So, You’ve Been Asked to Do Employee Communications...

Hmmm… You actually already have a job that keeps you pretty busy, and now, as your company has grown, someone (who shall remain nameless) has asked you to also pick up employee communication. They may also have called it employee engagement, or internal communications, or something that sort of sounds like that.

The only problem is...you’re not quite sure where to start, and you’re not entirely sure you’ll know if you’ve been successful, and sometimes it all seems a little overwhelming, if you’re being honest…

Employee Communications is a thing
Fear not. The truth is that in larger companies, employee communications is actually a whole job unto itself. In fact, there are whole teams that do nothing but oversee employee communications. This is because how employees understand their role in a company — how what they do every day affects the bottom line — has a big impact on that bottom line itself.

Think about when you’ve been new in a job, and haven’t really been entirely clear on what’s going on, how things work, or even what it is exactly that you’re supposed to be doing. When you don’t have that bigger picture, that broader context, you can’t perform at your best — it’s a frustrating feeling!

Once you understand how all the pieces fit together, you can, to use a technical term, crush it. You do your job better, faster, smarter and with more energy and enthusiasm than you did when you were, well, kind of clueless.

Employee Communication plays a big role in helping people crush it at work
So, now you can start to see that employee communication is kind of a big deal. And that means that you have a big opportunity to be a total rock star at work.

But wait, there’s more.
Want to know specifically how employee communications affects your company’s bottom line? It has to do with the connection between employee communication and, what is often called employee engagement. Employee engagement is a much larger topic that we’ll address is future articles, but basically, it’s a way of measuring how much better and harder someone is willing to work.

That may sound kind of transactional at first, but here’s the thing -- employee engagement is linked to some big ways that companies either make or lose money when it comes to their people, including:

• Recruitment
• Retention
• Productivity
• Innovation
• Profitability
• Customer experience/satisfaction
• Safety

So you can see why companies take employee communication (and engagement) seriously as they grow. However, for smaller businesses, it’s not usually feasible to have a dedicated person doing this role, which is where you come in. See? Total rock star opportunity.

There’s something else though — it’s not just about the productivity and the profit. We spend a lot of our lives at work, and employee communication and engagement just makes that time better. Helping people thrive at work, and contributing to a great company culture is a very important role, and one that hopefully, by now seems more like fun, and less like just. More. work.

In this series of articles, we’ll demystify the basics of employee communication, and share some ‘tricks of the trade’  so that you can feel confident and enthusiastic in helping your company to be a better, stronger, happier place to work.

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Have questions? Concerns? A persistent, prickly feeling of panic that keeps you up at night? Fear not; this is a safe space. You can either ask them in the comments, or just email us directly. We’re here to help.