A recent Harvard Business Review study found that internal corporate communications suck. While working on a paper about the social networks inside companies and how they are used to convey information across the organization, the researchers discovered that, for the most part, corporate social networks don’t exist.
But why are companies that invest a percentage of their earning into marketing their products and communicating their value to external audiences so dysfunctional when it comes to creating a united organization in which everyone understands the corporate objectives and how their individual work contributes to the company’s success?
The Harvard researchers found that organizations find the best internal communication occurs within separate business units or geographically isolated offices, but not cross-departmentally. In other words, the Marketing team knows what it is working on and how its activities will impact sales, the company’s perception and ecosystem, yet the rest of the organization probably doesn’t have clue about what Marketing is doing or why.
Effective internal communications is important. By fixing internal corporate communications, organizations:
- Achieve higher organizational effectiveness
- Improve morale
- Foster a family environment versus an “it’s just a job” mentality
- Engender loyalty
- Reduce employee attrition
- Create a small army of evangelists.
Many of the tools that organizations use to promote themselves and to communicate directly with their customers and partners can used to improve internal corporate communications. Here’s a short list of ways your company can keep everyone informed of what’s important to the organization and involved in the business’ growth:
- Use social networking tools
- Podcasts, videocasts & microblogging tools like Yammer allow you to deliver snippets of information to employees in engaging mediums they already use outside the workplace.
- Blogging
- Allowing executives, middle managers and rank-and-file employees to post to an internal blog opens up dialogue. Imagine allowing Marketing to get feedback on planned campaigns, or engineers inviting coworkers to beta test a new application.
- See Lorelle VanFossen’s post on “How to blog.”
- eNewsletters
- Too often companies try to disseminate information internally via email. But everyone receives too many emails already. Condense the news & updates and compile them in an html newsletter that goes to the staff monthly. Include photos & images to keep it interesting.
- Surveys
- Solicit feedback from employees on a quarterly basis and share the results. Sites like Survey Monkey and PollDaddy provide free or low-cost online survey options that compile the data for you.
- Internal community site
- If you have the resources (web developer & budget) create a secure community site where employees can share documents and presentations, get help on projects, publicly thank project team members, give kudos for new sales, product launches or partnerships, and interact freely.
- Brown bag lunches
- While technology can improve how we communicate, face-to-face interactions are crucial for instilling a communal sense of purpose and belonging. Senior executives can use brown bag lunches to reinforce messages disseminated through corporate social networking at all the corporate offices.
Each aspect of your internal corporate communications plan should have a champion – someone who oversees the activity and ensures that communications are timely and consistent. The new rules of public relations emphasize directly connecting to your target audience. The same applies to your most often-overlooked audience – the company staff.
Get serious about your internal social network, and watch your employees from Accounting to the CEO take to it like a teenager takes to MySpace.
