How to Improve Communication Within Your Organization

The foundation of every successful and profitable company is communication. Whether you need it to share updates, handle a crisis, listen to employees, or ensure every member of your team is safe (it doesn’t matter what it is), communication is integral to efficient management and organization. 

To succeed in business, companies must do whatever it takes to ensure they have great and effective communication across all organizational levels — employees, management, shareholders, vendors, and so on.

Luckily, there are ways to improve and ensure good and effective communication in any organization: 

1. Build and Nurture a Healthy Corporate Culture 

Did you know that more than half (58%) of employees say they would quit their job if they felt negative office politics were prevalent in the workplace and damaging corporate culture?

Corporate culture matters more than you think for today’s workforce. It refers to the tacit social order of an organization that shapes attitudes and behaviors within the organization. 

Since employees are looking for a healthy workplace with opportunities for professional growth and innovation, a healthy corporate culture can give them what they want. 

When aligned correctly with the personal values, ideologies, and needs of employees, a strong corporate culture unleashes positive energy and healthy interactions within teams. It unites employees and motivates them to reach common goals and unlock the organization’s growth potential.

Most importantly, corporate cultures improve communication because you focus on healthy interactions and connections between employees. Aim for interdependent corporate culture that encourage teamwork and professional engagements and interactions within teams. 

Employees in such healthy corporate cultures get along, collaborate, and think of success as a group effort rather than the individual.

2. Create and Implement an Internal Communication Strategy 

Many businesses overlook this aspect of business management. But an effective internal communication strategy, which is essentially a blueprint guiding you to internal communications success—that is communication between top management, and management and employees, might be just what your organization needs to thrive. 

Like corporate culture, having an internal communication strategy has many benefits. Firstly, the right internal communication strategy improves information flow, as well as employee engagement, morale, and satisfaction. 

Secondly, it makes employees familiar with straightforward expectations regarding their responsibilities and duties, which ensures everyone is aligned with the company's values and objectives, making it possible to meet the company’s goals and mission.

Thirdly and most importantly, it gives employees a much-needed voice. Your staff need to feel free to share their opinion with their colleagues and the management without fear of victimization. It’s one aspect that can considerably reflect on their overall satisfaction and experience as employees.

Your internal communication strategy should aim to make any communication within the organization two-way. You can leverage intranet communication applications like Blink to encourage teams and departments to share information and eradicate any silo mentality that may exist.

Having a solid internal communication strategy in place will help in aligning staff with corporate objectives as well as help should the company suddenly faces a crisis. People will know how to communicate both the good and bad news to each other. This way they’re not leaving any room for misinformation or gossip spreading around the workplace and causing undue stress and frustration.

3. Develop and Enforce Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Policies

A workplace environment promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion brings people of different backgrounds, nationalities, religions, races, and gender under one roof. When managed well, it’s can lead to a highly innovative and high-performing workplace and organization. 

Create and promote workplace policies that recognize, embrace, value, and respects individual differences. As such, your business and company should reject imposed stereotypes and remove all the prejudices and superficial barriers preventing a diverse workforce from seamlessly working together.

When you’re promoting equality in the workplace, make it clear that every employee has equal opportunities and receives equivalent benefits for their work. More importantly, they all receive fair treatment and the respect they deserve regardless of their education, gender, disability, and so on. 

To create this kind of workplace, you first need to embrace diversity yourself. It’s all about accepting and celebrating differences that make employees unique instead of letting differences separate them. The same goes for inclusion—no employee irrespective of their sexual orientation, ethnicity, or age, among other things, should be unfairly denied of equal treatment and an opportunity of making a living.

An equal, diverse, and inclusive workplace communicates better because they’re not letting differences get in the way of interacting, building strong relationships, doing their jobs, or working together as a cohesive team. Employees become more considerate, open-minded, and respectful of each other.

4. Set Up a Recognition Scheme and Celebrate Milestones 

How does your organization mark achievements, special occasions, and milestones? The reason your company isn’t communicating well could be because you don’t have a recognition scheme in place.

For better communication in the workplace, you need to bring people together and foster camaraderie. And what better way to do so than by celebrating milestones and the various achievements within your company?

Of course, milestones and successes aren’t the same for everyone. For some employees, it’s closing a huge deal with a client or completing a project they’ve been working on for a long time. For others, it might be something more ordinary, like mastering a new skill or helping recruits settle in a good workplace environment. 

Whatever the success is, make sure it’s celebrated appropriately in the company. But first, make sure to find out what success means to your employees and what kind of a reward would mean a lot to them. Being consistently good at a job is also a good cause for celebration.

Giving a simple present to a staff member that they’ve always wanted can make a big difference in boosting staff morale, and it also makes the achievement and celebration more meaningful to that particular staff member. Strive to organize celebrations based on employees’ personalities and preferences. 

Conclusion 

No company or business can be successful if their internal communication is poor. That’s why business owners and managers must always improve communication and maintain it at a high level. Implement the methods mentioned above and you will improve and enjoy better communication in your organization.