With the increasing complexity of today’s business landscape, effective communication within a company has become more important than ever before. It’s essential to have a well-thought-out strategy and plan in place to ensure your internal communications campaigns are successful. In this blog post, we will discuss the unique challenges of internal communications, the importance of strategy and planning, and tips for creating successful campaigns. By incorporating these insights, you can drive employee engagement, improve collaboration, and enhance overall business performance.

Unique Challenges of Internal Communications

Diverse Audiences

One of the main challenges in internal communications planning is catering to diverse audiences. Companies often have employees with different roles, responsibilities, and levels of authority. This makes it necessary to tailor your messaging to resonate with each group effectively. Understanding the needs, preferences, and expectations of various employee segments is crucial in crafting targeted and relevant content and it’s worth taking the time to map out audiences at the beginning of a campaign in order to maximise engagement throughout the campaign.

Information Overload

The digital era has brought an influx of information, making it increasingly difficult for employees to keep up with the constant stream of updates and announcements. Information overload can lead to disengagement and decreased productivity. Too often, the answer is to try a new channel but an effective internal communications strategy can help you find the right balance between providing essential information and avoiding overwhelming employees.

Remote and Hybrid Workforces

The rise of remote and hybrid workforces presents new challenges for internal communications planning. With employees spread across different locations and time zones, ensuring consistent and clear communication becomes more difficult. Remote workers may feel disconnected from their colleagues, leading to a sense of isolation and decreased engagement.

Rapidly Changing Business Environments

Today’s business world is characterized by constant change and evolution. As a result, internal comms must be agile and adaptable to keep employees informed about organisational changes, new initiatives, and shifting priorities. This requires a proactive and flexible approach to planning with a willingness to iterate on strategies when necessary. 

The Importance of Strategy and Planning

Aligning with Organisational Goals

A well-defined internal communications strategy is essential for aligning your efforts with the overall goals of your organisation. By setting clear objectives and KPIs, you can ensure that your communications campaigns contribute to driving business success. This alignment also helps to secure buy-in from leadership and other key stakeholders.

Enhancing Employee Engagement

Effective internal communications planning is critical for fostering employee engagement. Engaged employees are more productive, motivated, and committed to the success of the organisation. By delivering targeted and relevant content that resonates with each audience, you can create a strong sense of connection and purpose among your employees.

Facilitating Collaboration and Innovation

A strategic approach to internal communications planning can help break down silos, encourage cross-functional collaboration, and promote innovation within your organisation. By creating a culture of open communication, you empower employees to share ideas, provide feedback, and contribute to the company’s growth.

Managing Change and Crises

In times of change or crisis, a well-structured internal communications plan can help maintain stability and ensure that employees are informed, engaged, and supported. By providing timely and transparent updates, you can build trust, manage expectations, and guide your workforce through challenging times. Set time aside to create a template for crisis communications so you have it when you need it.

Tips for Creating Successful Internal Communications Campaigns

Develop a Comprehensive Strategy

To create a successful internal communications campaign, start by developing a comprehensive strategy that outlines your objectives, target audience, key messages, and desired outcomes. Ensure that your strategy aligns with the overall goals of your organisation and addresses the unique challenges of your internal communications landscape.

Use the Right Channels and Tools

Select the appropriate channels and tools for engaging with your audiences. Consider a mix of traditional channels (email, intranet, newsletters, townhalls) and modern tools (team collaboration platforms, social networks, mobile apps) to reach your diverse audience effectively. Make use of analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of each channel and adjust your approach as needed to optimize engagement and reach.

Personalise and Segment Communications

To increase the effectiveness of your messaging, personalise and segment your audience based on their needs and preferences. Create targeted content for different employee groups, considering factors such as job function, location, and seniority. This approach ensures that your messaging is relevant, engaging, and impactful. You can download our stakeholder mapping template here and adapt it to your needs.

Encourage Two-Way Communication

Successful internal communications campaigns foster two-way communication between employees and the organisation. Encourage feedback and open dialogue by providing channels for employees to ask questions, share ideas, and voice concerns. This not only helps to identify potential issues but also promotes a culture of transparency and trust.

