EFFECTIVE INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

Any growing organization is bound to face employee goal alignment problems, especially in the IT industry, as communication is mostly not face-to-face. The success of an organisation depends on making sure all the brains under the umbrella are working with a similar understanding, approach, belief, knowledge and strengths. Most corporate companies forget that an effective corporate communication strategy is as important (if not more) as their customer engagement strategies!

Following are a few reasons why internal communications are important from an employee’s perspective

• Every employee wants to be informed
• Information is required to build trust
• Every employee wants to understand growth
• Every employee feels involved
• Every employee wants to contribute
• Makes the employees feel good
• Makes the employees learn

It is easy for organisations to loose gravity on the importance of effective internal communications, as it usually becomes a mandate and part of the process once the organisation crosses the medium size. Many organisations use communications to push content which usually would be from the perspective of the management rather than from the employee’s.The two major challenges in internal communication are:1) Will people read what is sent?2) Will it satisfy the need and intent?Based on communications that we have seen in the past 3 years, in my mind, a few fundamentals that could help cross this hurdle to a large extent are listed below:Will people read what is sent?Here are some great internal communication ideas:An interesting subject line – 40-50 % of the readers either walk away or delete the mail if the subject is uninteresting or obvious but irrelevant to the reader.Tease the recipient – if possible, before the actual message. This will arouse curiosity.Reward and engage – either through the teasers or the actual messaging, try to make the reader do something. It could be as simple as a quiz or answering posed problemCollect data and continuously analyze the pattern – what you think is a solution might not be. Changing tactics to align to the situational need is important as there is no cookie cutter solution.In the next part of this article, we will explore the other challenge of internal communication and how to combat it.