Internal Communications 2024: Benefits, Solutions, Examples

We've all been there—victims of ineffective internal communications…

Remember that time the entire marketing team spent a frantic morning crafting the perfect Instagram caption, only to discover their colleague in sales had already launched a near-identical campaign weeks ago?

Or the moment project timelines went flying out the window because a crucial update got lost in the email abyss?

74% of employees report that they are missing out on important company information. And 60% of companies don’t have long-term strategies for handling internal communications.

Obviously internal communications is an issue. So what can you do to improve it?

In this blog post, we'll dive headfirst into the fascinating realm of internal communications. We'll explore why it matters, how to build a winning strategy, and the tools and channels that can help.

What Is Internal Communications?

Internal communications is the art and science of communicating within a workplace—of making sure everyone is aware of what they need to know in order to do their jobs and maximize the productivity of the business.

Internal communications involves 3 layers:

• Top-down: Leadership shares strategic plans, company updates, and important announcements.
• Bottom-up: Employees provide feedback, share ideas, and raise concerns.
• Lateral: Teams collaborate, share knowledge, and build camaraderie.

In order to be truly effective, internal communications should have the following elements:

• Clarity: Communication among the team should be clear and easy to understand.
• Consistency: Communication among the team should use consistent channels and formats so that the expectations are normalized and apparent.
• Timeliness: Communication among the team should be as prompt as is appropriate to avoid speculation, confusion, and unnecessary last-minute stress.
• Relevance: Communication among the team should be relevant to the segment of the team that’s being communicated with.
• Openness: Communication among the team should be open to feedback, to ensure everyone feels heard and valued.

The Importance of Internal Communications

Consider this: “Only 7% of workers strongly agree communication at their workplace is accurate, timely, and open,” according to one report.

Internal communications hold a team together.

Without effective internal communication, processes can crumble and it can be difficult to get anything done efficiently.

It’s kind of like if every musician in an orchestra stuck in earplugs and just started playing something, without a thought to what all of the other musicians were doing.

Each musician might be talented individually, but his or her talents can’t contribute to the symphony because nobody is on the same page.

But just as a conductor brings unity and harmony to the orchestra, strong internal communications brings alignment and clarity—allowing each “musician” to take out their earplugs and make beautiful music together.

(The analogy falls apart if you think about it too deeply, but you get the idea!)

And with 74% of employees saying they’re missing out on important information (as stated in the intro above), it’s obvious that many businesses’ internal communications are failing.

If you can get everyone smoothly communicating on the same page, you can see improvements in…

Productivity

If people don’t know what’s going on, the result can be chaos.

Employees not knowing what’s expected of them.

People working on one project when they should be working on another.

Multiple people working on the same thing.

Clear communication keeps everyone on the same page, reducing confusion and time-wasting—thus, making people more productive.

Creativity

When information flows freely, teams can brainstorm, share ideas, and build on each other's strengths.

This sharing of ideas fosters innovation—which can lead to creative solutions.

And those creative ideas can become big wins for your business.

Retention

If employees have clear expectations and communication, they’ll likely be more satisfied with their work environment.

And more satisfied employees means they will stick around longer.

On the flip side, a lack of good communication leads to chaos, stress, and frustration. And that kind of frustration obviously does not contribute to a desirable work environment.

Flexibility

Changes happen within businesses. It’s inevitable.

Many people don’t like change, and transitions can be difficult—sometimes disastrous.

But by having clear internal communication, you can build trust, manage anxieties, and ensure everyone is aligned in navigating the situation effectively.

And all of that helps team members be more flexible with whatever changes come their way.

How to Create Internal Communications Strategies

Creating an internal communications strategy doesn’t have to be stressful.

It simply means making sure you have an established process for the important communication that happens across your company—and making sure everyone knows what that process is.

