Internal Communications Tools

Expectations of internal communicators has changed over the years. Once our role was simply pushing a message top-down through an organization and assuming it had been understood.  Today, leaders are responsible for ensuring they have effectively communicated. Poorly communicated information hinders employee engagement. It’s almost worse than not communicating at all.

To help support leaders, we must now ensure structures are in place that enable consistency of the message sent to a distributed workforce spanning business units, skill levels, languages, regions and cultures. The modern IC professional enables and empowers organisational leaders to communicate effectively – whether it’s good or bad news.

Read the full article to find out more about these seven elements that can be utilized to help foster effective leader communications:

1. Have a clear vision, strategy and goals
2. Understand the value of good internal communications skills
3. Have a place at the top table
4. Align leader and audience with message
5. Create informed conversations
6. Measure, identify and align
7. Share results with stakeholders

"The employee communications department is at risk of becoming irrelevant. There already are voices calling for companies to do away with them, arguing that a function focusing on one discrete audience is anachronistic given everybody’s ability to see what everybody else is saying.

Most internal communication departments spend most of their time creating and distributing content. Much of that is done through email and intranets, which have become the replacement for newsletters and magazines (and something called a “magapaper”).

It remains vitally important for a dedicated internal comms function to report news and other information employees need to know. While they may read the same reports other stakeholders read (like customers, shareholders, and local communities) and have access to sites like Glassdoor.com, where employees praise or condemn their organizations with granular detail, employees have special contextual needs those channels don’t serve.

Reporting alone, however, is not enough to sustain employee communications’ relevance. Everything about business and work is changing; so is the way people get, share, and use information outside the workplace (and even inside, since it’s easy for employees to bypass official channels). Employee communications departments need to recognize the realities of the modern workplace and reinvent themselves in response."

Read the full article to find out more about these roles a modern internal comms department needs to fill:

• Facilitating employee-to-employee communication
• Message Mission Control
• Channel management
• Inspiring and sharing employee-generated content
• Data analysis
• Coordination with other communication functions
• Change and culture communication
• Leader communications
• Communicating for engagement
• Supervisor communications
• Employee advocacy
• Measure, measure, measure
• Call to action: Go forth and communicate