Internal Communication: 7 Tips to Boost Employee Engagement

According to IBET 2020, disengagement at work is estimated to cost companies €14,310 per employee per year! Conversely, developing employee engagement would help reduce turnover and absenteeism, increase employee productivity and improve the company’s overall performance.¹ In short: it is time for organisations to rethink their internal communication strategy, in order to make employee engagement a priority.

What are the main levers for motivating employees at work? And what best practices should you put in place to retain them over the long term?

We reveal 7 tips for improving employee engagement through internal communication.

       

1. Create a feedback culture

According to an officevibe study, 98% of employees disengage when they receive little or no feedback from their manager. To address this challenge, it is now essential to build a feedback culture.

Beyond its impact on employee engagement, feedback helps employees progress, feel recognised, become more autonomous and increase their productivity at work. In a Gallup study, 26% of employees say that the feedback they receive helps them do better work.

Also read: Internal Communication: How to Encourage Feedback?

To encourage this feedback, we recommend in particular that you:

• Check in with employees and managers to understand what they consider to be constructive feedback, and how best to share it
• Raise awareness among all your employees on this subject by organising training sessions and by sharing the best practices expressed by each of them on your internal communication tool
• Encourage employees to speak up on your enterprise social network or intranet, for example by creating groups dedicated to feedback, and by encouraging everyone to give their opinion and congratulate their colleagues
• Regularly run surveys to gather employees’ views on certain topics, and involve them in the company’s strategic decisions

2. Support employees’ skills development

Of course, feedback is not the only lever available to internal communication for developing employee engagement. Here too, training has a role to play. Indeed, according to an Axonify study, 92% of employees report feeling more engaged when they are properly trained for their job.

And the same goes for the way their role develops: the more an employee feels they are progressing in their assignments and managing to develop their skills, the more motivated they will be at work.

Also read: Human Resources: 5 Trends to Watch Through 2023, According to Gartner

Here are a few ideas for initiatives to support your employees’ skills development:

• Set up a mentoring scheme to ease onboarding and help newcomers become autonomous more quickly
• Talk regularly with employees to understand their needs and offer them new training
• Offer a continuing training programme tailored to each person
• Raise awareness among managers and employees of the importance of training and knowledge sharing
• Identify the skills of all your employees, and list them somewhere accessible to everyone (a directory, for example). That will give you an overview of who can do what, and let you determine who is able to train their colleagues on specific tools or processes.

3. Give employees’ work meaning

One of the best ways to engage your employees? Show them that their actions have a real impact! More and more today, employees are looking for meaning in their work. This is exactly what a recent Kantar study shows: a quarter of French people believe that their work should be “useful to society”.

Several communication actions can help you (re)give meaning to your teams' work. For example, you can:

• Highlight the successes of the different teams on your enterprise social network,
• Show employees (in company meetings, or through an announcement on your intranet) how the projects they undertake affect the company’s performance (for example, signing a contract, creating a new piece of content, etc.)
• Share your company culture, and showing how your values apply day to day

Also read: 8 Advantages of Using an Enterprise Social Network

4. Be transparent and inclusive

If you want to develop employee engagement, it is also important to share information transparently with all your employees, whether they work in the field, in the office or remotely. So as not to exclude your blue-collar workers, we recommend using an internal communication tool that is accessible with or without a work email address (such as Talkspirit), and usable on different devices (PC, tablet or mobile).

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Also think about communicating regularly, and if possible on a single channel, to avoid information being scattered. For example, you can create a group on your internal social network to share your news and important events, or highlight them on your home portal. We also recommend that you centralise all your documents on a drive for the whole company, so that everyone can easily access the information they need to carry out their tasks. That makes your employees’ work easier, and keeps them motivated day to day.

5. Build a sense of belonging

The sense of belonging is also a key factor in employee engagement. Our advice for building it: organise internal events to mark your key moments, and so strengthen team cohesion.

Are you moving into new offices? Has your company hit a record turnover? Are you welcoming several new employees to the team? All these events are opportunities to communicate with your employees.

Likewise, do not hesitate to create a range of rituals to maintain the sense of belonging, for example:

• annual seminars,
• drinks, afterworks and team building workshops,
• coffee breaks (in person or by video call),
• a newsletter with an informal tone highlighting employees’ everyday lives,
• sports, music, or cooking challenges (adapted to individual interests).

Also read: The 7 Major Challenges of Internal Communication

6. Make Employee Wellbeing a Priority

According to a study by the Mind foundation, 60% of employees feel more motivated when their employer cares about their wellbeing. It is therefore essential to build this into your internal communication strategy.

Several initiatives can help improve wellbeing at work. We recommend in particular that you:

• Talk with your teams about what they expect on this subject, so you can put in place actions that respond directly to their needs
• Run surveys to gather everyone’s preferences in terms of work-life balance, working hours and working environment
• Raise your employees’ awareness of psychosocial risks and of the importance of the right to disconnect (including for your remote workers)
• Communicate actively about the best practices to follow to maintain good mental and physical health (for example, the working postures to favour, the good habits that prevent isolation when working remotely, etc.)

Also read: Evolving Ways of Working: What Place for Quality of Work Life?

       

7. Measure employee engagement

Finally, do not forget to measure employee engagement using a range of qualitative and quantitative indicators. That way you can check whether the actions you have put in place are having a positive impact, and continuously adjust your strategy according to the results.

For example, you can track:

• the engagement rate on your internal communication tools (by looking at the number of likes and comments on posts),
• the reach of your messages (how many employees saw the messages published on your intranet? What is the open rate of your internal emails?),
• the number of active users per month and/or per week on your internal social network,
• how satisfied employees are with internal communication,
• turnover,
• the social climate,
• the absenteeism rate,
• the rate of employee participation in company events.

It is up to you to choose the indicators that match your objectives! And of course, remember to survey employees regularly (through interviews, studies or polls) in order to adapt your indicators to your teams’ needs and expectations.

Conclusion

Employee engagement now holds no secrets for you! As you have seen: boosting employee motivation means putting in place initiatives to maintain the sense of belonging, improve wellbeing and recognition at work, and make it easier to share information and feedback. The next step in carrying out these actions? Putting in place a strategy and targeted internal communication tools.

Are you looking to deploy a new internal communication tool to develop employee engagement? Talk to one of our experts to find the solution that suits your needs and discover our offer in detail.

Would you like to discover examples of companies that have successfully improved their teams’ engagement? Download our practical guide on the “10 best practices for improving the employee experience”:

Access the Practical Guide

In our practical guide “10 best practices for improving the employee experience”, you will find: advice on creating a quality work experience, examples of initiatives implemented by our clients to develop employee engagement, and tools to roll out within your organisation.

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¹ 2021 Gallup Report “State of the Global Workplace”