This includes…

• Making sure people know what communications tools will be used – i.e., email? SMS? Slack? A particular channel on Slack? Zoom? (More on communication tools later.)
• Making sure people know when each communication tool will be used – i.e., which Slack channel should be used for what purposes? Should a Google calendar invite be created and sent out for time off requests?
• Making sure people know what the expectations are at each stage – i.e., who is in charge of what tasks? Who should questions or comments be directed toward? At what point in the process does the project action item pass on to the next team member? How should feedback be handled?

It would be helpful to create a document for yourself outlining every contingency you can think of regarding all of the questions above.

You don’t need to share that document with the whole team, but you should be able to communicate the process succinctly to everyone, and could perhaps share a condensed version with the broader team.

But before implementing a new internal communications strategy, make sure to get the input of team members—particularly the team leads.

The specific process will look different depending on your specific business and team, but those are some overall guidelines to lay the groundwork.

Internal Communications Channels

There are several communication channels you can use for internal communications.

Email

Email is used by virtually every business.

There are 4 billion email users in the world, after all.

Email can work well for longer company announcements. Because it is more formal and lends itself to longer messages, email is a good medium for important company-wide announcements.

Often it is a good idea to pair announcements made in all-hands company meetings with emails to review what was discussed.

In other cases, unexpected but significant company news can effectively be communicated via email—an employee being let go, for example.

That being said, while internal emails do have much higher open rates than external—typically in the 66% range—it remains the case that email inboxes are cluttered, things slip between the cracks, and so important information can be missed if communicated primarily or exclusively through email.

Additionally, given that many workers already spend up to a quarter of their time on email, it may be unwise to build your internal comms around a method that many people already feel overwhelmed by and spend too much time with.

Slack

Slack is an internal chat system that does many things well.

It makes immediate communication with an entire team or an individual easy.

It supports many different apps, like tools for project management, that your business probably already uses.

It provides most of the services you would need as part of an all-in-one internal comms solution.

With tools like Slack, the issue isn’t functionality. It’s volume—when you have an all-in-one messaging solution, well, you have an all-in-one messaging solution. And that means all your messages are going to that one place.

It’s not surprising, then, that Slack fatigue is a thing.

In practice, what can easily happen with Slack is that it doesn’t replace email with something better; it simply doubles your workload for managing messages (if used alongside email) or it simply ends up taking up all the time you used to spend on email.

Thus while there is certainly value in having a messaging app like Slack that can facilitate certain types of internal communication, you’ll want to put guardrails in place to help it not become overwhelming for your team.

SMS

SMS, or text messaging, communicates with employees via the use of a bulk texting app, such as what we offer at Mobile Text Alerts.

If you don’t currently use texting for internal communications, you should consider it. Here’s why.

First, engagement with texting tends to be higher than other messaging channels. By some reports, texts enjoy a 98% open rate. (In other words, everyone reads their texts.)

Second, for short, time-sensitive information, texting can be the ideal medium because it’s easy to access and read and will not clutter email inboxes or add to a person’s mountain of Slack notifications.

Third, texting allows for similar tracking and personalization as email, but, as already mentioned, with better engagement and a better format for short, quick messages.

Calls

Some communication is best done via voice and/or video.

Calls can be made via phone, via Slack, via Zoom, or via similar voice/video calling services.

While voice-to-voice communication can be helpful for bouncing thoughts back and forth, there are a few major limitations:

• Calls are usually more time-consuming, because people tend to talk more via voice than they do when typing out a message via digital channels
• Calls are less flexible, because they require finding time that works for all parties’ schedules
• Calls don’t leave a paper trail, so if information isn’t written down, topics can get forgotten or misremembered later on

For mass company updates that you’d like to make via call, one option to consider is Phone Alerts.

Phone alerts work by taking a voice recording and sending that recording out to your list members that cannot receive SMS messages.

Here’s how our Phone Alerts feature works.

Internal Wiki

Internal wikis, maintained either via the open source Media Wiki (which also powers Wikipedia) or through some sort of proprietary software like Tettra, can be an excellent tool for particular types of internal communication.

