How do you refresh your internal communication channels?

Understanding and customizing the message, medium and the most impactful messengers for your audiences is absolutely critical. At any given point, a company competes with an infinite set of messages across internal, social media, personal messages from friends & family - within a finite time. That’s why having an informed, insight and data-driven channel and content strategy goes a long way.

Make sure you're taking into account the wants and needs of your target audience when updating your content strategy. It's important to provide a mix of "need to know" and "nice to know" content. Need to know content (information an employee needs to do their job or live their life) can drive a sense of urgency for using a channel while the nice to know content (your culture building content) can keep an employee coming back to the channel more frequently.

A key bit when diversifying channels is to look at how they can complement each other. Don't just repeat content on multiple channels. Use your channels to reinforce, amplify, or summarize content on your more primary channels. That helps employees navigate through noise, rather than adding to it.

I'd be careful with diversifying channels. You likely don't have the time or resources to create connect across multiple channels. Better to deliver great content on one channel than good or less-than-good content across many channels. Also worth asking if employees want more content or better content. They already have jobs to do - reading, watching and listening to a constant flood of content is likely not high on their list of things to do. All employees really want to know is: does senior leadership know what they're doing? Do they value what I'm doing? And what do I need to start, stop and continue doing?

In my experience it’s not just about diversifying the channels but diversifying the methods within the same channel. For example, if you’re using an intranet site like SharePoint to communicate internally, how user-friendly have you made it? Add graphics and links all on one page to create easier on-ramps to other pages, libraries and folders for those who don’t know their way around.

Sharing best practices, along with recognizing excellence that aligns with your organization's strategic priorities, should be the key focus for internal comms. Introduce employees to colleagues who've found better, easier & new ways to do their jobs. This is how you deliver relevant "news you can use" to employees.

Before creating any internal comms, know the answer to 3 questions - what do you want employees to start doing? Stop doing? Continue doing? And never forget that employees are busy - no one's waiting and hoping for the next newsletter, email, video, all-staff memo, senior leadership walkthru or town hall invite. Every communication is an interruption so make sure it's well worth employees' time.