How can you excel as an internal communications manager?

Become an Audience Matter Expert. Know your internal audiences so well that your leaders come to you for insights about what they need to be successful. When you position your expertise close to the audiences that drive organizational success, you are firmly anchored at the core of the business. Understanding the business is important. Knowing what audiences need to be successful so that they can power the business, is essential to your success.

Before communicating anything here’s a simple checklist I work through. 1. Audience: Am I clear on who I’m talking to? It can’t just be all employees. 2. Intention: your intention/expected outcome as a leader/communicator AND equally important your audience’s intention. The biggest mistake is assuming your intention is the same as your audience. Make sure you understand this before writing a single sentence, building a slide or scripting a video. 3. Content: what’s the best medium(s) to get my message across? 4. Distribution: we often assume that once you’ve sent an email, created a video/seminar, updated slack that you’ve achieved your intended goal. Take the time to confirm that your intended message landed. If not, go back to 1.

Leverage your internal network. Learn how to communicate with different levels and functions. Learn what makes them tick, their pain points, and how receptive they are to certain cues. Not everyone communicates the same way and through the same channels, so finding the perfect balance is key. Maintaining a two-way communication is just as important. You don't want to just push information out - you want them to contribute to your strategy in some way as well.

Think of every communication as an interruption. Is what you're putting out worth employees' time and attention? Will it make their jobs easier? Will they feel appreciated? Or will your communication leave them with more questions than answers and feeling disrespected? If the communication is not immediately and obviously relevant, they'll ignore it no matter how clever your delivery. Employees are busy. Value their time. And treat them like adults.

Listen. And then filter the feedback through the lens of executive leadership. Figure out where the disconnects are and close the gaps. More than channels and messages, account for systems and programs that align employees with organizational goals.

Understand your mission is to strengthen organizational confidence via education, information, enlightenment, empathy, collaboration, ideation, and involvement!

Embrace your role as advisor. You are the voice of not only the leadership TO the employees; but the voice of the rank-n-file TO the leaders. You are not just the megaphone for HR. You are a critical link in two-way symmetric communications. You must cultivate a deep understanding of all internal stakeholders via systematic processes that allow you to be an effective bridge between their needs and the organizational goals and mission.

Creating an internal communication service model is a great way to establish boundaries and guidelines around how you work with internal clients. This enables consistency across campaigns. Plus, it gives you a clear framework for what IC prioritizes as part of your scope of work and what falls outside it.

More employees are using mobile devices to view internal communications than ever before. To ensure that your employees aren’t missing your internal communications (or avoiding them because they’re difficult to interact with), ensure that your emails are fully viewable on mobile devices.

Effective planning and prioritization are crucial. Aligning your communication activities with the strategic objectives and priorities of the organization ensures that your efforts contribute to the overall success. Develop a clear vision and mission for the internal communications function, reflecting the organization's values and brand identity. Create a communication calendar and budget to keep activities on track and within resource limits. Managing resources and stakeholders transparently fosters collaboration and ensures everyone is working towards common goals. With strategic planning and resource management, you can enhance the impact of your internal communications.

In internal communications, you are only as effective as your relationships. The stronger your relationships the better content you can get for staff, the more access to executives and you will understand staff needs more. Don’t limit your relationships to the C-Suite, talk to everyone. Hang out in the coffee shop downstairs, be accessible and helpful.

Don't be afraid to knock on new doors! Introduce yourself, and suggest aligning on topic A or B. I've never encountered resistance when I've done this. One step further: don't be afraid to ask to be a fly on the wall at meetings in other departments. I've always found a lot of value in attending other department meetings--you can learn about the issues that the team is facing and where employee sentiment in that team lies. You can use that information to ask the right questions and include the right people when you are trying to push through a related communications initiative.

It’s important to build connections with your key stakeholders and understand their needs. In my experience building connections, relationships and alliances are key to building trust. Once this has been established, you gain a ton of employee advocates ready to support internal communication activities and campaigns.

Effective IC management thrives on collaboration and coordination with various organizational departments, ensuring message consistency and trust-building with internal partners. IC managers reinforce their role as essential collaborators by offering guidance, support, and feedback on communication needs and initiatives. Tapping into the influence of internal champions and employee advocates can exponentially amplify the reach and impact of communication efforts, underlining the value of teamwork in the field.

