Internal Communications in Tech Companies: Everything You Need to Know

Internal Communications in Tech Companies: Everything you need to know

Tech companies always need to communicate with the outside world through marketing, public relations, and customer service, but good internal communications are just as essential.  Strong internal communications (IC) help define your brand and message, optimizing interactions with customers, shareholders, and the public.

Additionally, best practise IC strategies keep employees informed about management and company goals, allowing them to provide feedback and collaborate with their teams. By sharing your company’s values and priorities, internal communications strengthen your culture, brand, and identity. Without them, these elements can become unclear for workers, shareholders, and customers.

Benefits Of An Internal Communications Platform

Companies should go with an IC solution that assists easy communication and keeps everyone on the team connected, all in one easy platform. In this article, we’ll go over some challenges tech companies face with their internal communications and how to go about overcoming those challenges. Companies that don’t use all-in-one communications platforms run the risk of overloading employees with information from too many channels. Communication hubs streamline information so that employees aren’t dealing with communications from too many channels, at once.

Internal Communications Challenges For Tech Companies

In recent times, good organizational communications networks are more important than ever to keeping everyone on the same page. Remote work and dispersed teams are becoming more popular, and face-to-face communication is becoming less prevalent as teams continue to work remotely.

Engagement is important in the workplace, because it helps employees feel valued and informed, which increases productivity and workplace satisfaction and ultimately improves retention rates. Unfortunately, employees can start to feel disengaged if they work remotely and rarely communicate face-to-face with their supervisors or co-workers.

A good organizational communications platform can help employees feel more engaged with management and with each other. Working remotely doesn’t have to be lonely for remote workers; they should be able to reach out to co-workers just as if they are working physically right alongside them.

Geographically Dispersed Workplaces For Tech Employees

Keeping employees connected, especially if they are geographically dispersed, can be a challenge for tech companies. Everyone in the workforce needs to stay on top of changes and updates as they happen in order to properly do their jobs with the best information. But when workers are working in different locations across the globe, they may struggle to keep each other up-to-date on changes and updates.

As more tech companies become remote or hybrid, time zone differences become a greater challenge to internal communications. In addition, remote employees start to feel disengaged when their co-workers and managers are miles away from them.

Companies can make their dispersed teams feel like a unit by having regular team-building exercises. Companies can also continually refine and improve the overall communication culture of the company, thus demonstrating to remote employees that their input matters and their concerns are being heard.

Inconsistent Communications Across Channels

Significant problems can arise if employees receive inconsistent information. If employees are getting the wrong information or conflicting information, messages can be misinterpreted and everyone on the team can get confused. This could ultimately lead to the erosion of trust in leadership and the organization’s management.

Inconsistent information to the business could potentially be a large problem if there is no cohesive messaging sent across one central hub. Using a communication hub can help to make sure that messages are consistent and that employees are all getting the same information.

Information Overload

Employees can easily feel overwhelmed if they are bombarded with too much information across emails, text messages, or social media. This information overload can lead to frustration, confusion, and low morale and low productivity. 

When they are overloaded with information, employees tend to become distracted and miss important information or messages. They may struggle to figure out what is relevant and what is not. Overload can decrease productivity, increase stress in the workplace, and eventually harm your retention rates.

Addressing Employee Feedback

Employees can feel devalued if they don’t have a voice inside the organization and a clear channel to vent their frustrations or offer suggestions. Addressing feedback regularly and promptly can go a long way toward increasing employee morale and trust in leadership. Giving employees options to provide feedback anonymously can let them know they will be heard.

Accepting feedback can only do so much if the company doesn’t act on the feedback, however. That doesn’t mean management must make every change employees suggest, but they should at least confirm with their employees that they have heard and considered their feedback and explain rationale. Furthermore, much of the feedback from employees can provide ideas for making positive changes, thereby setting the company up for success. 

No matter how much feedback they ultimately end up implementing, management should consistently address the feedback of their staff.

Maintaining Employee Engagement

Employers must work harder to maintain engagement with their staff members as remote employment among tech companies grows in popularity. Although there may be a significant geographical distance between the company and its employees, management must communicate with its workforce to let them know their managers are always available, whether through messages or through video calls.

Even though your company’s headquarters may be far away from your remote workers, you must interact with them as if they were at your office in person. By implementing engagement strategies for motivating remote workers, your organization can foster a much more productive and enjoyable work environment.

Ensuring Data Privacy and Security

Security and confidentiality are important when communicating internally. Company communication channels carry sensitive information on a daily basis. The company’s internal data as well as the private data of clients need to be secure at all times. If data is breached, the company’s reputation can be damaged and clients may look elsewhere for a more trustworthy company.

To ensure privacy and security, and compliance, companies should review their communication practices and establish internal policies on confidential information handling. Employees should be trained on data privacy, and clear roles should be assigned for information access. This ensures secure communication and protects employees’ information.

Best Practices For Internal Communications

How To Keep Multi-channel Communications Always-Open

Multi-channel targeted communications can help companies avoid information silos, information overload, and inconsistency across channels.

Remote workers are unable to communicate with their co-workers or managers in person on a regular basis, but they can still speak with their supervisors or co-workers face-to-face regularly. Use multi-channel approach to reach your employee where they are, people have different comms preferences and you want to make sure you’re not leaving anyone behind.  Hangouts and virtual meetings can keep remote workers in touch rather than sending impersonal emails.

