What is employee communication and why is it important?

Where internal communication refers to any exchange between employees, employee communication typically refers to interactions between team members and their managers or organizational leadership. Executed effectively, both types of communication enhance the employee experience, increasing retention and creating a positive working environment.

Employee communication typically takes place over multiple channels to provide a seamless and unified experience to employees. Some examples of employee communication might include:

• An employee logging in to a company intranet to view workplace communications and updates.
• A manager communicating key objectives through a messaging platform, which is accessed by an employee on a mobile app.
• An HR department soliciting employee feedback and measuring employee satisfaction through digital surveys or face-to-face meetings.
• A company-wide series of weekly memos sent by a manager or executive communicating recent company news.

Proactive and multichannel employee communication, like other aspects of the employee experience, has become exponentially more important in recent years. Less than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, Gallup reported 56% of employees in the United States worked in an entirely remote environment.¹ This led to organizations having to rely heavily on digital-first employee communication tools such as email and Slack.

While many workers have returned to the office, the global paradigm has shifted: 39% of knowledge workers around the world operate in a hybrid environment, according to the consultancy Gartner.² Concurrently, many companies have begun to source their talent globally, taking advantage of the borderless nature of the mobile workforce.³

In the modern global economy, organizations are communicating with a more diverse group of employees who might be working from multiple locations, across time zones. In this new paradigm, effective employee communication channels increase employee engagement and maintain a cohesive company culture across a plurality of platforms.

Remote employees might receive communication from several digital services and collaboration tools in real-time, from employee portals to video conferencing software. These rapid changes to the global workforce have created an environment in which leaders at large organizations typically manage far more types of communication than in the past.

Today, effective employee communication is a cornerstone of organizational success: As a recent report from the IBM Institute for Business Value found, organizations delivering top employee experiences outperform others on revenue growth by 31%. By fostering open, clear and consistent communication channels organizations can enhance employee engagement, collaboration and productivity, reducing turnover and developing key talent.

A holistic, multiplatform internal communication strategy increases employee engagement and unifies a business around a cohesive organizational culture and high-priority initiatives. Some potential employee communication benefits include:

• Increases employee engagement and morale
• Enhances employee experience
• Fosters inclusivity for a diverse workplace
• Improves collaboration and teamwork
• Facilitates change management
• Enhances decision-making

Open, timely communication channels make employees feel valued and respected, boosting morale and engagement. This in turn keeps employees committed and motivated, leading to higher job satisfaction, increased productivity and, hopefully, increased retention.

According to a recent survey from the IBM Institute for Business Value, over 70% of employees value flexibility and work-life balance in their careers. Effective employee communication fosters a people-centric workplace, allowing organizations to recruit and retain valuable talent.

Accessible, clear employee communication across multiple channels fosters inclusivity by breaking down information silos. By proactively encouraging continuous feedback, organizations can ensure they’re meeting a diverse range of employee needs.

Clear and consistent top-down communication fosters better collaboration between team members, minimizing conflict and promoting a unified, company-wide vision. It also strengthens the company at large by building on employee-level ideas and fostering innovation through cross-company collaboration.

Transparent communication is key during organizational changes such as mergers or digital transformations. Keeping employees informed and up-to-date can help employees with a smooth transition.

Access to accurate and timely information empowers employees and management to make informed decisions. A collaborative decision-making process can use diverse perspectives and organization-wide expertise to improve workflows and key metrics.

This includes meetings, one-on-one discussions and informal conversations, which allow for immediate feedback and personalized interactions.

Written employee communication can include emails, memos, newsletters, performance reviews and reports. These provide a record of employee communication and can be useful for detailed and formal comms. Employees also communicate with leadership through surveys and other forms of written communication, providing feedback and recommendations to improve the employee experience.

This type of communication involves the use of digital tools such as intranets, collaboration platforms (for example, Microsoft Teams or Slack), and occasionally social media. Digital communication encourages employees to access the information they need in real-time, allowing for more agile and immediate workflows.

For global organizations employing workers across time zones, digital communication offers a flexible way to share information regardless of location. The plethora of digital technologies used to communicate with employees also grants leadership more access—for example, over mobile apps in the field—whether information exchange takes place one-on-one or across a team.

Today’s organizations use multiple platforms and communication methods to reach employees, from internal intranets to mobile apps. Typically, a company engages multiple technologies concurrently to provide employees with information where and when they need it. Common employee communication technologies include:

Email is a fundamental tool for both formal and informal employee communication, allowing for daily comms and asynchronous messaging. It is often used for sharing documents and sending announcements across a company or department.

