Improving Internal Communications in the Workplace: Why It’s Important and 9 Ways to Do It
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Everyone has been at a job or been in a situation where they’ve been burned by poor communication.
For instance, you arrive at the office and open your work chat app. To your dismay, you find out you missed a conversation that ended with the announcement that it’s a work from home day for everyone.
Or it’s getting toward the end of the day and you get a sudden email wondering if you’ll be able to get your project in on time. They think today is the due date, but you have it scheduled for next week.
The issue with poor internal communication is that it negatively affects everyone involved. It confuses employees and creates chaos where there doesn’t have to be.
In this article we’ll cover:
- Why internal communication is important
- 9 ways to improve internal communication
Why is Internal Communication Important?
Internal communication might not seem like a big deal, but without proper protocols, your business can become a mess. Here’s the reasons you should care about internal communication.
It Helps Keep a Record
Having a record of communications, deadlines, and project procedures will help your business improve and cover itself in case something were to happen. A standard procedure for communication will make digging through these communication channels much easier.
Clear records are helpful to look back on to understand hiccups in a project and how things played out. Your business can use this information to improve procedures and learn from past mistakes.
You’ll Avoid Miscommunications
Missing due dates, misunderstanding tasks, and other general confusions can be mitigated by implementing an internal communication plan. A good internal communication plan will include protocol for how to structure tasks and deliver those tasks to team members.
Getting bombarded with random bits of information will confuse and frustrate employees. Good internal communication will negate this by ensuring that important information is delivered clearly and correctly.
Your Employees Stay Tuned in
As the workforce continues to shift more to remote work, managers need to find ways to keep remote workers tuned into what’s happening within the organization. Standard practices for internal communications will do just that.
Standard practices like weekly check-in’s, organized chat rooms, and open door communication practices, will keep employees tuned into what’s happening within the organization, even if they aren’t physically there.
9 Ways to Improve Internal Communications
An organization with poor internal communication will suffer from overcommunication, long meetings, and unnecessary conversations about things that have already been covered. Fixing internal communication within a business requires new policies, tools, and even a culture change.
1. Create A Standard Operating Procedure
If you really want to improve your organization's internal communication, you’ll want to develop a standard operating procedure (SOP). With an SOP everyone will be on the same page regarding:
- Who to communicate with
- What tools to use for communication
- Changes in policies
- The onboarding process
- Responsibilities
Creating an internal communication SOP requires:
- Evaluation of current tools
- Determining pain points
- Establishing goals
- Finding tools
- Modification when necessary
A good communication SOP will be built to change when things fail. Communication is something that can always be innovated upon and changed. If something isn’t working, revisit the plan and adapt.
2. Keep Communication Guidelines Available
Internal communication SOPs are useless if no one has access to them. These guidelines are important for maintaining the efficiency of your communication. So make sure your people can easily refresh their memory on the protocol.
To do this, make your SOP documents easily findable in whatever project management tool you use. This could look like having a designated space for all important internal protocol documents including:
- Communication guidelines
- Project guidelines
- Project management set up guides
- Important onboarding documents
By keeping these protocols close, employees can quickly find the important information they need to successfully work in your organization.
3. Choose The Right Tools
Project management tools are vital to creating a productive working environment. They also help maintain communication.
Businesses are required to keep track of a lot of tasks and information. With a project management tool, you can keep track of due dates, internal check-ins, and documentation all in one place.
There are a lot of great project management tools out there. A lot of these tools are specific to project types. Jira is great for software development, but Asana is good for keeping track of different teams. Depending on the size and scale of your business projects, you could choose a simple program like Asana, or choose to upgrade to a large workspace platform like Basecamp.
Whatever tool you use, make sure to use it to its fullest potential by learning all you can about it. Some tools can do some really cool things you wouldn’t think about at first glance.
4. Start from the Top
Start implementing change from the top. Those in leadership positions should know what’s working and what’s not. Use that knowledge to make your internal process smoother.
Your leadership will also be able to establish and maintain an open door policy making communication channels more effective and helpful. Team members should be able to chat freely about projects and strategies to improve processes, that’s why an open door policy is so important.
5. Keep Channels Open to All
Internal communication when everyone’s door is open. Workers shouldn’t have to ask their team to ask their department lead to ask one of their team leads to ask someone in that team a question.
Cross department communication and open door policies are important for creating a transparent and honest perception of what’s happening within the business.
To implement an open door policy, define the policy in your organization and give employees ample opportunities to communicate with higher ups and other leads, managers, and team members.
6. Create a Social Intranet
Without the proper tools, creating open and helpful communication channels can be difficult. However, with the proper tools you can create helpful channels to keep your business organized and work culture healthy.
Software like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat, or Discord can help your business’ teams stay up to date. You can use them to create chat rooms for different projects or subjects. You should also consider creating a room for employees to chat about life outside of work.
A social intranet will help create a positive work culture by allowing conversations to occur easily. Depending on the scale of your business you may need to spend some extra time making sure important messages aren’t getting drowned from responses.
7. Organize, Organize, Organize
Most companies have a shared drive everyone can look through, add to, or edit. For your business to be successful, you’ll want to keep those files as organized as possible.
Create a workflow for people to use while adding documents, this will keep everything nice and tidy. You can organize by department, team, client, project, project specifics. By organizing this way, all documentation exists within a logical flow.
You should also organize your social intranet to include the proper people in the correct channels. If you have a chat room or thread for your development team, don’t include the employees on your video team.
8. Is This An Email or a Meeting?
Everyone has experienced attending a meeting you don’t have to be in. Sitting there listening to not important information while thinking about the tasks you have to complete by the end of day. It’s not great and it demotivates employees.
Running a successful meeting means inviting only those who need to be there. Meetings shouldn’t be used to get everyone up to speed on every little thing. Before scheduling a meeting, consider if there’s a better way to get the information across. You could use your businesses intranet to message only those who need to know, or you could send a company wide email. If your channels are open, employees can always ask questions there.
Improve your organization's internal communication by scheduling less meetings and writing more emails.
9. Try Out 1-on-1s
A 1-on-1 is a meeting between two people. It’s not that wild of a concept, but when used in a business setting it will help you catch issues in your workplace before they become major problems.
1-on-1s give employees a scheduled time to talk about their work - what’s working and what’s not. 1-on-1s should be scheduled by team leads with the people they lead. These meetings should include questions like:
- How are you enjoying your work?
- Have you learned anything new?
- Are there any pain points?
- Have you noticed any areas that need improvement?
Over time these meetings will become more and more invaluable for improving your business.
Improve Your Internal Communication With the REDC
Internal communication is something that requires constant maintenance and adherence to guidelines. Managers and owners alike can benefit from a healthy internal communication process while employees will enjoy working in an open and ever improving workplace.
The REDC helps businesses achieve healthy and helpful communication by offering important services to Arizona businesses and employees. Your business can receive employee training and consultation with industry experts.
Get in contact to start leveraging all the resources available to your business.