For globally dispersed teams, consider making communication flexible. There may be time zone differences between team members, so not everyone may be able to attend a live video conference at the same time. Video messages can still be sent out to the whole team.

Utilize Surveys To Address Your Employees’ Feedback 

Utilize surveys as a tool to gather direct feedback from your employees, fostering an open and positive work environment. To encourage feedback, implement an open-door policy where management actively listens to concerns. Address feedback in video meetings where management can go over survey results or other feedback solicitation. 

Ideally, built-in survey tools should be available in your internal communications network, allowing employees to provide feedback quickly and anonymously and potentially on the move for convenience. Maintaining open lines of communication is crucial for engaging with employees and getting to know them. 

Survey your employees regularly to learn what they are thinking, engage with them and gain insights on how to increase team happiness, productivity, and enhance the work-from-home experience. Responding to feedback is crucial in showing employees that management values their opinions.

Keep Employees Engaged

Utilizing targeted comms is an important tool in keeping employees informed and engaged. For example, if you want to solicit feedback from remote workers, create a weekly newsletter with topics relevant to their work or lifestyle and survey them through it. You can also leverage your internal communication network to send short surveys or polls. Additionally, to engage remote workers, employers should regularly hold virtual meetings, use icebreakers, conduct team-building exercises, and prioritize good health and work-life balance. Through these measures, you can open a dialogue between management and the staff and ensure that everyone’s voice is heard.

Information overload is a big issue, especially in tech companies where the nature of work is quite knowledge intensive and the changing economic environment naturally results in a lot of news coming at the tech employees both internally and externally. To keep employees informed without overwhelming them, tech companies should adopt a targeted approach to internal communications. By segmenting audiences and delivering tailored messages, employees can stay up to date without feeling bombarded by information.

Effective communication also plays a critical role in improving engagement rates. In fact, a study found that companies with highly engaged employees outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share (EPS). To engage remote workers, employers should regularly hold virtual meetings, conduct team-building exercises, and prioritize good health and work/life balance. Additionally, conducting anonymous surveys and maintaining clear communication channels can help foster better relationships between management and employees.

Other measures that can keep employees engaged include:

• Holding regularly scheduled virtual meetings to keep employees in touch with each other.
• Having team-building exercises so employees know they are team members and part of a greater group.
• Regularly conducting surveys and making surveys easily accessible and anonymous.
• Encouraging good health and a good work/life balance.
• Prioritizing teamwork and group cohesion.
• Always keeping clear, open communication channels.

Employees who are properly engaged are more productive, more engaged in their own growth and development, and more likely to enjoy working from home.  By continuously soliciting feedback and insights from employees, management can better understand which methods of engagement work best for their workforce. This leads to improved productivity, morale, and overall success for the company.

How to Choose the Best Solution for Internal Communications For Your Tech Company

Many solutions are available that solve the IC problems listed above. Consider your company’s communications needs and the features you’d like to see when searching for the best solution. A good internal communication platform should have some of the following features and benefits.

1. All-in-one Platform

Using just one employee communication platform can ensure total alignment across all users and improve information flow. Employees may not feel as overloaded and overwhelmed if they are getting their messages from the company all in one place plus receive the added benefit of not having to jump back and forth between tools.

A single platform with the whole company on board can also foster a sense of community. Employees can log in to one platform and see that all of their coworkers and managers are using the same platform, and be served additional messages that they may not have otherwise seen.

Using one secure platform is also a great way to ensure the privacy and security of all communications.

2. Mobile-first Design

A mobile-first design and interface is ideal for many remote employees. 60.9% of the world’s internet traffic now comes from mobile devices. With over half of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices, it follows that many employees will prefer to use a mobile app to communicate with teams, rather than desktop interfaces.

Furthermore, when an internal communications platform mimics social media, it may get better adoption rates and users may feel accustomed to the easy-to-use interface. 

3. Built-in Surveys

Having employees respond to surveys is a great way to get feedback and suggestions. Anonymous surveys allow employees to speak their minds and allow managers to get the unrestricted opinions of their teams.  These insights can also be fed into future campaigns and check effectiveness of previous ones. 

Since encouraging and addressing feedback is so important to cultivating an open and positive work environment, tech companies should choose an internal communication solution that has surveys built into the platform.

4. Multi-channel and Targeted Comms

An internal communications solution like Haiilo provides companies with the ability to disseminate important information to other channels like email or Slack, or digital signage for important communications when teams are away from the computer. With the targeted comms feature, managers can target specific departments, locations, or even languages to ensure the right recipients are getting the intended message, at the right time.

This allows tech companies to access a variety of channels and methods for delivering important messages or updates. Not only does this allow employees to stay informed, it also encourages greater collaboration between departments and teams.

Why Haiilo?

Haiilo is the top internal employee communication platform that businesses can use to keep in touch with their employees on one platform for cohesive communications and the best employee experience. 

Our social internal communication platform is a suite of tools that can help your staff keep in touch with each other as well as help management reach, understand and engage employees unobtrusively as part of normal workflows.

Reach out to Haiilo today to book a demo and we’ll show you how it works and how it can help your tech company’s internal communications.