Internal Communications Strategy

What exactly are you trying to achieve? Every company will have different goals, based on their individual needs. However, in a successful internal communications strategy, there are some goals that should be the gold standard. These are:

Share information – ensuring employees are kept fully informed
Unity culture – imparting the values and ethics behind business decisions
Employee feedback – offering employees a platform to share ideas and concern.

While the primary goal of internal communication is to keep employees informed, it is also crucial to ensure that a unity culture is strived for and two-way internal communication channels put in place. Ask yourself the 5 best internal communcations questions.

Who is it aimed at?

Never forget to focus on who your internal communications strategy is aimed at.

Your employees have a lot on their minds, from the stress of the job they have in hand to worries about what the future has in store. They have personal matters and concerns too. Your job is to cut through all the noise and get your company message heard.

To get, and keep employee engagement you will need to understand your workforce and what information they will find interesting and important. It may be helpful to segment the audience into specific groups based on age, locations, teams and attitude. Messages about pensions will be more important for older employees for example, as anyone under 25 plans to live forever!

Don’t expect a single internal communication to work for every employee. Use a range of techniques in your internal communications strategy to allow for individual needs.

Why do you do it?

To get the most out of your internal communication strategy, you need to define your goals.

This will be different for every company and it can’t be just “make more money”. For some the goal may be to improve staff retention levels, while for others it will be about improving productivity.

Using an employee engagement app like VRAMP give you the ability to set benchmarks and monitor engagement to achieve these goals.

Once you have strong, clear goals in mind, the rest of your internal communications strategy will fall into place much more easily.

What are you sending?

You need to always consider the two questions that reside in the minds of your employees, “why should I care?” and “how does this affect me?”. Employees will see everything you are saying through their own personal filter.

Your internal communications strategy will work best if you have already mapped out some outcomes that will interest them. Making their jobs more enjoyable and easier for example.

Not as easy as it sounds I know, you can’t put a positive spin on everything! This is where a positive unity culture comes into play, the bad news needs to be on everyone’s shoulders in the business, not just the shop floor.

How is it received?

It’s important to consider how your messages are transmitted when creating an internal communications strategy.

Will they respond to a company-wide email, a social media channel or perhaps a messaging service like Microsoft Teams? Your best option is always to provide a choice of channels to allow your employees to receive information the way they like it.

An employee engagement app offers a range of channels, tools and feedback mechanisms. Providing a two-way communication stream for maximum employee engagement.

When are you broadcasting?

Like comedy – timing is crucial in both external marketing and internal communications. It is a balancing act between announcing too early with incomplete information, and leaving it until after the office grapevine is in overdrive!

When your internal communications become sporadic and only when there is a crisis you will find engagement levels begin to suffer as employees feel forgotten and side-lined.

Your aim should be to maintain a regular and consistent pace of messaging within your internal communications strategy. Use the range of tools and reports at your disposal to ascertain when the best time of the day is for your employees.

Rachel Stidworthy

Marketing Manager

With over 15 years’ experience in communications I have seen first-hand the difference strong internal communications can make. I am passionate about helping organisations reap the rewards of an engaged workforce and feel privileged to work for an organisation that has this same passion. We can achieve so much more when we work together towards the same goals.