In this Episode of Safeti School, we look at the problems around internal communications and some tactics to improve on the status quo! These tips will help you think about how you can have more impact with your internal communications strategy.
Improving Internal Communications | Additional Resources
Podcasting & Media Services: find out more about how Safeti can help you with your internal communications strategy
Safeti – pay us a visit at safeti.com for more free content, learning materials and support services
Pro Safety Management – home of Alex Burbidge’s health and safety consultancy, based in York, England.
Richard Collins – connect with the podcast host on Linkedin
Related Episodes: Safety Communication Breakdown,
Coaching For Safety with Michael Emery
Safeti School: for more free, educational HSE content visit the Safeti School podcast page
If you would like to read the transcript, you can watch our video below or read on further down the page!
Improving Internal Communications | Podcast Transcript
Welcome to Safeti School where we crunch down health safety and environment learning into simple bite-size snippets that you can use for your business or your career helping you improve your knowledge boost your performance and maybe even providing some inspiration. Let’s get started.
In this episode we’re going to look at some strategies that you can adopt to improve your internal Communications. Our first step is to stop using email so much. This is a real bugbear of my own to be honest is just the incessant use of email.
I used to call it email tennis within a business. Where people are just going back and forward not really adding value, getting into silly debates and arguments over small stuff. Really just relying on email as a means of internal correspondence between their colleagues and themselves. Rather than do that, because it doesn’t really help you nurture real relationships and discourages you know face-to-face meetings and so on.
When you are communicating externally, sometimes it is easier to use email but something I would suggest is just think about when you’re internally communicating each time, you’re sending an email, your writing a big script.
Do you really need to be doing that? Can you pick up the phone and speak to the person directly or indeed can you go and actually see them in person?
And once you start consciously thinking about how often you’re doing that you’ll find that there’s a lot more opportunity to have face-to-face engagements with people and therefore build relationships that are much stronger.
Our second tip here is to ensure that whatever way you’re communicating to your employees, to make sure that they have a means to share their opinion and their voice.So essentially that you’re promoting a two-way communication rather than a one-way communication. Sometimes companies focus their efforts on pushing lots of information out to employees.
We’re all I’m sure very aware of when that happens,but it’s obviously very important that you provide a means for those employees to share their opinions and get their voice out to give feedback with any questions or concerns that may be valuable to the business.
And going side by side with that need for giving employees a channel where they can voice their opinions and concerns is ensuring that each employee knows where they fit within the organization.
So knowing what their purpose is within their team and how they feel Into the bigger puzzle that is the company and the company’s Vision.
The research on how companies are actually doing at this is quite startling.First of all, its said that nearly 50 percent of employees actually don’t have a clue what they’re meant to be doing at work and there are free to ask which clearly is a failure on organizations part, but more than that the latest academic research on levels of engagement shows that only around sixteen percent of workers feel like they’re actively engaged in the work that they do.
As you can see,we have a whole lot of work to do with this, but also at the same time there’s lots of opportunities. So let’s move on to the next tip.
More practically. How can you improve your levels of engagement and cooperation within your Workforce?
Something that perhaps it’s pretty obvious to some of us but as well as that it’s easily forgot that rearranging the actual layout of your offices or your workspace can have a real profound impact on the interaction and the collaboration that takes place within those spaces.So, take a step back have a look at how things are laid out.
Does it encourage that interaction and team working ethic within your Workforce more often than not there’s lots of room for improvement.So that’s something definitely to consider.
The next one then is just the use of technology. If you look around you, of course, you can see that we’re all using smartphones these days the likes of WhatsApp is integral to our Communications within groups and use of social media websites Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc is of course,ubiquitous across society.
But also there’s lots of options when it comes to business communications.
We have things like Basecamp project management tools, we have apps like Slack where you can create groups within teams and use that as a communications channel to share information and,create a real vibrant community within your workforces and split that up and arrange it and whatever way you feel is appropriate.
There’s lots of other options out there in terms of apps, software and so on and my advice would be you know,don’t be afraid to look at these options. There are some great tools out there and as we were saying before with the real lack of engagement that’s occurring in workplaces. These tools are being made to facilitate your ability to improve your engagement.
So open your arms, open your eyes to them and see what’s out there.
Staying on the use of technology is just going back to I suppose the type of communication method that we’re using. We mentioned at the start that the use of email should be really minimized were possible and something that obviously you use a podcast listener.
I’m sure can appreciate the likes of podcasting and the use of audio and as well as that video by means of blogging and podcast episodes share.During stories and talking about lessons that have been learned through experiences within your business is a fantastic way to communicate especially if you have work happening all around,you know, your country or in different regions and there certainly are different means of communication that can be distributed and regardless of whatever way you’re creating or recording your content or the messaging & communication that you’re you’re actually sharing with your employees.
There’s a huge amount of options when it comes to distributing that in a way that’s accessible for your employees.
Finally, whenever you are looking at your internal communication strategies,it’s extremely important to make sure that you have a plan.
If you’re involved in health safety and environment, of course, you’ll be very aware of planning and policies and all that goes along with it,but we don’t have to create something that’s overly complex here.It’s just really being able to identify the different communication channels that are happening within your business.
How things are flowing from one point to the other. What way things are being created and how you’re being communicated.
Just identifying that in simple terms and also recognizing if there’s any areas of your business where information is siloed or not being shared and also if there’s areas where there’s too much information being lost or there’s lots of white noise being created and valuable information isn’t being retained and used in an effective way.
So by planning and strategizing around your communications strategy itself, then you will be able to pick out how you should be doing things then your business,but also then communicating this to your employees.
Part of that will be identifying which types of communication will be acceptable within the certain mediums or channels that you’ve created and by doing that you can cut down on the loss of time and make sure that your communications are efficient within your business.That’s it for this episode of Safeti School. We hope this was helpful.
If so, please remember I were to read review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes ,Google podcasts,or Spotify and remember for more health safety and environment help.You can visit us at safeti.com. Until next time.Take care.
