Effective internal communication is the cornerstone of a successful organization. It fosters employee engagement, boosts morale, and aligns teams toward common goals. Implementing creative and strategic internal communication ideas can significantly improve your company's overall performance.

Determine What Your Culture Is and How to Improve

Company culture is the bedrock that helps or hinders any change or project within a business, and it's becoming increasingly important for employees. 35% of US workers wouldn't take a new job if the culture clashed with their values (1), and 71% would look to leave if their current company culture deteriorated (2). After all, none of us would choose to work in a stressful, toxic environment.

So, before diving into any new, exciting communications ideation, ensure you've had a good, honest look at your business's culture. Do people feel safe enough to be open with one another? Do they trust leadership? How engaged are employees, on average? Both exit and stay interviews can greatly help determine what keeps people leaving or staying at your business. Once you know this, you can consider how to express or improve an innovative, supportive, and employee-oriented culture in your internal communications.

A key way to do this is to work with HR clearly, regularly communicate company values, and show how they come to life across your organization. While there are fun and creative ways to reinforce values, like storytelling in your regular comms, running workshops, or team-building activities, don't forget about more concrete elements like how culture fit is considered in interviews or through employee benefits.

Other ideas to express or build a more positive culture:

Organize Social Events for Relationship-Building: Team lunches, happy hours, or volunteer opportunities promote camaraderie, collaboration and teamwork.
Create Employee Resource Groups (ERGs): Encourage the formation of ERGs to provide support and community for employees with shared interests or identities.
Work with Internal Influencers: Advocates are strong resources for any internal comms. They can share content on their experiences and opinions, help share key information, and promote internal initiatives.
Shape Management and Day-to-Day Best Practices: Create management support resources to ensure everyone creates dedicated chat channels and holds regular team meetings and 1:1s for support and transparency.
Introduce Traditions: Annual events or celebrations foster community and belonging
Regularly Update on Progress Toward Company Goals: Motivate employees to contribute to overall business success and support a more transparent and open culture

While you certainly can't control a lot of what makes a company's culture (for example, manager-employee relationships), you should be trying to encourage everyone to do their bit to create more openness, collaboration and support throughout your organisation.

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1. Communications Ideas to Connect

To foster stronger connections with your employees, it's essential to prioritize personalized communication. Some ideas here include:

Highlight Employee Achievements: Ensure all employees have the tools to regularly recognize and celebrate accomplishments, whether this is a successful project, positive customer feedback or just a mammoth task accomplished.
Audit Recognition for Diversity: Review your recognition platform or channel to see who and where the shout-outs are coming from. If you notice they're lacking for one or a few teams, speak to them to see how you can better enable their achievements to shine.
Combine Public and Private Recognition: Public recognition, such as company-wide emails or social media posts, can easily come from internal comms but ensure peers or managers are empowered to follow these up with private acknowledgements, like personalized notes or one-on-one meetings.
Celebrate Personal and Work Milestones: Send personalized birthday and work anniversary messages or gifts from leadership or team members, and acknowledge employees who've hit major milestones like finishing a PhD or apprenticeship, getting married or starting a family.
Conduct Pulse Surveys: Always ensure you combine forces with HR to survey employee satisfaction and engagement and ask employees for anonymous, honest feedback. If they feel truly listened to and you can act on their feedback, they'll feel safer, more engaged, and connected to the business.

2. Innovative Communication Ideas to Do Something Different

To truly engage your team, consider these innovative communication ideas:

Make Your Material Multimedia: The days when text was enough are long gone, so find ways to use or produce videos, podcasts, audio summaries and interactive elements in your day-to-day communications to get employees to engage.
Go Beyond Email Newsletters: In much the same way that it's not enough to avoid multimedia formats, employees are tired of emails. One study estimated that around 40% of the workforce isn’t reading emails from the HR department (3), so the likelihood of regular email newsletters being ignored is high—try new channels like SMS texts, digital signage, internal social media, or Teams messages.
Experiment with AI Assistance: AI-assisted writing can help save time and inspire new ideas, whether you're trying to create copy for announcements or more long-form intranet or newsletter content. Try testing and see what you can get from AI; it may take a few tries, but don't disregard it entirely!
Make Your Intranet Visually Interesting: It should feel easy and natural for employees to use your digital workplace, so consider how to add your logo and brand colors throughout or look to improve your site's UX and general experience to drive more traffic.
Test Gamification: Game-based approaches to learning or objectives make things more challenging and exciting while clarifying the next steps. Try it out for smaller initiatives around seasonal events like Christmas or Easter, and if your employees like it you could consider going bigger by integrating with things like onboarding or tasks around other milestones.

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3. Communication Ideas for a Crisis

Crisis comms are not to be taken lightly, so while these are a few ideas, a full crisis plan must be in your back pocket.

Show the Human Side: When a crisis does strike, face it head-on and don't hide behind digital-only channels; make sure that leaders are speaking to employees about it, and hold company meetings for major announcements.
Emergency Alerts: Ensure a method or specific channel is outlined to send safety and readiness communications. SMS tends to be best as, by its nature, it is instantaneous, and 43.9% of employees in one survey said it was the best way to send timely and emergency alerts from HR (3).
Stay Consistent Across Channels: Multiple communication channels help you to reach all employees effectively in times of crisis, but make sure you clearly understand your message and stick to it to prevent confusion and misinformation. This will help maintain the trust and transparency you've been building every day.

4. Ideas for Remote and Hybrid Communication

Consistently delivering communications across multiple channels is useful not only in times of crisis but also for large-scale enterprise businesses with employees spread across the globe or any size company with remote or hybrid teams.

Whether it's down to individual preferences on accessing information or being located away from main business contacts, digital workplaces are no longer nice to have; they're essential for many employees just to be able to work.

Some communication ideas and thoughts to consider for communicating with remote and hybrid teams:

Put Yourself in Others' Shoes: For instance, many businesses run meetings as hybrids, with anyone in the office in a conference room and others dialling in on virtual meeting software. However, this often creates an unlevel playing field, with at least networking, if insignificant, conversations missed for those joining virtually. It is also important to give employees options to ask questions or access information to get help how they want to.
Work with IT to Get Users the Right Equipment: Remote workers need their tools, including headsets, laptops, monitors, and any necessary workstation adjustments for health and safety, more than anyone else.
Set up Reference Libraries to Share Knowledge: Documents, including company policies and training materials, should be readily available for employees to find themselves and hopefully solve their questions, if not refine what they need to ask someone else.
Make it Easy to Build Employee Profiles: According to McKinsey, the average information worker spends approximately 20% of their time looking for information internally or tracking down colleagues who can help them (4). Making this kind of information freely accessible and encouraging employees to include additional information like what kinds of projects they work on, special skills in their profiles, hobbies and personal interests enables more peer-to-peer connections more easily.

Using Technology for Effective Communication: The Power of an Internal Communications Platform

A robust internal communication platform is a powerful tool for sharing information, messaging, and resources and supporting physical communications initiatives, such as social events. One centralized communications platform enables you to send coordinated, aligned messaging across all the channels available to reach employees. An internal comms platform that naturally integrates with the rest of your digital workplace enables you to effectively drive traffic from comms channels, like Teams, back to your intranet or knowledge base.

Akumina creates modern intranets and digital workplaces to make this a reality for your internal comms team. With a Broadcast Centre that enables comms teams to create one and deliver it indefinitely, specialized seamless integrations with Microsoft 365, and an easy, intuitive CMS that reduces the need to burden IT with requests, you can focus on creating innovative, creative, and effective communications to engage employees. Contact our team today to learn more about our comprehensive internal communication solutions.