The 7 Key Internal Communication Challenges
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- Poor internal communication costs French companies more than €9,000 per employee per year, according to a Mitel survey.
- Seven challenges frame the subject: access to information, engagement, upward feedback, cross-functional exchanges, involving managers, inclusion and company cohesion.
- Access to information comes first: the difficulty of getting the right information at the right time costs each employee around 13 hours a week, according to a Panopto study.
- Frontline workers, who have no professional email address, are the ones internal communication forgets: email-free access to the internal platform brings them back in.
- A summary table gives, for each of the seven challenges, the sign it is unaddressed and the first action to take.
- The seven are settled upstream of the channel, in the order structure, collaboration, communication: an AI assistant plugged into a blurry organization only amplifies the noise.
Poor internal communication can be costly! According to a Mitel survey, French companies lose more than €9,000 per employee every year due to ineffective collaboration and internal communication. The best way to fix it? Optimize your internal communication, starting by prioritizing your biggest challenges.
What are the main internal communication challenges in the era of hybrid work? And what actions and tools should you put in place to address them? We explain everything in this article 👇
What is an internal communication challenge?
An internal communication challenge is an outcome the organization depends on and that communication is in a position to serve or to miss: giving everyone access to information, sustaining engagement, surfacing feedback, connecting teams across departments and sites. It is not the same thing as a channel or a tool, which is only the means: an enterprise social network solves nothing until you have said what it is for. The seven below are the ones multi-site and hybrid organizations run into first, and they build on each other: without access to information, none of the other six holds.
1. Streamlining Information Sharing and Access
Information is the lifeblood of any organization. Facilitating access, flow, and sharing of information (‘cold’ and ‘hot’) is one of the key challenges for internal communication. This is especially important for organizations that have adopted hybrid working, split between in-person and remote work. Poor internal communication leads to silos, loss of connection, wasted time, and reduced productivity in hybrid teams.
Indeed, according to a Panopto study, the difficulty of getting the right information at the right time costs each employee around 13 working hours per week (including 5 hours contacting colleagues with the relevant knowledge, and 8 hours looking for solutions independently).
To avoid this, internal communication must adopt several best practices to facilitate access and sharing of information internally, for example:
- Share information on a single channel (for example, a all-in-one collaborative platform) accessible to all employees, to save time and avoid information fragmentation
- Communicate regularly using different formats to keep employees engaged (for example: videos, image and GIF-enhanced posts, webinars, video conference meetings, etc.)
- Create groups dedicated to knowledge sharing on your enterprise social network (for example, groups for sharing industry news articles, field feedback, or specific professional expertise)
2. Engaging and Motivating Employees
Improving engagement and employee motivation is also one of the main internal communication challenges. And for good reason: companies with the most engaged employees are on average 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than those with disengaged employees.¹
However, only 6% of French employees are truly engaged at work (compared to 17% in Norway, for example).¹ To address this, it is important to take targeted actions proactively.
Here are some ways to improve employee engagement:
- Give greater visibility to everyone’s actions by highlighting their successes on your internal social network (for example, through a dedicated post, photos, and/or a video interview)
- Gamify your internal communication, for example by offering quizzes, challenges, or mini-games that will boost employee participation
- Involve employees in internal communication by inviting them to create content about company life (for example, a video presenting their role) and/or to suggest new ideas to improve their quality of life at work
Read also: Internal Communication: 7 Tips to Boost Employee Engagement
3. Encouraging Upward Feedback
Encouraging upward feedback is another key challenge for internal communication. Indeed, this feedback enables you to gather valuable information that a purely top-down communication approach would miss. For example, it can reveal:
- problems employees face in the field,
- conflicts that may arise within project teams or between managers and their reports,
- requests and improvement suggestions from customers,
- misunderstandings related to certain communications,
- etc.
Read also: Internal Communication: Why Encourage Feedback?
All of this essential information will help you stay attuned to employee needs and continuously adjust your internal communication strategy.
