Internal communications is one of your biggest brand-building weapons.
Yes, you can make a beautiful TV ad, have a big, bold billboard, a glistening new logo, letterheads in matching colours but it is one-to-one daily conversation that is most important, and your employees are your frontline here.
As Sir Richard Branson once said: “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of the clients.”
So, how do you make your workforce happy? Pay and conditions are important. But making them feel valued, informed and listened to are too. This is where internal comms PR comes in.
Within our team we have experts on internal communications strategy who have worked with organisations such as Volvo, Vattenfall, Barings Asset Management and Capgemini to produce and deliver messages and campaigns on behalf of management and facilitate dialogue with the people who make up the organisation.
We have helped manage change communications in the face of a crisis and devised new ways to get people involved and invested in the bigger picture.
Internal communications deals with communication within a business or organisation and is used to inform, engage and motivate employees and ensure everyone in the organisation is ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’.
Internal communications should be part of your overall PR strategy and should reflect your brand vision, values and business goals in exactly the same way as your external communications.
Just like your external PR strategy, the consistency of your message, the frequency of your message and the channels and platforms you use to broadcast that message are key to your success.
We use a range of tactics to help you work out where to begin.
From surveys, polls and questionnaires to using intranet platforms, newsletters, noticeboards, forums, meeting rooms and video conferencing facilities, we will find out what the problems are first and foremost.
Is internal comms happening? If so, is it effective? What tools are being used? Is information coming from the top downwards? Or is it a two-way communication?
From here we can start to work out what your goals are.
What’s the aim of your internal comm activity? To keep staff up to date so they’ll share more on social media? Improve staff retention? Enhance productivity? Boost business growth? Or an overall improvement in staff morale?
Next, we look at the tools available.
From an internal intranet system to newsletters, surveys to suggestion boxes, networking to mission statements and events to focus groups and meetings to glossy magazines, we have everything covered.
We are also experts at change communication – sometimes reshaping the whole cultural landscape of an organisation or managing the fallout after a restructure, a merger, an acquisition, a redundancy consultation or, more recently, the upheaval left by COVID-19.
More often than not, change within a business is met with uncertainty, confusion and resistance.
But in a world in which change is the only constant, it makes sense that a good internal comms strategy can help you sail through choppy waters. We are here to guide you.
