Advances in digital technology have given us new tools for communicating professionally even in increasingly decentralised corporate structures. To get the most out of the technology, however, you need one thing more than anything: exciting content.

Get the feeling your staff aren’t all equally well informed about what the organisation is doing, or that they’re not getting important news on a regular basis? Generally there are two reasons for this: employees aren’t sufficiently interested in what’s going on in the organisation, or internal communications are poor. The Kununu rankings show that the latter leads to dissatisfaction: a lack of, or poorly designed, internal communication is one of the most common points of criticism – as well as leaving room for speculation and uncertainty.

Crises are wake-up calls

Often underestimated or given too little weight, in the past internal communications have been neglected or even forgotten by many organisations. But in recent years there’s been a gradual rethink. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, many companies are becoming much more professional in the way they communicate. Secondly, crises such as the rampant spread of Covid-19 have given them a painful reminder that they don’t have adequate tools to provide staff with timely, cross-departmental information and involve them actively in the development of the organisation, even when they’re not present physically.

Living platforms needed

For this reason the intranet, an established internal communications tool, is experiencing a boom. Having an intranet is all well and good. But its mere existence doesn’t automatically mean good internal communications. If it’s not actually cultivated, it’s no more than a platform creating the technological framework for sharing and dialogue. To fulfil its purpose it needs to be actively managed and filled with life in the form of content and input from staff. This, unfortunately, is often what is lacking.

Many organisations see the intranet purely as a source of information, fed to employees from the top down without any possibility of interacting. While this solves the problem of getting information to all staff at the same time, it fails to exploit the full potential of an intranet.

Stories to be told

By getting employees actively involved, it’s possible to make an intranet into a true platform for dialogue. This gives it an entirely different status and makes sure people actually use it. They’ll be more willing to make contributions of their own and supply the editors with material for exciting stories with insights, news and learnings from their work. And that, ultimately, is what it’s all about: content that tempts users to stay.

The role of these stories shouldn’t be underestimated. They give co-workers in other departments a sense of what’s going on outside their silo. They provide a good overall picture of what’s happening in the organisation as well as creating a common understanding. They also reveal areas in which internal communications can facilitate further improvements by way of other measures. Last but not least, they sometimes lead to stories that should be told to people outside the company as well – also used in other forms of corporate communications as part of an integrated communications approach.