Internal Communications Keys 1

I've had a LOT of interviews lately for internal communications positions and freelance opportunities, and so I wanted to catalog some of the comments that have gotten a lot of head nods and "oh, yeah, that's us!" from people in the industry. Here's the first one:

Every single communication is a retention tool.

This is now my calling card because it hits every time.

Internal communications can be a hard sell. Even if you can recite off open rates, or click throughs - even if you're meeting astronomically high KPIs on your CTAs - ultimately the business wants to know what they'll get out of it, and having a 65% readership doesn't equate to dollars. Businesses big enough to have internal communications, for better or worse, care a lot about money. And while it's nice to say you're making people's lives easier (I'll cover that later too - it is important, just not number 1) and it's great to say you build culture, both of those are nice to haves. What's an absolute necessity is people not quitting.

You have to translate why a company should bother to make people's lives easier and build culture, condense the importance of the job, and doing it right, into something that impacts the bottom line. Good internal communications, for a variety of reasons, help retention - because if you don't pay attention to how you are communicating with employees, they will quit. Full stop. There are a million reasons why people quit their jobs, and nobody wants to add one more.

Every person in every department in every level is aware of "how hard it is to find good talent" or at the very least, how annoying it is to have to pick up your resigning coworker's slack while you wait for a replacement to be trained. And from an HR perspective (the people often doing at least one of the interviews) retention is a huge monetary factor. It costs tens of thousands of dollars in actual cost and lost time to replace even a minimum wage worker.

So how does good internal communications help? Transparency, honesty, tact, and even consistency are all hallmarks of what a good internal comms person can bring to the table that the frontline worker or senior official will appreciate. Or at the very least, they will not feel like "corporate" is trying to dupe them - a common sentiment when decrees are handed down. Even the most well meaning director can accidentally use the wrong wording and suddenly the field team members receiving the information third hand feel like they are being taken advantage of, or tricked. And I'll talk later about how to not do that, and how to do the things that help with retention, with culture, with engagement. But that first rule - recognizing that every single communication from a sign in the break room to a new policy is a retention tool. It can be a bad retention tool, or a good one, and that's up to the strength of your internal team, but no matter what, each one is serving a double purpose beyond just what the requestor needs to say.