Partner Article

Improving Internal Communications

As your company begins to grow and turnover, profits and staff increase it’s important to maintain a tight grip on internal communications.

The greater the pace of change the more important it is to ensure you have a comprehensive internal comms strategy or you face a workforce that feels neglected and unsure of what the future may hold.

With cartridgesave.co.uk our growth was gradual, but still in the last twelve months we realised that while senior management had a very clear business plan, but this vision wasn’t being passed on to staff.

To address this we have pushed through various changes in the hope that this will galvanise the workforce and create a happier team.

What have we done?

One Roof

The biggest move is perhaps not an option for everyone. We recently took the step to move all of our team under one roof. When we launched we felt that we needed to separate

our head office from our depot. Our senior management team operated from bright, shiny new offices that we believed would help to recruit staff and impress visitors.

My advice to any etailing start-up looking to launch a company is to have, wherever possible, your entire team working under one roof. Having separate spaces can create an ‘us vs them’ mentality and needs to be carefully managed. Do you have the time to split between two buildings whenever there’s a problem? Can you realistically treat both sets of staff fairly (and see things from both points of view) if you spend most of your time in one place?

By the workforce for the workforce

Something that can be done very simply is to provide a newsletter, but it’s not a simple case of drafting come copy and sending it out to your internal group email. To make sure your staff newsletter is read you need to make it relevant and readily accessible.

Ask your department heads to write short sections about their part of the business so all departments are involved- there’s nothing that screams undervalued to a member of the team than them being ignored throughout the company newsletter. Make a feature ‘by the workforce, for the workforce’ whether that’s a noticeboard of staff news or a section that calls for contributions.

A final step we’ve pushed through is to put our KPIs, and an update of how we’re doing, on the front of the newsletter. It’s a sign that everyone, from the bottom up, is working towards the success of the business.

Finally, now you’ve gone to all this trouble, make sure you print it off as well as emailing it round, you shouldn’t exclude anyone.

Canvas opinion

What’s the point of all this effort if you can’t monitor its effectiveness? We have also recently instigated a weekly anonymous survey asking questions about employee happiness along with a request for suggestions on how we can improve. You could do this yourself and save money using an online survey creator tool, but the beauty of an online package is that it will benchmark you against similar companies of a similar size and type.

Your employees might rate you 7 out of 10, but is that better or worse than the average employer? One score is meaningless to you without the other. A warning though, anonymity can give license to an outpouring of feelings, you might well feel winded after reading some comments, but these are necessary steps to improving employee happiness.

A final thought if you have external agencies working for you. Ask them to prepare a weekly update to be sent round to your team. External agencies may be considered a threat or an expensive waste of time by some of your staff, so a weekly email update will demonstrate their value, and signal that the agency answers to the entire staff.

Results

So what’s the point in doing all this? In short, happy staff and increased effectiveness. How much of it is quantifiable though is a difficult question.

There’s no doubt to my mind that securing buy-in from your staff into the business has untold benefits. Every cog in the machine needs to know its job to work effectively. For example a newsletter shows everyone the way the company is headed and consequently allows employees to assess whether what they’re actually doing contributes to the aims of the company. KPIs let staff know what their work achieves and anonymous feedback gives employees a safe place for employees to complain, and see that the company cares about them.

There are additional benefits that are hard to qualify though, but I believe a happy, cared-for workforce is a more productive and loyal one. Where staff is concerned, does everything have to relate to the bottom line?

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ian Cowley .