Measure and Evaluate Success

Continuously measure the success of your campaigns by tracking key metrics, such as employee engagement, open rates, click-through rates, and feedback. Analyse this data to identify areas of improvement and refine your strategy for future campaigns.

Leverage Storytelling and Visuals

Engage your employees with compelling storytelling and visuals. Share success stories, case studies, and employee experiences to create an emotional connection with your audience. Use visuals, such as infographics, videos, and images, to make your content more engaging and memorable.

Train and Support Internal Communicators

Invest in the professional development of your internal communicators by providing training, resources, and support. This will help them stay current with best practices, improve their communication skills, and ensure the success of your internal communications campaigns. Get in touch if you would like to find out more about how our consultants can help.

Conclusion

A successful internal communication plan is an effective expression of your company’s values and overall strategy whether it’s for the entire company or simply a part. It contains the elements of a solid understanding of the situation, a clearly defined set of actionable goals, a set means of delivery, and measurability. When you make time to set it up, making sure you’re informed by employee data, it can become an effective tool in your arsenal.

The post Mastering Internal Communications Planning: Strategy, Challenges, and Success appeared first on ICPlan.

The Current State of Internal Communication Planning

If you’re without one, you’re not really alone in lacking an internal communication plan. The most recent State of the Sector report pushed out by Gatehouse has found that only 50% of businesses had a clear internal communication plan to begin with. Even fewer had an overarching strategy to guide their internal communications efforts. This goes to show that many companies are simply reactive or opportunistic when it comes to internal communications.

On the surface, there’s really nothing wrong with that. After all, internal communications seem to serve their function best when they are fluid with what is going on within a company at any given time. For example, most businesses go in to reaction mode and are quick to push out reassurances from top management when a something impacts the overall organisation structure. This is an effective way to ensure that employees are kept abreast of current developments and reassured with the direction of the business.

The problem with this reactive mentality is that it doesn’t take into consideration the usefulness of internal communications in many other aspects. It’s more than a tool for broadcasting corporate announcements and ‘fire-fighting’. It can also be used to continuously align employees with your overall corporate strategy. It can help promote better visibility of leadership, actively drive support for initiatives, and can improve the discourse between employee and employer. For all of those needs, however, you need a good internal communication plan.

The Necessity of Planning

Business planning is a mixed bag for many companies. Many, for example, argue that it’s better to do things rather than sit down and talk about it. While there is some weight to be had in the idea of action over planning, it all boils down to a simple, fundamental misunderstanding. Many assume that a plan needs to be overly long and fleshed out to be viable. In actuality, a simple framework is a good enough place to start.

You see, the value of any business plan is in its ability to clarify your goals, guide actions towards them, and address any issues that may crop up. An internal communication plan is no different. These don’t have to be comprehensive from the outset. After all, the best plans are constantly evolving in the face of newly discovered challenges and opportunities. What they should be at the start are solid and measurable guides for action.

Strategy Versus Plan: Which One Do You Go For?

The answer here is both. Your strategy is the grand view of things and tackles questions of why. Well-established and long-standing businesses already have this set up.  Your company’s values, its unique selling proposition, and its overall character are the heart of the strategy that should guide your internal communication plan. Anything that you formulate in this regard should always be in alignment with your strategy.

For example, if your company strives to build itself as an environmentally-friendly venture, your internal communications can and should be supportive of this. Communications will likely include pushing to reduce carbon initiatives, the removal of plastics from day to day use, and highlighting the participation i Earth Day initiatives. Strategy flows into plan flows into action here, and should be the consistent order that is followed.

Numbers Support Planning

A look at recent surveys fully supports the idea of having an internal communication plan as opposed to being merely reactive and communicating on the fly. A Gallup survey, for example, found that businesses that engage their employees via effective internal communications saw a boost of up to 20% in productivity. On the financial side of things, a 16% increase in profit margin was seen in employees that experienced high engagement again via internal communications. That was in a case study from Standard Chartered Bank. These case studies definitely speak to how creating a sound plan is definitely the way to go.

