The facts don’t lie, or at least these particular facts don’t. The vast majority of companies are failing to perfect their internal communications strategy. Read on if you don’t know why bucking this trend is so important.

This month on the Smoking Gun blog we are all about employee engagement and internal communications. That’s because it’s our belief that in order to deliver exceptional output you need to ensure your own house is in order first.

Considering that perspective, we find it pretty astounding that the majority of firms still need to get this aspect of day-to-day-business sorted. According to Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends Survey, only 23% of organisations believe their employees are aligned to corporate purpose.

What does this mean?

Without being too obvious, it means that 77% of companies do not see their staff as in tune with their goals. How do you get people to understand where the business destination is? In short— through good internal communications.

The survey included some 10,000 HR and business leaders hailing from 140 countries across the world. To us that sounds pretty comprehensive.

With this in mind clearly there is a lot of work to be done. Vast improvements can and need to be made.

The internal communication – engaged employee – business success trinity

We have already written about how much easier it is to achieve business goals when you crack employee engagement. If you missed it we advise catching up on that blog post.

One of the best ways in which you can improve employee engagement is through better internal communication. This can impact on every aspect of the company, from staff retention and recruitment, to innovation and strategy.

That’s because engaged employees are, on the whole, more satisfied and happier in their work. They feel heard, understood and valued, and want to give something back in return.  For example greater dedication to the task at hand.

Deloitte’s recommendations

Based on its own internal communications strategy, Deloitte recommends the following approaches to fine-tuning yours:

*Make the complex simple

Use real world examples, helpful metaphors and personal stories to put big concepts into everyday language

*Have one voice

Everyone in the organisation should understand values and beliefs, which are consistent across the business

*Turn big into small

Even if the company has thousands of employees in different countries it’s important to make them all feel they are close colleagues

*Reward employee initiative

Praise innovation at an employee level, because this is the best way to move things forward together

Fostering the right culture

The idea of corporate culture is nothing new. But it has never been more important.

To reference Deloitte one last time— in this post at least— positive cultures can be defined with relative ease. In 2018, the overarching trend is towards a culture that can help ‘build the 21st Century career’.

Developmental opportunities are therefore of paramount importance, and that means offering the chance for continual learning. In order to achieve this there are five simple steps:

*Understand where your culture is right now, and what learning opportunities are available

*Identify the type of culture you would like to create, and what learning opportunities would fit and bolster this

*Create a specific curriculum which can get you to the desired destination

*Roll this out across the entire organisation, matching learning opportunities to specific roles and departments but ensuring all feed one shared goal

*Build the curriculum to be a constant continues to evolve and change as the company develops