Internal Communications

Summary

Nowadays, the internal communications become different than before, the managers more focus on “employee care” than “customer care”. Today’s employee is a different person in terms of values and needs than earlier decades; they are well educated, have higher expectations, and want to know more about the company they work for. Also the workplace is different today—tighter staffing, longer hours, greater workloads and more emphasize on performance. Therefore, strong internal communication will play a pivotal role for increased employees’ workforce loyalty and productivity.

Internal communications means all communication within an organization—it can be oral or written, face to face or virtual, one-on-one or in a small group. Good internal communication can help organization to establish formal roles and responsibilities for employees. But what is the good internal communication? There are some features of good internal communication below:

• Transparent and timely
• Clear
• Concise
• Informative
• Openness
• Honesty
• Two-way communication

Since the technologies developed very well, so the ways of communication with employees become more and more, such as e-mail, intranets, blog, and satellite meetings connecting distant office. But the most important thing and factor of the internal communication is—the managers who has a basic responsibility to listen to what his or her employees say and get to know who they really are as individuals.

Example and Self-Experience

This video is about the communicator John Robataille speaks on effective communications in business and management.

Some companies, uncomfortable with the openness of public blogs, use them as an internal communications tool. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the German investment bank, has set up about 120 internal blogs to promote discussion and distribute information, including some that encourage users to share ideas, requests and criticisms of in-house information technology systems. All employees are free to contribute to the blogs, and the chief information officer in the bank estimates that there are several thousand active users in the company.

In fact, I found out the chain pharmacy which I worked in also has the same communication policy as the investment bank in Germany. But, they only opened one blog which could be used by employees to check the newest policies and news, which was published by the main company. Also, they could see the ranking of each store within specific categories. Even though they have only one blog, it still has a good effect as an internal communication tool.

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References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_communications

http://www.stepupcommunications.com/Services/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CECiY_lRQ84

http://nevon.typepad.com/nevon/2004/12/ft_highlights_e.html