The Key Elements of a Successful Internal Communication Plan

Now, when talking about planning, you quickly get down to specifics. A good plan effectively answers questions of who, what, when, where, and how. A great plan does all of that while being consistent with several key elements. Here are those elements that you should always take into consideration when assembling an internal communications plan:

Proper Situational Awareness

In order to build an internal communication plan for the future, you need to be fully aware of where you are at the moment. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your existing setup allows you to make key adjustments moving forward. Begin by asking yourself what the overall purpose of internal communications has been. Is it to announce important events in your company? Is it to promote corporate initiatives? List all these down and make sure that you cover everything. Bear in mind that – depending on the size of your company – you may be looking at communications for a specific project or business area, or the entire company.

The next thing you need to look at is how effective you have been thus far. Have many people received previous communications? Did you see the change in behaviour and actions that you were going for? When you have the answers to that, take a step back and list down the different channels that you used for each specific piece of communication. This will be invaluable down the line when you work channel options into your internal communication plan.

There are several ways you can gather the data you need. One is to conduct surveys. By going straight to employees, you can learn not only whether or not you’ve gotten your message across, as well as which means of delivery were most effective. Ideally, you should have a central means of gathering data and statistics on your internal communications like channel and audience splits. Something like ICPlan with its built-in analytics suite will help provide the quantitative data to support the qualitative data you gather through surveys.

Clear Goals and Objectives

The next element of a great internal communication plan is a clear set of goals and objectives that you are aiming to achieve with it. You should start with more general objectives. The most common of these include alignment of employees with your corporate strategy, support for your initiatives, improved discourse and efficiency, leader visibility, and more. You should then break each down into more focused specifics. For instance, “improving efficiency” can be broken down into “increasing sales numbers by 20%”, or “lowering staff turnover rates by 10%.”

Confident Direction and Procedures

At the heart of every great internal communication plan is a clear set of directions and procedures that will guide its execution. The best way to go is to have a step-by-step listing of what activities are necessary to achieve the goals you’ve stated. It all begins with the message. You want to make sure that the message is always clear, concise, and carries a clear call to action. You can opt to be specific and write down what you want to say, or you can just present clear guidelines for your communicators to follow.

Included in the element are the various channels that you will use to carry out the task. Here’s where the data you’ve gathered from employees comes in. A great internal communication plan is adaptive to what works. If audiences aren’t opening their emails, you shouldn’t push its use—at least not in isolation. You’re always free to have channels support one another. For instance, you could send a longer policy document via email then send out a message via Workplace by Facebook or Yammer mentioning it with a link for people to read it.

Measurability

Finally, a great internal communication plan has clear measures of success. This starts with the tools. As mentioned earlier, employee surveys are a great way to go to get qualitative data, but this needs quantitative support. The good news is that most channels have analytics baked in to help give you numbers for opens, reads, and even engagement. The key here is to clarify in your plan who is gathering this data as well as the timeline in which data should be collected.

A key component to this element is also the tool you use to aggregate all the data you collect. It’s tempting for many companies to utilize something like Microsoft Excel. There are certainly advantages to this. For one, many are at least passingly familiar with it. For another, it does allow for the use of formulas for tracking. That said, it is a very inflexible platform—requiring in-depth knowledge to manage successfully. Remember, it isn’t purpose-built for the task of managing internal communications.

It is worth mentioning here that there are some enterprise solutions that make all of this wholly simpler by unifying everything under one platform. Purpose-built, all-in-one options like ICPlan allow you to have all the measurable statistics that you need in one place. It’s certainly worth the investment because it saves you both time and effort getting data that you need. This is one of the more important elements to consider because they aid the refinement and robustness of your internal communication plan.

