PR Fact - To maintain a strong brand identity, you must nurture a robust communication system with your audience.
The difference in the audience merely changes your messages while the channels, a need for strategy, and even goals remain the same. Structuring a strong internal communication system strengthens your brand’s PR personality. Check out these factors that play a role!
Brand Awareness: To enable your internal teams to function effectively and perform better you must ensure they are aware of your culture, background, visions, and achievements with the company. Making them a part of your journey through internal communication is the best way to ensure they give their best to help the brand succeed.
Reputation Management: Effective internal communication fosters a positive work culture, influencing your employees to maintain your company’s reputation externally as your unofficial brand ambassadors. When they feel heard and acknowledged internally, they reflect the positivity in their performance.
Alignment With Objectives: An internal communication setup is the best way to encourage your employees and align them with the business objectives for better performance outcomes.
Employee Engagement: Creating internal communication for your employees creatively also helps you to encourage your employees to collaborate together beyond their immediate teams.
Crisis Preparedness: In times of crisis, internal communications prove vital for sharing accurate and timely information with your employees. This ensures that your employees are well-informed and allows them to represent your brand during a crisis, helping manage your external image.
Team Building: Internal communications connect the various departments in your company together, a lot like sewing together the buttons of a shirt. When each team has transparent information about the other’s activities, agendas, and achievements, it builds a sense of trust and loyalty within the organisation.
What difference does the tonality of your internal communication make?
Your messages, the channels they are sent on, and the tonality of your communication have a huge impact on how they are perceived and implemented. For instance, if you share a communication around a new policy over a WhatsApp message, there is a high chance your employees will overlook it amidst the flood of other messages on the group. Similarly, sharing a specific team’s presentation feedback via email to every department will be considered spam. This will lead them to lose interest in other emails from you that might be important. Let’s talk about the formal and informal tonalities of your corporate internal communications.
Formal Internal Communication - What, Why, And How
Any structured, official message or interaction shared with your team, that can affect employees organisation-wide, or the company in any manner can fall under formal communication. Formal internal communications are created and distributed in a controlled and consistent manner and play an integral role in the organisation’s functioning and reputation.
The key goals that frame your formal internal communication are disseminating crucial information, providing clarity, aligning ideologies, educating employees, and preparing for or managing crises. Communication that falls under either of the mentioned buckets impacts the reputation of your brand inside-out.
Here are 5 key channels of communication:
Emails: “Put it on email” is the most common corporate phrase for a reason - the credibility of the channel. If it’s on email, it’s documented and official, whether it’s company announcements, updates, or information-sharing.
Newsletters: If you want to give important emails a creative twist, newsletters are your option. Sending out periodic newsletters is a great practice to keep your internal communication active and consistent. It can consist of informative content pieces, company updates, announcements, and appreciative messages.
Memos: If you want to share a quick organisation-wide update, a memo is your go-to channel.
Intranet Portals: Sharing communication across your company’s central hub is an effective and fast way. These messages can consist of documents, notes, and quick updates and can be meant for an individual or team/s.
Company-Wide Meetings: Not all internal communication needs to be written. You can also host town halls, internal webinars, or conference calls to share important updates and information with a large internal audience.
Informal Internal Communication - What, Why, And How
A spontaneous plan to wear ethnic attire to the office counts as informal internal communication. Even if the message is shared by a leader, it does not bring a structural or process change in the company. Overall, informal communication is an unstructured interaction or information within the company that does bring a change organisation-wide.
So why does informal internal communication matter to your brand’s public image and reputation? Informal interactions within your company build bonds within the company, ensure enhanced collaborations, encourage knowledge sharing, and vitalise employee engagement. A forest is strong, healthy, and beautiful when the roots of its trees hold each other together. Similarly, when different teams within your organisation collaborate with each other on informal levels, they make your company strong from within.
Here are the various channels where you can host informal internal communication:
Instant Messaging Apps: Need to share an idea or reference and need it to be seen in real-time? Share it on the messaging apps used by your employees. WhatsApp groups are one of the best examples of the category. From sharing views without any inhibitions, planning quickly, sharing reminders, and easily sharing content, to holding conversations, these apps are your go-to space.
Company Events: Virtual or in-person events and activities facilitate high engagement among your employees. From team building projects, offsites, and inter-department projects, to fun activities, these events promote a healthy work culture and bring different departments together to stand as the brand.
Notice Boards: Having a board where you can put up important information for everyone to see is a quick way to communicate internally. You can share creative learnings, team reminders, or acknowledge someone, and it is a great way to encourage your employees.
Intranet Portals: These platforms are accessible to everyone in your organisation, individually and as a team, which makes the conversation here confidential. This makes it perfect to share information that is unofficial but should be limited to your employees. Communication here could include resolving doubts about a document, sharing ideas, and even planning activities.
Break Rooms: Let’s admit it, break room conversations can be surprisingly enlightening, given you are more relaxed. It’s a space of free-flowing ideas, views, and opinions, which help your employees understand each other better. These breaks can even create scope for insight sharing and sparking creativity, which they can use in their day-to-day work, in turn improving your company’s performance.
Internal communication, formal or informal, acts as a bridge between your company and its members. Unless your organisational structure is strong, how you showcase yourself outside will not be compelling enough. The strength of this bridge determines the effectiveness of your company’s PR efforts, as your team's progress determines how your company grows. If you’re interested in understanding the depth of internal communication’s effect on your brand’s image, drop us your queries.
Psst! This blog was made with 💕 and created after some thought by a real person.