Increase Employee Engagement with the 3 C’s of Internal Communication

This post originally appeared on the Stiltsoft blog in April 2016 as a guest post by Nicholas.

Effective communication is vital to keep employees engaged and motivated. Research shows there is an “explicit positive relationship between communication satisfaction and employees’ organizational commitment”.

Authentic, frequent and collaborative conversations with employees leads to increased trust, decreased turnover and improved productivity. In this post we’ll explore how candor, cadence and collaboration can drive increased employee engagement and improve organisational performance. These are the ‘three Cs’ of effective internal communication.

Candor

Through internal communications, the management team is able to share company news and operational details with employees. Including facts and figures that may not be suitable for the general public can enhance employees’ understanding of the business and market, helping them make better decisions.

Further, communicating candidly can create trust and empathy throughout an organisation. For example, a leader could share their own shortcomings and how they are working to address them. This encourages others to reflect on their performance and pursue their own areas of improvement. When a leader demonstrates transparency, it shows the rest of the team that honesty really is the best policy.

Cadence

Let employees know that you highly value internal communication by sending company updates regularly. Maintaining a regular frequency lets employees know when to expect your updates. Every two weeks works well and provides a leader with ample opportunities throughout the year to share news with employees.

Keep company updates interesting by asking different members and teams of the organisation to provide news on their projects. By retelling the stories of others, you can keep employees engaged with different areas of the business.

Collaboration

The bigger the organisation, the more difficult it is to give employees a sense of ownership in daytoday business operations. By bringing intracompany conversations online, all members of the company can read up on important news and participate in conversations.

You can encourage these important online conversations by asking leaders to blog on Confluence. When a blog is published on Confluence, employees can log in and leave comments on the blog post. Comments and @mentions allow employees to reference colleagues and discuss a particular aspect of the blog’s content. The Confluence notification emails include a Like button, allowing employees to provide immediate feedback.

Finally, Confluence enables leaders to easily and quickly tell compelling stories, using rich content such as images, tables and charts.

Better Blogs for Confluence

With Better Blogs for Confluence it is easy to implement the Three 3C’s of internal communication.

Better Blogs is a Confluence add-on that enables a Space Administrator to subscribe an entire group of people to email notifications of new blog posts in a space. For internal communication I recommend setting up a Confluence space called ‘Announcements’ and subscribing the ‘employee’ LDAP group to email notifications of new blog posts in the space using Better Blogs.

With the ‘three Cs’ of effective internal communication you can increase trust, decrease turnover and improve employee engagement.

Ready to improve the engagement of your employees? Install Better Blogs for Confluence today.