Get internal communication right with these 5 best practices
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Get internal communication right with these 5 best practices
Elaine Keep
16 April 2024
7 min read
Elaine Keep
16 April 2024
7 min read
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Why internal communication is an important skill
How to communicate with your teams:
1. Communicate with clarity
2. Create the comms they need
3. Encourage free flow of ideas
4. Experiment with your approach
5. Let teams express ideas their way
Think the biggest blocks to your business success are external? Think again! Discover how to improve internal communication with our guide.
Poor internal communication is a pinch point for organisations of all sizes, bottlenecking progress and hindering innovation. Many tools help you communicate – you may like our guide on Confluence personal spaces to enhance internal communication – but what are the more general rules around internal communication best practice?
Why internal communication is an important skill
We don’t all emerge from the womb able to negotiate, express big ideas, or convince others to act. Communication involves all of this and more, and at some point, you will need to get buy-in for an idea at work.
Internal communication needs to engage your most important stakeholders (employees!), so should always be clear, impactful, easily understood, and on-brand.
Internal communication needs to engage your most important stakeholders (employees!), so should always be clear, impactful, easily understood, and on-brand.
How to communicate with your teams:
1. Communicate with clarity
Internal communication fails if it confuses, so it is internal communication best practice to presume that the reader or listener knows little to nothing about the topic or terminology.
Ensure it is clear from presumption, jargon, in-jokes, or unexplained acronyms, even ‘obvious ones’. Any references should be explained.
Compare these two examples:
Ensure it is clear from presumption, jargon, in-jokes, or unexplained acronyms, even ‘obvious ones’. Any references should be explained.
Compare these two examples:
- “To help the SEO agency, we will be storing all company information on our Knowledge Base. Please don’t store locally from now on and add all to the KB. Thank you!”
- “To support our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) agency, which is working with our marketing team, we need your help. We need to provide them with a wide range of articles using product guides and manufacturer updates. If you usually save documents and images, PDFs or links of this type on your computer or email, please ensure you save them on our Knowledge Base. (Here’s a reminder of what it is, and what we use it for.) To log in to the Knowledge Base, please click here. Here's a link to reset it if lost. If you have any issues, please email support@business.com. If you aren’t sure whether we will want something, send it on anyway, and we can take a look. This really helps the company. Thank you in advance.“
Internal communication works best when it is direct, honest, and authentic with simple language.
Never forget that sensitivities can arise from even simple communications done poorly. An employee may fret that their role is changing, or that work is being taken off them. By forming a habit of over-explaining, you minimise worry.
Worried this will take too long? To enhance your own messaging approach, you may want to investigate using AI solutions. Businesses are using tools like ChatGPT Enterprise to create their own corporate versions of ChatGPT. There are many other similar tools around. In short, AI can be taught to help create internal communication for you.
2. Create the comms they need
It’s all well and good learning how to say what you want to say, but what do your teams want to hear?
To gauge what they are actually thinking about, worried about, or interested in, you need to:
To gauge what they are actually thinking about, worried about, or interested in, you need to:
- Regularly survey your teams
- Allow anonymous contributions or questions to be posed
- Speak to managers
- Speak to employees ‘off the record’
- Host team events and build a trusting relationship
You may discover that employees are keen to get more positive feedback, follow up information after a project or a pitch, or that they want to learn more about the industry. They might want to stop sharing communications on certain channels, or to express to a senior leader how hard it is to save information on a wiki.
If you don’t ask, you might never know!
3. Encourage free flow of ideas
Expertise and information sharing are integral parts of a generous corporate or team culture, especially as continuous learning is imperative to remain competitive.
A culture where innovation is stagnant will never thrive as much as one that’s bubbling with new ideas.
How can you get more insights and ideas from your team? You need to ensure you have an open communications culture where ideas don’t have to be polished and perfected, but simply voiced and saved in the right place.
It’s internal communication best practice to have an ideas channel, perhaps in the form of a Confluence personal space, or other online repository which allows people to share.
They could add:
A culture where innovation is stagnant will never thrive as much as one that’s bubbling with new ideas.
How can you get more insights and ideas from your team? You need to ensure you have an open communications culture where ideas don’t have to be polished and perfected, but simply voiced and saved in the right place.
It’s internal communication best practice to have an ideas channel, perhaps in the form of a Confluence personal space, or other online repository which allows people to share.
They could add:
- Trade journal content
- Screengrabs of competitor approaches
- Social media inspiration
- News articles
- Meeting notes
The caveat? Simple, seedlings of ideas will need to be reviewed and evaluated. Who will do that in your business? Where should they be saved?
Read more: What’s the difference between a wiki and a knowledge base?
Our tip? A Confluence personal space has the features to serve as that ideas channel, especially as your teams face challenges on cost, management, and security fronts.
4. Experiment with your approach
When you’re on the journey to enhance your internal communication, it’s normal to take many routes to find what works for you.
- You may start planning a resource for FAQs, but find that you actually need a more comprehensive repository that captures all ideas in the form of a knowledge base.
- You might start mapping the internal relationships, org chart, and company processes in a documented format but find that you need a way to make a more interactive learning journey.
It’s important to have the time, space, and tools to support this kind of expansion and growth. Look for software that works well with other apps and third parties so the solutions you choose fit easily into your business.
5. Let teams express ideas their way
The ultimate rule for internal communication best practice? Remember that a barrier to good internal communication is to not allow expression.
Give your team the tools to work in unique ways. They might be inspired if they are able to make raw data come to life through bar charts, pie charts, and more, to create meaningful insights then build compelling stories and interactive reports with embedded visualisations.
Take a look at Forms for Confluence to see an example in action.
Give your team the tools to work in unique ways. They might be inspired if they are able to make raw data come to life through bar charts, pie charts, and more, to create meaningful insights then build compelling stories and interactive reports with embedded visualisations.
Take a look at Forms for Confluence to see an example in action.
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Written by
Elaine Keep
Content Writer
Elaine has established herself as a respected authority in the HR industry and uses her experience gained as the head of marketing in the employee rewards and recognition software sector to inform her reporting.
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