The most important messaging of all might not be advertising, tweeting, or all those posts on LinkedIn. Sometimes, it’s the internal message that rings loudest and clearest.

Why? Because that is the message that carries far past social media and proves that a company is worth working for, and sticking with. A clear internal message increases productivity, which increases growth, and we all know what happens next.

According to Karen Johnson of Chron.com, effective internal communication “is particularly critical during tumultuous times for an organization to ease anxieties, boost morale and inhibit inaccurate information.” If employees know that their company has a solid plan in place, that eases tensions across the spectrum. But even if the staff knows and recognizes that the company is on unsure footing, if that is communicated well – and openly – they know they can trust upper management and will follow as a team.

Team-building and loyalty is perhaps what is at the very epicenter of good internal messaging. When a company is trying out a new path, forging new avenues into new markets, a straightforward, clear internal communications plan is essential. Knowing
that while some areas of the business are under reconstruction, others are steady and moving along as predictable honesty and thoroughness is as important as it gets. What I mean to say here is that especially in a large company, if change is afoot, it is essential to let staff know in the most assuring ways possible that rollouts are going well (when they are going well) because the rumor mill is stronger than any tweet, LinkedIn post or slide deck. Employees will fill in the blanks with conjecture, so it’s far better to have a strong team approach, even when the future is unclear. A well-crafted message can often be the steadiest hand in the entire organization.

Let’s not forget what was perhaps Yahoo’s greatest stumble. Just when they could have been focusing on long or short-term development goals, they decided to pivot toward using Microsoft’s failed QPR (Quarterly Performance Review) system, whereby team members were stack-ranked.

This created an interior bias sentiment, rather than a feeling of open communication system-wide. Stack-ranking is generally perceived to be a non-transparent business communication system, and a poor employee motivational approach. While it is not strictly a communication practice and is more closely related to HR, the rollout in Yahoo’s case was greeted with a great deal of pushback on Yahoo’s own communication message boards. It was met with deafening silence from Yahoo’s CEO, Melissa Mayer. The response is the internal communication failure. The non-collaborative practice practically urges people to stop working together. When expectations are unclear and competition is the goal, people almost always underperform.

If the internal messaging is strong, employees feel connected to their company and feel confident in the direction it is taking. This, in turn, creates a connective tissue which bonds the team together, and creates a greater return on the productivity of the team. With strong communication, a company is without a doubt greater than the sum of its parts. The tensile strength can be tested and measured in terms of its output.

This begs the question, then, how do we get internal communication right instead of wrong?

I have some ideas about this. (You probably guessed that , or I would not be blogging on the topic!)

First, connect actions and words. We have tons of jargon in every professional field, and we say that some things are important, but we must follow through. We only develop trust if the actions follow the words. If a promise is made in a document, it must be adhered to in action.

These days, trust is hard to keep. It is easy for a slide deck to appear in New York, and for those employees to tweet the content of that deck to their colleagues in LA to let the cat out of the bag before the presentation is even complete. We must be trustworthy in all our messaging. This means that those of us who are preparing internal messaging must be certain that we are on point long before the cow leaves
the barn. No guessing, no conjecture, no half-baked plans. We owe it to our colleagues to be sure before we print, upload or speak. If we cannot be 100% certain, we must be 100% open about that as well. We must be willing to say, broadly and loudly, that whatever plans we have in place are conjecture. Or else we should not be publicizing those plans.

As communicators, we must be willing and ready to work with managers to build daily, intimate relationships with leadership and staff alike, not sheltering ourselves from both customers and idea-makers in order to understand the whole ball of wax. Internal communicators have a great view, from the top, from the bottom and from the middle. What a great opportunity to see the inner workings of a company, and what great trust is bestowed on the messengers, eh? A vision like no other. But if a communicator is unwilling to see that the message can be transparent but not translucent, then we have done a bad job of being what the company – and the staff needs us to be.

Clear and consistent jargon-free messaging has to become part of the company culture. If we can’t get past all of the marketing pizzazz, which is necessary, and the emotional protection, which is also necessary, then we weaken the relationship that we strive to build. Erwin Steinberg, the ubiquitous professor of Professional Writing at Carnegie Mellon University captained “plain language” writing in the professional sphere. That is precisely what is called for here. If we can master that, we will all have done our growing companies the best service of all.

All of these together – simplification in communication, building trust between leadership and staff through openness and idea-sharing, and delivering clear, consistent content in internal communication without the outdated and misguided notion that employees should be somehow shielded or separated from the plan – this is what forward-thinking corporate communications is about. I’m not saying that any company today, especially a large-scale one, should be completely revelatory to the entire workforce. That would be risky and unnecessary. What I mean is that a new level of transparency begets a new level of loyalty, trust, and productivity. We expect our teams today to be agile, responsive, and to deliver not just products but ideas in rapid turnaround. We ask for nearly unprecedented levels of buy-in and conceptual trust at the development level as we test methods of agile release trains and try to get to market faster, better, and leaner than ever before.

If organizations, in turn, create messaging at a similar level of speed, engagement, and positivity, the sky’s the limit in terms of engagement and trust. A facile win for all. Indeed, the communication will flow from the inside out – a great investment.