5 tips to create effective internal communications with your team

Putting together a strong team means getting a variety of personalities to communicate on the same level. Getting the right level of engagement and excitement from all of your players can be tough. You need to establish a plan that gets everyone on the same page and fully bought-in. Here are five ways to improve internal communications with the members of your team.

Create a Strategy

You won’t know if you’re improving if you don’t know what you are working on or where you currently stand.

Start by analyzing what you are already doing as part of your communications plan and considering what could be improved on to get the kinks out of the process. What channels are you using and where are you leaning the heaviest for communication? What team members are actively communicating, and who is struggling to respond in a timely way?

You will also need to determine what goals you will be shooting for and how you will determine success or failure. Be specific. A good strategy will help you stay on track and give you a place to start for improvements.

Implement Smart Tools

You need to consider what methods of communication are going to be efficient and convenient for your team.

Establish guidelines in your HR communications strategy, like whether or not you will pay for employee mobile plans if you expect them to use those devices for communication. Make sure you are defining whether intranet software, forums, email, texting or another format is best for the majority of your online communications.

Establish cloud hosting for your company to hold all of your important shared communications, documents, images and content for easier accessibility.

Don’t Be All Business

Don’t make internal communication a drag.

A 2013 PGi survey found that the majority of your younger employees (88%) want to be in a “fun and social” work environment. Productivity doesn’t have to exclude entertainment. Include random facts, fun stories, best viral videos or other tidbits in your communication that will increase employee engagement and boost morale.

Measure Your Results

You are only going to really see improvement if you can measure what you are doing.

Quantify your communications performance to see how employees are connecting with the company and getting their information. If you have access to analytics and metric dashboards that can be used to benchmark engagement, this can prove powerful. Measure your engagement levels now, and then compare them in a few months after implementing a new strategy and establishing specific goals.

Metrics signs can be placed throughout the office to help draw awareness to areas where your team may struggle, like time gaps between callbacks or percentage of newsletter emails opened within 24 hours.

Get Honest Feedback

Your team isn’t going to let you know what they really think unless they feel safe from blowback.

Whether you use an anonymous system or strictly prohibit retribution, making your feedback process honest is the only way you can get more internal eyes really looking to improve the system. Not only do your employees need to feel free to express their ideas, but they need to find it easy to do so as well. You will need to utilize channels that are easy for your team to use in order to increase the likelihood that they will do so.