A wiki is a great place to document various processes that are essential to the company’s day-to-day operations. It can also be where the employee handbook lives as well as things like scripts that sales teams use when calling, guidelines for marketing messaging, and so on.

That being said, a wiki has limited value in as much as it is not built around an inbox. So there is not a great way of sorting messages chronologically or of identifying new content. So for many purposes, especially alerts and notifications, a wiki would be the wrong channel.

Google Drive Solutions

Google Drive solutions, particularly Google Docs and Google Sheets, can be used in many ways. They are helpful as a way of sharing a meeting agenda ahead of time as well as tracking department goals and performance.

What makes them especially useful is the collaborative element which allows multiple users to all contribute to the same doc.

Indeed, there are many ways in which Google Docs and Google Sheets offer the same benefits as a wiki.

That being said, the problems with wikis also apply in slightly different ways to Google Drive solutions. While you can arrange your docs by when they were most recently edited, most users are not going to treat their Google Drive as being like an email inbox. So time-sensitive information can easily be lost.

Additionally, an excess of dependence on Google Docs can lead to the same problems we have discussed with most other internal comm channels: overuse leads to too many notifications which leads to messages being ignored or not read.

Here's a list of more cloud-based collaboration tools.

Word-of-Mouth

Word-of-mouth, of course, is how most communication gets done in very small businesses and start-ups. And up to a certain size it works. But that size is almost certainly smaller than you think it is. Once you have more than ten employees, you almost certainly need some formalized methods for communicating with employees. Word-of-mouth isn’t good enough once you reach a certain size.

Internal Communications Tools

So what communication tools can you use to take advantage of all the channels listed above?

Here are some examples of internal communications tools you can use—and some of these are what we actually use at Mobile Text Alerts.

• Email – There’s no need to get too fancy with email tools; the basics will do just fine.
  • Gmail – Most businesses tend to use Gmail to set up their email domains, and users can easily access it online.
  • Outlook – Outlook is a popular 3rd-party email client that lets you integrate email directly onto your computer or mobile app.
  • Apple Mail – Apple Mail comes free with all Apple devices.
• Workplace Management
  • Slack – See comments on Slack above; we find it very useful for organizing conversations across the company.
  • Trello – Trello doubles as a project management and internal communications tool and makes it easier to track projects and communications affiliated with those projects.
  • Google Calendar – Google Calendar offers an easy tool for not only communicating about events (such as meetings) but also schedules, “out of office” times, and deadlines.
• SMS – SMS platforms such as Mobile Text Alerts allow you to send and manage text message conversations across both your team and customer base.
• Calls
  • Zoom – Zoom meetings have become a norm in businesses (particularly since COVID), because Zoom is so easy to use.
  • Slack – If you’re already using Slack for workplace management (see above), note that it also has video and audio calling options, which can be convenient.
  • Google Meet – Though we tend to use Zoom for meetings, Google Meet is also an easy option.
• Google Drive Solutions – Why reinvent the wheel? The benefit of using the below Google apps instead of, say, Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint is that your document is easily accessed, viewed, edited, and shared across the internet.
  • Google Docs
  • Google Sheets
  • Google Slides

Internal Communications Plan: Example

While creating a strategy and deciding on the channels and tools are important, those are actually only pieces of the overall internal communications plan.

So what does an internal communications plan actually look like?

Here’s an example based on some of our own internal processes…

• All comments, issues, and feedback go to the appropriate person or the appropriate channel on Slack
• If a comment or idea requires further action, a card is created using Trello on the appropriate Trello board
• A description of what is needed is provided in the Trello card
• A weekly prioritization call determines the priority of cards within the Trello boards and gives people an opportunity to voice any feedback or thoughts regarding projects
• Prioritized Trello cards are assigned to the appropriate person, and anyone can make comments within the Trello card related to the project
• Once the assigned person is done with his or her portion of the project, he or she can pass it along to the next person and (if necessary) tag them in the card
• The process continues until the project is completed, and any questions can be posted in the card or asked directly to the person in question via Slack if a more immediate answer is needed

You can see how a communications plan goes hand in hand with a project management plan and how helpful an overall process can be.

