How Improving Internal Communication Will Foster Workplace Productivity & Engagement: 6 Effective Tips & Solutions
- 1. Assess Your Current Internal Communication
- 2. Establish Reliable Communication Channels
- 3. Create Internal Networking Spaces
- 4. Facilitate Team-Building and Bonding Activities
- 5. Invite Third-Party Educators for Assistance
- 6. Make Time for Coaching & Feedback
- The Outcomes of Improving Internal Communication
- Fostering a More Communicative Workplace (Conclusion)
Effective, solution-oriented internal communication is one of the cornerstones of a healthy corporate environment. However, many companies struggle with facilitating good internal communication despite a plethora of coaching solutions and digital platforms available for assistance.
According to reports, employees engaged by their work environment exhibit 21% greater profitability, 59% and 24% less turnover in large and small corporate environments respectively. Additional data indicates only 19% of employees feel sufficiently engaged, with 64% fully prepared to leave their workplace in 2020 due to poor internal communication.
Fostering workplace communication and employee engagement is a show of outstanding leadership, and you should thus do your best to improve your employees’ work environment. Let’s take a look at how you can do that in 2021 and the benefits you can look forward to from improving your internal communication.
1. Assess Your Current Internal Communication
Before you take any drastic steps to improve your internal communication, you should conduct interviews with employees and managers. Find out the current state of affairs. What’s the general atmosphere and company culture in your company? How friendly are your employees with one another, and which platforms or services do they use for internal communication?
Internal communication refers to interpersonal relations and professional correspondence between employees – both should be fostered to create a safe and inclusive environment for everyone. Finding pressing problems or issues during your initial assessment will allow you to focus on critical areas before expanding your internal communication with innovative ideas.
2. Establish Reliable Communication Channels
Once you decide to work on your company’s internal communication, you should start establishing how it will be done from now on. Modern companies, especially those, which rely on remote work management and overseas employees, often use a dedicated project management platform. If you already have such a platform present in your workflow, assess why no one is using it as intended and whether to change it.
Otherwise, integrating online collaboration software such as Flowlu into your internal communication strategy can dramatically improve the way your employees communicate. Such a tool will allow your employees to use a dedicated online hub for both casual instant messaging and project planning from a single UI. Its collaborative environment, a user-friendly feedback system, and mind mapping functionality will serve your internal communication needs effectively.
3. Create Internal Networking Spaces
While effective project management and productivity are essential, so is the mutual communication and networking of your employees besides official work. Instead of leaving things to chance, you can create a safe and focused networking environment that your employees can use to talk and learn together.
Implementing a knowledge base into your workflow will serve several important points, not the least of which is continuous learning and development for your employees. You can post new learning materials on such a hub regularly and allow your employees to discuss new materials, trends, and innovations within the industry. People who learn and network with one another in their spare time will be far more efficient when official projects come their way.
4. Facilitate Team-Building and Bonding Activities
It is crucial for your employees to feel like a part of a bigger family, as cheesy as that may sound on paper. When it comes to team-building, both managers and ground-level employees should mingle together and participate in the same activities.
If you operate strictly remotely you may be limited to online video games, quizzes, and discussion. However, if you can meet your employees in person, the world becomes your oyster. You can participate in sports activities, organize various friendly games of competition or engage in 360° feedback to help everyone get acquainted with one another. Even though these activities don’t necessarily correlate with real-world scenarios your employees might face, they are an amazing internal communication booster for everyone involved.
5. Invite Third-Party Educators for Assistance
Coming back to personal and professional development, your employees will likely want to expand their horizons with new skills and expertise under your wing. Your employees might be more willing to open up and discuss pressing communication bottlenecks and potential solutions with people outside your company hierarchy.
This is where third-party HR agencies, industry experts, career coaches, and other development facilitators come into play. Organizing occasional seminars, webinars, conferences, and events for your employees to talk, bond, and learn together is an amazing opportunity for better internal communication. Effective communication, feedback sharing, objective criticism, and other topics related to teamwork can be at the center of your training events.
6. Make Time for Coaching & Feedback
Once you put different internal communication activities into effect, you should take time to talk to your employees periodically. Coaching is an important part of corporate culture, one which will allow you to assess how effective your internal communication measures really are. Coaching can help you guide each employee through their career development, help them set effective SMART goals, and bring them closer to your vision.
Through feedback, each person can express new things about the affairs in your company before and after new internal communication has been made. Сombining the feedback of various individuals on your payroll, you will know how to improve your communication efforts further. Making your company as inviting, hospitable, and tolerant for every employee under its roof should be your end-game – work with your employees to get there.
The Outcomes of Improving Internal Communication
With several tips and solutions for internal communication improvement covered, let’s turn to the benefits of applying them to your existing workflow. Based on recent research, 69% of employees said they are ready to work harder if they are appreciated more, with internal communication cited as crucial.
Estelle Liotard, content marketing and writing expert at GetGoodGrade writing site spoke on the topic: “If you want high-quality work to come out of your employees’ efforts, take the time to talk to them effectively. Companies that focus on writing skills and impersonal employee relations especially need to pay attention to this. Study your employees, ask about their personal experience with internal communication and start from there.”
Simply put, people want to work in an environment where other people will recognize their hard work and share their passion for professional development. Personal mental and physical health is of utmost priority for every employee on your team, and as such, improving communication can raise their professional commitment. The benefits of doing so will also manifest in many ways going forward, including:
- Better teamwork and more effective, objective communication
- Improved employee agency, ownership, and commitment
- Quicker, efficient responses to problems and crisis scenarios
- Lowered employee turnover and improved company retention
- More experienced employees and leadership grooming opportunities
- Higher profit margins and improved industry positioning against competitors
Fostering a More Communicative Workplace (Conclusion)
The purpose of your internal communication efforts should be to enable everyone to communicate more professionally, effectively, and in a friendlier manner with one another. It is not a goal that you can achieve overnight, so make sure that you give your project some time to bear fruit.
Start by assessing how well your employees communicate right now, through which channels, and what their main bottlenecks are. Combine different means of easing everyone into more stable professional relations as we’ve outlined them until you find what really works for your workplace. There is no one-size-fits-all in this case. But with care and dedication, your employees will enjoy a more productive and welcoming work environment.
About the author: Dorian Martin is a writer, editor, and proofreader with years of experience as an article, research paper, and case study writer. Dorian is an academic with degrees in computer science and mass communication expertise, which he uses by writing for an academic essay writing site. He contributes to his personal blog in his spare time and aims to expand his knowledge constantly to become a more reliable copywriting expert.
Photos by Alexander Suhorucov from Pexels
