Internal communications is an oft forgotten element of a marketer’s toolkit but is a critical one. Your staff are your ambassadors, your supporters and (perhaps) your captive audience. If you can’t win them over, how can you hope to win over external audiences?
Your staff need to know what is expected of them and how they contribute to the organisation as a whole. They should feel engaged, listened to and valued. 2020 saw working patterns changed, sometimes permanently, so it’s more important than ever to think about how and what you communicate within your business.
Here are four principles to ensure that your internal communications (both every day or in periods of change) will be what you and your staff need them to be.
Be genuine
We are all pretty aware these days what ‘guff’ looks like so, first and foremost, ensure any communications with your team are honest and genuine. We have all been inundated with emails from supermarkets, banks, mortgage companies and so on about how they are doing their best to ‘be there’ for us during this difficult time. Call me a cynic, but it starts to look like businesses jumping on the bandwagon or an excuse to market to me when I’d opted out. You don’t want your internal messages to be tarred with the same brush so be sure to communicate when you have something to say that is of genuine interest. (For everything else, see my final tip).
Be positive but don’t sugar-coat it
Staff morale can be a tricky thing to gauge but, as a general guide, your people want to hear encouraging news. However, we are all grown-ups and will spot a mile off if you’re just trying to keep us sweet. A business not facing reality (at any time) looks like a business that doesn’t understand what’s going on. (“Crisis? What crisis?”) Positive does not mean only sharing good stuff; positive can also mean sharing challenges overcome or clear plans for the future. Staff want to know how the business is doing, what new practices are working and to understand what the future might look like. Don’t patronise your staff and respect them enough to trust them with reality.
Provide practical information
One of the biggest emotional challenges we all faced during the Lockdowns of 2020 was the sense that the situation was entirely beyond our control. We were all passengers but didn’t know if we are passengers on the Titanic or Queen Mary 2. One of the most useful things we can do both in a crisis situation and in the normal run of business is help people find things are within their own control. Whether that is signposting them to some wellbeing coaching, giving them access to some online training or asking them to get involved in a new project they can do from home, sharing practical advice and activities will be welcome.
Think about frequency
How often you communicate with your staff is a bit of a ‘Goldilocks’ problem. How much is too much and how much is just right? The reality is that you won’t get it perfect for everyone. (“You can please all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of time, but you can’t…” to quote Winston Churchill). Focus on the quality of your message first and foremost (coming back to being genuine, above) and think about facilitating people to communicate with each other for the time in between. Could you create a staff webpage that signposts to all sorts of support and advice that people can refer to at will? Could you set up a regular ‘coffee break’ online session that people have the option to dial into? Internal communications do not always have to come from ‘the top’; keeping your people talking to each other is just as vital.