visibility on key decisions and the reasoning behind them, as well as having channels employees can ask questions via and receive genuine responses, helps to contribute to a culture where people feel informed and valued rather than managed at a distance.

Train Employees on the Tools and Channels You Use

Introducing new communication tools and platforms and not explaining how they work or best practices, isn't going to get the results you need. This will only end up with the tools and channels being underused and people defaulting back to familiar habits they are more comfortable using.

Training doesn't need to be extensive. All employees need clear guidance on what channel is used for what, how to find information within the platform, and what is expected of employees in terms of keeping their own information up to date goes a long way.

It's a good idea to identify internal champions who use tools well and can help to support colleagues informally as they get used to using the new methods of communication.

Measure What's Working

The mistakes here are implementing new communication options and assuming they're working. There'll be kinks you need to work through to make sure it's working for you. On top of this, the platform you use might not be used effectively or at all by some people. This is why measuring how it's working and how it's being used is vital.

Simple metrics can tell you a great deal. Open rates on internal newsletter engagement with platform content, uptake of new tools and employee surveys will give you a clearer idea more than gut feeling will. You need to establish a feedback loop so you can identify what is working, adjust what isn't and demonstrate the value of communication as a business function rather than background noise.

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