11 engaging ideas for your internal communication plan

Stress, strained relationships, and missed deadlines. According to Grammarly’s 2024 State of Business Communication report, poor internal communication causes all three of these things.

In contrast, good workplace communication leads to increased productivity and work satisfaction. Employees who get enough information to do their job well are also 2.8 times more likely to be engaged in their work.

There’s a strong link between internal communication and employee engagement.

Effective communication helps employees feel more connected to the organization, their work, and each other. These highly engaged employees then contribute to positive workplace communication.

It’s a virtuous circle that — according to Gallup research — leads to improvements in employee retention and wellbeing, as well as your business profits.

In this article, we look at how you can boost employee engagement through your internal communication strategy.

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The basics of a good internal communication plan

If you want to improve employee engagement, improving employee communication is a great place to start. To do that, you need a plan.

An internal communication plan helps you approach employee communications with strategy. You understand where you are now, where you want to get to, and which combination of activities is most likely to get you there.

We can boil an employee communication plan down into four key stages. You can create a successful internal communications strategy by:

1. Assessing your current situation

What are the strengths and weaknesses of your current communication strategy? Are your comms successfully engaging employees? Are messages resonating in the way you want them to? Are some communication channels more effective than others? Listen to opinions and ideas from across the company to evaluate your current comms performance.

2. Choosing communication channels

Communication channels should be accessible to all employees, including those working remotely and on the frontlines of your organization. You need appropriate channels for company-wide updates, 1:1 meetings, and group chat. You also need channels that facilitate top-down, bottom-up, and peer-to-peer communication.

3. Deciding on communication content

If one of your priorities is employee engagement, crafting engaging company messages is the next item on your list. Create an internal communication calendar, starting with the essential messages that help your organization function safely and efficiently. Next, decide on the types of content you’ll use to share company culture and foster a sense of belonging.

4. Assessing engagement

A good internal communication plan is fluid. It’s a constant work in progress. So once you’ve put your new strategy into action, it’s time to assess what works and what doesn’t. Using communication and engagement key performance indicators (KPIs), see how far you’ve come and make targeted improvements.

Read more: 13 ways to quickly improve your internal communications

11 engaging ideas for your internal communication plan

Approach your internal communication plan tactically and it will better support your employee engagement efforts. Here, we’ve put together a list of internal communication best practices to incorporate into your plan.  

Choose the right channels

Employee communications should reach every member of every team. In a world of remote working, this means using digital communication channels.

These digital communication channels need to be accessible on mobile devices because 80% of the world’s workforce doesn’t sit behind a desk — and because paper memos on a noticeboard are far too easy to miss.

If email is your first thought, bear in mind that it’s rarely the best solution. Many frontline workers don’t have a company email address and lots of desk-based workers are suffering from email overload. There’s a temptation to overlook company comms in your inbox when it’s already overflowing.   

Your internal communications engage employees more effectively if you create dedicated, digital channels with the help of a social intranet or employee app.

These platforms allow your teams to communicate over a news feed, group chats, and 1:1 messages. The best tools come with lots of engaging, social-media-style features and are available on every employee smartphone.

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Be clear and concise

Clear and concise internal communications are essential to engagement because:

• You get fewer misunderstandings — and when employees fully understand your message they’re more likely to respond to it quickly
• It makes messages easier to absorb and remember
• You show respect for your employees’ time, which means they’re more likely to read future messages

So when creating employee communications, try to use simple language, avoid industry jargon, and keep sentences short.

Before you put anything down on paper or into words, think about what you want your audience to do after reading or watching your content. Also, identify the most important information and put this at the start of your message.

Once you’ve written your content, edit it ruthlessly cutting unnecessary words and repetition. You can also use AI tools, like Hemingway. Hemingway highlights sentences that are difficult to read. You can then simplify these sentences to make your internal communications clearer and more concise. 

Foster two-way communication

Imagine you’re watching a presentation.

The speaker — let’s call him Steve — clicks through his well-designed slides. He talks through the content competently. But he doesn’t pause for input or questions.

