Internal communications is about so much more than employee engagement

The benefits of effective internal communications are typically measured by surveys that produce a variety of employee engagement metrics. However, while employee engagement is critical for job performance, it isn’t the whole story.

Effective communications is also critical for ensuring change programs are successful. As change guru John Kotter quotes “without effective communications, organisational change will fail”.  Indeed, as any good program manager knows, communications and engagement represents a large portion of the change workload.

Its also the hallmark for high performing teams.  Teams who do communications well are particularly patient with each other and collaborate to solve problems and innovate more successfully.

It also helps promote and protect your brand and reputation. Given the speed at which communications moves today, internal communications is equally as important to control as external and media communications.  The last thing you need in a crisis is some employee tweeting speculative office gossip for all to see.

Importantly, effective internal communications is really about managing relationships better….between leaders, people and teams. It’s about creating more trust and understanding, which reduces internal politics, bullying and stress. Its more about informal conversations, quality social time and two-way collaboration between people…and less about newsletters, emails and fancy intranet sites.

Are organisations’ realising the best returns from internal communications today?  This is difficult to answer, given that measurement of its success has thus far been limited.  One suggestion to help expand the ROI metrics range is to monitor the flow and quality of informal conversations in teams.  The attachment provided explains a process by which this has been trialled in organisations, using electronic tags that measure how people communicate throughout the day. 

the new science of building great teams

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