How to Improve Employee Communication

There are many ways strong employee communication can benefit your organization. 

No matter what your business does, it’s made up of your employees. They are your identity. They spearhead your productivity and execute your plans toward your brand’s goals. It only makes sense to keep your employees included in your mission and what’s going on in your organization. To increase productivity, improve employee morale, and employee engagement, you need to keep employee communication at top of your mind. 

Employee communication is incredibly important because it spurs a strong company culture. If your employees feel included, it will strengthen your culture. By feeling included, they will feel valued, and that leads to better employee engagement. 

The Benefits of Employee Communication

If you have a strong company culture, your organization will be a more desirable place to work and will have better retention. If you have strong employee engagement, your employees will be more productive, making your company more profitable. 

You may not realize this, but addressing employee communications at your organization is a huge opportunity because many companies do not do a good job of this, and it leads to some huge benefits. 

Employees are 4.6 times more likely to perform their best work when they feel their voices are being heard.

Employees who feel their voices are heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered and perform their best work, according to Salesforce. 

This statistic epitomizes how employee communication can benefit your brand. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients. They will have a stronger connection with their job, giving them that extra motivation to do their best work. Making your employees feel valued leads to employee engagement. 

Companies with engaged employees are 21% more profitable because their employees are 17% more productive, according to a Gallup study.

Companies with engaged employees are 21% more profitable because their employees are 17% more productive.

The benefits of employee communication are clear, but how can you make it a priority? What steps can you take to improve your employee communication? 

Implementing a Strong Employee Communication Strategy

Employee communication is about having a collaborative environment. It’s also about management and the executive office being open with the rest of the employees at your company.

You want to encourage your employees to work together, ask for help, and bounce ideas off of each other. Your employees should not feel siloed. A strong culture with great employee communication has a team mindset. This starts from the top down. 

The best way to start practicing employee communication is to communicate with your employees. Your leadership should be an example of what you’re trying to set.  

This does not mean executives leaving memos updating employees on important announcements. Let employees know what your mission is, what your strategy is, give updates on how your company is doing, and be transparent when doing so. Include them in building your strategy and mission statement.

By doing this, each employee will gain a better understanding of where they fit in. They’ll know how their role and their work contributes toward the final goal. 

Here are some great ways to get started. 

Recurring Meetings 

Some good ways to practice top-down communication are company meetings, quarterly company town halls, department-wide meetings, and one-on-one meetings with managers. 

There are a few reasons why these types of meetings are helpful.

First, they’re informative. They let people know what’s going on, keep people in the loop, and gain a better understanding of their workplace. Considering all the time and effort they put in, giving them transparent updates is not that big of an ask. 

Second, it builds consistency. Having a common practice of updating people in these types of meetings makes communication an expectation. Giving routine updates injects communication into your culture. 

Third, it allows people to be heard. Let’s be honest, in many organizations, especially large ones, the average person does not work side-by-side with people in the C-suite. Some people work at their company for years without ever meeting their CEO.

Having a company meeting allows your employees to be heard and have a back-and-forth conversation between employees, management, and executives. 

Speak With Them, Not At Them

Whether it’s a company-wide meeting or one-on-one, executives and management should not be a megaphone to the rest of the employees. 

Of course, it’s more difficult to have a back-and-forth conversation in a meeting with hundreds or thousands of people, but you should allow people to speak, whether they are voicing their opinions or asking questions.

In smaller department-wide meetings, it’s much easier to get feedback from employees and have a conversation rather than talking at them. As for one-on-one meetings, they should always be open and transparent conversations.

Practicing these types of meetings and allowing more of a conversation makes employees feel like their voices are heard and they’ll feel more valued at your company. This improves your culture and employee engagement. 

Use The Right Tools 

Not all communication needs to be done in a scheduled meeting. 

We’ve all walked out of a conference room before and thought, “That meeting could have been an email.”

And it’s true! It happens. So what you need to do is value people’s time and optimize your communication tools. Email works great in some instances. There is a slew of messaging tools that help people have conversations, whether it’s video calls over Zoom or Microsoft Teams, or direct messages over Slack or Google Hangouts. 

A great way to casually communicate with people in your organization is through employee communication and employee advocacy tool such as GaggleAMP. This is a great way to go if your organization wants to improve communication, culture, and social media efforts. 

Employees can share content internally in group messages, and the marketing team can decide if this content would be valuable externally. Furthermore, it allows for messaging in all the ways you’re accustomed to seeing out of a business communication tool.  

Effective employee communication helps empower your employees by giving them the information they need to do the best jobs they can. This helps them keep a pulse on what is happening in the company, and how they can contribute.

Let your employees’ voices be heard, and let them know where they fit in your company’s mission so they feel valued.