Case Studies

Siemens – Internal Communications Done Right

From the offset, it’s clear that Siemens had the right idea in its internal communication plan. As their head of International Communications, Shelly Brown, put it, their goal was “to foster engagement while helping employees understand the company’s business objectives and how they fit into them.” They achieved this by having a very human approach. Their communications didn’t straight out reiterate their strategy, but rather resonated with it across many levels.

One of the keys to their success was the effective use of multiple channels. They leveraged internal social media and essentially went to meet their employees at their level—paving the way for meaningful interaction. They also made use of videos and blogs to better communicate their ideals to their people. This was all supplemented with the use of traditional print media via their monthly global newsletter.

The other key to their success was in fully integrating their values into their internal communication plan. With accessibility as their starting point, they took into consideration where their employees were at. Communications to factory workers who didn’t have access to online channels were heavily focussed on print. They even strongly leaned on employee engagement via participation in community activities. All in all, what they managed to create and execute on was a proactive and very dynamic internal communication plan that worked.

British Airways – Rising From The Ashes

In the early 2010s, British Airways was the poster child of communications gone awry. Along with the weight of the global recession, they were also wrestling with cabin-crew strikes. Morale was at an all-time low and it was clear that internal communications had broken down terribly. They went back to the drawing board and came up with a cohesive and working internal communication plan—a tall order if there ever was one.

Facing an already hostile us-versus-them situation, further challenges to this effort lay in the fact that you’re talking about a highly disparate and scattered workforce. The response was to refocus on what was at the centre of the brand. The sponsorship of the Olympics was an excellent starting point. The internal communication campaign sought to ignite pride in the company as being at the forefront of welcoming the outside world into the country—as well as the specific roles each employee played in that, and they went from there.

Royal Mail – Meeting Their Employees Where They Are

Finally, the Royal Mail Group bears looking at as the perfect example of effective channel selection. With many of the 150,000-strong workforce regularly on the move around the country, it was clear that communication was going to be tough. Face-to-face communications are hard to implement, while email is often a non-starter with so many deskless employees. So they leveraged their printed newsletter the Courier.

It made perfect sense. It required no power to read, it could be taken everywhere, and it was easy to pick up and read. They completely overhauled the Courier to have it tabloid-like with catchy headlines, punchy images, and quick, concise reads. This gave their people the facts in little bites that could be consumed at down times. Better still, they supported this printed newsletter with a digital copy so as to allow more ways for employees to access their communications. An internal communications plan that meshed both traditional and modern channels.

Bring It All Together

A successful internal communication plan is an effective expression of your company’s values and overall strategy whether it’s for the entire company or simply a part. It contains the elements of a solid understanding of the situation, a clearly defined set of actionable goals, a set means of delivery, and measurability. When you make time to set it up, making sure you’re informed by employee data, it can become an effective tool in your arsenal.

The post What Are the Key Elements of a Successful Internal Communication Plan? appeared first on ICPlan.

What is a crisis?

A crisis is defined as any event or sequence of unwanted events that have a strong impact on a local or even global scale. It can be anything from a natural disaster, an outbreak of some disease, or generally anything that can cause physical, mental, and psychological disturbance to your workforce and business operations. It also brings with it the potential for escalated panic and worries when not properly addressed and dealt with.

Why it’s important to have a crisis communications plan

The key watchword is “preparedness”. When a crisis hits and hits hard, your employees are going to react like any reasonable person would: with fear and confusion. This can escalate into a full-blown panic—especially when there isn’t a word coming from their leaders within a company. Regardless of the specific type of crisis that you’re dealing with, having a strong crisis communication plan in place and ready to go ensures that you are able to mitigate even the worst of circumstances.

The challenges of crisis communications

In order to come up with an effective crisis communications plan, you need to first identify the specific challenges inherent to this particular aspect of internal communications. There are five that you need to focus on.

A flood of information

Major crises often come with a deluge of information—and not all of this can be reliable or verifiable. It can quickly become overwhelming when it first hits. If you aren’t discerning and careful in sifting through this information, you won’t be able to effectively condense things in a meaningful way. The key is to think ahead about where you’ll source your information from. This, of course, should mean going to credible first-hand sources depending on the specific crisis.

