Internal communication helps employees connect with the vision and goals of the organization and improve employee engagement, motivation, focus, enthusiasm and overall productivity of the company. Effective internal communication produces happy, effective, productive employees that positively contribute to organizational growth. An ineffective internal communication breeds confused, unproductive, and disengaged employees. While companies with good internal communication are four-times as likely to have high levels of engagement, disengaged employees could cost organizations over $450 billion per year.
Top internal communication strategies for companies in 2022
In this era of work from home, employees are no longer working together in the office. A study reveals that at the height of the pandemic lockdown, 60% of the world’s population was working from home. Even after the pandemic, 26% are planning to continue to work from home occasionally or permanently.
Though there are a lot of benefits associated with remote working like increased productivity, cost savings, better work-life balance etc, there are many drawbacks too. Employees are finding it difficult to “switch off” after work. They often get stuck in long and never-ending group chats that demand their attention 24/7. It puts pressure on them to be online & available all the time. The biggest challenge is to have robust internal communication tools and strategies to enable employees work from remote locations just like working together at the office.
In this article, we have identified the best internal communication strategies and tools that will help companies to boost their productivity by bridging the gap between employer and employees.
1. Documented communication strategy
Have a well-documented internal communication strategy in place to guide you and your team to cover most work scenarios. The strategy must be specific and include goals, objectives, key messages, communication methods and channels that will be used etc.
2. Communicate regularly
Communicating regularly with your employees will help you to build trust and avoid misinformation and rumors. It will also help you to improve employee productivity, engagement and morale.
3. Communicate clearly and concisely
Not only should your communication be engaging, they should be concise and written with correct spelling and grammar without unnecessary jargon.
4. Use multiple communication channels
A unified communication tool brings all internal communication together in one application. With these types of tools, all your internal communication will be in one place including email, chats, calls social feeds, and cloud storage. Without this, most of the employees will be wasting time toggling between different applications rather than doing productive work
5. Encourage two-way feedback
Companies should encourage two-way communication between the management and employees. Management should focus on listening to employees’ feedback, opinions, recommendations frequently.
6. Ensure top management support
The top management of the company should encourage and support internal communication efforts. But unfortunately, only 32% of employees feel that their company’s top leaders were communicating effectively.
7. Identify communication champions
Companies should identify and encourage internal communication champions from diverse teams to promote the communication efforts that the company is taking.
8. Emergency communication system
During emergencies and crises, companies should have a reliable system to communicate with their employees in a fast, effective and easily accessible manner.
9. Make it easy to find the right information
The internal communication tool that you are using should be able to help your employees to quickly find any information, when they need it. Most of the time, employees spend a lot of time searching for files and documents or recreating the same files just because they can’t find them.
10. Avoid internal communication silos
Companies in their quest to equip their employees with the best internal communication tools, end up subscribing to a lot of software, which results in communication silos. Since most businesses use various internal communication tools for their day-to-day communication, it is very easy to create silos of information. Searching across these silos is tedious, time-consuming and unproductive. IDC data shows that a knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day searching, which is about 30% of their workday. For an organization that employs 50 workers, with an average annual salary of $60,000, the cost of unproductive searches amounts to $3 million per year. Hence the internal communication tool that you are using at your workplace should address this problem.
11. Integrate with corporate culture
Integrate your internal communication with your company’s culture. Companies that can form a better connection with their employees are 20–25% more productive.
12. Reward and recognize outperformers
Employees are more productive when their feedback is taken seriously and their work is recognized. So, establish rewards and recognition programs for your teams.
13. Be the first to convey important news
Whenever anything material happens within the company — good or bad — be the first to let your employees know about it before they get to hear from the outside world
14. Leverage cloud communication technology
During this pandemic, a significant number of employees are working remotely. Having a cloud-based employee communications app will help you to reach all your employees quickly and easily
15. Evaluate your communication
No matter what steps you take to improve communication in your company, it is important that you have a mechanism in place to evaluate your work. Without a proper system of evaluation, you will be operating in the dark and won’t know if your efforts have been successful or not.
16. Free and uninterrupted internal communication
Though internal communication plays a key role in employee engagement, it is often a neglected issue. Free and uninterrupted internal communication in a company results in higher employee engagement, better customer service and more profits. It has been shown that companies with connected employees are 25% more productive.
According to a study, 74% of employees feel they are missing out on company information and 85% of employees feel motivated when management offers regular updates on company news. For organizations, effective internal communication is critical for their employees to perform their duties and responsibilities efficiently.
17. Facilitate remote working
After the pandemic, remote teams are likely to account for 40% of the global workforce. 83% of workers believe that they don’t need to work in an office to be productive. More than two-thirds of employers have seen increased productivity among their remote workers. Companies such as Dow Chemical, Best Buy, British Telecom, and more have seen a 35% to 40% increase in productivity from their remote workers. Hence your internal communication tools should make remote working seamless.
