Internal communication tools ? What tools ?!
As much as people need to communicate to express their feelings to find a consensus and build a balanced relationship between individuals in their own entity. Because if we think about it, a company is just a group of people sharing a common goal to at least coexist as a social group. Of course, this group share an ambition to make the company they work at valuable, economically or ethically.
As long as there are contact between two people there are communication existing trough some « tools ». Body language, miming, sounds and language are all means of communication that are used as tools to express ideas and thoughts. But as soon as the number of people interacting to each other and working together grow the Castafiore talent start to have its limits.
These limits can impact the efficiency of the communication as a mean to find cohesion.
The evolution of History offers us a lot of examples of Tools used in communication. When the means of interacting and communicating evolved with the technical progress, the tools used inside a company did too. From the friendly messenger pigeons from the Army to the less friendly e-mail from your boss asking you to change the whole design of your brand-new logo idea. Of he doesn’t understand the choice for a calligraph styled police or the use of a wonderful meme. Meetings, company’s Journals or even the last Christmas Company Event where there is always too much bad Glühwein.
Gutenberg made the means of communications evolved and helped the humanity to enter an era where printed communication was prevalent. Social Networks and Digital Medias are now doing the same think but with small 0 and 1. Their uses become more and more widespread as the need of speed takes an important place in a globalised world.
The ambition to be faster as the light, or the Flash, is not the only goal for a digitalised internal communication. Cohesion and efficiency can have a central place too. When there is one information shared in the same form to all the people it concerns, it prevents misunderstandings and mistakes due to a lack of information and comprehension.
Team building and reinforcing the culture of the group, or the company, in a whole is a good way to motivate the employees and see the happiness inside the office improve.
The tools of the Internal Communication Manager (or ICM if you want to sound like an expert, which truly we all want) helped a change in the structures of the companies. We moved from an ascending form communication where it always came from above to a form of communication which is more « peers to peers » and where almost everyone can create content or just participate dynamically in the Internal Communication. The intranet, emails and meetings in person are the most common tools of internal communication in companies. But these common tools give inspiration to create digital shared spaces, where these tools will find a new form but will still exist in their spirits.
Let’s focus on the intranet, which was deeply impacted by the development of digital and is in constant evolution in its structures and uses. The intranet is a network of computers within a company or organization, and it appeared during the 1990 alongside the emails platforms. At the beginnings, it was mostly a document repository or it provided links to the tools available for the employees. During the years, with the expansion of the web, intranets function evolved and they began to be used to keep employees aware of what was happening in their company and, therefore, they made the newsletter kind of obsolete. Then they kept on evolving, making employee-to-employee and leader-to-employee communication easier. This is one of the biggest communication tools used in companies for internal communication.
According to some statistics coming from a poll from 2016[1], 87% of employees are receiving their information through the 3 ways mentioned above. But does it mean they are efficient? Maybe not. In fact, 74% feel they are missing company information and 30% simply ignore their employer’s emails. Then, despite the popularity of these tools of communication, they seem to have some limits.
First of all, maybe we should answer this question: why bother?
Internal communication already exists, even if it’s not perfect, so why should we keep thinking about new ways and tools? Well, that’s simple: an organization with an effective internal communication will tend to be more competent and consequently, more productive. As a matter of fact, in the same pool, 62% of employees said that accessibility to company information directly affects their job satisfaction and for 50% of them, a lack of transparency just holds their company back.
So what kind of new forms of communication could we think about? We can observe that the importance of mobiles increased a lot during the last decade. A mobile platform could be a solution: 55% of the employees answered that a mobile application would help them to be informed and thus be more engaged towards their company.
Intranet is still the most used tool inside a structure but the rise of new mediums and platforms will affect its usages and perspectives. Maybe, if you are lucky, in a next article we will underline some new platforms.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/DynamicSignal/the-evolution-of-internal-communications
