You spend a lot of time making sure you effectively communicate with your clients. After all, if you keep your clients happy, your business will thrive. However, internal communication is just as important, yet it is often overlooked. When you can effectively communicate with your employees, you can increase your company’s productivity and enhance your business growth. In fact, your internal communication may have a larger impact on your bottom line than external communication. Here’s why.
1. Decreases Employee Turnover
As you know, it costs a lot of money to hire and train an employee, so the more often you have to do this, the bigger the impact is on your bottom line. By implementing a proven internal communication system, you can provide a better work environment for your employees. They will receive constant feedback from you, which can help them become more engaged in their day-to-day tasks and feel like they have a purpose. When they feel valued in their job, they are less likely to quit, which means you have fewer costs associated with hiring and training.
2. Encourages Productivity
Without a clear end goal in mind, employees may have a hard time staying focused. As such, properly communicating the goals you have for your employees, and how you plan to help them reach these goals, can make a huge difference in how productive they are.
When employees feel like they are part of a team and have something to achieve, they will work a lot harder. And when these goals are reached, a sense of accomplishment will be felt that will only push them even more—and it all begins with effective communication.
3. Boosts Employee Morale
One thing that nearly all employees want is recognition. They also want to feel like a team and they want to love where they work. All of these can be achieved with effective communication. Announce top achievers to the whole company, encourage interaction amongst employees, and promote internal contests and competitions to the team with proper internal communication.
4. Allows You to Control the Message
In the world of social media and smartphones, news spreads quickly, and the last thing you want is for your employees to learn about company news from someone besides you. With proper communication methods in place, you can make sure that your team hears about any company news straight from you, which means they will hear the truth instead of some skewed media opinion. To ensure your employees get their company information from the right source, you need an effective method to communicate with all of your employees in an extremely timely manner. It should be interactive and reliable to make sure your message gets through.
5. Improves Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is all about delivering on your brand promise. But if you don’t effectively communicate to your employees what your brand promise is, they will have a hard time giving your customers the service they expect. By clearly communicating your brand’s goals and effectively training your staff, you can make sure that your employees represent your company the right way when working with your customers.
6. Minimizes Rumors
If you rely on word-of-mouth communication for information to spread throughout the company, then it is undoubtedly getting misconstrued in translation. And when rumors spread, workplace conflict ensues. To make sure this doesn’t happen, you need to set up an effective internal communication method that allows you to speak directly to all of your employees.
When they get the message straight from you, there is a dramatically higher probability that it will be understood the way you intended it. Additionally, immediate communication directly from you makes your employees feel like you are being transparent with them. Transparency is vital to fostering trust with employees and making them feel valued.
Effective internal communication is one of the most overlooked aspects of running a company, yet it is easily one of the most important. When your employees feel like you are being transparent with them, and they feel valued, they will work harder. When they understand their goals and how to reach them, they will work smarter. And when they love their job and have a clear understanding of your company’s mission, they will portray that to your customers and improve your brand perception. The bottom line is that happy employees lead to happy customers, and the secret to keeping your employees happy is to communicate.
Photo credit: Silhouettes of businesspeople interacting from YanLev/Shutterstock