The Importance of Internal Communication for Company Cohesion

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” That is a quote by Henry Ford, and fewer sentences have covered company cohesion and teamwork as concisely as it has. 

Companies know to put their best foot forward in external communication with the outside world. That is evident in the amount of time and money spent on optimizing the company's website, social media accounts, and newsletters. However, they drop the ball in internal communication, which is equally important and necessary for company cohesion.

Internal communication is any means a company has set up to facilitate communication among its employees. This includes messages from superior to subordinate, subordinate to superior, and between coworkers.

This information sharing can be done verbally or through internal communication tools like email correspondence or a company intranet.  

Why is internal communication important to a company?

Internal communication enhances productivity, increases employee engagement, builds company culture, and enhances cohesion when implemented properly.

Grammarly’s State of Business Communication report in 2023 points out that 72% of business leaders believe that effective communication leads to increased productivity. This occurs mostly through increased engagement from a well-developed internal communication strategy. 

The question now is, “How does internal communication improve employee engagement?”

When employees are well-informed on the happenings in the company and allowed to express their thoughts on important decisions, they begin to feel valued. These staff feel like they're an important part of the business, leading them to be more engaged and more productive as a result.

This is great because low engagement cost the global economy a whopping $8.8 trillion in 2023, according to a report by Gallup. Keeping your employees engaged with a well-executed internal communications system is one easy way to avoid being a part of this terrifying statistic.

We’re also in the era of ‘quiet quitting’, and that changes things. 

Previously, the worst thing you had to lose with a disengaged employee would be the cost of onboarding a new one once they quit. Now, some of them don’t leave. Instead, they stay on while working at minimal productivity and costing your company more money by the hour.

It’s obvious now that internal communication has moved beyond “keeping things moving in the workplace.” Its importance has doubled dramatically in recent years, making it an invaluable tool for companies wishing to thrive in the current business landscape. 

What are the main purposes of internal communications?

The goal of effective internal employee communication transcends the basic need to pass information along. Its core aim is to enhance company cohesion, elegantly building a company that works like a single unit —with every hand on deck and all actions in sync. 

There are some specific ways through which this cohesive company is built with great internal business communication tools. We’ll look at a few:

Information sharing

Without internal communication, a company becomes nothing but a few scattered groups of individuals with a vague sense of direction. 

Information sharing is necessary for all departments in your company to work in tandem with each other. And the proper internal communication platforms are necessary for that to happen quickly and effectively. This becomes more important for a multi-national or remote-centric organizations, where employees have a tendency to isolate themselves.

In such cases, internal communication platforms like Assembly, Slack or Microsoft Teams allow for real-time messaging, document sharing, and even virtual meetings, ensuring that everyone, regardless of their location, stays informed and connected. 

Employee engagement

In 2022, employee engagement reached a record high of 23%.  This sounds great until you realize that it means that 77% of workers are not engaged. Now, the $8.8 trillion loss begins to make sense. 

Engaged employees are every manager's dream. These workers are connected to the work they do and actively seek out ways they can perform better.  Their enthusiasm and drive aid their performance and drive them towards the actualization of company goals. 

An ingenious way to encourage employee engagement is through Improved internal communications. By communicating with colleagues, workers form deeper roots in the workplace and feel like they are important parts of something great. 

Which they are!

Alignment and consistency

When creating and maintaining a brand image, many companies only look outward. They only focus on their external communications that speak to the customers. While that may be working, it does create a problem. 

Your employees are the ones selling your brand. For instance, all your marketing promises of hospitable employees can be shattered once a customer meets a frustrated or green worker who’s not been taught your company’s ethics. They are simply not aligned. 

Your internal communications is meant to be consistent with your promotional messages. This helps align your employees with your company’s values, ensuring they can adequately reflect that to your customers. 

Building company culture

Your company culture is the sum of all the values, beliefs, and standards everyone follows in your workplace. This experience should also align with your brand and is largely built through your internal communications templates.

You can foster an open and friendly communication style in your office, building a workplace where subordinates can meet superiors for help. This would lead to connections and higher engagement. 

Your business can also go for a more rigid approach, where unimportant communication is reduced. This would form a strict hierarchy that may increase productivity slightly but would damage engagement.

Feedback and dialogue

Feedback is necessary for building an effective company. This is especially true when managing and onboarding new employees. Proper feedback would help your staff grow and let go of undesirable traits, molding them into ideal workers. 

Feedback can also be used to congratulate an employee for a job well done. This could be reaching a milestone, or accomplishing a task. Pointing out these feats and awarding appropriate rewards can enhance employee engagement and 82% of employees agree. 

For this reason, many internal communication software come equipped with in-built reward centers. Assembly, specifically, has an expansive rewards shop with 1000+ retailer gift cards and other swag that can be redeemed for points by your pace-setting employees. 

