In and out: How internal comms shapes your external brand

“One and done.” “Set it and forget it.” It’s a recurring motif throughout many organisations: Let’s just invest a little bit of time and resource into some basic comms and marketing. Nothing too fancy, nothing too onerous. Nice and safe.

Of course, this is better than doing nothing at all. But you can do SO much better.

Employer brand, without argument, is more important than it’s ever been. To rewind a few years, we’ve seen a huge shift in what a new generation of employees expects from employers, and the pandemic has changed how we work with one another. In short, it’s out with boring, uninspiring offices and heinously outdated paperwork and in with hybrid, dynamic workplaces and fun and engaging ways of communicating.

The importance of “the basics”

We’ve seen workplaces with slides that move colleagues from floor to floor, immersive VR headsets where you can turn up to a meeting as a woolly mammoth, and even “out-building allowances” for people who can’t dream of working anywhere else but their own garden.

If you don’t have any of these things in your business, then don’t worry. Neither do we. And whilst we’re in collective agreement that it’s all kind of cool, these are the “top tier” of nice-to-haves and are in no way essential when we consider what’s actually important.

We prefer to prioritise the basics. In fact, we believe that the basics are a fundamental building block for everything that’s to come. Get them wrong or forget them altogether, then “perks” like Porridge Fridays just aren’t going to cut it. (Sounds pretty good, though.)

So what do we mean when we talk about the basics? Here are a few examples:

• An internal communication platform such as Slack, Teams or Staffbase
  Better still, an internal comms structure and strategy
• A clearly defined employer brand agreed upon by leadership, marketing and HR
  In addition to that, assets and materials that clearly communicate said brand
  
• A rock-solid onboarding strategy to welcome newbies into the business
  

Don’t hide the good stuff

If you’re a business owner or HR professional, you can be forgiven for thinking that things like which comms platform you use, your company newsletter or your internal brands aren’t particularly exciting or important. But the truth is, the board have clearly indicated that these are essential ingredients to the business, so why treat them like a fire drill or health and safety presentation? (For the record, those are important too, but they’re not going to make you famous.)

Internal comms, in particular, is a part of your employer brand that, while rarely seen by the outside world, is seen every single day by your employees. Messaging, tone of voice, design, sentiment and values all play a crucial role in ensuring effective communication throughout your business.

It’s unlikely that internal comms becomes external, but in the age of Glassdoor reviews, meme culture and an age group happy talking about remuneration, aspirations and everything in between, you can bet that they’ll be talking about your workplace culture amongst family and friends, which, simplified massively, is the entire purpose of employer brand in the first place.

So when we say, “Don’t hide the good stuff” we also mean don’t gloss over it. Don’t skim-read it. Don’t half-ar** it. Going back to our comment about laying the foundations: Invest in your internal comms now, and set yourself with a solid people and culture strategy.

Design it like it’s external

We’ve all seen those painful Word doc newsletters or embarrassing clip art door signs. Your business is better than that, and you know it. Your company culture deserves better. So while we may be a little biased here, investing in internal brand design is a great idea and can really elevate not only the style and execution of your internal comms but the engagement from your teams and the respect it garners.

Applying guidelines, tone of voice and strategic design to internal comms builds credibility around your people operations and can be the catalyst to building a strong employer brand from the inside out, and, ultimately, a better company culture too.

I think I speak for us all when I say I’ve rolled my eyes at a piece of company comms that I wouldn’t even use to mop up a spilt coffee. And that’s not me being a design snob. Far from it. It’s about consistency and acknowledging that employees, particularly Gens Y & Z, notice these things and, however fickle it may sound, really do use them as a mark of consideration when choosing the suitability of roles.

Design is a language

The statistic above makes us smile because it’s what we’ve been saying all along. Effectiveness in communication isn’t just the copywriting or the size of the font you use. It’s so much more. Internal comms is your company’s most important line of communication, particularly in an age of distributed workers and ethically diverse and neurodiverse teams.

Communication is just as much about design, layout, brand, identity and usability as it is about tone of voice, spelling and grammar. An example might be an HR platform with poor UX leading to incorrectly submitted hours or an internal newsletter that’s been badly coded and suddenly not working on people’s mobile devices. So without this holistic, quality-driven approach to internal comms and HR, seemingly small problems can quickly snowball into company-wide issues that, if not remedied, can have a detrimental effect on culture or, worse still, performance.

Invest internally, improve exponentially

So here’s the big sell. It’s time to get introspective and start looking inward. What’s working, what’s not? Which pieces of internal comms or HR marketing are you truly proud of? What would you be happy showing your customers or clients? What do interviewees think when they first speak with you? What’s the company culture really like when the big boss isn’t in the room?

If any of these things are feeling a little lacklustre, then you know it’s time to invest in your people operations, your comms and your culture. Spend some time thinking about your employer brand, your internal comms practices and the entire brand that wraps it all together.

We work with businesses of all shapes and sizes to help them understand their overall vision, mission and values and how internal comms can clearly communicate that throughout the business. A better-connected business is one that can be proud of everything it creates, from a sign on the vending machine to its quarterly report.

If it’s time for better comms, a more engaged team, and an employer brand to be proud of, give us a nudge. We’d love to help.