Organizational communication: how to improve your relationship with employees

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Organizational communication

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Organizational communication is essential for a company’s proper functioning. It ensures alignment between employees and managers, enabling them to understand the business’s strategic objectives and day-to-day operational challenges.

In addition, effective organizational communication is responsible for ensuring that employees are engaged, integrated, and aligned with the company’s objectives

Corporate communication fosters a sense of belonging, positively impacting team performance and productivity.

After all, internal communication creates a favorable environment for the exchange of ideas and suggestions.

There are four benefits of the strategic use of organizational communication:

  1. Improves the company’s image;
  2. Avoids rumors and gossip;
  3. Promotes integration among collaborators;
  4. Improves organizational climate;

Keep reading to learn more about the subject, the best tips for improving communication management and what technological solution can help you to achieve success.

What is organizational communication?

This concept involves the distribution and availability of information throughout the company. It includes both external and internal strategies –to build a company’s image in the market or improve the current one, and internal strategies that provide guidelines for employees.

Corporate communication is extremely important for any organization; it allows to share the company’s mission, vision and values with collaborators, which improves engagement and therefore performance.Moreover, having a good image among consumers is crucial for positioning a company in the market. In this sense, ESG studies and applications are extremely relevant, as they consider environmental, social and governance aspects.

Corporate communication is extremely important for any organization. It allows sharing the company’s mission, vision, and values with collaborators, which improves engagement and therefore performance. Moreover, having a good image among consumers is crucial for positioning a company in the market. In this sense, ESG studies and applications are extremely relevant as they consider environmental, social, and governance aspects.

Check out the following 4 types of Organizational communication:

Organizational communication

Types of organizational communication

There are many ways for a company to communicate with both internal and external audiences. It is important to use them in order to reach a large and varied public.

Check out the main internal and external communication types that an organization can adopt:

  • Internal communication: availability and distribution of information to the internal audience (collaborators);
  • Vertical communication: connects higher level professionals to those in operational roles;
  • Horizontal communication: refers to communication between peers, that is, people with similar roles within the company;
  • Diagonal communication: type of communication that involves all professionals in the company —from higher-level to lower-level roles;
  • Circular communication:  all employees know each other and information circulates more easily. It is common in smaller companies;
  • External communication: refers to communication made to the target audience, such as investors and stakeholders. Generally, marketing and public relations teams are responsible for this task.

6 tips for managing organizational communication

To help you improve the communication processes of your company, we have separated here 6 tips for successful communication management.

  1. Understand each of the audiences

To communicate effectively, you need to consider who will receive the message. After all, do you know who you are talking to? As mentioned earlier, a company usually deals with two types of communication and their respective audiences: internal and external.

While the internal audience are the employees, partners, suppliers and service providers; the external audience includes customers, prospects, the surrounding community, etc.

When your audiences are well defined, it is easier to direct the right message, at the right time, to the right person; through communication strategies that make sense for each stakeholder.

Therefore, it is important that you know how each audience communicates – their preferred language, the best way and time to approach them – in order to ensure the best possible interaction.

  1. Centralize the communication flow

Another important point to consider in communication management is that a dispersed communication flow tends to cause noise and conflicting information.

When your marketing team sends an email, for example, and one of your employees replies via WhatsApp, it is possible to lose that response in the large volume of messages received on this application. 

As a result, you end up missing what the collaborator said about the referred email.

Many crises are caused when communication’s flow is not properly directed through the best channels.

Therefore, to avoid problems in sending and receiving messages, it is worth investing in software that centralizes communications, such as Slack or Discord.

  1. Act with transparency

This is one of the most important tips for improving organizational communication.

Provide employees with all the information they could be interested in and share the company’s status, such as results, indicators, goals achieved, etc. Additionally, let them know about the importance of each person’s work in achieving the company’s objectives.

When employees understand how their work impacts the organization’s performance, they feel motivated to do their best and trust management more.

  1. Do not underestimate the power of feedback

Good communication management cannot leave aside one of the most valuable tools within organizations: feedback.

In a good conversation, it is possible to provide constructive feedback to  collaborators; such as strengths and areas of improvement.

If employees are demotivated, for example, show them all the goals they have conquered so far and emphasize that they have the potential to do better.

In this way, they will feel more engaged in performing tasks in the best possible way, and also contribute to the company’s results.

Learn also: How to do an employee evaluation in your company? See tips and examples.

Another important tip is to give feedback periodically for better performance results. That is the reason why many companies have implemented a feedback culture.

  1. Get the ideal language

Corporate communication is associated with interpersonal relationships that are built within the company. When they are based on excessive formality, day-to-day interactions could become challenging and difficult to carry out, which harms the organizational climate.

Therefore, use the ideal language to communicate with your team, which helps to reduce tension from daily tasks and ensures more willing and motivated employees.

Social events, birthday parties, outdoor or virtual meetings; for example, contribute to building a better atmosphere in the workplace.

  1. Use the appropriate tools

Using appropriate tools makes all the difference in the corporate communication process. Each audience, external or internal, and each “subgroup” (sectors, departments, type of client, etc.) has specificities that must be considered when communicating.

Notice boards, internal newspapers, corporate TV, newsletters and intranet are examples of very effective tools for communicating with the internal public.

For the external public, you can use traditional media, such as radio, TV and newspapers, or resort to digital marketing strategies.

The choice will depend on the available budget and the objectives you want to achieve through communication.

Next steps to optimize organizational communication

As important as knowing what to say, is knowing the best way to communicate, remembering that organizational communication contributes to the corporate’s image, in addition to improving the relationship between managers and employees.

Using technology to your advantage is the best way to do it! A good business management system can streamline the monitoring of strategic, tactical and operational indicators, in addition to keeping them centralized in one place.

Having access to this information can contribute to making more accurate decisions.

In parallel, an internal communication system allows access to personalized reports, making meetings and feedback more productive.

If you want to invest in your business’s organizational communication and have these benefits at your fingertips, check out STRATWs One.

This corporate performance management software makes communication among company members more agile and transparent, so day-to-day operations and the company’s strategy are closer and clearer to employees.

Request a demo now!

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