Good internal communication is helpful to everyone across the company in better understanding business, hearing each other and simply making people feel better. Managed properly, it will support managers and employees alike in building valuable relationships that underpin effective management. In their communication with workforce, company heads and executives will gain the confidence that their dialogue helps their employees to understand the management’s actions and decisions. Communication is also an emergency response platform. It enables managers to diffuse stress and conflict before it spreads throughout their organization.Internal communication experts can equip leaders with tools that will help them communicate strategic concepts more effectively as well as hold everyday conversations with employees. The employees, in turn, will feel that their company follows transparent rules, values its workers and appreciates their contributions. How can you make this model a reality in your organization? Here are a few simple tips you can use to build a better communication strategy for your company.
Create your own COMMUNICATION MISSION
Make a few clear points to outline what internal communications means to you. Then take a close look at your company and the challenges it faces and use what you see to formulate a robust internal communications mission. As you proceed, keep your thinking and ideas simple. Imagine that a company head tells you: “You have 5 minutes to explain what internal communication is all about. Convince me it can be useful to my organization and how. Do this well and you can consider yourself hired”. The job will be a whole lot easier if you keep your thinking and plans simple and refer to real-life examples. To build and successfully unroll a good communications strategy, you need to realize what is crucial to us, IC professionals, and superimpose the goals that arise from the company’s views and needs over your individual beliefs and preferences.
Name the PRIME COMMUNICATION TASKS
for your company without losing sight of your priorities. Describe the way things are at the moment and identify the key issues and communication needs that the company is facing. Use this to name your key focus areas. Should you focus on better informing the workers about the company’s affairs, or on supporting the leader in adopting new ideas? Or should your priority be to boost employee commitment? Since communication is a broad field, it is critical to narrow it down and pick the most vital objectives on which to focus before one can even begin to develop a strategy. When selecting the priorities, do not limit yourself to the “here and now” forgetting about the long term. Try to look into the future and anticipate what role communications is going to play in your company a year or two from now. It may well turn out that your company needs a more comprehensive global communications approach and therefore should develop multiple communication strategies and plans for each specific area.
Identify ALL BENEFITS
that the company can gain by employing the strategy you are proposing. All your IC efforts should center on recognizing the way things are at the present time and how they should be once the strategy has been successfully deployed. Define the “before” and “after” and describe both in measurable terms. The field of communication is still learning to properly gauge its effectiveness. Online reports and publications offer a slew of new tools and tips on how to evaluate communications in your company in quantitative and qualitative terms. A handful of such solutions may well be useful, allowing you to create a “mix of measures” that will give you a good idea of how popular your communications materials are, as gauged by newsletter readership, the number of article likes, or user activity, assessed, for instance, on the basis of the number of online posts. You can also use multiple qualitative measures based, for instance, on employee feedback. Once you have chosen the measures you want to apply, specify the values you ultimately aspire to espouse. Wherever possible, be sure to present the underlying values you have adopted as a baseline. This will later enable you to demonstrate progress.
Bear in mind the complexity of TODAY’S COMMUNICATIONS
Today’s increasingly virtual world greatly influences internal communications activities. I have already written that such communication characteristically blurs the line between private and professional roles. By posting comments on social media sites as private individuals, we indirectly speak for the organization with which we are professionally associated. You must not forget about this blurring of borders between the two worlds. A keen awareness of this is particularly vital when working with company leaders. They can use IC guidelines to post personal comments with a view to strengthening the image of their organizations. Therefore, in formulating a strategy, it is essential to remember that we all function in social media. These can be harnessed as pivotal communications tools.
Develop your own COMMUNICATION LANGUAGE
We are constantly flooded with diverse messages. Your employees, who are your target audience, are accustomed to the world of multimedia. Verbal communication is just one of the many available options and not even the most essential. For your communications to be effective, you need to employ multiple channels and a varied mix of methods and tools. Therefore, build your strategy on the basis of a communications patchwork. Many reports claim that traditional newsletters and e-mails are becoming less effective as messaging applications and video content gain popularity. Texts, reports, videos, infographics, graphics, links to online publications, creative metaphors, case studies, quizzes, tests and messaging apps may all make up a huge arsenal that you can use to achieve your strategy.
Uphold your VALUES and maintain CREDIBILITY
Your success in implementing your strategy depends on your credibility as a professional with both the board and the workers. To effectively promote employee commitment and motivate coworkers to engage in additional activities for the company, you must set an example. Every step you take as a specialist will be assessed both formally and informally. You must be credible and responsible for your actions. Whatever values you choose to project will be applied firstly to judge you and your actions.
Create a communications strategy for ALL LEVELS
Traditionally, company communications used to be seen as a dual system. On the one hand, there was the kind of communication, referred to as horizontal that took place among the employees and concerned specific ongoing projects and operational management. For horizontal communication, we – IC experts – would choose the kinds of tools, such as messaging software, that improve day-to-day communication and cooperation in the company. On the other hand, our job used to be to equip the management with tools for communicating strategic information to all employees. An effective strategy would support both horizontal information flows among employees and the vertical “top down” messages coming from the management. Our job has changed with the technological revolution, which greatly affected the way we communicate. Social platforms and a proliferation of mobile applications have created “all-to-all communication”. This changes the tasks performed by the internal communications function and its very meaning. Increasingly, organizations are viewed as a network of information flows or relationships. This is made possible by organizational network analysis tools. The key from the network perspective is to provide users with communication tools, support their activity in the digital environment and promote interactions among them. Thus, the job of an internal communications expert becomes very similar to that of a community manager.
Do not forget about money
Each successful strategy that aspires to be more than merely a theory or wishful thinking needs the backing of a realistic and well-defined budget. If you are planning to hold regular conferences and employee training and regularly publish video content, remember that all that costs money. Do not set out on creating complex, expensive projects unless you are certain that the company can afford them.
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