Change management

Change management is the process of guiding the transition of your company’s goals, visions, organization, or technologies.

Changes in large entities like companies are never easy to accomplish. This is due to the amount of employees that have to be carried along during the process. If it is a new technology, you’d have to give the workers some tutorials, and hierarchy changes would take some getting used to. 

These can be moved along with some executive announcements that explain the changes clearly. These publications should outline the problems the changes were designed to solve and specific actions employees should take to ensure its smoothness. 

Knowledge sharing

Here’s a statistic from Coveo: 88% of employees feel demoralized when they don’t have access to information needed to do their work. These employees spend three hours daily searching multiple sources for the necessary information, damaging productivity. 

To eliminate this issue, many internal communications tools have options to integrate with a knowledge base. This would ensure that your employees can access all their information at a single location. 

Assembly takes this further by integrating an elegant universal search bar functionality which makes the process a lot easier. A single search accesses information across all the integrations and channels available to the user. 

Boosting productivity

All the different changes made by well-developed internal communication software in your workplace culminate in increased productivity. 

Your employees have access to all the information they need, ensuring they spend less time searching and more working. Managers can easily point out issues with the work of their subordinates, causing them to make positive changes. 

Internal communication ensures that you can bring the best heads together to collaborate on a project. Ideas are passed and breakthroughs are made in a fraction of the usual time. This also creates a welcoming workplace, causing your employees to make connections and become more engaged. 

How does internal communication affect organizational performance?

Increased productivity, enhanced teamwork and collaboration, well-developed organizational culture, and adaptability to change are traits usually seen in offices that follow internal communications best practices. 

Their effects on your business are important and widespread. They will also be evident in almost every key performance indicator (KPI). We’ll take a few of them. 

Organizational culture

Internal communications are important in building your organizational culture. This is the set of values, beliefs, and standards that your company follows. You can actively create one or let it develop organically. We recommend the first, as you may not like what grows on its own. 

Based on your internal communications, you can have an open and friendly office where employees are encouraged to ask questions and speak their minds. You could also have a more rigid style where your workers only speak to direct managers. 

In terms of performance, the friendly office wins every time. They have high employee retention and increased productivity, in contrast to the rigid style that has high turnover rates and lots of negativity.

Employee motivation

Your internal communications have a great part to play in fostering employee motivation. This is better done with a well-developed recognition and rewards program incorporated into your communication software. 

Many employees would do better work when they’ve been recognized for their efforts and accomplishments. This could be through strategies like employee-of-the-month programs, or rewards for milestones.

These employees would feel valued by the company, motivating them to keep up or even increase their performance. 

Teamwork

Teamwork and collaboration are important and impossible without the proper communication channels. With these communication platforms on standby, team members can share updates and information on a project to brainstorm and generate ideas. 

Nowadays, teamwork doesn’t just involve a conference room filled with pacing employees. Instead, it could entail a project team dispersed across the globe, passing information through the company’s intranet. 

This ease of communication leads to faster problem-solving and increased performance.

Adaptability to change

An enterprise can be likened to a truck. It can move along at a fast pace, but once it’s time to turn, it becomes slow and difficult to steer. 

The size of these companies makes these changes difficult, especially when replacing something major like the company’s intranet to keep up with the latest trends in internal communications. This is why a well-developed tool that scales with your business is vital.

With this communication tool, you don’t have to be scared of your growth. 

Overall performance

A well-developed internal communication tool can improve collaboration, streamline information flow, and increase employee engagement. This would result in higher productivity and increased overall company performance for you. 

Efficient communication promotes a shared understanding of goals. It also allows for faster decision-making, resulting in a more agile and responsive organization.

How does internal communication improve employee engagement?

Effective internal communication fosters a sense of transparency in your company, keeping employees informed, and allowing channels for feedback to management. This creates a positive work environment that makes employees feel valued and motivated.

Internal communication also encourages interpersonal relationships between your employees. 

Communication platforms like Assembly that allow for friendly conversations between team members and colleagues creates a team bond that can’t be found in a 2-day seminar. This builds a sense of community and is great for employee engagement. 

Foster A Highly Cohesive Workplace with Internal Communications

Now you know the importance of internal communication in an organization, the next step is to start adequate communication in yours.

Internal business communication platforms exist for more than information sharing, as they aid in change management, feedback gathering, and knowledge sharing. By fostering open dialogue in your workplace, you can build a positive culture that is conducive to the growth you need.

With this culture of transparency and collaboration, you can empower your workforce, aid innovation, and achieve sustainable growth. 

This would be easier with Assembly, thanks to its various unique features that make it perfect for businesses of every size. Book a demo with us and watch your business become more cohesive.