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.

The second aspect is internal communication, or communicating to employees. The messages can vary from anything as simple as corporate announcements to larger strategic shifts and – increasingly – employee collaboration. As with external communications, the channels through which messages can be sent varies—from chat applications to intranets. Whereas before there was a clear differentiation between the two, there is now a blurring of the lines that needs to be addressed.

The Importance of Building and Maintaining a Brand

You can’t talk about internal and external communication without also touching on the importance of branding in today’s business landscape. We live in a world where access to information is near instantaneous. Any business can get a social media post or website update out that exposes it to a very wide audience. With so many businesses offering the same kinds of services, the key differentiator has been branding—what the business values, what the characteristics are and – ultimately – what the business projects itself as.

If there’s one thing that makes any one particular brand successful, it’s consistency across the board. If a brand touts itself as being family oriented, then its marketing message will often reflect a light-hearted friendliness in its website content and social media posts. More than that, however, it also needs to reflect the same value within the company and among its people. For example, it doesn’t work to project a family-friendly image to the outside world, but then force too many hours on an employee—preventing them from quality time with their family.

The Blurring of Lines Between Internal and External Communications

That’s where communications come in. Through the effective balancing of internal and external communication strategies, a business can communicate its values and its brand consistently and effectively to both employees and target audiences without creating this disconnect and confusion. Naturally, this has led to the trend where the lines between internal and external communications teams are starting to blur, if not overlap entirely. And this is a trend, which is very positive.

Simply put, a unified internal and external communication strategy makes it easy for a business to be both uniformly authentic and wholly transparent. This leads to two critical avenues of success. Externally, this means that people will get to know your brand and respect it for how it resonates with them through your messaging. Internally, this means that your people relate to the communications being reflective of your values—effectively becoming your ambassadors and representatives through their interactions with the outside world.

The Influence of Social Media

You can’t talk about the blurring of the lines between internal and external communication without talking about the impact of social media on communications as a whole. Before social media, companies could get away more with lack of consistency between the internal and external. After all, employees only really had their immediate circles to complain about any disparity that they might experience. In fact, it was only when things were bad enough to hit local and national news that companies ran the risk of finding themselves exposed for a lack of consistency.

That’s changed with the increasing popularity of social media and their use as a way for people to self express. Nowadays, it’s easy for any one employee to complain about contradictions to a company’s stated value. It’s then just as easy for that message to spread beyond one’s immediate circle to a much wider audience. In the Philippines, for example, there has been a trend of boycotts being organized around companies whose poor labor practices have been shared on social media—which has had a negative impact on the companies being exposed. To a certain degree, it’s also the ease by which information can be had that caused the temporary bans imposed upon Huawei for alleged data breaches.

It’s clear that in today’s world, a company can no longer afford any disparity between internal and external communication. Companies that do not endeavour to unite the two in a meaningful way risk exposing itself to the very audience it wants to get onside.

Developing an Overarching Strategy for Communications

Now, all the understanding in the world means nothing if your internal and external communication teams aren’t guided by a plan. The first step towards this is educating them fully on the nuances of your brand and your values. This is important because it will not just dictate the content of the messages you send out, but the tone and character of your message as well. If you don’t have it yet, it helps to have a brand bible that dictates all your values in the clearest sense, its practical application to communications, and the overall goals you seek to achieve.

Once that is done, you can then focus your attention on the overarching strategy that will guide your internal and external communications efforts. This can be achieved by following five simple steps.

Prioritization

The first thing your need to do is identify what exactly you need to communicate at a given moment. If it’s more than one thing, you need to then identify which should come first. Nothing defeats effective communication more than sending out too many messages at once. One trick to prioritization is to figure out which messages have a bigger impact over the others. 

Planning

The next crucial step involves identifying the most effective channels to transmit your chosen messages. The key to doing this is to clearly define your intended recipient and analyze which channels they are most likely to use. From there you can then move on to creating the message itself. It helps to create several variations of a message and then studying which ones meet the criteria of your values and intent the best.

Production

It’s in this step that you decide what form your message takes. There are many options available to today’s communicator. Email is the simplest and easiest to produce, while videos can catch the eye but are more time consuming to make. Overall, how you produce your message is defined by a number of factors including purpose, audience, budgets and other things happening across the organisation.

Publication

When you’ve sent your message out through your chosen channel, it can help reinforce the message by using other channels. For instance, you can post a Workplace by Facebook message informing colleagues of a vital email that’s just been sent to increase the chances of it being read. That’s an internal communication example. For external communications, you could support a robust PR campaign with social media efforts, for instance.

