Internal Communication
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Internal communication – also referred to as employee communication, internal employee communication or business communication – can be defined as everything that gets said and shared inside an organisation. As a function, its role is to curate, enable, and advise on best practice for organisations to communicate effectively, efficiently and in an engaging way.

We are communication consultants that specialise in helping you diagnose why chaos is occurring inside your organisation.

The Field Model™ seeks to understand, diagnose and fix issues. To follow the framework, you need to be ready to delve into the core of your organisation, and address some tricky issues. We have lots of resources to help you do it yourself, with consultancy support, or completely done for you through our full communication consultancy service.

If you’d like to find read more about internal communication, Redefining Communications’ founder and global communications expert, Jenni Field, has written two books. These are ideal guides for internal communication professionals, leaders, CEOs and business owners looking to ensure more effective internal communication in their organisation. You can find out more here: redefiningcomms.com/books/

The most important thing when it comes to fixing issues in your organisation is to get to the root cause of any issues you’re seeing.

There are some issues that can be resolved with quick wins, but often things take a while to develop, so need time to be unravelled. The Field Model™ framework has been designed to fix issues for the long term and improve internal communication by diagnosing why you’re having issues.

Take the time to have conversations, find out what’s going on underneath the issues you’re seeing and then address those.

MacLeod and Clarke view employee engagement as:

“A workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being”.

When you work with us as your employee engagement consultant, we’ll want to explore the employee lifecycle, the organisational culture and the employee experience. Employee engagement objectives need to be linked to the overall organisational strategy and the culture you’re trying to achieve.

We use the definition from Maylett and Wride: The Employee Experience is the sum of perceptions employees have about their interactions with the organisation in which they work.

They go on to explain three different types of contracts between employees and the organisation: Brand, Transactional and Psychological. We explore these in workshops and strategy days with clients as we explore how to improve the employee experience. Ultimately this links to culture, the employee lifecycle and requires strategic internal communication.

The employee lifecycle typically consists of six stages: attraction, recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and separation. Each stage presents its own challenges and opportunities, so it’s important to focus on them individually rather than one big, long journey. We have shared more about it in this blog post: redefiningcomms.com/what-are-the-stages-of-the-employee-lifecycle/

Mental resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of trauma, threats or stress. As a leader or business owner, you can build mental resilient teams by taking time to understand yourself.

We can run workshops for teams to help build mental resilience and this focussed on our TEEAM model, boundaries and strategies that will help you make practical changes to how you work. We’ll discuss how to recognise stress, manage anxiety and engage the power of your mind.

Communication is so important in building and maintaining excellent relationships at work. Do you understand your communication style? And do you know how you impact others? These questions are so important to answer to make sure you communicate effectively.

We have recorded podcasts around this topic and Jenni regularly works 1:1 with people looking to improve their skills to build better relationships at work. Start by taking some time to understand your own communication style and that of your team. Coaching, reading and developing the skill over time are all very achievable.

To really understand what’s happening in your leadership team and how it might be affecting any organisational transformation or growth, you need to look at themes of accountability, adaptability, capability, communication, connection, strategy and velocity in your organisation.

If you are going through leadership changes or just find that the team aren’t full aligned, our Leadership Alignment Tool has been built to help you within a month. redefiningcomms.com/consultancy/leadership-alignment-tool/

Internal communication is: “Everything that gets said and shared inside an organisation. As a function, its role is to curate, enable, and advise on best practice for organisations to communicate effectively, efficiently and in an engaging way.” (Field)

Employee engagement is: “A workplace approach designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well-being”. (MacLeod and Clarke)

Employee experience is: “The way in which employees internalize and interpret the interactions they have with their organisation, as well as the context that underlies those interactions.” (Gartner)

Communication is so important in building and maintaining excellent relationships at work. Do you understand your communication style? And do you know how you impact others? These questions are so important to answer to make sure you communicate effectively.

If you’d like to improve your communication skills, we create and deliver bespoke communication workshops for teams to help you to adapt your communication style to influence others and use the right communication methods to achieve the outcomes you want.

Effective internal communication is the key to creating excellent workplace relationships. Here are some quick tips:

• It takes time – acknowledge the symptoms of chaos, but don’t rush to fix. Take the time to delve into the root cause.
• Great storytelling – make sure you’re telling a compelling story that takes people with you and helps them understand the journey towards achieving organisational goals.
• Know your desired outcome – focus on what you want people to “think, feel and do” to make sure your messaging elicits the desired response and behaviours.
• Invest in yourself – we have to understand how we work and why we behave in certain ways to improve our relationships, so it’s essential to work towards increasing skills that improve communication, productivity, empathy and resilience (see links below).
• Know your scope – what does internal communication mean as a function in your organisation and where does it sit? Being clear on scope is important. It doesn’t really matter where it sits, as long as it supports the business strategy.

Leadership isn’t easy. There’s a huge amount of pressure on leaders to understand the complexity of their industry and organisation, lead projects, grow the business, as well as recognise team dynamics and nurture relationships.

Focus on aligning your words and your actions, being honest with what you can achieve and if trust is an area of concern, make sure you’re getting face to face time with people as much as possible.

An audit should be carried to help you understand whether the content and channels you use are working for your audience. If you’re doing one, make sure you have some ideas around what you want to prove or disprove here.

Depending on you organisational size you’ll need a survey and/or focus groups and some 1:1 interviews with leaders. Combine this with data you have from digital channels or existing information on the channels and you’ll have the insight you need to make the changes you need.

There are lots of podcasts, books and events out there. Do you know how you like to learn? This is the first thing to consider. Jenni is a big fan of attending events and reading as that is how she learns best and for some it’s online events or podcasts. Once you know that, drop us an email and we can point you in the right direction for where you’re based.

Remote and deskless are a little different. If you have people who are remote from the organisation but sitting at laptops, there is a separate strategy needed than for those who are on the frontline and disconnected.

For remote, focus on improving digital communication across the organisation, training leaders on how to use digital tools and the importance of the different aspects of digital writing. This is a bigger cultural challenge so make sure you’re looking at meeting times, breaks and expectations.

For deskless workers, check out our latest research in this area where we uncovered the real issue being linked to cultural differences between office workers and those who are deskless – here

You have to focus on your credibility and the eight skills linked to this. This is around building your skills and strategies around empathy, having a vision, capability and integrity to name a few of them.

You’ll need to be more intentional in how you communicate and engage with others and invest in yourself and your development to grow in these areas. Drop us an email if you’d like to explore more as Jenni can share her research in this area and do some 1:1 consultancy with you too.