18. Don’t lose sight of the big picture
When you use too many tools for your internal communication, you may spend a lot of your time toggling between multiple windows looking for the information. If you want to refer to a specific conversation or files, you will have to search in multiple places and remember all the information in memory to visualize the big picture. The communication tool must be able to automatically connect all related information no matter where it resides. This will make it easy to naturally see the big picture.
19. Use social tools in workflow
Social media is increasingly becoming an important tool in digital marketing and for getting instant feedback from customers. Unfortunately, social media feeds are independent of other communications creating silos. Younger employees believe in integrating social media with the workplace. A study by Cisco reveals that 56% of young professionals won’t work at a company if they were not provided access to social media. Apart from company provided online communication tools, 49% of younger workers are already using social tools for their internal communication and collaboration. A study shows that 40% of millennials would even pay out of their pockets for social collaboration tools to improve productivity. It is imperative to use tools that naturally integrate social media in the day-to-day workflow.
20. Avoid email overload
Your internal communication should pay attention to this serious problem of email overload. Employees spend more than half their day checking emails. The Washington Post suggests that the average worker spends about 4.1 hours a day checking their inbox. Though it is not possible to eliminate emails, you can reduce your teams’ emails by up to 75% when you use the right internal communication tool.
21. Provide seamless access to cloud documents
The internal communication tool that you are using at your workplace should integrate with all the major cloud storage drives such as OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, pCloud and Mega. So, when your team is working remotely, they don’t have to worry about having access to all their work. Once you integrate your drives with your workplace communication tool, you will have instant access to all your files anywhere, anytime. This will remove a key productivity barrier.
22. Reduce unnecessary meetings
An Atlassian study recently found out that on average, employees waste about an hour a day in meetings. That comes down to 30 hours a month and over 300 hours in the whole year. The internal communication tool that you are using should have voice calling, screen sharing, group events, group chats, and direct chats. These features will help your employees to be more productive by reducing unproductive meetings and expensive and time-consuming business travel. Once the internal communication strategy is in place it is important to equip the teams with the right communication tool.
25 best internal communication tools
We have identified the 25 best internal communication tools that will help to bridge the gap between employer and employees and boost productivity by improving employee engagement.
1. Clariti
Clariti brings all communications to one place including emails, chats, calendar events, to-dos, and calls. Clariti also connects all related communications as if it is one conversation. There is no need to shift between many apps and there is no need to stress trying to remember all the connected conversations in memory. Clariti eliminates the need to search across many apps looking for information and makes it very easy to see the big picture without any effort. Clariti allows you to put any item such as email, conference chat, social feeds, and To-Do inside a TopicFolder. All the subsequent related conversations are automatically stored in that TopicFolder. Few months down the line, when you want to go back and refer to a prior conversation or file, all you have to do is look inside the relevant TopicFolder. In Clariti, no matter what was discussed and when it was discussed, you will be able to see the big picture in one view. This is not possible with other digital communication apps.
Clariti is ideal for small and medium businesses to boost team collaboration and drive productivity. It is securely hosted on Amazon Web Services, providing total reliability, 100% uptime, and trusted security of all your workday data. Clariti is a free cloud-based tool that can be accessed from anywhere with a browser and internet connection.
2. Swit
Swit brings just the right amount of everything for collaboration — from chat to ideation, to file sharing, to task management. With Swit, you can turn your conversation into trackable tasks and share the full context of tasks to chat simply by drag and drop unlike any other. You don’t have to get frustrated any longer to go back and forth between chat and tasks losing context.
3. Mio
If due to some reason if you are working on one platform and your colleagues and clients are using a different platform, then you can use Mio. It works in the background of your chat apps. It helps users to send cross-platform messages to colleagues and clients on Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Webex Teams.
4. Stashcat
Stashcat’s channels for teams and groups are not limited to any number of participants. You can create a channel for individual departments, teams, or the entire organization, even if there are 50,000 or more participants. With Stashcat, each user has their own file repository in which files can be stored, accessed and used at any time.
5. Slenke
Slenke helps to keep the team on the same page with encrypted in-app messaging, posts and file sharing. Using Slenke you can organize project resources and workloads with assignable tasks, project boards and workload calendars. Using Slenke you can organize and manage projects, communicate with your team, manage and assign tasks, track your time etc.
6. Rapporr
Rapporr enables you to separate your work messages, files and images from your personal life. All your work-based messages and content is within one, secure purpose-built app for business. Rapporr works across all iOS and Android devices so no one in your team gets left behind.
7. SEDNA
SEDNA’s smart team communication software unifies all messages, data, and documentation to reduce email volume and help teams focus on the work that matters — wherever they are. By creating one home for all internal and external team communication, SEDNA cuts down on email volume by up to 95% and brings collaboration, scalability, and efficiency to company workflows.
8. Pumble
Pumble enables real-time communication across all your teams. Pumble helps connect everyone in your company regardless of their location. Using Pumble you can organize conversations with channels and threads. You can also send direct messages, make video and group conference calls. Pumble is available across all mobile and web platforms.
