Learn the basics of internal communication and plan your strategy using our template.
Why Internal Communication is Essential
to Your Business?
You've probably heard the saying, “People don’t quit jobs, they quit toxic work cultures.” Poorly organized internal communication at a workplace is one of the most popular reasons why people quit their jobs, even if they like what they do. The toxic work culture is always a result of an ineffective organization of internal communication between employees. Organizations with effective external and internal communication are more transparent and build more trust for their brand, product, or service.
Why do you need internal communication?
Once you, as a manager, have created a healthy work environment, attracting new talents and lowering employee turnover rate will be easier. Good internal communication keeps you up-to-date with regular employee feedback so that you can improve the work environment anytime. And thus, making people stay in your team or company.
Here’s a list of reasons why managers should devote more attention to the internal communication in the team and the company:
Internal communication keeps your employees informed
Tell people about the company updates, provide them with more detailed information about projects they're working on. In other words, create more transparency.
Internal communication gets your people engaged
Creating a two-way conversation is key to maintaining effective internal communication. When you give employees a voice, they are more likely to go above and beyond the organizational needs.
Internal communication helps to keep people calm in times of crisis
Business sometimes suffers, and things may not go as smooth as before. Being transparent, delicate, and extra-caring in any change announcements can be paramount in tough times. Create an atmosphere of openness — this won't turn people against the company. Don't let a small problem become a full-blown crisis.
Internal communication adds another dimension to your workplace
Well-organized internal communication promotes learning and speaking events, training and education programs, entertainment events, and any other opportunities for people to get more involved. When such activities exist, employees are more likely to be encouraged to remain a part of your organization, as they have a space to grow.
Internal communication creates a channel for feedback, debate, and discussion
If a company supports an open communication strategy, it provides room for feedback, pushback, and public debate of issues and ideas. Many crises can be avoided by employee polls, internal discussion forums, event announcements and feedback collecting, and even some debates.
5 Reasons for ineffective internal communication
Ineffective communication in a workplace can result in an extremely tense environment wherein people are not motivated to be productive and are not inspired to collaborate. Difficulties in communication can then spill over to how employees relate to clients or customers.
But why does the communication turn this way? Here are the main reasons:
1. Unclear objectives
It is important to conduct face-to-face meetings with employees to discuss their achievements and set new objectives. The lack of task clarity tends to lead not only to lower productivity, but also to misunderstandings between teammates.
2. Poor leadership
Good leaders can act inspiring examples and motivate their team, leading to success. On the contrary, incompetent leaders are indecisive and unable to provide a motivational example. It is even worse if the communication is rude and high-pitched. Such behavior can pull the whole business down in a flash.
3. Cultural diversity
Work environments are getting more and more diverse over time. People of different backgrounds, races, religions may work for the same company and experience difficulties in communication. Therefore, for such diverse teams, it is crucial to organize seminars or workshops on intercultural communication. That might significantly simplify communication and prevent possible conflicts in the workplace.
4. Demoralized employees
When employees lose interest in their work, they feel undervalued and unappreciated. This state of mind is very dangerous, because it may spread to other people, aggravating the situation that is emerging in the team or company.
5. Distracted employees
Sometimes we all get distracted by personal issues. If an employee is going through tough times, he/she probably won't be full concentrated on the work. Besides, he/she may communicate in the wrong way or react negatively to some situations. In this case, as a manager, you should make sure to give your employees time off to deal with their issues. They will appreciate it and will usually return grateful and motivated.
How to build an effective team communication?
Over the past ten years, building effective internal communication became a lot easier than before. Thanks to the software, social media, and the internet, it became simple to manage. One of the ways to improve and maintain team communication is to start using software that facilities efficient information exchange.
Analyze how effective and convenient is the tool that your team uses at the moment. Try to find the best solution that suits your needs. You can create a group or channel on social media — chatting on informal issues brings people together. It could work as a channel for feedback, debates, and discussion. Besides, you can celebrate your employees' successes, share their wins and stories on social media or in your internal space.
Depending on your teams’ size, age, preferences, and other characteristics, develop an internal communications strategy. Remember that the most important thing is to value and respect employees, especially those who contribute to your company values. Having invested a little effort in a more connected and aligned workplace will pay off handsomely. Don’t let your work culture become toxic. Keep going towards the perfectly organized team communication. Your team deserves that!
Planning to build or improve the internal communication
strategy in your team or company?
Take a look at our Internal communication strategy template
It provides a good plan that can be used as a basis for your project, so you know where to start.
How to use this template?
Create a new project and choose the Internal communication strategy template to start. All Infolio templates include some demo content. Feel free to remove it once you've familiarized yourself with the concept.
The tasks are grouped by the steps of communication strategy development: "Research and analysis", "Strategy and planning", "Implementation" and "Evaluation". Example tasks provide general guidance, remove them and add your own tasks easily.
Group tasks by Status to track their progress (e.g. "In discussion", "Working on", "On hold",
”Approved", "Done"). In this view you can easily add new statuses to your workflow or rearrange existing ones. Update the status of any task by dragging and dropping it to the corresponding column.
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To see how tasks are distributed within your team, group the project by Assignee. In this view, you can reassign tasks quickly by dragging and dropping them between columns.
If you need any further help or if you have suggestions about how to improve
this template, don't hesitate to let us know!