Now, another speaker takes to the floor.

This speaker — let’s call her Maria — starts her presentation with an interactive poll. After speaking for a few minutes, she involves the whole room in a discussion so everyone gets to share their thoughts and ideas. She speaks some more, then invites you to ask questions.  

Which presentation is the most engaging?

It’s likely that if you had to sit through Steve’s presentation, your mind would wander. You’d start thinking about the workload waiting for you back at your desk — or what you fancied eating for lunch.

But by incorporating two-way communication, Maria grabbed everyone’s attention from the beginning. She sustained that attention by regularly involving everyone in the conversation.

When you involve people in a presentation — or in your internal communications — you make the experience more engaging.

There are lots of ways to create interactive, two-way employee communications. You can launch polls and surveys. You can run an online Q&A session with your CEO. You can also post content to the company news feed, where employees can interact by commenting, liking, and sharing.

Create open dialogue like this — where thoughts, opinions, and questions flow in all directions — and you’ll find it much easier to interest employees in your internal communications.

Collect feedback

As we’ve just mentioned, polls and surveys boost employee engagement. Employees like to feel that they have a voice — and that leadership takes their thoughts on board.

So collect feedback regularly. Ask employees about the employee experience, the latest company changes, or the next company social event. You can also ask them what they think about your internal communications.

According to Axios research, 36% of employees want to share feedback with leaders about the essential communications they’re receiving but they don’t feel they get the opportunity.

So ask your employees about their communication preferences and any pain points they experience with your current employee communication plan. Give workers the option to share feedback anonymously if they prefer.

Then, analyze your feedback results. Also, be sure to share the results of polls and surveys with your employees. Thank them for their input and tell them what you plan to do.

This type of feedback loop shows employees that feedback requests aren’t just empty attempts at engagement. You really care about their opinions and ideas — and are willing to take action on them. This helps to engage employees with these types of communications going forward.

Tailor your communications

If all employees get all internal communications, they start to switch off. When your audience knows that only a small proportion of employee communications apply to them, they stop taking the time to read them.

That’s why another internal communication best practice is personalization. Using digital internal communication tools you can segment your audience based on their role, department, location, and tenure. You can then tailor content to each segment of your audience so everything they receive is relevant.

Your warehouse team sees different messages to the staff in HQ. Managers receive different comms to new hires. Employees in each of the regions you cover only see content relevant to their location.

With an intranet or app, you can also personalize employee dashboards, making them applicable to different roles and departments, putting the most important content front and center.

Celebrate achievements and milestones

Recognition is an integral part of any good employee communication plan. That’s because praise makes employees feel valued — and because other employees love to get behind a co-worker who’s done a great job.

Whether you’re celebrating the completion of a project, a birthday, or a work anniversary, you’re engaging your workforce. You’re creating a sense of accomplishment, belonging, and motivation. This can make a huge difference to your business.

A recent Gallup and Workhuman recognition report revealed that, by making recognition an important part of company culture, a 10,000-person organization can save up to $16.1 million a year in reduced employee turnover costs.

The easiest way to give company-wide recognition is via a dedicated recognition program across your digital communication channels. This type of program helps you build recognition into the fabric of your organization.

It makes manager-employee and peer-to-peer recognition incredibly easy, so it becomes a regular occurrence. A digital solution also ensures that frontline employees — who don’t get a lot of face-to-face time with managers or co-workers — get the same level of appreciation as their office-based peers.

Be consistent

The best employee communications are consistent. They stick to a reliable schedule and they demonstrate a similar tone and style.

This consistency ensures that employees come to trust and rely on your internal communications. They know when and where to expect key messages and feel kept in the loop. So they’re more likely to engage with what you have to say.

Here’s how you can make your comms more consistent:

• Use an internal communications calendar. Plan your comms for each month, including a mix of formal and informal company content.
• Provide clear guidelines and templates. That way all members of staff can deliver communications with the same style and tone.
• Use automation tools. A feature like Blink’s Employee Journeys allows you to create automated content paths. This ensures that all employees receive essential comms at key milestones — for example, during onboarding or after a year of service. 