9. MangoApps
MangoApps helps companies modernize their employee-facing applications. It brings intranet, communications, training & work management together in one platform to provide the most adaptable, intuitive, and unified experience in the market today.
10. Jivesoftware
Using Jive you can unite your people, content and resources in one easy-to-use platform. It can ignite communications in every direction: top-down, bottom-up, peer-to-peer.
11. pimentaCHAT
pimentaCHAT is a unified collaboration and communication tool that lets you make a video or audio call to more than 50 people at the same time. PimentaCHAT let you reduce emails by including relevant participants with the @username mention to notify them immediately. pimentaLIVE lets you make video or audio calls with screen sharing for more efficient teamwork.
12. Infinity
Infinity is a work management system that will allow you to organize all your work, however, you want, regardless of whether you’re dealing with projects or not. It offers 24/7 customer support that’s there to help you with any issues or questions you might have regarding the app.
13. Flowdock
Flowdock brings all of your conversations, work items and tools into one place. Using Flowdock you can prioritize work, solve problems, search and organize across teams, locations and time zones. Flowdock is available in both iOS App Store and Android Store.
14. Jandi
Jandi helps your team to easily organize work group chats, smart search files and more in a single unified platform — Chat, collaborate & unlimited video calls.
15. Mattermost
As an alternative to other proprietary internal software, Mattermost brings all your team communication into one place, making it searchable and accessible anywhere.
16. Workvivo
Workvivo is a new breed of employee communication platform designed to build natural, meaningful bonds between teams while helping companies reach and engage their employees in ways that traditional tools simply can’t. Workvivo brings your people together, wherever they are. It’s your intranet, internal comms tool, employee app, all merged into one familiar social experience at the very heart of your digital workplace.
17. eXo Platform
eXo Platform is a flexible solution built for all your evolving digital workplace needs to help you improve your employee experience and engagement by optimizing your internal communication strategy, facilitating collaboration in your workplace, empowering and rewarding your employees.
18. StaffConnect
StaffConnect is designed to maximize the impact of your internal communications and ensure messages reach your entire workforce, regardless of role or location. The StaffConnect app has been designed to help you reach, connect and engage with your entire workforce, maximizing the reach and impact of your internal communications.
19. Connecteam
Connecteam, the leading employee management app for the mobile workforce, helps organizations address internal communication needs in times of crisis. Connecteam gives organizations the ability to reach 100% of their employees right on their smartphone with their very own internal employee app. Connecteam streamlines employee management, helping companies to communicate, engage, and manage their remote employees from one place.
20. OnSemble
OnSemble’s comprehensive intranet software and services solution enables you to foster a customer-oriented culture by informing, aligning, engaging and enabling your employees. OnSemble allows you to regularly communicate with all employees, keep them connected and engaged, align them with company objectives, and enable them to share documents and collaborate.
21. Talkspirit
Talkspirit is one of the best tools to boost your internal communication. It brings all your employees together in a secure online space, wherever they are, even without an email address. By centralizing your news, events, documents and discussions in one place, Talkspirit provides a better way to spread the culture, share values and connect across the company.
22. Brosix
Brosix is the perfect solution for businesses looking to streamline and secure their internal communication. With Brosix, your team will receive a secure internal communication network that comes with a full range of collaboration features. All of these features are included in one user-friendly package, saving your team members’ time. These collaboration features are peer-to-peer and fully encrypted, meaning your team members can collaborate in complete security. From file transfer, screenshot and screen-sharing, to co-browsing, virtual whiteboard and chat rooms, Brosix has all of the features your team will need.
23. Simpplr
Simpplr software helps companies connect their workforce by streamlining internal communications and forging employee connections. Simpplr claims that employee adoption rates for their products are many times higher than industry averages, and it integrates well with other world-class, cloud-based technologies.
24. Flipsnack
Flipsnack is a secure and complex internal communication tool that allows everyone to transform any boring PDF like incident management handbooks, company newsletters, policy and framework documents, or even onboarding publications into an interactive experience and share them both easily and confidentially. Flipsnack also offers a broad range of interaction statistics such as the total number of clicks, impressions, page visits, and even the average reading duration for each document. You can also choose to connect your internal documents with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for better insights.
25. Lifesize
Lifesize connects people to make the workplace great. Lifesize enhances all of the different ways your team communicates, from one-on-one audio and video calls to large company meetings across multiple locations.
These internal communication tools will help organizations overcome communication challenges that every team faces — coordinate across different time zones, manage information silos and overcoming language and cultural barriers.
Effective internal business communication also has a significant positive impact on how remote teams collaborate. After the pandemic, remote teams are likely to account for 40% of the global workforce. Organizations need better internal communication tools that will help remote teams to communicate and collaborate better. We hope the strategies and tools discussed above will help you to deal with this new normal.
