Internal communication: main errors and good practices to implement now

Content about the importance of knowing your target audience, defining the buyer persona, choosing the tone and style of your language, using storytelling and copywriting to connect abounds. This is the to access a desired market, but in reality, little is spoken of another type of communication that is equally important: internal communication. According to Sociabble, efficient internal communication increases the productivity of a company between 20 and 25%.

This communication is established between the staff and the leaders of a company. Its objectives are to keep company values and objectives aligned and establish an efficient workflow. This type of communication also requires a strategy and knowledge of your audience, that is, to define what you want to communicate, how and to whom.

It is true that we live in times of hyperconnectivity, where immediate communication reigns, and we have an endless number of digital tools focused on the organization. However, one of the main problems of companies today is the communication between their employees.

Bad practice of vertical communication 

The new-and not so new-generations (millennials and gen Z) have the curious habit of congratulating themselves every time they quit a job. This shows that those who now dominate the world of work have little tolerance for jobs where their effort and creativity are not valued, or where they are not treated with due respect. This paradigm shift is a big step for the world of work and forces companies to value their human resources. Wrong vertical communication fosters lack of integration into teams, misunderstandings, and abuse of authority.

Separating internal from external communication 

A company’s consistency with its values inside and outside the company is the basis for a positive and reliable corporate image. Manifesting the company’s values to empathize with the target audience, but not putting them into practice within the processes, reflects a lack of seriousness, transparency, and credibility.

Ignore the team

There is no professional who understands the importance of knowing the target audience better than marketers. The same happens in internal communication when it is not thought according to their needs and motivations. Knowing each member is essential to perform a segmentation of the audience and to identify the value of the human resource.

Lack of transparency

85% of employed people say that they feel much more motivated when they are told the new of the company. It’s important to leave behind the bad practice of keeping the news that concerns all the staff as a secret, this only makes the company an unreliable body, where rumors are present daily.

The main thing is to develop an internal communication strategy 

It is necessary to resort to endomarketing or internal marketing, an enriching tool for the strategy of an internal communication. Endomarketing unites the forces of the human resources area and the marketing team to communicate effectively with the staff and thus promote an optimal work environment, where people are perceived valued, and can develop their professional and creative capacities.

Know each person who works and segment the audience Just as in marketing 

it is key to know the audience, it is also essential to know human capital, their concerns, their working time, their skills, their training, etc. This will facilitate segmentation, as it is clear that the same things should not be communicated to all teams. If messages are classified according to audience segmentation, communication noise and confusion are eliminated, so that each person can develop their activities smoothly.

Develop a defined project to optimize your internal communication 

Keeping this type of communication optimized requires more than an isolated strategy. You need to keep monitoring and controlling over it all the time. Ideally, establish a defined project and point out a project leader to ensure that it is carried out in the right way and is constantly implemented. The objectives must be defined and measurable so that progress is evaluated from time to time.

Establish channels and spaces for freedom of expression 

Employees who feel heard tend to be more committed to their work, as well as to the goals and values of the company. According to a Bluesource study, highly committed staff can improve a company’s operating revenue by 19.2% in 12 months. Holding meetings to get to know the concerns or ideas of the staff is an excellent tool within the internal communication strategy.

Use the right communication channels

Since confinement, many companies continued the practice of permanent or hybrid home offices. This was a challenge for the organization and communication of companies at the time. However, people are now used to this way of working, they know organizational tools and, in general, they are familiar with the digital world. Internal communication must take advantage of new digital tools and exploit them, but never saturate your employees with an excess of channels where information can be lost, replicated, and confused. It is necessary to use only the channels that best suit the processes of each company and avoid fragmenting information by various means.

Pooling efforts to optimize the internal communication of a company is always a success because the benefits range from the motivation of all the people involved to conversion. For a company to become the dream work of many people is a reflection of its success.