Liaising between different departments, senior management, and employees while ensuring smooth communication organization-wide can get overwhelming if you’re a solo internal communicator. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this situation is quite common in today’s corporate world.
According to the State of the Sector survey, 72 percent of businesses with an internal communication team have fewer than five members. With 62 percent of respondents in the same poll declaring that internal communication is just one of the many roles an employee might play, solo internal communicators often have much to deal with.
Whether developing effective communication strategies or employee engagement plans, creating content, or managing communication during a crisis, following the right approach is essential to balance the different internal communication tasks. Mistakes here can impact the overall organizational efficiency, reduce morale, and have ramifications in terms of raising employee turnover.
Therefore, getting it right is paramount, despite teething troubles. So, in this article, we dive into five tips you can implement to navigate the role as a solo internal communicator smoothly.
Tip 1: Don’t Shy Away From Seeking Help
According to the US Census Bureau, 78.5 percent of firms have fewer than ten employees. It's common to find a few employees juggling multiple roles. If this describes your situation, it doesn't hurt to ask for help from others.
An effective strategy is to rope in help from the IT, HR, marketing teams or just about anyone with internal influence to help you with different facets of communication. When you have someone who knows their field best and is willing to help you get the message out, you’ll have to spend less time figuring out things from scratch.
Tip 2: Build Your Library of Reusable Communication
As an internal communicator of a small organization, you may often have to repeatedly communicate with the same people or around the same issue. For instance, this may be common when gathering information for documentation purposes. In such cases, it is a good idea to have a ready database of email and text message templates that you can modify based on circumstances for speed and ease.
In a close-knit company, your audience will already know you're using templates, and there always lies the opportunity to use wit and humor in your content without working too hard on content creation from scratch each time. You can also plan your content strategy in a way to include evergreen content that you can repurpose easily to save more time.
Explore: Content Strategy Template for Internal Communicators
Tip 3: Develop Guidelines for User-Generated Content
If user-generated content such as blogs or reports by employees is a part of your content plans, drafting a unified submission process can make it easy for the rest of the employees to submit content and help you better. You can create different personas, and a well-defined content calendar that aligns with others' busy schedules. Alongside, you can create playbooks to outline some specific guidelines around desired language and tone of voice guidelines.
While you may have to conduct regular meetings until everyone understands the preferred communication, language, and media usage styles, this one step can save you a lot of time getting the right help and creating on-point content at speed.
Tip 4: Rely on an Integrated App for Greater Control
Drafting compelling emails and creating attractive videos and newsletters requires using multiple tools like Canva, Loom, or Lumen5. This can result in having your data scattered across different applications, delays, losing control over your workflow and experiencing friction to a smooth internal communication.
Moreover, you also can't just depend on emails and newsletters, especially when you need to communicate with a frontline workforce. This most obviously means spending additional time communicating across varied mediums like telephone, bulletin boards, or messaging apps. While using WhatsApp or other text messaging applications may offer you immediacy, you’ll have to settle for a bargain on the privacy and security front.
Using a dedicated internal communication app can help you centralize all interactions with employees - both in the office and out and about. This can ensure that you disseminate content in different formats synchronized and securely from a unified interface. If you use internal communication apps like Speakap, you can also unify your communication with other apps like Task Management, hiring, e-learning, and payroll tools to save you and everyone else even more time. Moreover, it can also render the ability to measure various metrics related to employee engagement and ensure you leave no gaps in managing comms. Learn more: Measuring Employee Engagement: Key Metrics
Bottom Line: Solo Internal Communicators Can Operate With Might Too
Seamless internal communication is critical to keeping employees engaged, aware of growth opportunities, and ensuring their roles align with their skill set. With attrition rates much higher in smaller companies and startups than in larger businesses, solo internal communicators often struggle to maintain healthy communication with their employees.
Thankfully, if this describes your situation, there are simple ways to supercharge your efficiency. While relying on other team members for support, creating evergreen content and templates and promoting user-generated content per preset guidelines always helps, using specialized communication tools is also quite handy to simplify internal communication with uncompromised security.
Using employee communication apps can help you appear professional and accountable and successfully streamline back-and-forth communication while enabling scientific measurement of engagement metrics.
Contact us today to learn how Speakap's solutions help you retain and communicate effectively with your employees.