Internal Communication - The Key To Happy Employees

The watercooler chats. The smoke room banters. The coffee breaks. The lunch hour gossips.

All fun and exciting aspects of working in an organization. While offering common ground for employees to connect, each of these communication avenues can deeply and often irrevocably impact an organization’s health.

Not that all grapevine conversations are detrimental. A certain level of experiences exchange within the work space is even healthy. But, what if these conversations cross the dangerous thresholds? This is usually the case when the watercoolers, smoking zones, and cafes become the only respite for employees to share workplace woes, raise concerns, or be heard. It is then that an organization is officially ailing?

But, how does it get this bad in well-structured organizations? I often wondered until I saw it unfold. The erosion of confidence in the protocols, the feedback process, and the redressal system doesn’t happen overnight; it’s gradual and often self-inflicted.

From a Human Resources (HR) perspective, conversations in an organization flow three ways: top-down (Leadership/Management to staff), bottom-up (from employees to HR/Management) and horizontal (employee to employee). While top-down is used for information dissemination/decision sharing, the bottom-up method is prone to being reactive. This directly and often adversely influences horizontal communications.

When I began work at a young establishment, besides HR onboarding on day 1, I found no proactive feedback processes in place. No employee check-ins. Except for automated birthday greetings, the efforts to foster a culture of organizational belonging i.e. employee engagement were simply neglected. The bottom-up communication was - at best – reactive & voluntary, with the onus lying on the employee.

This is a classic case of creating and harboring an isolation culture which can be avoided with a dedicated Internal Communication (IC) team. The IC teams handle communication that is different from HR communication. IC, in my view, is an extension of HR; a support team that keeps tabs on the employee pulse, their satisfaction levels and brewing concerns. IC ensures employee engagement and paves the way for change management and implementation.

Unfortunately, lot of organizations skim on dedicated IC teams, either for lack of resources or simply not seeing value in the idea. As a result, the burden of employee engagement falls on HR. This turns out to be a massive strategic error.

HR teams usually have enough on their plates with employee management (entire lifecycles), managing HR systems and databases and more. The added pressure makes employee engagement a reactive thought. This is when the grapevine becomes excessively strong. There is no effective way to assess the authenticity of concerns. The issues, quite literally, begin to circle the drain and work environments become murkier.

HR will, of course, be forced to step in when the grapevine rumblings become too loud for comfort or complaints are brought forth. By then, it is more about fire-fighting and less about expectation setting, employee satisfaction and bringing about positive change.

The way we work is changing too quickly. We have diverse teams, flexible work options and remote management as the norm. To be profitable, the focus on customers is paramount. Marketing solutions prioritize finding an emotional connect to sell. How, then, can the internal customer – the employees– be treated as afterthoughts and their investment & well-being in the work environment not be priority? Organizations need IC teams to not only run smooth ships but to literally have all hands on deck. Happy employees make great businesses and not the other way around. IC teams can make that happen.