Create engaging content

We all know from browsing social media that multimedia content catches the eye. An original photograph, an infographic, or a video is much more likely to grab our attention than plain, old text. So make these multimedia elements part of your internal communication plan.

Also, include a variety of content on your communication channels. That means need-to-know company updates along with snaps from your latest social event. Informal content helps to amplify company culture and create a sense of belonging.

Stories are also engaging. So post a real-life story about a customer your company has helped — or about one of the causes your organization supports.

When planning internal communications, think about what matters to your employees, too. They might like a reminder of the training and development opportunities, wellbeing resources, or benefits you offer. FAQs come in handy for new hires. 

You could also take inspiration from the Tesco supermarket chain, by creating personalized videos to support employees with financial planning. 

Encourage leadership involvement

When leaders communicate transparently with their workforce, it creates trust and builds engagement. It also sets a great example. Employees are more likely to be active on communication channels if their leaders are showing up there, too.

Employees also care what their leaders have to say. 36% say that they’d like to hear from their leaders more often.

So encourage leaders to get involved on the company news feed. Schedule a bi-weekly post from the CEO. Or plan an online Q&A session, where employees can ask leaders their burning questions.

Create connection

Employees who feel that they belong within an organization are 5.3 times more likely to feel empowered to do their best work.

So use your communication channels to reinforce a positive and inclusive company culture — and make peer-to-peer connection part of your employee communication plan.

Frontline employees — and those who work remotely — have much less opportunity to collaborate and build workplace friendships. So ensure that employees have company communication channels suited to informal conversation.

Salesforce has made peer-to-peer connection and inclusivity a priority. They’ve created equality groups where employees with a shared interest, background, or identity can come together to champion their needs in the workplace.

However you choose to do it, be sure to make connection part of your internal communication plan. By giving co-workers the tools they need to support one another, share useful insights, and build workplace friendships, you create a more engaging workplace.

Leverage technology                 

Internal communication tools make comms and employee engagement much easier. With the right all-in-one platform, you create a company hub, which becomes the go-to place for the latest company news.

Using this platform, you can post communications that are easy for employees to find and search. You can create multi-media content to engage employees. You can recognize hard work, launch polls, and automate content so it reaches the right people at the right time.

Through integrations, you support employee engagement beyond comms. Employees are only ever a click or tap away from learning and development programs, wellbeing resources, and self-serve HR tools — like vacation booking and shift scheduling.

Technology helps you measure the success of your internal communication plan, too. A communication tool with in-built analytics can tell you how employees are interacting with your comms.

Metrics like message open rates, post likes, response time, profile completion, and communication tool adoption build a picture of what is and isn’t working when it comes to your internal communication strategy.

You can then use your findings to make data-backed improvements, finding new and more effective ways to engage employees with your internal communications going forward.

Using an employee app for internal communication plan success

Creating and executing a successful internal communication plan is easier when you use the right technology. A great tech tool is essential if you have hard-to-reach employees working on the frontlines of your company.

Frontline employees don’t spend a lot of time in the office nor do they have easy access to a computer or company email account. That’s why — if even a small proportion of your employees work away from a desk — you need mobile-first internal communication tools, accessible via smartphone.

An employee app fits this description. It brings communication channels to the palm of every employee.

Workers can catch up with company news during a break or check their shift schedule from home. They get to chat with co-workers and feel part of company culture in a way that simply isn’t possible if your organization still relies on emails or a desktop-based intranet.

Here at Blink, our employee app comes with a company news feed, 1:1, and group chat. It has tools for surveys and employee recognition.

Your employees also get access to a content library and a digital hub — where it’s easy to access other workplace software. Your comms team gets automation and analytics features that help them hone your internal communication plan.

If you’d like to see what Blink can do for your employee communications, schedule a personalized demo today.