What is it like to be an employee at your organization? Do team members understand what is expected of them? Are they all updated on the latest good company news? Is boredom, or loneliness, ruling their days? Are they truly motivated and engaged at work? Undoubtedly, answers to these questions depend on internal communication. Indeed, it is impactful on employee experience, company culture, and business in general.
Effective communication is a significant factor in engagement. Employees are committed to the organization’s goals, understand how they contribute to its success, and are committed to doing their best work.
Manage change effectively
It’s fair to say, change is inevitable. It’s how you handle it that makes all the difference. Make sure you’re putting the employee engagement best practices in place and you’ll find it can have a positive effect on your bottom line. When it comes to adapting to remote working, you’ll need to step up your communication efforts in order to overcome the new barriers to employee engagement. The following tools will help you keep you fully connected to your remote workers, whatever the situation.
Make sure leaders and managers understand their vital communication roles
Senior leaders must articulate where the organization is heading, clarify priorities and share progress and accomplishments. Key leaders must reinforce big-picture messages and provide specific objectives for their groups or functions. Managers must define what their employees should do to help the organization succeed, answering staffers’ questions and addressing their concerns.
Create compelling content
As channels become less differentiated and devices become interchangeable, the only thing that matters is content: fresh, unique, useful, personal, engaging content. Your success depends on your ability to create, curate or share (by managing social media) content that attracts employees. To do that, provide how-to information that will help employees solve a problem and learn what to do in certain situations, which will make their lives easier. Think of such information as a “recipe”: You’re not teaching people how to cook something; you’re providing tips or guidance. As information architect Richard Saul Wurman said, “Half of all our communication is the giving and receiving of instructions.”
Encourage Bottom-Up Internal Communication
What exactly is bottom-up internal communication? It’s an approach in which employees at all levels within an organization contribute their feedback and ideas. It focuses on building communication channels that cross traditional hierarchies. That way, the information doesn’t just trickle down from leadership. It flows in both directions, and it gives frontline employees the opportunity to submit their ideas and requests.
Improve meetings
Nearly 45 percent of leaders and managers believe meetings accomplish nothing. Make them more compelling and meaningful, especially for big-impact sessions (town halls, leadership forums, internal conferences). You can try two approaches: Change the chairs (to bring people closer together) and reboot timing (to create more opportunities for interactivity).
Remember it starts with you creating new effective habits to improve communication in the workplace. You can not definitely ignore how you communicate. Grow to be a good communicator to have strong conversations.