Internal Communications Best Practices

So what are the best practices when it comes to internal communications in your business?

Be Clear

The most important thing with any communications plan is to be clear.

Be clear about expectations. Be clear about processes. Be clear about everything—and don’t make assumptions. Better to overcommunicate than to undercommunicate.

If your communication is unclear, it will lead to confusion and frustration.

Be Organized

A lack of organization can be as frustrating as a lack of clarity.

If everyone’s scrambling through a sea of chaos, it’s difficult for real communication to happen, and difficult for things to get done.

So for best results, make sure your communications plan is orderly and organized.

Be Understanding

While it’s good to be clear and organized, make sure people also understand that things are flexible.

You don’t want your communications processes to be so rigid that the atmosphere becomes unbending, cold, and unapproachable.

There may be occasions when special care is needed. Make sure people know that they are free to voice their feedback and concerns. For this, you can even use performance management software, since it effectively supports feedback in communication, avoiding misunderstanding and allowing your team to perform their best.

Be Professional

While you want communication to be open and you want people to feel comfortable expressing concerns, all communication must be professional.

That doesn’t mean it needs to be formal. It doesn’t mean you need to ban all emojis, GIFs, and “text lingo.” (Yes, it’s sometimes OK to say “lol” to colleagues.)

It just means that when people express themselves, they can’t fly off the handle. They can’t berate you or other employees. They can’t engage in inappropriate conduct.

If everyone can be professional in their communication, everything will run a lot more smoothly—with a lot less drama.

Internal Communications Examples

Here are some more examples of some specific ways this all might play out within a company…

• Guidelines for how to give and accept feedback
• A communicated process for how meetings should be run and what takeaways attendees should come away with
• Instructions for how projects should be handled at each step
• Documentation that indicates what tasks people are responsible for in relation to different projects
• Descriptions for each Slack channel explaining clearly what they’re for
• A clearly delineated process for requesting time off

There could be better communication at almost every level of your business. So don’t be afraid to think of areas of weakness within your own business and to brainstorm ways to improve them.

Goals of Internal Communications

So what’s the end goal of all of these internal communication principles? In other words, what’s the point?

The goals of internal communications could be broken down into the following…

More Profit

A business with poor internal communication will not be as profitable as it could be.

Why?

Because employees won’t be able to be as productive. Turnover will be higher. Processes will be less efficient.

And any one of these issues can make a big hit to your company’s profitability.

Happier Employees

It’s commonly recognized that happier employees often translate to a more successful business.

And if your employees and team members are plagued with bad communication, they’ll be less likely to feel positively about their work environment.

And this attitude can impact productivity and creativity.

Maximum Efficiency

All businesses are looking for maximum efficiency.

Efficiency both saves money and helps you get more work done—all of which are highly sought-after benefits in the business world.

Better internal communications can help streamline efficiency. That way, your business can be the best it can be.

Internal Communications Jobs

Thinking about a career in internal communications? Here’s some info about jobs and salary…

Internal Communications Vacancies

You can check out these sites for the latest information on current internal communications job vacancies:

• Indeed
• LinkedIn
• ZipRecruiter

Internal Communications Salary

Current internal communications salaries will vary widely, depending on the type of position you qualify for:

• Internal Communications Specialists typically make between $56,139 and $95,353.
• Internal Communications Managers typically make between $109,434–$144,041.

If you’re just starting out, you would probably expect to make the low end of the estimates, and then you could work your way up as you gain experience.

Get Better Internal Communication for Your Business

How could you improve internal communications for your own business?

Here’s one way: SMS. You can try out an SMS platform for free here.