Instant messaging platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams facilitate rapid, informal communication among employees. They can be used for team- or organization-wide collaboration, quick answers to questions, and to share status updates.

Video conferencing tools—such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet—enable face-to-face virtual meetings, webinars or conferences. They can be used for training sessions, remote meetings and company-wide town halls.

Some organizations use internal websites or portals that can serve as a central hub for company information and resources. Platforms such as SharePoint and Confluence support multiple integrations, allowing organizations to customize their platforms for internal intranet use. These platforms typically act as a one-stop-shop for organizational comms, hosting policies, procedures, internal news, employee directories and collaborative tools.

In the last decade several employee communication platforms have combined various employee communications tools, from document sharing to project management, to unify the employee experience. Companies such as Microsoft Teams, Trello and Asana support project collaboration, task management, multieditor document management and team communication.

Comprehensive platforms like SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle HCM Cloud offer provide employees with access to HR services. These portals allow employees to view pay slips, access company policies, and engage with onboarding resources in a centralized hub.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have improved internal communication tools by offloading routine tasks and rapidly responding to employee needs. With the strategic deployment of AI in employee communication, managers and human resources departments can free up time and resources to focus on the human relationships at the core of a business. Some of these applications include:

AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants can handle routine queries and tasks. These tools can answer frequently asked questions during the onboarding process, helping new hires navigate the organization. They can also provide information on routine HR queries such as benefits and leave policies. These tools can reduce long wait times—which contribute to employee frustration—and reduce the administrative burden on HR professionals.

AI can tailor routine employee communication to individual employees based on their preferences and behavior, delivering personalized learning materials and updates. In today’s borderless workforce, AI can also translate communications into multiple languages, delivering company news feeds or crucial notifications into an employee’s native tongue.

Some organizations use AI to perform sentiment analysis, deploying natural language processing (NLP) to glean insights from large-scale surveys and feedback forms. These technologies can also analyze internal opportunities that would best suit an employee based on their experience and expertise, providing recommendations to HR professionals and helping top internal advance.

Communication with employees requires significant paperwork and overall maintenance. Using AI, organizations can automatically manage the scheduling the meetings and interviews, create new employee accounts, and send routine communications to help ensure consistency across the employee experience.

Effective internal communication involves consistent, timely and human-centric messaging that encourages employees to share information as well as receive it. A cohesive employee communication strategy ensures a single organization-wide vision and facilitates consensus on key performance indicators (KPIs.)

Ideally, an employee communication strategy also uses feedback to create dynamic and responsive employee experiences across multiple channels. To foster a productive and engaged working environment, some steps leaders can take to enhance communication across an organization include:

Effective employee communication strategies directly correlate with a business’ success; the more employees feel supported and engaged, the stronger customer satisfaction tends to be. According to the IBM Institute for Business Value, employee well-being is a major priority for 77% of outperforming company CEOs. Various concrete metrics can help leaders assess the strength of their employee communication strategy. Some of these data points include:

• Employee surveys and feedback: Organizations can conduct regular surveys to gauge employee satisfaction with communication channels and practices, whether they take the form of comprehensive biannual surveys or anonymous polls.

• Communication audits: Some businesses might regularly review communications practices, channels and content to identify gaps and areas for improvement. A third-party consultant might provide an unbiased assessment of a communication strategy’s effectiveness.

• Key performance indicators: An organization can glean valuable, immediate insight from KPIS such as email open rates and intranet log-ins. They can also track message response times and completion rates for surveys and other employee communication tasks across channels to gauge their effectiveness.

• Performance reviews: Performance reviews can provide valuable feedback and communicate clear expectations to employees, as well as give employees an opportunity to identify pain points.

• Employee advocacy rates: An employee advocacy rate is a metric used to measure the extent to which employees promote of advocate their organization. A company might opt to track social media engagement, referral metrics or other data points to assess the strength of its employee communication strategy.

• Employee turnover and retention rates: High turnover rates can be indicative of poor communication. To assess the source of friction, an organization might analyze exit interviews for communication-related issues to increase retention rates.

• Internal NPS scores: An internal Net Promoter Score (iNPS) measures employee satisfaction and loyalty within an organization. An adaptation of external customer satisfaction, it can be used to provide insights into the overall health of a company’s employee communication strategy.