To develop an effective organizational communication strategy, employers should begin by linking communication to their overall strategic plan, including the organization’s mission, vision and core company values.
đź“šRead on: Company Values: Definition, Importance and Examples
For example, your business strategy may be to improve performance by increasing employee retention or employee engagement.
As employee communication plays a crucial role here, your organizational communication strategy should be directly linked to your business strategy.
2. Understand your audience/s
Identifying your audience is an important step for ensuring the effectiveness of your organizational communication strategy.
One of the main causes of ineffective organizational communication is the fact that employers don’t segment their audiences based on their job roles, departments, locations, interests and preferences.
As a consequence, most employees get a similar type of information even though that information may not be relevant to them at all.
What happens then?
Very low engagement and consumption rates with your internal communication content.
As this is something all communicators are trying to eliminate and avoid, defining and understanding your internal audiences is a crucial step for developing a good organizational communication strategy.
3. Engage all employees
Organizational communication is the process in which all employees should be involved and participate in.
The mindset in which communication mainly includes delivering messages to employees about business issues, policies and procedures, and company updates is the wrong mindset.
Communication in the workplace should never be one-way. Two-way conversations, on the other hand, have a great power to create and support a healthy workplace culture. Listening to employee issues, questions, comments, ideas and concerns builds loyalty and drives employee productivity.
At the end of the day, everyone in the organization has a role in building an organizational communication strategy that works well:
- CEOs and senior managers are ultimately responsible for setting the tone and establishing a great organizational culture. One of the main responsibilities these leaders have is ensuring effective company-wide communication.
- The HR professionals and other people strategists also play critical roles in organizational communications, especially in today’s workplace where employees’ expectations, preferences and needs have changed significantly.
- Managers and team leaders are responsible for daily communication with their employees.
- All employees have a responsibility to share their voice, their concerns and issues, provide feedback and collaborate with their teammates.
đź“šRead on: 8 Employee Engagement Statistics You Need to Know in 2020 [INFOGRAPHIC]
4. Create engaging and relevant content
Unfortunately, many employees don’t engage with their company’s internal content. Moreover, many employees ignore messages being delivered to them through a company’s intranet or email.
This happens mostly because the content delivered to them is not relevant to what they do. Sending out a mass newsletter to all employees hoping that they will read it is not realistic at all today.
An effective organizational communication strategy requires much more than that. As IC practitioners are now seen as important strategic business partners, their new role is to step up their game by ensuring that the internal content actually gets consumed by employees.
However, content and audience segmentation, especially in large organizations, is impossible without the right employee communication tools that enable communicators to create and distribute more engaging content to the employees.
đź“š Check out our new guide for driving employee engagement in the workplace!
5. Distribute your content through the right channels
Now even if you have the right content ready and you know who should receive it, there is another important factor to consider: the communication channels you’re going to use to distribute your content.
As the number of different communication channels we use in the workplace is continuously increasing, choosing the right channels becomes a big challenge to communicators.
đź“šRead on: Top Communication Channels to Consider for Your Business
Intranets, emails, internal social media, private messaging apps such as Slack, document sharing and project management tools are all means of internal communication in organizations.
Therefore, this communication ecosystem has become very complex and hard to manage efficiently.
For this reason, many organizations are now turning to modern employee communication solutions that enable them to connect all their organizational communication channels into a single place where all the important information is available to all the employees at all times.
6. Implement the right communication technology
Choosing the right employee communication technology can really bring your organizational communication strategy to the next level.
If you know that engagement levels through your current solutions are low, that is probably the sign that something needs to be changed.
Many intranets are still outdated and they don’t match employees’ preferences regarding the way they communicate even in their private lives.
