Creating successful internal communication program for Employee engagement

Often organisations has well researched, defined policies and action plans, for communicating its business service to its customers, partners, community and potential jobseekers but does it has the same level of communication plan explored and implemented for its own employees?🤔

Simply offering digital tools such as Teams, Slack, Intranet won't make a difference if its not set up with clear audience and goals in mind.

Organisations must focus on this critical aspect for building improvements in cultural alignment, employee engagement, and employee advocacy inorder to run a profitable sustainable business.

Lets understand why its important?

Just like without conversation you cant make a friend, similarly without effective communication you cannot engage employees or provide excellent services to your stakeholders at any level.

Existing scenario: 

Organisation often set up one single communication system and tend to forget, track or update it as per the changing business environment. This unfortunately leads to many using outdated systems that don't communicate well with their employees creating confusion, misinterpretation of info, rumours, frustration and even losing key employees whose replacement cost is as high as 150%.

Expected scenario:

But with succeful internal communication strategy productivity improves and employees feel connected and act as a brand ambassador promoting company in social media that helps company to grow (Reviews on Glassdoor, Seek, Linkedin )

In my past organisation consistent issues in team projects we conducted a survey and found that nearly 80% employees want their employer to update them on latest news on whats happening across their organisation whereas 70% stated that it helps them to build relation with colleagues and can act as an advocate for business and tell others about their company. 

This is where we focused to capitalize with effective Internal communication programs.

Following this 7 steps by our team, helped to avoid the typical roadblocks that comes up and lead to sucessful implemetation:

1. Assess your current internal communication strategy

Doing an internal research, making notes and answering key important questions actually helped us to identify the current position of organisation.

2. Identify your key metrics to track for success

Statistics on our internal communications demonstrated if employees actually use our intranet. It also shows how they use our tools and if are able to reach others in the process or are they even reading it. This helped us to understand which areas need attention. 

We required core metrics that will show us if our strategy is actually working.

We found that we need to tap the amount of social shares our content receives (Hiring post or buiness accolades). So we decided to track that by implementing an internal comms tool, that helped us to see the total shares by our employee network, content or user to analyze our overall reach and awareness, which opened doors for improvement required in these areas.

Then we also focused on measuring our overall employee engagement metrics that provided deep insight into (what your staff uses/reads the most, how often are they reading our internal content? Do they comment, like, share or start a discussion with our content?) This evaluation helped us to understand at what level do employees feel open to discussion/share on organizational content.

3. Set realistic goals & timelines

So we looked at our previous metrics, data to identify where we can make an immediate impact. 

• What do you want your internal communications strategy to do for your company? To deliver the right message to our employees and engage them to act as an advocate of our business to increase visibility. 
• Which areas are working well, why those areas are working well, and what needs improvement? Intranet is doing fair, needs improvement alongwith social share option.
• How quickly do you want to reach your goals? 4-6 months timeframe
• What communication tools or platforms are available given company size, priorities, and expectations of what employees should be doing with information shared? Intranet, Email and phone. Employees must share it with their networks and be aware about latest news, its impacts and how they contribute.

Answering these questions provided a blueprint on what we want your internal communications strategy to actually accomplish. We used SMART goals to define it clearly for team.

4. Segment & map out your audience

Segment your employees into distinct groups based on their working environment (call centers or frontline retail) or communication preferences. 

Set these groups up in your communication platforms to enable easy targeting of relevant messages – in the format and channel best suited to them.

in our case, we discussed with key stakeholders in the organization to discuss what type of content would be necessary for their team. Rather than sending the same information to everyone, our internal communications strategy focused on delivering relevant information to the right people, at the right time For example: Sales team will require sales updates, marketing team will need info on events and IT outage for specific location needs to be communicated only to specific teams.

5. Build an approval process

This will prevent any unnecessary errors, closed comments or news from accidentally being published to the wrong segments of your team.

We gave the accountability to the Marketing/Communications teams to finalise:

1. who will read, write or approve the messages we send to our team?

2. what stakeholders from each department can contribute to the approval process for content. 

This helped streamline content approval, publishing and avoid bottlenecks. We also created a contingency plan which outlines alternative courses of action to be taken in the event of roadblocks to the main plan – whether timing delays, lack of resource etc. 

6. Identify your internal communications tools

It’s important to note which channels and tools you will use in the process.
For example, major news might be more suited to Twitter, while job openings may get more visibility on LinkedIn and Facebook. By using an internal comms tool like Bambu, we reduced our marketing costs and increased our social reach.
To reduce communication costs while streamlining collaboration strategies, social tools—from messaging apps like Slack to advocacy platforms like Bambu—helped us to bring disconnected teams together towards a shared goal.

7. Evaluate your progress & optimize

We started with quarterly evaluations of our communications strategy and build it into the core foundation of our workflow.

We developed communications related questions into our employee satisfaction survey that include:

• How well do you think we are communicating internally?
• Are we doing everything we can to keep our organizational vision transparent?
• What setbacks limit you from working with others on projects?
• Do you believe we could increase our communications across departments?
• What barriers prevent you from better internal communication each day?
• Where can we improve the most on company communication?

This evaluation provdied great insights on how to improve and grow.

Conclusion:

Today, workplace communication isn’t just about making sure that executives and lower-level employees feel comfortable talking to each other, it’s also about evaluating the technology available for communication and understanding how it can be adopted to improve collaboration, performance and ultimately, advocacy.