The importance of internal comms
If your internal comms strategy isn’t up to scratch, it can impact company morale, productivity and retention. Research performed by Clear Company found that businesses with effective communication are 50% more likely to have lower employee turnover. Another study by Trade Press Services found that 85% of employees were most motivated when management offers regular updates on company news.
These stats are just some of many that illustrate the vital role a strong internal comms strategy plays in your organisation’s overall performance. On the other side of the coin, they highlight how a poor internal comms strategy could hinder growth aspirations. So, unless you relish high turnover and unmotivated colleagues, it’s time to rehaul your internal comms strategy.
Here’s our best practice approach for effective internal comms.
Review your current strategy
Reflection on past activity is key to future growth. Take an objective look at the internal comms efforts you currently have in place. Do your comms meet your objectives? How do you know if they are? How much engagement are you getting from employees? Are the right messages getting through and, more importantly, are they sticking?
If you find that your internal email open rate is low or intranet visits are lacklustre, it might be time to change things up. The best way to understand where or how you’re missing the mark is by asking your colleagues directly.
By finding out what their pain points are and what could be better, you embrace the importance of internal communication. Set up working groups, run staff surveys and organise focus sessions to find out what people in the company think of your internal comms. To achieve a rounded view, make sure the group members straddle different levels and teams of the company.
Set SMART objectives
We talk a lot about SMART objectives over at WLM HQ – and for good reason! SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound) objectives can be really useful to help you gain a clear picture of what you’re looking for out of your new and improved internal comms strategy. Because after all, how do you know what is effective without first defining what ‘effective’ looks like?
Objectives could be improving your employees’ transparency perception results on your next employee engagement survey, or improving newsletter or email readership.
Identify who is responsible for what
It’s all very well getting your ducks in a row, but without clarity on who will be actioning your internal comms plan, your efforts could quickly prove fruitless.
Assemble a team who will be responsible for internal comms. Then, define roles which will complement the smooth running of the strategy. Remember to ensure the whole team understands the core principles of your comms strategy.
People from outside the comms team can provide useful sources of information as to their own team’s wins, as well as other activity among their colleagues to help you put together a strong internal comms team.
Consider what type of content you want to create and share
While there may be best practice principles in place for effective internal comms, there’s no one-size-fits-all policy for content. It should be curated and shared to achieve maximum impact for your audience. Think back to your SMART objectives, and how the content you create can help you to achieve maximum engagement.
Over the years, we’ve found that recreating proven formats helps us to plan, publish and share the right content, at the right time, over and over again. The best internal communications content tends to fit into certain key story types, which you can read more about in our blog: 5 types of internal comms content.
Measure your progress
Without putting metrics in place, it’s impossible to know what comms content is working and what isn’t. Working in the dark also takes away the satisfaction of seeing your hard work pay off!
There are lots of tools out there to help you measure analytics, including ContactMonkey, Workvivo and Unily. Whichever software you use to deliver your internal comms campaign, there are usually analytics options available to help you track things like click-through rates, read time, traffic to internal pages, internal comms survey results and programme or event sign-ups.
Brewing up an internal comms plan from scratch can feel a little intimidating, but think of it as a roadmap to driving your employees (and therefore your organisation) forward. And if you need to enlist a little help along the way, you know where we are!