Analysis

Finally, you should go back to your message once it’s out there with an analytical eye. How many people did it reach? How many people opened the message? Most crucially, how did people react to the message? Did it generate the intended response? Did it result in the desired change in behaviour? Uncovering the answers to these questions will help your efforts for internal and external communication down the line.

Special Considerations for Internal Communications

While those steps are universally effective in communications planning as a whole, there are special considerations when you’re undertaking internal communications. The first is the type of communication you’re pushing out, and this can fall into one of three categories:

While those steps are universally effective in communications planning as a whole, there are special considerations when you’re undertaking internal communications. The first is the type of communication you’re pushing out, and this can fall into one of three categories:

Reactive

This type of content is usually pushed out because of events and incidents that haven’t been or can’t be anticipated. This includes personnel changes, crises arising within and outside the company, or any changing demands made by business partners. Reactive messages take into consideration three things: an honest relaying of the events as they occurred, the company’s stand on that particular event, and what steps are being taken by the company.

Proactive

Furthering employee understanding, far-reaching policy changes, and announcements all fall under the category of proactive content. The aim is almost always to drive a change in employee behavior, establish a deeper understanding of a particular topic with employees, or to elicit aspecific change in behaviour. Messages of this nature need clear wording to avoid misunderstandings, the right channel to get the message across, and a clear set of desired actions or reactions.

Opportunistic

As the name suggests, this type of content takes advantage of content that already exists. The aim here is to utilize what’s already there to send a message that’s consistent with your values. A fine example of this is the retelling of employee success stories to reflect the potency of your company’s values. This can be used to inspire or even improve performance from your employees as a whole.

The second key consideration to internal communication are the channels themselves. Many companies today utilize a wealth of communication channels without properly considering what their people actually use. It’s important for you to take a step back and look at what your employees favour—be it email, chat, or the intranet. If you don’t meet them where they’re at, you risk your message going unnoticed.

Understanding What Makes External Communications Successful

When talking about external communications, the key differentiator with internal communications lies in the form of the message itself. Yes, it’s important to reiterate the importance of consistency with your branding and your values, but you aren’t going to win people over by sending out your corporate policies in their raw format. You need to focus on selling your brand and your product in terms of the value that they offer people.

That’s why values expression in external communications tends to be more subtle and nuanced as opposed to overt. Rather than simply stating that you’re a brand that cares for its customers, you would be better served by highlighting the effectiveness and efficiency of your customer service channels. Simply put, you get your message across without unduly labouring the point. You can do this by leveraging the many channels available to companies nowadays.

Those That Have Done It Best

As great as theory is, it’s always good to look at companies that have taken these many ideas and used them to flourish when it comes to internal and external communication.

Bosch China

This company hasn’t yet fully integrated their company’s internal and external communication teams, but has pushed for strong collaboration between the two. Buoyed by the corporate belief that “the brand is not an accessory, it is the main point”, Bosch China has made sure that its initiatives engage both employees and customers alike. This means that everyone is united behind who and what Bosch China is all about—allowing for all messaging to come across loud and clear every time.

GE

GE is the perfect study in the benefits that uniting internal and external communication efforts brings. This is because they fully recognize the part played by their employees in delivering their messages inside and outside the company. Any big changes or exciting product releases are first communicated internally. This transparency means that their own people help them communicate their brand’s values to the outside world by sharing what’s going on internally, externally.

The New York Times

Because the organisation thrives on information, The New York Times has built itself around a culture of free sharing that sees no differentiation between internal and external audiences. The very heart of the company—its processes, procedures, and programs—all focus on information sharing. This very open culture has enabled them to effectively and efficiently deal with day-to-day issues and problems as well as the production of consistent and reliable content internally and externally.

FedEx

What makes FedEx unique is that everyone from cargo handlers to the executive team play a huge role in their overall communication plan. Their C-suite executives never slow down in their interaction with one another, their personnel, and their audience on a daily basis. This openness has helped their corporate communications team maintain transparency and openness that effectively spills out to their external audiences as well. This means that messages come across as more authentic and, ultimately, more relevant.

Final Thoughts 

A proper narrative can only reach the audience when the content is released at the right time, making a calendar outlining content production and publishing essential. Scheduling also relies on deep knowledge of the audience’s behavior down to an almost individual level. 

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