The importance of effective internal communication within a remote workforce

During these times of self-isolation and working from home, there is plenty of room for miscommunication, deadlines being missed, and opportunities for error in all businesses.

Now, more than ever, it is imperative for workplaces to ensure their internal communication is perfect, so that all work is being achieved on time, while ensuring staff culture and morale is being nurtured.

If your company isn’t using internal communications to the best of its ability, we recommend rethinking your approach to ensure you’re capitalising on the value it can truly achieve.

Here are three reasons why internal communication is extremely important when staff are working from home.

 1. Helps employees create an open and transparent environment

These days, most people who are working office jobs are now taking their skills to their home study or any other quiet place they can find in their house. Even before isolation, many employees either took work home after hours, or worked from home every now and then because the novelty meant better efficiency.

The massive shift though is moving into an environment of seeing your co-workers most days, to only seeing your pets, family or partner each morning, lunchtime and night. Because of this, it is crucial to ensure you encourage your employees to keep their usual work routine, however it may include a new way of internal communication to ensure they are staying up to date with business matters and still achieving KPIs.

Easy and effective ways to help create an open and transparent environment include:

• Scheduling a morning meeting every day with an agenda for each employee to discuss their responsibilities
• Starting an internal group for key projects to easily update each other on work in progress
• Organising set meetings every second day with client teams to understand priorities and set tasks to work towards a common goal
• Be careful of going over the top though. There’s often a meme floating around about how ‘that meeting could have just been an email’ which is a reminder that you need to ensure each meeting has a purpose

 2. Develops employees’ skills in accountability and time-management

Often when moving to remote working, many businesses start sharing their calendars online and conducting daily meetings to be aware of what their team members are working on for the day.

The benefits of these simple tasks not only help employees be more accountable and realistic about their day-to-day activities, but also helps push them to be better communicators. Working individually means each person has to be more mindful of their own time and deadlines, which if not managed, can affect the entire team. It might feel like micromanaging, however when every individual is working from a remote space, it’s important that all team members understand each other’s daily goals and can support them to achieve these.

 3. Offers a sense of continuity

During these times of self-isolation, employees can sometimes feel low on company culture, so providing internal communications to keep staff regularly updated can really help increase morale.

Providing recurring and timely internal newsletters or EDMs about different aspects of the organisation such as business wins, personal anecdotes or different updates is a good way to start. Sending around positive emails or testimonials is also another way to keep morale high!

Sending around news that isn’t always directly related to work can remove the void of working from home and chatter you miss when you’re not seeing your co-workers every day in the office.

 At Elevate, we are proud to practise what we preach to ensure our team is communicating effectively (especially during these times of self-isolation), however we have also supported a number of clients with their internal communications, including communicating with both employees and other stakeholders, such as franchisees or membership bases.

If you’re looking for help to communicate effectively with your internal stakeholders, whether it’s through eNewsletters or EDMs, supporting on internal documents and magazines or helping build staff morale and job satisfaction, contact us on info@elevatecom.com.au for a free non-obligatory quote.