Updated: 28 July 2022
Are your internal communications not working for you? Take a look at our 26 top tips to improve internal communication
We’re going to give you 26 proven, simple ways to improve internal communication in the workplace. These are simple internal communication best practices that you can easily implement.
But before we jump into that, let’s talk about why internal communication in the workplace is so important in the first place.
Why is it important to improve internal communication?
The quality of communication In the workplace reflects the organization’s health.
Conference Board reveals organizations could lose over $450 billion per year due to disengaged employees through retraining time and lost productivity leading to losing sales.
Despite this data, companies still view internal communications as an expense rather than a potential revenue driver. This approach will ultimately lead to employee-related problems, such as low engagement and retention and more challenging employee acquisition.
Fortunately, there are many approaches to improving internal communications strategy.
Below, you’ll see 23 different methods that follow internal communication best practices that are ready for you to implement and build your company’s internal communications plan.
1. Start with the leadership team
Everyone wants open and communicative colleagues, but how would you rate your communication skills?
Many people realize they can improve internal communication by improving the way they share ideas and information with others. That’s why examining the way you communicate is a great place to start.
Your role as a leader is to establish a culture of open internal communication in the workplace and set a standard of internal communication best practice for the way people communicate within your company. You should always remember that improving internal communications starts with you, so evaluating your communication skills will help your colleagues follow your lead.
2. Check-In with Your Employees
Getting in touch with your employees regularly is essential to improving employee communication. A great way to start is by planning in-person or online meetings every few weeks to discuss projects, personal issues, or the organization.
Encourage your employees to share their thoughts and opinions. Do they have some recommendations or complaints? What do they think about the company and the work given to them?
If you respect and value your staff’s opinion, you’ll improve internal communication and see massive improvements in your company culture.
3. Learn more about your employees
No two people are alike, and meaningful conversations can mean different things to different people.
Ask yourself, how do your staff like to communicate? Do they prefer to chat on their smartphones or via surveys and newsletters, or do they prefer face-to-face communication?
Knowing all the nuances of how your company communicates will improve internal communication greatly. You’ll be able to create an internal communication best practice for consistent workplace communication to keep employees engaged and informed.
Nothing will make your team feel more valued and appreciated than you reaching out in person to determine their needs. It also shows that you’re willing to act on it, which is always a plus for employee engagement and morale.
After you know which internal communication channels your employees prefer, you’ll be able to find the ones that best fit your message.
4. Ask for feedback
Gather feedback from colleagues on how you and your organization could improve communication in the workplace. Collecting this information doesn’t require a formal survey, but it’s a good idea to document it somewhere.
You can use this feedback to develop unconventional ways to facilitate communication through continuous improvement, and an effective internal communication strategy should constantly review those channels against employee engagement and improve internal communication.
5. Review your current internal communications plan
Improving your internal communications is impossible if you don’t know the root cause of your problems.
As a start, ask yourself how many channels your organization uses. Communication methods like email, team chats, video conferencing platforms, and even the telephone have pros and cons in improving employee communication in the workplace.
However, some are likely to be more efficient than others. For instance, email is not the best for two-way communication. That’s why some companies favor social intranets and collaboration tools.
Create a list of your current internal communication tools and make an honest evaluation of the ones you think are working and the ones that need to be updated or removed.
When making changes, look for tools that allow you to be diverse in your communication methods and make it easy to experiment with different formats. You can improve internal company communication through the following tools:
- Interviews
- Reports
- Debates
- Videos
- Commentary
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Webinars.
6. Create an “open door” policy
Communicating internally with your employees encourages them to feel comfortable bringing issues to your attention whenever necessary. It’s a great way to engage employees and improve communication in the workplace while making you more approachable.
Don’t be shy about inviting people to come in. Your door could be wide open and still have no one coming through it. It would be best to lead by example by getting up from your desk and making your own rounds.
Another way to do this is to implement scheduled communication that empowers your employees, builds bonds of trust, and creates a culture of free and open communication in your organization.
Take time to meet with your staff as often as you feel necessary. Also, invite them to group discussions about projects, tasks, and the situation in your company as a whole.
7. Try company standups
Another great option that serves a practical purpose is daily standup meetings. The more you remind your leadership team about the current status of their tasks, the better. They can be held in person or via video conferencing if you have remote workers. They can be as short as 10 minutes. For larger organizations, standups might be limited to departments or teams.
