“Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships.”
- Stephen Covey
Effective communication is crucial to every workplace. Creating an environment where there is open communication leads to fewer misunderstandings and creates greater transparency.
Why is Communication Important?
Put simply, internal communication helps bind your organization together. It connects departments and teams in the workplace and ensures that every employee is up to date, on the same page, and aware of company happenings and changes.
Internal communication is a platform where employees should feel safe and welcome to ask questions and make suggestions.
A Forbes article titled The Five Cs of Effective Communication, accurately describes the alternative: “When we don’t feel heard at work, where we usually spend most of our waking hours, we can become incredibly frustrated, judgmental and apt to misinterpret situations way more often. It can lead to breakdowns and unengaged employees or leaders if they don’t feel valued and respected.”
The Differences Between Generations
“The way we communicate with others and
with ourselves ultimately determines
the quality of our lives.”
- Anthony Robbins
Each generation has its own communication preferences. Therefore, knowing how to communicate and to who is very important, especially when your company has multiple offices and has multiple generations working side by side.
You can learn a lot by knowing how each generation prefers to receive information. This means knowing what platform each generation prefers using (e.g. push notifications vs email), how frequent communication should be, and what kind of message to send each target group.
Younger employees, for example, believe that communication should be regular and that their employer should be transparent in everything that’s happening with the company. Additionally, studies show that the younger workforce – especially Generation Z - want more collaboration, more transparency and more feedback.
Listen and Learn
It’s important to create a culture of inclusion where sharing your opinion isn’t just OK but highly encouraged. Ask your employees for input. What do they want? What are their ideas?
By welcoming and encouraging your employees’ ideas, you can cultivate a culture of appreciation, openness, and inclusion. Internal communication should never be one-sided or a monologue; successful communication is always a two-way conversation. Listening is a critical element of communication.
Listening not only shows respect but allows you, as an employer, to discover any issues you may need to address. 
Creating Engagement
Gallup has found that consistent communication - whether it occurs in person, over the phone or electronically – is connected to higher levels of engagement. Gallup’s research found that employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as employees whose managers do not hold regular meetings with them.
Additionally, Gallup finds that managers who use a combination of face-to-face, phone and electronic communication are the most successful in engaging their employees.
Want to learn more about the importance of internal communication? Download your copy of Benify’s e-book The Power of Communication.
