Internal Corporate Communications for Corporate Culture

Even though the culture and productivity of an organization are deeply linked to employees’ experience, internal corporate communications are still not a top focus with corporate management. Effective communication can influence employee experience and effectively improve employee performance and productivity. Organizations can create a positive work culture that aligns with the elevated work landscape by focusing on communication and providing support. Employees don’t assume that all corporate communication is good news and happiness; it can also be about expectations, culture, learning, retention, experience or general information. Moreover, effective and good communication promotes transparency and makes the leaders more human, understood, and familiar. 

Bottom-up communication is as valuable as top to down communication. You must take a pause to listen similarly. It is not surprising that leaders take what they hear as anticipated with uncertainty, but you need to create space to be able to hear them to smoothen the work environment and culture. If you run regular surveys and appropriately act upon them, you will create a willing and productive workforce. Create safe, easy, and usable channels for employees to ask questions and air their views. If you have not created a two-way communication channel in your organization then you are missing an effective ingredient in corporate management that can revitalize employees and do away with annual appraisal.

Repetitive and scheduled circulars, holiday announcements, and policy changes according to me don’t make internal communication. And still, several companies send out the same content disbursed through emails or scheduled through automated messaging tools. This hinders effective and interactive internal communications, it creates barriers. Your content should be current matter and seek to stimulate them.  That is why your content must be targeted in a language commonly understood and culturally sensitive. Promote inclusivity and be caring. Another important viewpoint in overcoming communication obstacles is employee engagement. You need to give your employees more than one reason to come back to you if you want a truly improve internal communication or even to make it a talking point amongst themselves. The idea is to keep your corporate structure alive and kicking.

Your content doesn’t always have unembellished, and you can learn a lot from social media messaging. You can include creativity by the use of heart, thumbs up, moody emojis of laughing, smiling, angry, puzzled, and so on.  Even a business platform like LinkedIn uses emojis. LinkedIn also gives badges to their users for their various contributions. All contributors love recognition, so why should your employees? Using these tricks it has worked for social media. Introduce features that enhance employee engagement, like gamification and recognition. Bring in individual citations and hall of fame to recognize employees and their contributions. Start the right reward simultaneously for employee motivation. For some, it could be Amazon gift cards, corporate tee shirts, backpacks, or planters, or what could motivate them more. Personalization is the key to reducing barriers by internal communications.

Every corporate may go through organizational changes at some point in time. These can be about new systems, processes, corporate restructuring, shift of business model, new technologies, or even changes in products or services. Internal communication for change is hard. People often get stuck in a negative mindset and silently resist changes. They are often reluctant to learn new techniques or technologies or even fear losing their jobs. Negative responses to change from the employees can cause failure of the change. This requires very skillful communication from the leadership to change mindsets. Here I will recommend consulting communication specialists. Instead of assuming that people are change-resistant or negative a leader must rise above preset notions and support people to overcome their fear and support and adopt change for betterment. Importantly help people to become more change-capable.  

Good communication is the key to your leadership success which can result in good work culture and productivity. Maintaining corporate happiness is a sign of good leadership. Keep informal conversations going while office parties, events, and gate meetings are also remarkable team builders. Stay engaged and keep talking.

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