Why Internal Communications is SO Important

Welcome to 2021. More than likely, the majority of your workforce is virtual or a hybrid of in-person and work from home. If you’ve taken this approach and adapted how you manage your team, then kudos…cause the times are a-changin’. 

In fact, we wrote about the toll back-to-office is taking on employees, and you should read it.

A hybrid workforce can sometimes make maintaining culture, team morale and productivity challenging, so an internal communications plan is so important. Most companies think this falls under human resources, but it actually needs to be a partnership between communications and HR.

If you don’t think it’s important, take a gander at these statistics from Ving!

• Employees often spend up to two hours a day (which equals one-quarter of the work week) worrying and gossiping.
• Confusion and frustration usually motivate your best employees to leave first, and it costs an average of 150% of their annual salaries to replace them.

Now that you’re convinced, let’s get started.

Assess

What are you currently doing to keep your employees engaged and informed? Do you hold regular meetings? Plan staff activities? Have a formal process for employee feedback mapped out?

On top of all the above, you need to have a unified message delivered from the top down. 

For example, each Monday and Friday, we hold team meetings, have various team members lead and always incorporate our core values. At the beginning of the week, we ask employees what core value or values they plan to embody throughout the week. Then at the end of the week, we ask them to rate themselves on a scale of 1-5 on how well they successfully embodied the company’s core values. 

You want your employees to champion your vision and values. 

Determine

What does success look like? Clearly, you want an engaged and happy workforce, but how the heck do you measure it?

Here are some of the things we recommend looking at:

• Social engagement: Are your employees sharing company content? Commenting? Liking? 
• Meeting participation: How engaged are your employees in your company wide meetings? Measure this on a scale and have them rate themselves at the end of each meeting. It’s all about the accountability.
• Track compliments and complaints. In our Friday meetings, we record the external compliments and complaints we’ve received over the last week. These could be from clients, vendors, the community, etc. We have found this keeps us all honest and working for those accolades. In fact, our client issues have drastically decreased to the point we average maybe one complaint every two months. 
• Regular check-ins with individual employees. Our president, Jen, has a monthly check-in with every single employee. It is their meeting, they determine the agenda, and it is their time to address any issues or hurdles they are facing. 

Get To Work

Put everything we just shared with you in motion. Your employees need to be heard, and that is going to require less talking and more listening. 

Employees who feel like they are genuinely listened to by their managers are nearly five times more likely to have high job enthusiasm and 21 times more likely to feel committed to their company than those who do not feel listened to.

By taking the time to address employee concerns and to just shut up and listen, you’ll increase company loyalty, enthusiasm, and engagement…and that is how you cultivate and grow a hybrid workforce.

Need more tips about cultivating a healthy culture? Hit us up.