Communication is everything in life and business. Companies that operate efficiently and as one cohesive unit are only able to do so because of their incredible internal communication processes spanning multiple different channels and ways to communicate with their employees.
Internal communication sometimes sounds like an easier process than it is. It sounds like sharing information with your employees should be easy. But if you don’t do it in the right way and through the correct channels, your employees may not see the information at all. Poor internal communication leads to lower productivity and lower employee satisfaction which ultimately leads to poor customer engagement and lower revenue.
If you’re unhappy with your organization’s methods of communication in the workplace, there are steps that you can take to fix it. We’ll highlight some of the best ways to communicate with employees that are also creative and innovative in this article.
Why internal business communication matters
Having a strong internal communication plan in place is essential to the long-term health of your company. That’s because it’s the method by which you share important information with your teams.
Imagine that you’re updating one of your products or services by adding a valuable new feature to it. You need everyone in your organization to know about that feature and why it’s valuable to get the most out of the addition when it comes to marketing and selling the service.
With a strong internal communication system, everyone in your business will be able to respond efficiently to the changes that you’ve made. With poor practices, your teams (or even individuals within those teams) could be on different pages for quite some time. This could lead to varied business practices and inconsistent results through your company, leading to poor performance.
Internal communications also play an important role in the following areas:
- Employee buy-in
- Trust-building
- Motivation
- Creating channels for feedback and discussion
- Enhancing transparency
- Building a better work environment
- Empowering your teams
However, you want your methods of internal communication to not only promote efficiency but also engage your employees. Engaging your employees keeps them involved and entrenched in the company culture. By incorporating creative ways to communicate with your employees, you can ensure better engagement. As to what those innovative internal communication methods are? Here are a seven:
Invest in digital signage to communicate with employees
Digital signage is a great way for companies to engage with their customers. But it’s also a highly effective method of communicating important information with your employees. You can use digital signage as part of your broader internal comms strategy to achieve your goals in this area.
For example, digital signs are great at capturing your employees’ attention. You can use displays with captivating imagery and attention-grabbing designs. Put this alongside the information that you want to communicate to your employees and they’ll see it.
The key is to place digital signage in high-traffic parts of your venue. When you do this, your employees will naturally look at them as they walk by. This makes it super easy to spread information across your entire team with minimal effort on your end.
Digital signage is also an excellent tool for sharing meaningful internal metrics and boosting employee morale. You could even look into setting up interactive digital signage for your employees. It’s this versatility that makes digital signage so impactful.
Engaging videos improve communication with staff
If you truly want to communicate vital information to your employees as effectively as possible, videos should be the primary way that you do it. People retain about 95% of a message when it’s delivered via video but just 10% of it when it’s delivered through text.
It’s this discrepancy that’s led 93% of internal communication professionals to say that video has become essential.
The best internal communication videos are short and to the point. You want to convey the important information that you have to share in a bite-sized format that allows employees to watch without having to delay their schedule to do so.
If you ever need to make a longer video, be sure to put timestamps on it. These are helpful because they allow employees to quickly access the specific parts of the information that they need immediately.
Videos can be a great option for all of the following types of internal communication content:
- Training videos
- Recordings of company meetings
- Updates to procedures or new health and safety information
- Messages from the CEO
- Newsletters
An internal social media platform can be a channel of communication to employees
Internal social media platforms provide an ideal way for you to share short snippets of information with your employees in real-time. They’re also a highly effective way to boost intra-employee communication and company culture.
That’s because your employees are already on social media. They use it to share information about their personal lives. An internal social media platform will tap into this behavior and leverage it to benefit your company by enabling your employees to receive and send communications in the same way they do outside of work.
Set up a wiki database to facilitate effective employee communication
As information becomes more detailed and complicated, it also often becomes more difficult to share.
For example, you can make quick videos or digital signage displays to share fast updates to company policy or to introduce a new client. But a video won’t be the best way to share detailed information about your company handbook or a best practice for a niche situation.
That’s why setting up an internal Wikipedia-like database could be the right move for your company. It could become a hub that you use to share important, long-form information with your employees.
Wikipedia is something that everyone has used so your employees will find this database super easy to navigate. It should also significantly reduce the amount of time that you or anyone else in your organization has to spend on explaining the same things over and over again.
Create an employee profile database to boost your company's internal communication
Employee profile databases are an underrated way to communicate important information in an organization. At first glance, they may appear to be nothing more than a way for your employees to get to know their coworkers. But these can be useful for your employees and save you a ton of time — especially if you have a very large team.
Your employees will be able to use the database whenever they need to find a coworker with a specific set of skills or area of expertise. Being able to search for that type of colleague in a simple online database is much faster than having to track one down manually.
Ultimately, if you don’t have one of these databases, your employees are probably going to come to you or another leader with their search. Creating an employee profile database will save you from having to repeatedly connect colleagues that could be connecting themselves.
Publish a newsletter at a set interval for communicating with your employees
Newsletters are a great way to share information that you don’t need to convey right away. If you publish one for your employees at a set interval, you can create a lasting process for sharing information that isn’t time sensitive with them.
But you can’t just throw a newsletter together haphazardly and expect your employees to read it every week. Instead, it’s important to format the letter in a way that will engage your employees and make sure they read it.
Here are some tips for creating an impactful internal newsletter:
- Keep them short and sweet
- Create bite-sized takeaways at the end of each section
- Utilize powerful calls to action where they’re needed
- Collect feedback from your employees by asking for an emoji with their reaction
- Make sure that each part of your newsletter provides actionable value to your employees
Add mobile integrations to your existing communication methods in the workplace
A lot of organizations have employees that spend much more time out in the world meeting clients and making sales than they do in the office. If you’ve got a sizable group of these types of workers, then they may not currently benefit from all of the investments you’ve made in internal methods of communications.
To fix that, consider updating your existing internal communication channels to make them more accessible from mobile devices. Doing so could immediately increase the number of employees that you’re reaching with your existing messaging.
This type of fix could also be much cheaper to implement than investing in building out a completely new method of internal communication.
Shift offers the best way to communicate with your employees
Each of the solutions listed above can help you communicate information with your employees more effectively. But many of the methods of communicating to employees require your employees to intentionally take time out of their days to view specific types of content.
Digital signage, on the other hand, engages your employees when they’re moving throughout your space and not focusing on anything else. That makes them an ideal way to share important messages that you want to make sure everyone in your organization sees. When everyone is on the same page, keeping your business practices consistent and optimal is simple, allowing you to more effectively drive revenue.
If you’re going to use digital signage, you should do it through Shift. Our platform is incredibly easy to use. It’s as simple as plugging a device into a screen, creating the content you want to display, and setting it up to run on an automatic schedule across all of the screens in your building.
In this way, Shift enables you to harness the full power of digital signage to facilitate stronger communication between management and employees. Schedule a custom demo with us to learn more about what we can do for your organization.
—------------
Recommended Resources
Why Back of House Software Matters: Operational Excellence
3 Ways Good Entertainment Improves Your Customer Experience
A Step-by-Step Guide to Designing TV Menu Boards For Your Restaurant
