5 sure-shot ways to boost internal communications

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Internal communications is not only about being social with colleagues and sharing information, but it’s about making the organisation more responsive to a constantly changing world, says www.BusinessGoesSocial.net.

Organisations nowadays pay a fortune to establish vehicles for internal communication like enterprise social networks, intranet, content and document management tools, and video conference facilities. Apart from these, most rely on the social media platforms like LinkedIn groups, Skype, group mails, Google Hangouts and Facebook closed groups to discuss, share documents, news, knowledge, and collaborate.

As many groups you form, as many discussions you attend, perfect communication is still elusive. However, using the platforms efficiently will obviously help you better the internal communications in your organisation.

Interlinking the intranet pages
If you have offices across different geographical regions and you are using SharePoint, it’s lot easier for you to better internal communications. SharePoint integrates intranet, content management and document management.  The contents uploaded by each department or branches in their pages, if interlinked to the main SharePoint home pages, will enable you to get a bird’s eye view of happenings within the organisation. If the interlinking is done, when a news item is added in a department/branch page, it gets aggregated in the news section of the main home page. Likewise, a story appeared in the media of a particular department will appear automatically in the media section of the main home page.

The interlinking automatically updates the feeds and facilitates the sharing and communication among the departments and branches.

Rotating the facilitation responsibilities in the LinkedIn groups
Using the LinkedIn group is one of the best ways to get regular updates and participate in discussion. If the groups are closed, it gives liberty to discuss the stuffs internal to the organisation within the group.

However, there are limited discussions in the groups and sometimes the discussion continues between just two colleagues. And the daily updates from LinkedIn to the personal or official mails leads to vexation.

One quick method to get the discussions ongoing and enthuse motivation among the group members is to rotate the facilitation responsibilities. If each member of the group can take turns to post interesting stuffs and arouse interest among the members, the discussion becomes lively.

Besides, inviting some influential figureheads to the group also helps forge better and intellectual discussions, though it restricts sharing internal stuff.     

Monthly e-newsletter for updates
A monthly e-newsletter providing short snippets of what’s happening in the departments, what’s being discussed in the LinkedIn groups and what type or work is being done in the different branches, will help bring about collaboration in the work you do.

A short synopsis of what happened in the meetings will not only inform those who missed the actual meetings but will also invite interest from members of other departments, if there are certain avenues of collaboration.

Microblogging the updates
Twitter, though an external means of communication, can be a helpful medium to send direct messages (DM) to the followers on real time. Its 140 characters limit and ease to share wakes up the lazy person inside us to share the updates instantly – and it’s up to you, whether to make it public or share personally.

Short updates to group mails
The traditional and most reliable way of sharing the updates within your organisation is sending a paragraph each on the recent happenings to the concerned group mails. People who are interested in the issues will contact the respective colleagues personally and thus it will increase collaboration.