For instance, outbreaks and diseases will fall under the purview of the World Health Organization. Localized economic crises are likely to be monitored by your local financial authorities. It might seem like a lot to think about but it’s far better to have these listed well in advance so when a crisis hits, you’ll know exactly who you should be listening to. It helps to have a centralized dashboard where all this is organized and accessible to all so you can turn to them at the very onset of a crisis.

A lack of information

Some crises are so subtle in their buildup or so mysterious in their origins that you might face the contrary to the above challenge. Either that or you don’t have an effective means to disseminate information and it’s your employees who find the information lacking. For the former, it’s all about clear organization and having a far more comprehensive list of sources. For the latter, it’s ensuring that you have the best channel mix at your disposal and the proper management of each of these channels.

Crises often come unexpectedly and can create waves in your workplace. Certain channels might become less viable than others and you want to make sure that you have effective backups to stay connected with your employees. Social media is one of the most reliable and popular means to share information, but you should also consider SMS or even in-office newsletters which would be effective should your internet connectivity take a hit.

Inadequate contact information

If you look at your employee contact list, you’re likely to find all their work contact details, naturally. While that’s great for the day-to-day operations of your business, it could prove to be inadequate in a crisis. Apart from their work email, you should at least get one other email and a number that they can be reached via your crisis communications. This allows you to reach your employees in the event that their work email becomes inaccessible for whatever reason.

Most companies have their databases stored securely, often in the cloud, for easy access. This is a smart way to go, but you should also have at least one printed-out hard copy just in case. You can never tell what kinds of disturbances a crisis will bring, and it pays to have your contact databases on-hand to ensure that your communications aren’t disrupted. This should be given to specific people responsible for internal comms at a time of crisis.

Unpredictability

By default, crises are unpredictable—not just in their arrival, but also as they run their course. This might make planning seem like an impossible task. While it is difficult, it isn’t impossible to be prepared. You can take a look at historical crises that have hit us in the past as a more or less comprehensive guide as to what you can expect down the line. After all, there are several categories that have cropped up over the century that cover everything from financial meltdowns, viral and disease outbreaks, and even terrorism.

As a preparatory measure for your crisis communications plan, companies should craft placeholder messages that address your company’s policies for each incident. If you don’t have those yet, then they should form a central part of your overall planning efforts. These can then serve as templates down the line when a crisis of an identified nature actually strikes. These should be written with clarity in mind—detail where you stand, what employees should expect, and even who is in charge of ultimately disseminating official information.

Insufficient visibility

Crisis communications isn’t just about sending the message out. It’s just as important to remain visible. A company’s visibility in a crisis can serve as a strong anchor that panicked or worried employees turn to for strength and comfort. Make sure that you have a dedicated channel in which your employees can direct their questions or even just vent their fears and frustrations. Your leaders should also take point in a crisis because employees draw a lot of strength from them.

More than that, you need to more closely monitor the effectiveness of your crisis communications. You want to ensure that there is full understanding of what you send out especially if there is some desired response that you are expecting. Analytics will be particularly helpful here for both distribution statistics and readership. Complement these with follow-up inquires to ensure that your employees got the message completely.

Developing the plan

Crisis communications plans can be painstaking and time-consuming to undertake. The thing though is that they ultimately will save you time, resources, and even energy when a crisis does strike. So, any efforts put into making one are truly worthwhile. The key is to approach it thoughtfully. Here are the most essential steps that you need to take to make sure you have a smart crisis communications plan.

Form a crisis communications planning and execution team

The very first thing your need to do is create a crisis communications team. Apart from planning, they’re the ones responsible for the eventual execution of the plan when a crisis hits. Your comms team should be core members of this team, but it should also include a human resource contact, representatives from each department and team. You should make sure to include a senior leader also.

This crisis communications team should take time to consider the challenges mentioned in this post and craft at least a working outline of your crisis response plan. To start, you need to clearly state the goal of your plan. You should detail your expectations of the plan and what exactly are the desired responses when they’re executed in a crisis. This doesn’t just guide the rest of the planning effort, it makes the plan easier to execute by anyone else in the organization should the crisis communications team be indisposed.

