Six changes internal communications needs to make
By Andy Getsey, co-founder of Employera
The communications and connections between companies and employees today are more important than ever. They’re also more challenging than ever due to transformed talent markets; the recent spate of layoffs; the advent of remote and hybrid workstyles; rising attrition and quiet quitting; and the expectations employees and candidates have for their employer’s purpose, values, and genuine commitments to DEI and ESG.
The current macro-economic environment will not last indefinitely, but the Era of the Employee is here to stay. Because internal communications are the mechanism for communicating with talent at scale, wise companies will take this moment to recalibrate their approach to fit this new era.
Based on learnings from our client collaborations and current third party research, we recommend six fundamental changes that companies and internal communications professionals need to make to serve and connect effectively with employees, build stronger, higher performing cultures, and drive better business outcomes.
The Six Changes
We need to think about internal communications the way we think about employer branding, recruitment marketing and talent acquisition: it’s not enough to inform. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average employee turnover rate in 2021 was 47.2%. In April 2022, Gartner predicted another 20% increase for the year. We need our efforts to cut through the clutter better to not just inform but inspire, motivate and re-affirm our employees’ decision to stay with the same priority and urgency as we put into recruitment advertising and talent acquisition.
Align our content with what employees really want and need to know. In its 2022 State of the Sector Report on Internal Communications, Gallagher found strategic direction and change, remote/hybrid workstyles, purpose, values, DEI, and ESG to be the highest interest topics for employees of large organizations. To these, we’d add fundamentals about career opportunity and employee value proposition to make sure we address the biggest drivers of engagement and retention.
Move from simply gathering feedback to active collaboration to create programs that will really work for the way people consume media and search for information today: co-create the (re)design and planning of communications with select management and employees. In spite of the ubiquitous presence of employee intranets – and the 5-10 distinct channels in use by most larger companies – ensuring that employees engage with our information and content remains challenging. In its 2022 Report, Gallagher found that most companies rely only on general engagement survey data as a gauge of the effectiveness of our efforts. Only 2 in 5 organizations use focus groups and listening sessions; under half gather direct feedback from people managers. Why not go beyond rudimentary feedback to collaborative program redesign? A cross functional team, representative of all key roles at the company, can collaborate with the internal communications team to actively assess, redesign, and evaluate the program on a regular basis – including channels and performance metrics – to ensure it works the way it needs to for your organization.
Adopt the mindset, process, quality and measurement tools that consumer media and content marketers use. Internal communications is media, and we’re competing for our employees’ attention with some really good stuff in consumer news, publications, websites and marketing outreach. How do we stack up? It’s hard to know. Fewer than a third of companies review data more than once a month, according to Simpplr’s 2022 State of Internal Communications Survey. And most of what is reviewed is not specific to content, channel or IC program performance. Our approach needs to parallel what our employees experience on the outside: shorter, more interesting formats, consumer caliber design, more two-way engagement. And we need to adopt more frequent and granular measurement of content and channel performance, and make active adjustments based on analysis.
Insist on higher caliber intranet functionality and design. Our intranets are competing with news, eCommerce and information aggregation sites where everything is fast and easy to find, and looks great. We’d all like our employee intranet to be the one central place that our people know to go for all company news and information. There is a healthy market for tool options but are our internal communications teams prepared to design and maintain sites that can keep up with user expectations? 45% of employees listed intranets as their largest source of dissatisfaction with communications and information access, according to Simpplr’s 2022 Report. If we expect employees to visit our intranets regularly – indeed, much of our internal comms efforts are about driving traffic there – the experience once they arrive has to be as good as they get on the outside. We have work to do.
Activate more people managers as primary channels for engagement, information sharing and two-way dialog. Even though they are widely acknowledged as pivotal to employee experience, 65% of large and enterprise companies do not use people managers as a primary channel, according to Gallagher’s 2022 Report. This feels like a pretty big miss, since people managers greatly shape the working experience of individual employees, and hold regular meetings that are the perfect channel for driving home important information and obtaining feedback. We need to view them as core channels and empower them to maximize their effectiveness: give them the time and mandate; include them in our processes for two-way dialog; provide the regular updates they need; and train them on communications skills.
There you have our Six Needed Changes. Now is a great time to re-evaluate and recalibrate our approach to Internal Communications to help align, inspire and retain current employees, and to build a modern foundation for shaping high performance cultures for when the economy enters growth mode again and the competition for top talent escalates to a brand new level.
Employera is a talent branding and communications firm for the Era of the Employee. We provide branded communications and experience design for every step in the talent journey to help companies attract, inspire and retain great people. We’re employer branding, recruitment marketing and internal communications partners to large and mid-sized enterprises across consumer, entertainment, financial services, manufacturing, aerospace, defense and other industries. When you’re ready to make changes to your Internal Comms program, we’re here to help.
Want to share examples of what you’re doing at your company, share your thoughts about other changes needed for internal communications, or just want to talk a bit about your program? Please get in touch at hello@employera.com.
Andy Getsey is a co-founder of Employera, and was previously co-founder of Atomic PR and head of global communications for a subsidiary of Lockheed-Martin.
About Employera
Employera is a talent branding and communications firm for the Era of the Employee. We build modern employer brands, design compelling experiences, and deliver strong, clear and creative communications at every stage of the employee journey to help companies, employees and cultures thrive. Our team is made up of experienced consultants, analysts, strategists and creators from large, well-known employers, and our processes and project management frameworks are designed for success in large and mid-size company environments.
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