While how your organization communicates with the world matters, so does your internal communication tactics! It would be best if you did not undermine the value of internal communication. On the contrary, it helps you build and nurture relationships among your team members. It then reflected into enhanced productivity of your employees. Thus, you must work on perfecting your internal communication strategy with equal importance.
Following are some of the ideas that help you improve communication across your organization:
Work on your current internal communication strategy
Dynamic Signal’s annual State of Employee Communication Engagement report has revealed that around 75% of employees waste significant time searching for important information. In comparison, 50% feel additional stress because of their current communication tools.
The above two stats point toward poor communication strategy. Ensure that you have a robust communication strategy in place that aligns with your business goals.
Your communication strategy should accomplish the following:
- Make a precise plan for ensuring consistent communication among your employees and evaluate if you can achieve your business goals through it.
- Clearly define which internal communication methods you will be implementing and how you will check if they are effective.
- Communicate with your internal communications team about focusing on activities that maximize the benefits.
- Gather quantitative (email tracking tool, polls, social media statistics, and internet analytics tool, etc.) and qualitative (group discussions, discussion forums, feedback from employees, feedback from management, and surveys) results. Use these measurement methods to evaluate your employees’ engagement effectively.
Make most of your meeting strategies
It has been found that about 37% of meetings offer no value and are counterproductive. Thus, strive towards making your meetings meaningful. How? Consider the following points for framing a meaningful meeting strategy-
· Make a point clear that you will not hold meetings for sharing routine information. It will waste employees’ time and company resources. Thus, use email, memo, slack or any other internal communications tool for sharing regular information.
Make your meetings goal-oriented. If there is no particular goal as such, you can safely cancel the meeting.
- Limit the number of attendees at every meeting by allowing only those team members directly contributing to the discussion.
- Set a time limit in advance for meetings. Try to optimize the stipulated time.
- Provide necessary data or materials to attendees before meeting resumes. Ask them to review given data/materials before they attend the meeting.
- Conclude a meeting with a clear plan. Avoid scheduling a follow-up meeting unless if it requires and share necessary information later through another method.
Opt for OCONNECT, a video conferencing software from ONPASSIVE. It facilitates real-time collaboration and helps in making online meetings more effective.
Create a culture of internal content making
While ‘content marketing’ help you boost your company reputation, it can also work for internal content making.
Publishing employee newsletters, delivering regular email blasts, or using an intranet, all these measures contribute to internal content marketing. However, there is more to it.
By enabling the creation of a steady stream of meaningful and valuable content, you can foster trust among your team. It will, in turn, boosts communication across your organization.
Try to involve more employees in creating content. It will help you get more perspectives and ideas.
Consider creating training videos for your marketing team or informative podcasts for salespeople. Make sure that all of you are team is involved.
Here are some tips for creating a culture of content making:
- Conduct regular Q&A sessions with your team and include their insights into blog posts.
- Record podcast interviews.
- Shoot videos for social media posts.
- If anyone is willing to write, encourage them to come up with related topics.
Use technology to your advantage
Consider using several technological solutions to engage employees and improve communication. Following are some of them:
· CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software: This software provides a central platform where employees can share and manage customer data. In addition, with CRM, employees can collaborate on different tasks such as sales, customer support, marketing, and vendor relationships.
- Digital workplaces enable innovation and interaction. It helps team members create and share content effectively.
- Online collaboration software platforms like Basecamp and Slack help employees manage tasks, projects, and overall workflow.
Arrange team-building activities
Team-building activities help break down inhibitions or barriers among team members. In addition, such exercises give employees a chance to mingle and interact with their colleagues.
This improved communication imparts creativity and innovation for resolving problems. Besides that, it boosts the spirit of teamwork.
Summary
Effective communication is a crucial aspect at workplaces. A larger organization with multiple tiers can face challenges imparting an effective internal communication strategy. However, if you invest in building a viable communication strategy by following the steps discussed in the blog, you can build a happy and healthy work culture.