List your affected stakeholders

The next task for your crisis communications teams is to identify all the stakeholders that you wish to keep informed in a crisis. You should also list the hierarchy and priority order with which communications is going to flow. This activity allows you to designate other point people to facilitate faster dissemination of information. More than that, it allows you to more easily identify which stakeholders are more affected by one crisis or another.

That said, it’s best to create hierarchy and lists for the different types of crises out these are each one is unique. Viral or disease outbreaks are likely to concern much of your employees, for example. Financial crises might affect your leaders and investors more initially. Terrorist attacks might affect a particular region where they take place. The uniqueness of many crises means that you can’t get it all right at the get-go, but having a framework makes it easier to adapt down the line.

Create holding statements for fast crisis communications

Placeholders are critical to crisis communications because they allow for a more expedient response just as a crisis hits. This expediency doesn’t just comfort your employees, it also imparts in them a sense of confidence in your ability to get them through a crisis. Again, it might be very difficult to anticipate every potential crisis out there, but you can at least craft general policies as a response to the chaos and uncertainty that a crisis brings.

With the recent NCoV and COVID-19 crisis, Google has enacted work from home measures to keep its employees safe against exposure to the virus. It’s an effective move and one that is worth considering for other potential crises or disaster. Other policies can cover things like evacuation procedures, company support for affected employees and the like. You can craft whatever works for you, just make sure that the messaging is detailed, understandable, and clear.

Select your emergency channels and educate your employees in their use

While there’s nothing wrong with using the most effective channels that you use day-to-day, you should consider that crisis communications might take place in a drastically affected world. Common communication tools like social media, the intranet, and even employee apps are sure to be affected by crises that cause the loss of internet connectivity. Old-fashioned SMS messaging can work as a great backup in a pinch.

Even then, being dependent on technology, it can still be vulnerable to failure. You need to be ready to distribute printed fact sheets that detail your stand in a particular crisis and steps that your employees might need to take. Support these with in-office bulletins. Remember: as effective as online communication channels are, they’re very vulnerable to disruption. List offline channel options in your crisis communications plan as a contingency.

Identify the biggest risks depending on a crisis and craft potential policy responses

It will help your planning efforts to identify the biggest risks to your company and your employees. Again, this might seem like an overwhelming task in the beginning but there are some common threads that you can study. Business continuance is a big one and has to do with how you keep the company operational and functional depending on the scenario you face. The health and well-being of your employees are equally as important—as is their income and job security.

When you start to realise the many risks inherent to crises, you can start by thinking up the appropriate responses to combat the risks. This task is best done with the participation of your decision-making leaders as well as your human resources leads. You might even end up with lasting solutions that you can actually implement when a crisis does hit down the line. You should be as comprehensive as you can in this exercise, making sure you cover as many potential crises as possible.

Test run your crisis communications plan

Before you wrap up your planning session, it’s very important that you test it in action. A quick dry run with a few employees—paying particular attention to simulating the speed by which information is spread through your chosen channels—should reveal how effective your crisis communications plan is. Make sure that you collect a lot of data. Analytics from the channels themselves should show some critical information regarding distribution and readership.

In addition, you should get feedback from your leaders. Their input can be invaluable in refining key parts of your crisis communications plan especially when it comes to response policies that you came up with. Get feedback from your employees as well, especially when it comes to the ease by which information is delivered, how clear information is presented, and even what they expect from the company during the crisis. All these details should go into revisions if necessary.

Face the future

To say that crises are unpredictable is an understatement, but there is no excuse to be unprepared. A proper crisis communications plan will ensure that your business and your people stay on their feet no matter what hits. Yes, there are a lot of challenges that will be faced as you sit down to think things out. In the long run, it’s all worth it as it can ultimately save you in time, resources, and effort. A great plan lets you face the uncertain future with confidence and preparedness and also help calm your employees and their fears.

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