9 best internal communication tools and best practices for small businesses

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.

Good internal communication drives employee engagement. Engaged employees feel motivated, focused, enthusiastic, committed and passionate about their job. They readily connect with the vision and goals of the organization. To truly engage your employees, you need the right combination of internal communication tools and strategies.

In this article, we have identified the 9 best internal communication tools and best practices that will help small businesses boost their productivity by bridging the gap between employer and employees.

Here is a list of the 10 best internal communication tools that will help you boost productivity by improving your employee engagement.

1. BlogIn

BlogIn is a beautifully simple internal blog and knowledge-sharing platform for teams of all sizes. The internal blog becomes the central information hub that opens a new, transparent, two-way communication channel inside an organization, where everyone can ask a question and get the information, they need to make faster and smarter decisions. It’s intuitive and easy to use, so everyone can quickly get on board, which is one of the reasons why it works so well as an internal communication tool.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Connecteam

Connecteam, the leading employee management app for the mobile workforce, helps organizations address internal communication needs in times of crisisConnecteam 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

Here is a list of the 9 best internal communication best practices that will boost your employees’ morale, make them more connected to their team and work towards the company’s vision and goals.

1. Free and uninterrupted internal communication

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.

Though internal communication plays a key role in employee engagement, it is often a neglected issue. 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.

2. Avoid 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.

3. Use a unified communication tool

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

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

Clariti has it all

• Clariti supports email, chat, calls, screen sharing, social feeds, meetings, events, reminders, and access to cloud documents in one app. Clariti automatically keeps all related communications including emails, chats, calendar events, to-dos, and calls connected as if it is one conversation.
• There is no need to shift between many apps and there is no 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’s powerful features such as “chat from email” and “instant share” reduces the number of emails in your inbox.
• Since Clariti is a browser-based application, there are no hassles like software installation, maintenance, license renewal, etc. You simply create a free account, log in and you are ready to go, anywhere you have internet access.
• In Clariti, you will be able to download your social media feeds and instantly share, begin a chat or create a reminder for all the feeds that you receive. This seamlessly integrates social media into your work.
• Clariti offers a simple but elegant solution to the painful search problem. Clariti connects all related communication like emails, chats, calls, social feeds and cloud documents in a TopicFolder. A TopicFolder can be named in ways that are meaningful to you. Since all the communication is automatically organized in TopicFolder with recognizable names, it is extremely easy to find when needed.