If you have the privilege of your entire team being in one time zone, try scheduling your meetings at the same time every day, ideally at the beginning or end of working hours. But if your staff are all over the world, try finding a time that works for all remote workers.
8. Encourage more regular conversations
Some managers and CEOs think engaging in regular conversations with their employees is slacking. However, as a communicator, you already know how important it is to build productive bonds. But that’s impossible if all you ever talk about is work.
A vital aspect of every relationship is engaging in normal conversation. If your employees feel like having casual discussions or debates during the workday, you should allow them to do so, all within reason.
The biggest reason to have informal communication is that your most lively, engaging content can often come from it. All great ideas come from the heart and soul of the organization – its employees.
Internal communication can improve employee satisfaction and generate great ideas for your organization. What’s not to like?
9. Make internal knowledge easily available
Not all communication is two-way or one-way. There is also information.
No matter what industry you’re in, document management and knowledge sharing are essential daily tasks. That’s why you need your employees to be able to find files, photos, and answers easily.
The company’s social intranet will centralize all this information and put it at the fingertips of your entire organization. To improve internal communications, start with how your staff finds relevant information.
10. Use social media
In recent years, more businesses started realizing how powerful social media is, especially for engaging with customers. However, only a few of them understand that they can harvest the power of social media to improve communication and keep employees up to date.
Encourage your employees to like, comment, and share interesting posts about your organization and company values. In addition, you can use social tools within your intranet to reap the benefits of social media in your business’ daily activity.
Allow employees to share their thoughts and interests to create meaningful, work-related conversations. It’s a great way to match relationship-building to your company goals.
11. Use an employee app
If you’re a large organization with national or even global locations with a wide variety of roles, it might feel like a challenge to get those who aren’t in the office to feel engaged and improve overall communication in the workplace.
If this is you, it means that a huge part of your company culture isn’t being heard and, therefore, isn’t being factored in fully to your internal comms.
Most people have a mobile phone, and now there are employee apps like Workvivo that mean you can keep an entire workforce connected, whether they’re on the frontline or behind a desk.
Using an employee app can ensure that even frontline employees feel connected to the wider organization and improve internal communication.
12. Organize your documents
If finding information in your departments is hard and messy, you can’t expect to maintain internal communication best practices, as it might mean you’re overloading employees with additional, needless tasks.
Use your intranet to organize your teams and the people and information within those teams and make your employees’ work easier. You can turn it into the go-to place for finding and accessing data.
Heads of departments can also instantly communicate with members by sharing documents and sending updates through an internal notification system.
As a result, management can easily contact members, and members can access documents and information on-demand. This is particularly helpful for new employees, as if they can find everything they need easily, they can hit the ground running.
However, all of this starts with analyzing your teams, the people in them, and how these people communicate within and across groups.
13. Create internal language within your company
Sometimes, the best way to improve communication in the workplace and employee engagement is to create an internal language. It can include acronyms used every day to describe aspects of business or made-up words inspired by your company’s inside jokes.
It’s a fun exercise that will keep things interesting throughout the week. Undoubtedly, it will improve communications and make them more fun and free-flowing.
14. List a common goal
What is the common goal or mission statement your company stands for? If you can use internal comms to share this goal and create conversations around it, everyone will be pulling in the same direction. A common goal is a great way to strengthen your staff’s productivity and eliminate confusion by identifying, clarifying, and reinforcing this objective.
Remember, there is nothing more important to a team than everyone being on the same page.
15. Openly reward your employees
When expectations are set, people deliver. You should recognize your employees’ efforts when they go above and beyond on a task and ensure that recognition is made public.
There are two reasons for doing that:
- It acknowledges and rewards good behavior. We, as humans, like to receive recognition, especially when working toward an overarching goal. Receiving one-to-one recognition from your manager is nice; receiving that in front of your colleagues, even your entire company, is even better!
- It sets an example for your entire organization.
There are several ways you can reward your staff. If your internal communication platform includes aspects of gamification, you can use that to publicly reward employees when they complete tasks. Another way is to have a good old-fashioned in-person chat.
Rewarding your employees publicly will improve their morale. As a result, internal comms will significantly improve because your employees will be excited to share their wins.
16. Use the outdoors
Spending hours in the same office can negatively affect everyone, especially during the summer.
Sometimes, all it takes is a little change.
Implementing regular outdoor activities within your internal communications plan goes a long way to improving employee engagement.
Going outside the office doesn’t mean wasting work time. It can be a fun way to interact with your team. You can choose a vibrant coffee shop for your team to work at or create periodic work-from-home days.
