Three Types of Internal Communications that Affect Your Operations

Businesses have various communications to manage, including their internal ones. For many businesses, this may be put on the back burner, as they prioritize their operational and sales-encouraging communications. On the other hand, internal communications are just as imperative. Listed below some of your options here, and how you need to use them.

First, some of the types of internal communications that commonly factor into a business’ operations.

• Information sharing - There’s a lot of news that needs to make its way throughout the office. Different types of communication can help accomplish this, helping to ensure that the message gets across, whether it’s a company-wide announcement or onboarding materials.
  
  
• Collaboration - Collaboration requires communication between any involved parties. There are a couple of solutions that make this more efficient and effective, not to mention simpler.
  
  
• Recognition and company culture - Who doesn’t like to be recognized for their accomplishments, or to participate in internal decision-making, especially when that decision-making is in regard to something related to something more fun? Collaboration solutions play a role here as well.

Now, consider a few solutions that can help you to accomplish this goal.

Information Sharing

This is possibly the most obvious use of internal communication: ensuring that all of your team is on the same page, whether as a means to promote collaborative tendencies (more on that below) or new policies, plans, or procedures are being put in place. To accommodate these requirements, you should make sure that your employees have the tools that they will have to utilize to do so.

These tools include:

• Email - While other solutions have become reasonable alternatives for email, the tried-and-true default still stands strong. As a good solution for all-around communications, it provides you with a means of communicating with your staff in a way they are almost guaranteed to be familiar with, just make sure they aren’t checking it excessively throughout the day.
  
  
• Newsletters - While newsletters are usually used as an external effort to remind your audience of your services, they can be just as valuable as a means of keeping your employees in the loop, especially about items that don’t often get brought up in the workplace, or questions that you don’t want to have to answer repeatedly. Using your aforementioned email solution to distribute an e-newsletter internally is a cost-effective way to do so.
  
  
• Video - While it may seem like overkill to put together a video to share information internally, they make sense to use in situations where you can reuse the material repeatedly, like when you are onboarding new employees or training them. Keep in mind, these videos should still be supplemented by other training tools, like other internal documents and resources, to use as references… plus, there’s a lot to be said for face-to-face, shadow-style training, too. On the other hand, maintaining an internal repository of reference videos provides your employees with an option to help them answer their own questions without distracting others in the office.

Collaboration

Collaboration is one of the biggest industry buzzwords nowadays, and for good reason; a workplace that operates collaboratively usually sees large benefits to its operations. This is especially true if a business has more than one location to contend with, or allows its staff to work remotely. There are also solutions that can help you encourage this kind of collaboration, such as:

• Dedicated Applications - There are a king’s ransom of collaboration-based applications out there, designed around a variety of business needs. Yes, you have your conferencing applications, but you also have things like shared storage applications (like Google Drive and Office’s OneDrive) that permit collaboration, as well as an assortment of other collaboration-boosting solutions.
  
  
• Surveys - Part of keeping lines of communication open in the workplace is ensuring that everyone has the chance to have a say. Distributing surveys to help make certain decisions gives your team a chance to have their say, increasing their investment into the business and working together to enact change.
  
  
• Chat Applications and Forums - All work and no play, as the saying goes, so you want to give your employees a place to quietly socialize without disturbing too many people, and without pulling too far away from the task at hand. While chat applications and forums are great tools for leveraging coworkers’ assistance on work-related projects, they also permit your employees to relax a bit and build stronger relationships.

Recognition and Company Culture

Last but not least, it is always critical for a business to keep their employees as comfortable and content as possible, less of the gray-cubicle stereotype and more of the casual, open-office ideals that are now being adopted. Part of this is accomplished by promoting a communicative company culture, recognizing individual and group accomplishments and encouraging your employees to inject a little bit more of their personality into the workplace.

• All of the Above, and More - Frankly, any of the tools discussed above can help you to accomplish these goals, if used properly.

Macro Systems is here to help your business put its technology to use. Reach out to us at 703-359-9211 to learn more about what we can do.