This is extremely important because your communication as an internal communications manager comes from your collaborative efforts

Innovate around *brevity.* Everyone in your organization is drowning in information: * Their inboxes overflow. * Slack pings at them constantly. * Meetings last too long, with too much rambling and too many words squeezed onto each slide. So ask yourself: How can I make our internal comms a delight? Something worth consuming? The answer is to deliver as much value in as few words / minutes as possible. This starts with being selective about what to communicate. Then, be creative about how you communicate it. Some messages get 30 words in the newsletter, but others get a 10-word billboard-style poster in the break room. Some topics get a brief video update. Let them look forward to your comms as the most helpful they ever receive.

The challenge facing in-house staff involves balancing the need to meet manager/leader expectations while taking them beyond those expectations. IC managers often make missteps by overdriving these expectations - especially when the execution is less than perfect. Where possible, find a peer group of Comms pros where you can test out ideas before trying them out live, and get your leaders to give you their expectations as precisely as possible.

Embracing creativity and innovation is essential. Utilize a diverse range of communication tools and platforms, including newsletters, intranet, social media, podcasts, videos, webinars, events, and gamification. This mix engages different preferences and captures the attention of your audience effectively. Incorporate storytelling, humor, visuals, and interactive elements to make your messages more impactful and memorable. By fostering creativity in your communication approach and content, you can strengthen employee engagement and promote a dynamic and inclusive workplace culture.

There are organisations in which it may be useful to create a map of internal leaders/influencers to be used as another channel for internal communication, it may be an innovative path to explore. Hay organizaciones en las que puede ser útil crear un mapa de líderes internos para utilizarlo como un canal mas en la comunicación interna, puede ser una vía a explorar.

Es importante que como responsable de comunicación emplees las herramientas que mejor se adapten a tu audiencia. No es necesario que tu comunicación esté en todas las plataformas. Es más, no es recomendable, ya que tu público seguro que no está en todas ellas. Por ello, mi recomendación es que después de hacer un análisis de tu audiencia, pongas el foco y la estrategia en esas plataformas en las que está tu publico.

Understand your company, exactly how it makes money, and the wider industry. Once you understand these aspects, you can help your managers help employees understand actions, as well as communicate directly to employees about crucial topics.

Continuous learning is the cornerstone of success for internal communications managers. Embracing the latest trends and challenges in the field is essential for personal and professional growth. Engaging with a network of fellow IC professionals allows for exchanging valuable insights and experiences, fostering a culture of constant improvement in our skill set.

Focus on growing as a professional and as a person as well as as a communicator. Own your development plan and find a balance between big audacious goals for yourself as well as smaller steps. Sometimes learning to manage your own energy is just as important as getting to grips with the latest collaboration tools!

There are numerous ways you can demonstrate your company culture in your internal communications. Feature communications from leadership to connect your employees to management and demonstrate the values of your company:

Crea conexiones con otros profesionales de la comunicación mediante el intercambio de ideas y experiencias para así construir una red sólida. Este enfoque colaborativo no solo enriquecerá el conocimiento individual, sino que también fortalecerá la capacidad del responsable para enfrentar los desafíos emergentes con perspectivas diversas y actualizadas.

Processes communicate as much as anything else. How many communicators have undertaken a process audit to determine which processes send messages contrary to those delivered as part of a communication strategy? You'd be surprised what a process audit can reveal.

Know your champions. Is there an executive passionate about culture? Is there a director ready to jump in to be the ambassador of the message? Is there a newbie who wants to try on the skills and volunteer on a program? Can you build your circle of trust with chiefs of staff and assistants and beyond? And then champion them right back with heaps of acknowledgement and appreciation.

The advice given by the author is far too general for an internal communications manager who hopes to have a significant and meaningful impact on her or his organization. Specifically, while the author did mention leveraging internal resources and partners, there was no specific mention of leveraging managers across the organization. Most surveys indicate that employees place more credibility and have a higher desire for messages from their immediate supervisor than any other channel. It is the specific role of the internal communications manager to train, equip and support those supervisors who have the strongest connection with employees across the organization.

It's important that IC managers get comfortable with measuring the impact of what they do...which includes being comfortable with numbers (aka math). For leadership to begin or continue to see IC in a high value light, the IC manager will have to prove its impact in a language that it can understand - numbers, dollars and cents.

Vision before action. Have a real strategic vision for internal communication (IC). Take the time to consider why you are in IC, what problems you want to solve, and which IC role you want to fill (the role is broad and every organization has a different understanding of what it is). Actions come from a vision and not the other way around. Listen. Do not assume that you know what the problem is. Strengthen your proposals with data and not simply "expertise". Properly analyzed data is the language in the boardroom. If you want to be taken seriously, do your homework and back it with valid sources. Be an agent of belonging. When people feel that they are seen, heard and valued, they are more inclined to speak up.