17. Allow your employees to recharge
Working long hours is exhausting, both physically and mentally.
Everyone has experienced burnout at some point, making it difficult to communicate with others efficiently.
Allow your employees to take their much-needed breaks.
Whether this means longer lunches or the occasional day off, it will pay off in the end.
While this tip isn’t directly related to internal comms, encouraging employees to share how they’ve used their time off with their colleagues boosts conversation and team morale.
18. Improve manager-employee relationships
In high-performing organizations, managers and employees work closely with each other.
However, this is not the case for every business. It’s not uncommon for employees to have quick interactions with their managers and never get to know them on a personal level.
If you encourage better collaboration between employees and managers, you allow people to be more open and communicate freely. The team at Gmelius (a leading email collaboration tool) put together a great guide on ways to improve team collaboration.
19. Stay away from top-down communication
Many businesses use a top-down approach to communication. It’s been a classic method for decades. This type of communication in the workplace gives you more control over your message but won’t serve your employees in the long term.
Instead, you should establish an open line of communication for employees, and you’ll see how your internal communication improves instantly.
After all, communication in the workplace should always be a two-way street.
20. Encourage content creation
Empowering your employees with intranet tools will allow them to create and share content within your organization. This will help them develop a voice in the company and skyrocket their engagement.
Content creation, by itself, will massively improve internal communications and may take the form of:
- Blogs
- Thought pieces
- Podcasts
- Video blogs
- Polls
- Posts.
Plus, employees can interact with their colleagues’ posts, which is another effective tool for creating productive discussions.
Not to mention, creating blogs will strengthen knowledge sharing for each group in your organization.
21. Start conducting stay interviews
A stay interview is a one-on-one meeting where managers (or other leaders) chat with their employees to figure out what’s working and what’s not working in their jobs and the company as a whole.
The goal is to improve internal communications and discover what problems need fixing.
Believe it or not, a stay interview is a great way to measure your organization’s success and could answer some of the problems your organization is facing. The best ideas are often inside the minds of your employees.
22. Make an effort with shy employees
Some people are shy but just as valuable as their more outspoken colleagues. You should identify and reach out to quieter members and encourage them to share their ideas.
As a part of your internal communications best practice, every employee should go through an onboarding process in which they get acquainted with all team members. This will help them break the ice with everyone and feel more comfortable in that workplace.
You can’t improve internal communications if you’re missing a group of employees. Within your organization, everyone should know everyone. This is what communication is all about.
23. Schedule video conferences for remote employees
Managing remote employees is hard, especially when it comes to building relationships.
One solution to this problem is video conferencing. It’s the best way to meet someone in a different location in person.
Schedule weekly video meetings to discuss ideas and topics or create other team-building activities. This is a great way to get to know the people you work with and keep up to date with what they’re working on.
Plus, it sets the right tone for your workplace’s internal communications — everyone should have a voice and a face!
24. Celebrate personal occasions and successes
We talked about how a comfortable working environment improves internal communications.
The key is to treat your employees as real people.
Announcing birthdays or work anniversaries are small, easy-to-do gestures that build a people-oriented community.
They make everyone feel valued and appreciated.
As part of your internal communications plan, make an effort to schedule work anniversaries and employee birthdays beforehand.
Equally, it’s great to encourage social sharing if an employee has had a personal achievement, like a new home, a wedding, a baby, or perhaps they’ve done something for charity.
25. Welcome questions
Questions are one of the most vital components of effective communication in the workplace.
Just as you should ask questions to any team member, your employees should feel happy to do the same. Employees at all levels, whether new employees, managers, executives, or even stakeholders, should be approachable.
Instil that mindset in your company by encouraging two-way communication and asking your employees whether they have questions for you.
26. Use surveys
Every employee is different, regardless of the type of organization you run.
Perhaps the best way to improve internal communications in the workplace is to run a survey and ask people how they want to communicate.
This is super helpful because it’s a way to ask direct questions and get all the information you need.
Also, your team will feel more valued and appreciated, boosting employee morale.
(However, some employees may find surveys boring. That’s why Workvivo gives you the opportunity to create short and fun polls that get people engaged and don’t feel like a drag.)
H3: Find out how Workvivo can improve your internal comms
Workvivo is an easy way for large organizations to improve company culture through better communication in the workplace.
One million employees connect through Workvivo daily, improving employee satisfaction and retention and saving your organization money on retraining.
If you’d like to hear more about how Workvivo can work for your organization, book a demo with our team of experts.