To cultivate this feedback culture, we recommend:
- Raising awareness among employees and managers about the importance of feedback
- Offering them training to learn how to give feedback at the right time and in the most effective way
- Acknowledging the work done by teams and thanking them through a dedicated post or live during your company meetings
- Regularly sharing polls with employees to gather feedback on company initiatives, and making time for 1-1 conversations when needed
- Creating an “Ideas and Improvement Suggestions” group on your internal social network, where any employee can contribute
Read also: [Webinar] Why and How to Build a Feedback Culture?
4. Encouraging Cross-Functional Exchanges
Beyond upward communication, it is also essential to encourage cross-functional communication, so that employees working in different departments and/or offices can easily communicate with each other, regardless of their hierarchical level. This cross-functionality makes it possible to:
- stimulate collective intelligence,
- break down organizational silos,
- unite the different teams,
- foster open dialogue,
- and drive innovation.
Fostering these cross-functional exchanges is often a challenge for internal communication, especially when the organization is spread across multiple sites.
Read also: [Ebook] The 7 Challenges of Internal Communication in a Multi-Site Context
Here are some initiatives to help you boost cross-functional communication:
- Create processes that clarify what types of information should be shared with whom and how
- Organize cross-team meetings to bring greater transparency to each department’s projects and identify collaboration opportunities
- Implement a mentoring program to encourage knowledge and best practice sharing across departments
- Deploy a collaborative platform (like Talkspirit!) that allows employees to communicate with anyone in the company
5. Involving Managers
Managers play a key role in internal communication, as they are responsible for:
- relaying management messages to their team,
- defining the roles and responsibilities of each team member,
- giving employees regular feedback on their work,
- motivating and engaging their employees.
Like internal communication itself, the manager plays a genuine communication role within the company. However, they don’t always have the time (or the habit) of communicating regularly, whether within their own team or with the rest of the organization. This is why it is important to put initiatives in place to more actively involve managers in internal communication.
You can in particular:
- Organize training to help managers develop their internal communication skills
- Give them regular best practices and concrete action ideas to implement (for example, by making a weekly post dedicated to managers on your enterprise social network)
- Create a practical guide to managerial communication (including for example post templates to onboard a new employee, organize a team-building event, showcase your team’s projects to other departments, etc.)
Read also: Hybrid Work: Management Best Practices
6. Fostering Inclusion
Due to their ways of working, some employees are sometimes excluded from internal communication. This is particularly true of frontline workers (also called blue-collar workers): field employees who don’t have a professional email address, and who therefore don’t receive company email communications. As a result: they are sometimes completely disconnected from what is happening in the company.
Read also: Connecting Employees Without an Email Address: Lyon Parc Auto’s Success Story
Remote workers, too, can be affected by this lack of information, especially when they are a minority within the company. While many companies formalize official communications in writing, informal exchanges primarily happen verbally, and especially in person. Over time, this can disadvantage remote workers who are not included in these exchanges.
It is therefore important for companies to make the effort to include all employees in internal communication, regardless of their working arrangements. Replacing your internal emails with an enterprise social network (ESN) is a great way to achieve this. Unlike emails, an ESN lets you broadcast your messages to all employees in real time, and in a dynamic way!
Read also: Email, Intranet, or Collaborative Platform: What’s the Difference?
Talkspirit, for example, offers an email-free access feature, allowing you to invite all your frontline workers to your platform. Feel free to try the solution and see what it can offer you in terms of internal communication.
7. Maintaining Company Cohesion
Maintaining company cohesion is essential for internal communication, as it has a direct impact on engagement, sense of belonging, well-being at work, and, ultimately, employee retention. For proof: according to an Opinionway survey for Monster, more than 40% of French employees say they would consider leaving their job due to a poor work atmosphere.
Building greater cohesion can also help reduce employee isolation, which tends to increase with remote work. Indeed, according to the Paris Workplace study, nearly 60% of Paris-region employees say they sometimes feel isolated at work. Hence the need to put initiatives in place to unite all teams!
Here are some ideas to inspire you:
- Organize in-person and video-conference events (for example, seminars, webinars, after-work events, sports workshops, etc.) and communicate about them regularly
- Encourage managers to organize team-building events within their team
- Showcase your company culture and news on your internal social network (for example, by adding a dedicated section on your home page)
- Create communities dedicated to informal exchanges on your ESN, and encourage employees to create their own groups (for example, to discuss cultural outings, movies, sports, etc.)
| Challenge | The sign it is unaddressed | The first action |
|---|---|---|
| ChallengeStreamlining information sharing | The sign it is unaddressedEveryone looks for information in a different channel, and finds it too late | The first actionBring information together in a single channel, open to every employee |
| ChallengeEngaging and motivating employees | The sign it is unaddressedInternal posts draw neither readers nor reactions | The first actionGive team wins visibility and let employees contribute content |
| ChallengeEncouraging upward feedback | The sign it is unaddressedLeadership hears about field problems months after they appear | The first actionOpen a suggestions space and poll teams on a regular basis |
| ChallengeEncouraging cross-functional exchanges | The sign it is unaddressedTwo departments work on the same subject without knowing it | The first actionMake each team’s projects visible beyond its own department |
| ChallengeInvolving managers | The sign it is unaddressedMessages from leadership stop at the management layer | The first actionEquip managers: post templates, dedicated time, training |
| ChallengeFostering inclusion | The sign it is unaddressedEmployees without an email address hear the news by word of mouth | The first actionOpen email-free access to the internal platform |
| ChallengeMaintaining company cohesion | The sign it is unaddressedTurnover rises without pay being the reason | The first actionCreate shared moments and space for informal exchange, remote and on site |
These seven challenges start with the organization, not the channel
One thing runs through all seven: the channel is rarely the problem. When nobody knows who decides what, no tool will make information any clearer, it will only move it faster. Internal communication sits downstream of two things that come before it: structure (roles, decision scopes, the bodies that make the calls) and the collaboration rituals that keep them alive. That is the order the three work in: structure, collaboration, communication.
AI inside internal tools makes that order easier to see. An assistant that summarizes, drafts and broadcasts amplifies whatever it is given: clarity where there is clarity, noise where there is not. Which is why it pays to agree on the rules of use before rolling anything out, and to know where the data those assistants read actually lives, a practical question for any organization under the GDPR that would rather keep its internal data on a European platform.
Read also: AI Governance Isn’t a Compliance Project
In practice, that means picking the tool once you know what you want it to do, then giving its launch the attention it needs: 4 steps to launch a new internal communication tool.
In Conclusion
You now know the main internal communication challenges and the actions and tools to address them. One thing is certain: the enterprise social network will be your best ally for improving your internal communication, and ensuring that everyone has access to the right information at the right time.
🤔 But what does this look like in practice? Discover in this practical guide how 10 of our clients use Talkspirit to energize their internal communication:
Access the Practical Guide
In our practical guide “10 Client Initiatives for Better Internal Communication”, you will discover: 10 examples of companies using Talkspirit to improve their internal communication, along with tips and tricks for better information sharing and strengthening cohesion within your company.
FAQ
There are seven: streamlining information sharing and access, engaging and motivating employees, encouraging upward feedback, encouraging cross-functional exchanges, involving managers, fostering inclusion and maintaining company cohesion.
According to a Mitel survey, French companies lose more than €9,000 per employee every year because of ineffective collaboration and internal communication.
Companies with the most engaged employees are on average 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than those with disengaged employees, according to Gallup. Only 6% of French employees are truly engaged at work, compared with 17% in Norway.
Frontline workers never receive company emails and end up cut off from what is happening in the organization. Giving them email-free access to the internal platform, as Talkspirit does, puts them back in the loop of official information.
They are the relay. Managers pass on leadership messages to their team, define everyone’s roles and responsibilities, give regular feedback and keep their people engaged. Training and ready-made post templates make that role far easier to hold.
It weighs directly on it. According to an Opinionway survey for Monster, more than 40% of French employees say they would consider leaving their job because of a poor work atmosphere.
